Learning Communities

Palloff & Pratt, in their excellent book Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace, Jossy Bass Publishers USA show how to develop community as a part of the learning process. They call it the missing piece of the puzzle of the new learning paradigm and that which locks it all together.

The keys to creating a learning community and a successful facilitation online as well as being catalysts for learning are; honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness and empowerment (Palloff & Pratt, 1999). They say they are critical to the success of online learning and without any one of them, a learning community cannot function. We have permission from Learningtimes.org to extract a short segment of a synchronous web interview with Palloff and Pratt. This short recording not only talks about setting the stage for building community but is an example of the process itself.

Building a learning community requires work and collaborative and facilitation skills. The online education website over the coming months will be populated with resources to teach you how. A good starting place is the summary  of some of Paloff and Pratt's work.

See also: Learning through online discussion: A case of triangulation in research .