Education Policy, Business and Technology

Building Real Community Online with Free Apps

Campus Technology: Sure, you use your learning management system's discussion forums to bring people together online for class conversations. Yet, that's not the same as creating community. According to Bonnie Mullinix, a lead member of the contributing faculty in the PhD program at Walden University's College of Education, discussion forum activity is often done "pro forma" — as a requirement of class. True community encompasses student "voice, choice and connectivity," she asserted, during a presentation she delivered at the recent Online Learning Consortium Innovate 2017 conference. Best, she said, the tools that can help build community in online courses are free.

Mullinix began her hunt for community-friendly tools in 2015 as she began leading a research forum of people doing their dissertations. Like most online students, she said, they needed to be able "to work on their own stuff [but] still feel like they're not completely alone." Without a sense of community, they weren't learning "from each other's mistakes and discoveries in the ways that we hoped they would."

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