Cultivate a Learning Community in Any Course!

One of the ways to provide a positive start to your course is to begin by instilling a sense of community in your class. Inform the students that you want them to be active participants in the learning process by contributing their ideas, insights, and perspectives. Make them aware that while your role will be to serve as an instructor and guide to the course activities, meanwhile students have an equally important role to share information, problem solve, and provide constructive communications with one another. Emphasize that learning is a collective experience that involves both the instructor as well as the students’ dynamic involvement.

Students benefit from active involvement in
a learning community.

Building a learning community requires intentional plans by the instructor to create ongoing learning
activities that promote student-to-student interactions. In addition to lecturing and other methods of delivering content materials, it is important to design your course to include frequent opportunities for student connections and small group assignments. As part of these group exercises, remind students that interpersonal communications and collaborations are a critical component of their grade for this course.

Start your course by having students meet in small groups to introduce themselves to each other, and have them perform some simple low stakes assignments or icebreaker activities. After that, have each group member introduce one of their classmates to the rest of the class. Subsequently, switch around group members in this and other class sessions so that everyone gets to know and work with one another. In addition to group work, include other learning activities that require student interactions such as working in pairs (e.g. Think-Pair-Share), discussions, peer reviews, and encourage them to form study groups.

Creating a learning community helps establish an environment where all students feel included, connected, and actively involved in learning together. Participating in learning communities has demonstrated many benefits for students including increased academic performance, engagement, retention, and satisfaction.

Tech and Training for LCCC

The CET is available to help you with learning technologies, you can book CET for individual help or you have access to expert training provided by the company themselves. If you would like the CET to host any live webinars in EEC 224, please let us know—we’ve got great space and provide treats!

Canvas and Portfolium

There is a new link located in Canvas under the Help menu for Training Services Portal. Here you can access Canvas and Portfolium training videos and courses created by Instructure. Videos include: “Customizing Canvas Gradebook”, “Using Canvas Speedgrader” and “Portfolium Projects”. A few of the courses are: “Grading and Feedback”, “Getting Started with Assignments and Assessments” and “Portfolium Network: ePortfolios Reinvented”. Note: Portfolium is an Instructure product.

Respondus

LCCC has purchased two Respondus products Respondus 4.0 and the Test Bank Network and Respondus LockDown Browser & Respondus Monitor. To learn more about these products, you can attend webinar training or watch training videos. The link to download Respondus 4.0 is located in the Faculty Resources Site located under the Help menu in Canvas.

YuJa

YuJa is used for lecture capture and video storage. All LCCC employees and students have access to YuJa in myLCCC. For quick start guides and video tutorials see help.yuja.com.

Zoom

For video conferencing, LCCC has purchased Zoom Meetings for use by staff, faculty and students. Zoom provides live training webinars and recorded training videos. When searching for training keep in mind that LCCC has only purchased Zoom Meetings, not Zoom Webinars which is a different product.