Every Friday at 1600 UTC (Noon Eastern), the Instructional Design Live team meet to discuss effective online teaching and learning practices with professionals in the field. You can listen to the live audio by visiting http://bit.ly/djnDpq or you can participate in the discussion by following the link below:

Instructional Design Live: Online Survival Guide - Nancy White (Friday, September 24)

This week, Nancy White will join us to discuss how to dvelop an effective learning community in an online course. Nancy's expertise lies in developing Communiies of Practice in both olnine and offline domains and providing traing and consulting in leadership and change management. She is co-author of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities with Etienne Wenger and has been working and teaching online for over a decade: http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/
 
Nancy will be discussing the following questions: 
 
·       Community of practice: How is it defined what are the benefits of benefits of participating in one?
 
·       What are the differences between online communities and online groups? If a typical higher education online course is considered as having a group of students, how do we harness the potential for developing a community of practice amongst the group?
 
  Related question: What kind of approaches would you suggest for creating community among online learners?
 
·         In terms of developing a community of practice around online teaching and learning, what kind of approaches (or even activities) have you found to be successful? (Conferences, weekly webcasts, listserv, community sites within one LMS, wiki, shared tagging?)
 
·         For faculty who are new to online teaching and learning, what would you suggest are key components to focus on in order to provide an excellent learning opportunity for students?
 
The link above will take you to the meeting. The direct link to the show is http://tiny.cc/idlive. Watch Twiiter for  the latest updates: robertisquires, JenM, cammybean, jonidunlap.
 
IDL Team