Cyberwisdom E-learning: Operate An Online Learning Community

The online learning community is changing the way people get knowledge. It shows that learning communities are far more attractive to students. It’s not difficult for companies to build an online learning community. But It’s hard to operate it and attract staff.

You can’t avoid these problems when you establish the learning community.

Why is the learning community always silent? How to improve popularity?

How to combine a learning community with the training?

How to motivate employees to share knowledge and experience in the community?

How to make sure that employees don’t make inappropriate comments in the community?

The secret to solving these problems is the operation. The online learning community is different from BBS. It requires operation in the long term based on well-designed rules. How to make the learning community work? Before answering the question, we must clear up a few concepts.
 

 

1. What is the learning community?

There is a group of people with common interests in the learning community. They work together to enhance themselves and solve problems.It is a learning community. In this definition, three aspects are worthy of attention.

Field: What kind of topic to talk about?

Members: A group of people that share common interests

Results: That is, the specific knowledge that everyone shares.

 

 

2. The classification of the learning community

 There are three types of online learning communities. They are dominant communities, recessive communities, and social communities.

 (1) What is the dominant community?

In the dominant communities, people share knowledge and experience in specific topics. For example, how to do a good job in business training and establish relationships between customers. Learners also solve problems and even collect ideas there.

 (2) What is the recessive community?

For the main purpose of sharing, It attracts people with content. For example, retail companies can set up a “display stand” in the internal BBS to display the photos. By doing this, they can attract everyone to watch and leave messages. People will submit their work for sharing. And then it creates different topics such as different festivals on display.

(3) What is the social community?

The previous two kinds of the community gather people by specific content. But social communities are people-oriented. It uses activities and content as carriers to establish relationships between people. The popular Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, etc. are both social communities. Knowing the learning communities, we can now learn to operate a community. Please pay attention to the following six keys.

 

 

1. Establish goals

Managers and operations should know what the community is for and its goal. The more specific the goal, the more targeted it will be to attract people. Then, we can define the learning community which is appropriate for the company.

 

2. Trust and commitment

We should make people identify with the learning community and finally trust it. To realize it, operations should maintain daily operations. Operations should pay attention to each speech and each registrant. They should summarize and share the results on time. What’s more, operations should find problems and solve them at any time. There both have virtual identity, honor, points and other functions in BBS or a new social community. Operations can make good use of these functions to enhance the trust in the participants.

 

 3. The culture of sharing

It needs to create a secure interpersonal environment to promote sharing. And only after voting and other activities, we can establish the culture of sharing. The culture establishment is an involved process. And we need to have enough patience. Operations should also promote communication such as mail, Weibo, etc. What’s more, they should also combine offline activities with virtual activities. Training managers can combine the online learning community with face-to-face training. In this way, it can fill the gaps between class training and give learner opportunities to share.

 

4. Operations specialists

Operations specialists will be in charge of community operations and even physical activities. Large enterprises can employee special personnel or outsource to professional third-party companies. Small and medium-sized enterprises can consider hiring part-time personnel.

 

 5. Content

Content is the core of the learning community, and the content is not generated by itself. Now, the operations will open the subject for discussion. We should also make good use of text, web pages, images, short films, stories, and sounds, so the content will be more attractive. Besides, operations should timely give feedback to the learners, launch new topics, sort, and file old content. Managers should be aware that the learning community is a tool to generate knowledge. The learning community is not good at knowledge classification and definition. Thus, managers should sort out the knowledge of the learning community regularly. Moreover, making good use of the classification, keywords and other functions in the learning community can help.

 

6. Establish a system

Besides the above, companies also need rules. In particular, when their performance is relevant to the activities of the online learning community, there must have a detailed rule. Employees can know better how to improve their knowledge and skills in the community.

In short, a good learning community was born in practice, not by theory. There are six indispensable basic keys to operate an online learning community. Further, operations should have online leadership skills, which require more experience and training.