During the course: community building

Another important consideration in your online course is building an online learning community. This can help encourage learning and enhance the student experience. There is further guidance on building an online community in the teaching toolkit and resources available in the Institute of Teaching and Learning, but here we will explore how your communications with your students can help support this community to grow.

Tutorials

Online tutorials are important, both to allow you to establish your presence as an educator, and to help to build connections between you and your learners and between your learners and each other. They also provide a valuable opportunity to disseminate key information to students, answer questions and discuss and feedback on course content and activities.

The number of tutorials you run throughout the course will vary though having a minimum of three or four tutorials throughout a single semester unit would be advisable. Having regular tutorials (e.g. every couple of weeks) can help encourage students to engage with content and help foster a learning community. If you have multiple topics and educators on the course, a greater number of tutorials may also be beneficial to help build connections and support students in developing their confidence in engaging with the course material.

The timing of tutorials also needs to be considered. It is important to consider the location of your students to check that times of tutorials are compatible with their time zones. Where you have key tutorials (e.g. discussing assessment requirements and expectations), it may be beneficial to run these tutorials twice, at different times of the day, to fully accommodate and support students from different time zones. Recording tutorials can also be helpful to support learning and provide a fallback for students that are unable to attend however it is important to ensure that you consider student consent and whether recording may inhibit discussion. Please explore the Guidance on Recording Student Participation which provides useful advice and further information.

Encouraging students to participate in tutorials can be challenging initially, though a number of approaches can help to encourage student engagement:

• Having a clear structure and guidance in your tutorials on what to expect (e.g. first half of tutorial being a formal presentation where students can ask questions via chat, second half of tutorial being a verbal question and answers session) can help students build confidence.

• Allowing students to submit questions in advance of the tutorial can not only provide you with time to prepare your answers, but also helps students who may be shy about asking questions directly in the tutorial to find their voice.

• Modelling the behaviour you wish to see in the tutorial by inviting a colleague or fellow member of the teaching team to initial tutorials can also be helpful. In the PGCert Medical and Health Education, two members of the teaching team attend each tutorial with one academic monitoring the chat and one primarily delivering content in the tutorial. This is beneficial in terms of being able to answer student queries, but also by having two staff members this allows the discussion of course content and topics throughout the tutorial. This conversational approach can help encourage students to actively engage in tutorials.

• Use of break-out rooms within tutorials (this can be done in both Blackboard Collaborate and in Zoom) can provide opportunities for small group discussion. This can help encourage students to speak to their peers, and also to gain confidence to answer questions or feedback to wider discussions in the main tutorial.

Informal opportunities

In addition to having regular formal tutorials, providing opportunities for learners to chat more informally with their educators and each other can be beneficial. Strategies such as the following can be considered:

• Providing informal opportunities for students to meet up with the educator team and their peers. This can be useful, particularly in the initial stages of an online course to help learners to get to know you and each other. In the PG Cert Medical and Health Education, an informal 'Coffee o' Clock' via Zoom ran in the first element of the course to allow students and staff to get to know each other.

• Providing a general discussion area in your course. This provides a space where students can get to know each other via chatting about the course, discussing course content and sharing resources.

• Signposting students to ways that they can 'meet up' with each other and start building their own community. This can be via encouraging students to chat in general course discussion areas, organise zoom meet ups, or to utilise the Blackboard Collaborate course room.

Academic participation in online activities

Throughout your online course, you are likely to be using various activities (such as discussions, wikis, quizzes and online bulletin boards). These activities can be very helpful not only in encouraging knowledge exchange and active learning, but also in communicating with your learners and helping to develop a learning community.

Academic engagement with activities (e.g. by reading and commenting in discussion boards, bulletin boards or blogs; feeding back on wiki or word cloud activities in tutorials) can help to encourage your learners to also engage with these activities and see the value of doing so. By engaging with these activities (e.g. supportive comments, asking follow up questions; clearing up misconceptions), it can help demonstrate your presence in the course and help build your students' confidence in engaging with these activities. In addition, by engaging with these activities this can help model appropriate behaviour and encourage professional interactions by students.

You may be interested in exploring this article by Professor Ralf Becker, Senior Lecturer in Economics in the School of Social Sciences, which documents his experience with discussion boards. This highlights how he used discussion boards to engage students and help develop a learning community.