Use Case: Communities of Practice

Communities of practice is a term that can apply to lots of different use cases – do you want people to share best practice, new ideas, interesting articles, or do you want to create communities for particular reasons within the course?

Below are a few ideas about how you can use discussions to develop communities within a course.

Subject Specific Discussions

If we propose the setup of: 

Forum: For a Unit of Content

Topics: The subject elements that make up that unit or time if your units are structured that way  (e.g. weeks, months).

You can post topics that relate to these areas, so there is a space for learners to pose questions and engage with that topic with their peers. It’s also a space where you can ask learners to post any other material they’ve found useful or appropriate to it.

Eliciting Peer Feedback

Use discussions to allow learners to get feedback on something they’ve been working on – you can do this in a group, or on a course level.

• Ask peers to review an essay draft.
• Elicit feedback on an approach to a project or argument.
• Post how you would respond to a scenario so others can pose more questions to expand on it.

Key tip here is to make sure you’re monitoring these to make sure the feedback is on the right track.

FAQs

Over time, you might find that there are some FAQs for your course. Putting these in a discussion means you don’t have to keep adding individual questions, but as learners post and reply to the threads, there is a comprehensive list of questions for all to see. 

Mixed Media

Use mixed media – you can post videos and ask for a variety of responses to them based off Blooms Taxonomy:

• Remember/Understand: Ask them to identify what strategies or processes were demonstrated in a video
• Evaluate/analyze: Ask them to evaluate how those strategies were implemented and what they’d improve.
• Understand: Put up case studies and get people to summarize them.

Want more examples of questions that align to the Blooms Taxonomy levels? Check out this article of question stems from Teach Thought here.