Manifesting Community
A very rough idea of what I’m imagining right now
So in part one and part two of this brainstorm I sort of set the stage for past learning communities I’ve been a part of—now it’s time for the fun work of thinking about the future, thinking about how to replicate the best parts of our own educational experience (and others we vicariously live through online, via friends, etc.). When I think about online community, my brain can’t help but think in terms of physical spaces, so that’s how I’ll break down the various pieces of an online learning community.
We start super wide and broad with a lobby. The lobby is where I go to socialize. To chat. I don't necessarily want to take a lesson right now, but maybe there’s some rooms for peer learning/mentoring where:
I can practice my pitch;
brainstorming product ideas;
do some A/B testing, etc.
The lobby is large and, quite frankly, a bit unruly. While it’s not the place to do deep work or receive personalized feedback, it can be a place where ideas spring up out of a bit of chaos.
Then we’ve got course-specific rooms. These are our “lecture halls”.
Instructors will come here to address all the students enrolled in a course, both “live” if your time zone happens to line up the right way, or asynchronously if it doesn’t.
Students can meet each other here, are assigned to smaller groups here, submit and collect assignments, and perhaps share some of their work publicly.
A student might not feel comfortable sharing a new product idea with all 3 million learners in the lobby, but doing that in the smaller lecture hall with a few hundred peers might be better;
Alternatively, there’ll be smaller groups for intimate conversations
Next up is an area for coaching, which is exactly what it sounds like.
But I also like having different kinds of coaching for students who need different things at different stages of their professional careers. Sure we’ll charge $$ for people who want 1-1 coaching, but we can charge a lot less for people who are fine with small group coaching around focused topics.
For small group coaching we’ll also be leveraging the power of peers, so for a group like “ecommerce product feedback”, a student would essentially have a focus group to get feedback from.
Finally we have “social learning”, which is where students can learn with each other. I don’t necessarily want to take all 8 hours of a course by myself in my room—sometimes I want that social element of chatting with a friend while we listen to the teacher. And when there’s groups watching the course at the same time, we’re able to integrate all sorts of social elements of learning into the course curriculum, like snap polls, “live” small group work, etc.
Just a start, but how am I doing so far?
