elearningpost: October 2000 Theme: Building Online Learning Communities

Community building on the Net is not an easy task. We are not talking of the difficulty in creating community-based products (the software), but of the difficulty in fostering and maintaining online relationships . Communities is about the people, and not about the tools that enable communication. In the following sections, we will guide you through resources on the Net that you can explore to learn about building online communities, be it for business or learning.

I thought that the following citation from the article was very timely. My students will (eventually) appreciate why I pointed this out!:

In a series of four studies, student postings on newsgroups created for their courses at Carleton University were monitored, and opinions were gathered from samples of students and instructors regarding their newsgroup activities. Results show that an overwhelming majority of students never posted messages on newsgroups, nor did their instructors. In addition, a large majority of students rarely read what others had posted? The results clearly indicate that course newsgroups have limited educational value until students and instructors find more time and motivation to make more and better use of the medium.