Intentional Connection: Creating a Classroom Community in Your LifeFlex Course

Online courses have their challenges when it comes to creating a sense of community between you and your students, and LifeFlex courses even moreso. Without a synchronous meeting time where students can see each other in a classroom or even on Zoom, it can be difficult to connect with your students and encourage them to connect with each other.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of Flex-friendly ways to build community within your course, both as a curriculum developer and as an instructor.

Building Community Into the Curriculum

The most consistent way to build community in your Flex course is to integrate social aspects into the course itself by:

1. Offering Optional Weekly Live Sessions

   Time for these live sessions is built in to undergraduate Flex courses, but it's available as an option for graduate courses too. These hour-long live sessions held on Zoom do not teach new content, and instead serve as communal office hours, where students can ask questions and facilitate discussion based around what they're stuck on, confused about, or interested in.

   For students whose schedules allow them to attend, this can be a valuable way to meet their peers and get a sense that they're not working through their program alone. For students who can't attend the live session, the Zoom recording allows them to reflect on the discussion and see their peers engage with the material.

2. Harmonize Discussions and Annotations

   Harmonize is a discussion tool integrated directly into Brightspace, that automatically grades student responses based on factors like numbers of posts and replies and word count. Not only do these discussions create less grading for low-stakes, write-to-learn or reflection assignments, they encourage students to read, respond, and react to their peers’ work. Harmonize also allows students to annotate and have discussions directly onto pdfs, mimicking an in-person discussion about a specific reading.

3. Video Presentations or Introductions

   Students are more than just names in Brightspace. To better match names to faces, you can build assignments that require students to record and post a video to a discussion forum. It can be a low-stakes introductory assignment asking students to introduce themselves (a perfect candidate for an autograded Harmonize assignment), or it can be a mid-semester or culminating presentation assignment where students are sharing what they’ve learned and researched about a particular topic. For larger presentations, encourage students to choose topics that they can relate to their particular interests, adding more opportunities for you and their peers to get to know them.

Building Community During the Term

Once the course is running, there are many ways an instructor can encourage students to collaborate and communicate, such as:

1. A Muddiest Point Forum or a Class Q&A

   Create an optional discussion forum or Q&A in Harmonize where students can ask any questions they have about the course and its content, and answer each other. You as the instructor can encourage students to post and respond in this forum during your regular communication with your class. You can even spotlight certain questions and responses in announcements and emails, or use the forum as a stepping stone for weekly optional live sessions (if those are built into your course).

   This can also be a way to get feedback about the course. If multiple students agree that they enjoy an aspect of the course (or they don’t), that is not only something they can talk about together, it’s helpful information for you and for CTLT so we can continue to improve the quality of our LifeFlex courses.

2. Facilitate a Class Resource Repository

   Create a place where students can -- if they choose to -- share links to resources they find helpful or relevant to the course. This can take many forms, including an optional Harmonize discussion, a shared Google doc or folder, or a NotebookLM.

   For research-heavy courses, this can be a particularly helpful way to get students thinking about their research in a collaborative way, and remind them that there are others in the same boat.

3. Share Your Interests and Personality

   Students feel more connected to the class and each other when they feel connected to their instructor. In your emails, announcements, feedback, and introductory videos, make an effort to connect to your interests or share small applicable anecdotes that remind students that you are human too. Reaching out to a professor you’ve never met with questions, concerns, and feedback is much easier when you feel like you already know something about them apart from their role in the course.

Have More Ideas?

If you’ve tried any of these or have used other ways to foster community in your LifeFlex course that have been effective, we’d love to hear about your experience! Share them with us at instructionaldesign@eastern.edu!