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Organizing and Managing    

Content Collaboration   

Curriculum Sharing     

Building a Learning Community Palloff and Pratt recommend seven basic steps for building a successful learning community. These include: clearly defining the purpose of the community, creating a distinctive gathering place for the group, promoting effective leadership from within, defining norms and a clear code of conduct, allowing for a range of member roles, allowing for and facilitating of subgroups, and allowing members to resolve their own disputes. The authors caution that it is possible to develop a community that has strong social connections between the students, but where very little learning actually takes place. Thus, it is important that the instructor be actively engaged in the process and encourages students who stray from the learning goals of the course. Specifically, the authors recommend: (1) engaging students with subject matter, (2) accounting for attendance and participation, (3) working with students who do not participate, (4) understanding the signs of when a student is in trouble, and (5) building online communities that accommodate personal interaction. Indicators of a Successful Learning Community You can tell if the learning community is working when you see: active interaction, sharing of resources among students, collaborative learning evidenced by comments directed primarily student to student rather than student to instructor, socially constructed meaning evidenced by agreement or questioning, with the intent to achieve agreement on issues of meaning, and expressions of support and encouragement exchanged between students, as well as willingness to critically evaluate the work of others. Finally, they suggest that the keys to successful learning communities are honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness, and empowerment. Palloff, R.M. & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Unlike a traditional blended learning environment where those who learn are fed from one source, a learning ecosystem balances those organisms (people) with the environment (organization, culture, tools).

what is the difference between blended learning and creating a learning ecosystem?  Blended learning takes on the funnel mentality.  All knowledge must funnel through the learning department’s people, systems, processes, packages and must be measured in standard ways as it goes through.  If it does not route and measure in these ways it is out of our circle of influence. In a learning ecosystem the environment is created so that learning just happens.  It is a part of work rather than separate from it.  It includes traditional blended learning when appropriate (for each piece does not lose its significance) but the funnel, for the most part, is gone.  Formal learning intersects with social learning intersects with informal learning intersects with traditional learning…

Instead of, “I am going to learning” it is “I am always learning.”