Our Learning Community

Building a strong learning community can help everyone achieve at a higher level in this class. You are an important part of that community. By learning the course policies and procedures, familiarizing yourself with the flow of the learning materials, and engaging with your classmates, you’ll help lay the foundations for a positive environment for everyone.

A learning community is a group of people who share common emotions, values, or beliefs and are actively engaged in learning together from one another. Four key factors^[1] that define a community^[2] include:

• membership;
• influence;
• fulfillment of individual needs; and
• shared events and emotional connections.

In other words in a learning community, participants must feel some sense of loyalty and belonging to the group (membership) and their actions must affect what happens in the community (influence). A learning community must give participants opportunities to meet their individual needs (fulfillment) by allowing them to seek help, express personal opinions, and share stories and emotional experiences (emotional connections).

Whether working alone or in a group with classmates, active participation in the learning materials in the course is essential for success. This course is designed for you to learn by doing. The “textbook” for the course is embedded directly in the course materials in rich, multimedia pages called What to Know. These pages include text, video, illustrations, and questions for you to answer. You’ll find that engaging in the page, actively answering the questions in response to the information presented, will prepare you well for the class activity found in the Forming Connections page. As the names of these pages imply, there is a continuous interplay between obtaining the information you’ll need and forming connections in the concepts to learn them.

Recent research points time and time again to the benefits of learning actively with others. Finding opportunities to work with your classmates on the activities and forming study groups to support one another outside of class will be powerful tools for success with this type of learning. Whether in the classroom or in a study group, positive, respectful dialogue will benefit your success, as well as each individual working hard to be a productive member of your group.

Take a few minutes to answer Question 1 in light of the definition of a learning community given above.

Now, in your group, discuss what supports and what inhibits your learning when you are learning in groups. Generate a list for each and type those lists out in answer to Question 2.