Belonging and learning communities: case study

I used various collaborative boards such as Padlet, Trello, AWW App and Talis Elevate to help students develop a 'creator' and 'collaborator' mindset in an online setting by sharing their opinions openly and freely. I used Padlet mostly during the undergraduate tutorials where students engaged in the timeline activities, primary and secondary source analysis and open group work. Whereas Trello proved an excellent facilitator of a learning community at the postgraduate level. I used Trello to develop an Ambassadors' Forum board, which allowed the students to create their own @Twiplomacy space by sharing diplomatic news from their assigned countries.

Talis Elevate, on the other hand, turned out to be an outstanding tool for source analysis – it allowed for discussion and collaboration around several content formats, including documents and pdfs, but also images and videos. In addition, I aimed to enhance the aspects of belonging and learning communities in an online environment by introducing role-play exercises and negotiation simulations. The students had to prepare their negotiating stance in groups. They were encouraged to communicate with each other before the exercise to further strengthen the group dynamic.

Finally, I introduced peer-reviewed online presentations, the goal of which was to work towards making the peer-review process productive so that everyone has learnt something, felt involved, and the session has taken the group forward in relation to the themes the fellow students were interested in and wanted to focus on in their dissertations.

The prompting question I kept asking myself during the transition to online teaching was about recreating the environment that would allow everybody in the virtual room to teach and learn within the context of a 'learning-group' or 'learning community'. I've been wondering how the students can collaborate during and outside the online seminars, share resources, create mind-maps, annotate documents, and send files back and forth. The collaborative boards, role-play exercises, and negotiation simulations helped facilitate students belonging and learning, allowed them to create projects, engage in creative collaborative work, and cooperate online.

It has been indicated in the positive students' feedback, which demonstrated students' satisfaction with the delivery of my online classes at both UG and PG levels:

"I really enjoyed the use of Padlet in the tutorials. It was an interesting way to engage with the content and it was also good to see what other people were saying."
"Use of Padlet during webinars was great way of thrashing out ideas with other students"
"I appreciate all the effort the course leader has put into organising the class each week, particularly the Padlets and quizzes. Teaching and learning online has been difficult for everyone, but her ability to make the class engaging and interactive has been beneficial and made online classes interesting and effective discussions have been able to take place during the classes."
"Feedback from Trello responses in weekly task was helpful in engaging with the module more often outside of the graded assessments."
"Feedback offered on our Trello posts not only offered us new areas to look at in regard to our host nation, but also provided us with greater understanding of the topic we had written about."
"I liked the presentation aspect of the module's assessments as it allowed me to engage with the module in a way which I have not for modules I have previously done which was refreshing."
"I really enjoyed the presentation assignment and the feedback given was really helpful."

Throughout the past 18 months I’ve realised that the transformation to online teaching can be a great opportunity to put to use many excellent open-source digital tools that make collaboration between the students even more accessible and effective and can further enhance the face-to-face learning in future.

Tagged: Belonging and learning communities