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Building Community in a Flex-Hybrid Course – Series Overview

There are many definitions of “community”, but most encompass notions of trust, belonging, “feeling at home”, connectedness, interactivity, shared expectations, and shared conversations.

One useful way of thinking about community is to break it into three components:

  • Community as physical space
  • Community as a “communication process”
  • Community as shared values and interests

In common usage we often use the word “community” to refer to physical spaces – even if people in those spaces don’t know one another well, such as in a “bedroom community”. Because of this, it can be easy to feel that creating a classroom community in a virtual space is difficult or even impossible. 

The good news is that Gen Z already knows that this isn’t true! For our students, some online communities have become more vibrant and engaging than many communities that exist “IRL”. Research on class communities in online courses backs this up (1).

In fact, all of the aspects of community listed above can be (even more) successfully created in a flex-hybrid course with a little creativity – and doing so only rarely requires more work than for fully in-person classes. (Really!)

Below we’ve outlined some ideas for each of the aspects of community, and there are plenty of links to take you to “deeper dives” into the topics that interest you the most.

Near the end of this overview, you’ll also find some links to posts about some specific techniques for building community before, during, and after synchronous class sessions.

Space

Your flex-hybrid course does take place in a “space” – it’s just a virtual space instead of (or in addition to) a physical one. With a little effort, you can make that virtual space (Canvas, Google Meet, etc.) as comfortable and conducive to learning as your physical classroom.

Here are some basic principles for making your virtual classroom space comfortable and conducive to learning:

  • Make it safe and inclusive.
  • Make it welcoming – that it’s got good “curb appeal”. 
  • Design the space to account for your students’ physical responses to working on a computer.
  • The less your students have to think, the better (yes, we know this seems paradoxical, but it isn’t!)

Read more about how to make your virtual course “space” welcoming and comfortable.

Shared Communication Processes

When designing a flex-hybrid course, you should make sure that everyone understands what communication channels you will use and how, and how often, you will use them.

However, online communication can easily end up feeling like a “firehose” of information. Thus, it’s important to streamline communication by limiting the channels of communication you use with your students. Also, using the Canvas Template and the Canvas “due date” feature is extremely important to keep things simple.

Keeping things simple will help students feel comfortable – and make them more likely to stay engaged with your course.

In other words, “less is more”! Learn more about how to streamline and simplify communication in your flex-hybrid course.

Shared Values and Interests

Agreeing upon and articulating shared values and interests is essential in all class communities.

The fundamental challenges of negotiating classroom values so are the same in both in-person and virtual learning spaces: 

  • Balancing freedom and openness with inclusivity and safety.
  • Making sure everyone is able to participate in class discussions and projects – and feels comfortable doing so.

Fortunately, flex-hybrid classes offer many options for navigating these challenges – and in some cases, may offer tools that make it easier to do so. Here is a description of some of these tools and how you can use them.

Building Community Before, During, and After Synchronous Class Sessions

These posts offer specific techniques for using your synchronous class meetings to create connections with, and among, your students.

How Do I Choose Which Tools to Use?

As you will see as you read the posts in this series, the real question when it comes to creating community in a flex-hybrid course is not whether it’s possible, but how to choose from all the multiplicity of tools available for doing so: Canvas, Google Meet, Zoom, chat, Docs, Jamboard, and more.

Three questions can help you choose the tools that are right for you:

  • What’s your desired outcome? A good discussion? collaboration among students?  reflection? sharing? getting help? Then, pick the tool that is most appropriate for your goals. This is known as “backwards design” – you start with the end in mind.
  • Is the tool easily accessible to your students, in terms of cost, learning curve, and technical requirements (bandwidth, hardware)?
  • Are you personally comfortable using the tool – or learning how to use it?

Remember that the Center for Learning and Teaching is always available to help you find a tool for your needs and to help you get up to speed with it!

(1) https://www.ideaedu.org/idea-notes-on-instruction/formed-teams-or-discussion-groups-to-facilitate-learning/; see also Garrison, D.R., & Vaughan, N.D. (2008). Blended learning in higher education: Framework, principles, and guidelines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(2)  See https://library.gwu.edu/utlc/teaching/building-community-and-interaction-online; see also https://clt.champlain.edu/fall-2020/course-design-principles/.

“Don’t Make Me Think!”: Minimizing Your Students’ Extraneous Cognitive Load

Web usability experts sometimes use the mantra “don’t make me think”* to describe the ideal for clear, clutter-free web design and navigation. 

While this may sound simplistic or lazy, it’s actually just a catchy summation of one of the fundamental principles of “cognitive load theory”. 

In broad terms, cognitive load theory breaks the types of thinking needed for a college course into two types:

  • Intrinsic cognitive load. This is the thinking required to master the actual course content.
  • Extraneous cognitive load. This is the thinking required to manage the learning process (parsing texts and examples, finding important content and references, figuring out where assignments are, and so on). 

While as instructors we cannot change the “intrinsic” cognitive load required to learn our subject, we have a great deal of control over the “extraneous” cognitive load that is imposed by our course design.

Thus, “don’t make me think” might be more appropriately expressed as “don’t make me think about the nonessential stuff so that I can think better about the stuff that really matters in this course”.

That’s why the Center for Learning and Teaching has developed the Canvas Template. The Template is designed to ensure that all Canvas courses use the same basic navigation and organization system. 

Importing and using the Canvas Template is one of the best ways to reduce your students’ extraneous cognitive load. Here’s how.

Once you’ve loaded your content in the Canvas Template, a good way to test the usability of your course is to look at your course in “student view”. This is easy to do – simply go to the homepage of the course and click the button marked “Student View” on the top right. (Here are the full instructions for getting into student view.)

If you want to get fancy, recruit someone in your household who isn’t familiar with Canvas to take your course for a test-drive in student view and adjust it based on their feedback.

* Don’t Make Me Think is the title of one of the classics of website usability design, first published in 2000 by Steve Krug. Here’s a PDF of an updated version that was published in 2014.

Reducing “Zoom Fatigue”

Meme of a cat with eyes half closed resting its chin on a keyboard. Caption reads: me attending a Zoom meeting at 8:30 in the morning.

“Zoom fatigue” is a real thing – it comes from the additional cognitive load imposed by trying to parse interpersonal interactions in a space where you can’t see a person’s full body and other physical cues that you get during in-person meetings. (1)

Here are some simple but effective ways to minimize Zoom fatigue:

  • Change your settings so that you can’t see yourself (because really, you don’t look like the Emperor from Star Wars and it’s stressful to feel like you do).
  • Shut down other apps and browser tabs so that you’re not tempted to multitask
  • Build breaks into your schedule so that you can get up and move around.
  • Set up your camera so that it shows more than just your face, and ask others on the call to do the same. The more of your body is viewable, the more interpersonal signals others will be able to see. 
  • Switch to audio periodically, and allow your students to do so as well whenever they need to.
  • Make yourself a “Loomie” – an animated “avatar” that looks like you and tracks your face and eye movements during meetings so that other people in the meeting or class feel like they’re interacting with a human being, but allows you to turn your camera off to take a break. Again, you can encourage your students to do the same.

If you’re worried that allowing students to participate by audio only will make them “check out” of class, you can always use active-learning techniques like polls or chat to keep them engaged.

(Allowing students to move to audio as needed also protects their privacy and dignity if they’re in a place they don’t feel comfortable sharing on screen.)

Likewise, moving to audio makes it possible for you and your students to get up and move around if they want to. This seems trivial, but it isn’t! Too little physical movement has been an unpleasant side effect of the pandemic for many and is leading to health problems.

As a plus, along with the health benefits of moving around, “walking meetings”, even if they’re just walking around everyone’s respective home offices, can be better for fostering connection than face-to-face seated meetings. (2)

(1) See https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/05/11/zoom-fatigue-is-real-heres-why-youre-feeling-it-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/, https://www.forbes.com/sites/yolarobert1/2020/04/30/heres-why-youre-feeling-zoom-fatigue/#2cbab1bf2ac6, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavirus-zoom-fatigue-is-taxing-the-brain-here-is-why-that-happens/#closehttps://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting

(2) See https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/walking-helps-us-think; https://hbr.org/2015/08/how-to-do-walking-meetings-right

Fun, Simple Ways to Foster Community During Synchronous Class Sessions

There are tons – here are just a few!

  • Chat. Some instructors dislike the “chat” function and dismiss it as a distraction. However, it can become a lively forum for side conversations and comments. It’s also a great way for quiet students, or students who are struggling, to participate. Some instructors have found such “backchannel chat” to be a transformative element in their classrooms.*
  • Google Meet “Nod” Chrome Extension. This Chrome extension allows students to post emojis to indicate their reactions to things others are saying. You can download the Nod extension here. Note that people will have to leave the Meet and come back for the extension to work if they install it during a Meet. 
  • Games. Games can be a great way to build community among students – or at any meeting. (C’mon, we’ve all played Collaborative Bingo.) In one such game, “the rock”, a secret code word related to the class content is chosen by the students. Every time the word is mentioned during class, the students do a coordinated move, like scratching their heads or high-fiving the side of the screen (or contributing something specific to the chat if the student is on audio). The goal is for the instructor to figure out what the code word is. A nice bonus of this game is that you can use it to assess engagement – if students respond to the code word, you know they’re paying attention to the discussion.

Of course, don’t forget to wrap up the semester on a high note by bringing your classroom community together to tie together all that you’ve learned.

* Chat is getting a lot of attention these days for its community-building and introvert-supporting capacities. See https://www.edutopia.org/blog/backchannel-student-voice-blended-classroom-beth-holland and https://community.chronicle.com/news/2367-turns-out-you-can-build-community-in-a-zoom-classroom?cid=VTEVPMSED1.

Thoughtful and Creative Starts to Synchronous Class Meetings Encourage Community

“Soft starts” to your synchronous meetings – i.e. opening the meeting about ten minutes before class officially begins – encourage community in a number of ways:

  • They can be used to work out tech problems before class starts so that students can participate fully. 
  • They can be used to “warm up” the class by encouraging students to comment in the chat about an interesting photo, question, or other graphic that you share on your screen.
  • They can be used to create a welcoming atmosphere by playing fun music (Zoom has a specific function for sharing audio).

To bring the “soft start” time to an end and segue to the regular class meeting, you can spend a few minutes doing some sort of check-in to see how everyone is doing. Reaching out to students with warmth and humanity is more important these days than ever, and it is an essential ingredient in creating community in a flex-hybrid course.

The start of each class might also be a great time for a little “how to be successful this week” pep talk. Let students know what you expect in the assignments they’re doing. Explain some common mistakes and provide clear examples of what success might look like.

Staying in contact with students via Announcements on Canvas was, I believe, pivotal to the overall success and continued student engagement with course work, as was a little TLC ‘pep talk’ at the beginning of each class session. This personalised the student experience and created a relaxed atmosphere in what was, undoubtedly, a challenging time for everyone.

Caroline Elbay

I used my synchronous meetings primarily to re-connect and re-create at each meeting our shared learning community. Major concept development and content learning was mostly left to the asynchronous discussion posts, individual or group tasks. What that means is that I tried to make our time online in zoom or google hangout meeting be more about human connection than content.

John Stroup

Supporting the Informal and Impromptu Conversations that Build Community

One of the best aspects of in-person teaching is that it allows for unplanned informal discussions before, during, and after class. These discussions are vital for creating and maintaining both strong and weak social ties among students and faculty.

While such conversations are harder to recreate in a flex-hybrid classroom, it is possible. Again, the (sort of) good news about flex-hybrid teaching is that this year, students will likely be required to leave their physical classrooms and exit the building immediately after class concludes, which means that casual conversations might actually be easier to have before and after flex-hybrid or fully remote synchronous class sessions.

Here are some ways you can invite and support those casual, invaluable discussions.

  • Students will naturally set up their own Google Docs and other communication channels for group work. Except for ensuring that all group members have access to everything, allow group members to manage their private group space and stay out of it.
  • Provide a virtual “student lounge” as a place for social and off-topic exchanges. This can be done using the “chat” feature during Zoom/Meet class sessions, and by opening up video class sessions early and keeping them open after class is finished. One Champlain faculty member who did this in Spring 2020 reported that some students stayed on after class for up to an hour.
  • Set up drop-in Google Meet sessions periodically as office hours – or even let students know that you won’t be at those sessions and that they can get together to talk about anything they want!
  • Set up an open discussion forum in Canvas that can be used at any time throughout the semester to talk about anything students want to discuss.

Set up a completely separate, fun platform for students to connect to share experiences and ideas that are completely unrelated to the class.

One of the really fun discoveries was playing around as a group with Jamboard.* The idea is to provide a shared creative space to upload images and notes to one another in real time. One could use it for more serious content related learning but I mostly used it to share playfully about our pandemic experiences.

John Stroup

* Jamboard is Google’s virtual whiteboard. You can use Jamboard by downloading a Google Chrome extension. Jamboard integration with Google Meet is forthcoming.