Come for the course, stay for the community

actively engaging, creating, debating, networking, and marketing yourself are keys to 21st century success

Were I to ever try to build an online community again, I wouldn’t launch the community until I already had one. I’d write, and gain followers, and then set up the infrastructure to enable them to communicate with each other.

Schools have relied on tools like Moodle and Blackboard for online educational community engagement, but some combination of the tools and the methods of use remain embarrassingly under-powered, forced, and lacking anything that could truly be described as organic engagement. Asking students to write a 500-word post on Moodle is not creating engage... See more

The irony of this is that the internet offers the tools for even better collaborative opportunities than in-person education

There seem to be two main lessons to learn here: if you want to build educational content, turn it into a community; if you want to build an online community, start with educational content.

remote learning is the perfect environment for asynchronous lectures and live collaboration on project-based work, known as the flipped classroom model. There is absolutely zero reason to ever make a large crowd of people all get on a video call at the same time to sit through a static lecture or presentation. It is a boring, horrid waste of people... See more

Unfortunately, we seem to have taken the worst aspects of in-person education and designed online education in the same image. Rows of desks facing a chalkboard have become isolated computer screens streaming pre-packaged videos.

As we’ve engaged in small group video chats and commented on each other’s drafts and started interest groups on Circle, a Facebook-like tool designed for this very purpose, it’s become increasingly clear that the value of this course has more to do with the community than the classes. And that’s not because David is a bad teacher, it’s because he’s... See more