Supporting Online Community Building with Program Spaces

NovoEd is introducing Programs, a way for your team to group multiple courses and provide your participants the opportunity to connect across your various class sessions. We believe that this feature immensely improves community building in online courses, during and after the course. Since Program Space is a relatively new framework, NovoEd support has brought together a few Program Space best practices to share with all course designers who may want to implement this collaboration tool.
First of all, what is a Program Space?
A Program Space is a broad community forum where learners can network with other participants in the program and have a bird’s-eye view of timelines for multiple courses within your organization. Within the Program Space, learners have the opportunity to network with others (even once a course is over) and learners may even create groups based on special interests or industries. In addition, learners can be more informed of others’ perspectives and activity level by looking at each others’ Program profiles, which showcases one’s contributions across all courses in that Program.
Program Spaces promote online community building, provide access to additional course offerings, and enable cross-course community discussions.
A course has a start and end date, and typically entails one focal point with specific learning objectives. On the other hand, a Program Space is self-paced, and therefore doesn’t have an end date and can be accessed at any time. The Program Space is a customizable community space outside of the course environment.
Program Spaces are completely customizable, so it’s really up to you how you want to distinguish your Program Space from your courses! Here are some tips for how to differentiate your Program Space:
The Program Space Facilitator can have the following tasks:
Intentions could be:
One for each department
One for each track
Create an exit survey within a course in which learners have to complete a task on the Program Space. This will allow them to become familiar with the space and will encourage them to participate in the community after their course ends.
The following 4 Program Space styles embody the core functionalities of this unique feature and support the most common Org Admin Program Space intentions of course alumni networking, track completion, and community building.
In some of the most successful company programs, Org Admin have found it beneficial to create one Program Space for each department within their organization. Set your intent, then consider how you want to layout the style of your Program Space.
Did you enjoy this post? Learn more about how to build an Online Learning Community in our other article.
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