Distant, Not Disconnected: How to Create Vital Online Communities

Penn contains many interconnected communities and different community members will have their own preferences for how they want to connect to university life including academics, research and scholarship, student life and co-curricular activities, mentorship and professional collaborations, pre-professional preparation and career planning, health and wellness, service and civic engagement, and life-long learning.

Begin by thinking about your role in supporting and maintaining community at Penn and what your community members want and need.

Questions to consider

• What audience(s) do you serve most directly?

• What do these communities want and need, both in general and in the context of this challenging time?

• What barriers might they be facing?

• How specifically will your target audience(s) benefit from the community you would like to cultivate?

• How will you articulate this value to your audience? 

Possible practices 

• Reflect on what has worked well in the past and what you want to keep doing.

• Consult surveys and feedback from the spring semester, such as Penn’s COVID-19 PULSE survey data, EDUCAUSE’s What Incoming First-Year Students Want Online Learning to Be, WCET’s National Survey of Undergraduates During the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the National Science Foundation’s preliminary data on graduate students.

• Conduct your own surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one conversations to gather data about what your audience(s) want and need. You can also use polling and reaction tools in Zoom or Poll Everywhere to get immediate data and feedback from your audiences when trying new things.

New and first year students worry about missing out on the college experience, and how they’ll make connections with classmates, faculty, and staff. These students benefit from well-structured opportunities to get welcomed and orientated and from opportunities to connect with each other.

Questions to consider

• How do you want to welcome students and get them ready to engage with your community?

• How can you get students comfortable with the tools and technologies they will be using?

• How can you empower students to build new relationships and reach out to each other and to faculty and staff? 

Possible practices

• Form small cohorts (no more than 6) and set regular meeting times and agendas or activities for them. You can also randomly pair students in a series of breakouts or invite them to have short get-to-know you conversations with a different person each week. 

• Begin with get-to-know-you activities, such as your favorite way to spend a free hour, the story of your name, or post a word or image that describes how you’re feeling today. For more ideas, see the Virtual Knowledge Café Process and Examples of Online IceBreakers. 

• Develop orientation materials, such as video tours of Canvas sites and other digital spaces, introductory videos, and quick-start technology guides. Contact us for an online orientation template in Canvas that can be adapted for a variety of purposes.

Students care deeply about their communities and can be impassioned leaders and creative collaborators. Think about how you can engage students in your community building efforts.

Questions to consider

• How can you involve students in the creation and vitality of your online communities?

• How can you identify and empower enthusiasts among your audience who can help lead this work?

• What steps can you take to encourage students to self-organize?

Possible practices

• Recognize and reward student contributions with leadership positions such as chairs of social committees, liaisons to staff coordinators, and peer mentors.

• Identify students who are excited to connect with peers and invite them to participate in efforts such as “ask me anything” (AMA) student takeovers, forming student-led chat groups or spaces, and coordinating informal student gatherings.

• Facilitate relationship-building by using Canvas sites and/or Google documents as optional places for students to exchange information and follow-up with one another.

Establishing an inclusive and welcoming environment is key to creating a thriving community. Fostering a sense of belonging requires intentional planning and attention to the challenges and benefits of an online environment.

Questions to consider

• How can you create an environment where all students feel welcome to participate?

• How might practices you have used need to change, given the online environment?

• How can you diversify the ways that students can contribute their voice and/or personal experience to the conversation?

• How can these experiences be accessible to students across time zones and locations? 

Possible practices

• Prioritize tools that are accessible, usable, and inclusive, and that students are already familiar with.

• Work with your community to co-create norms for online engagement, including the ways that the community will be welcoming to all members and the diverse perspectives and experiences that each person brings. For example, consider including your gender pronouns as part of your participant name or profile and let attendees know they have the option to as well and consider how you will handle situations where students may violate community norms. 

• Find ways to engage all members of your community: Consider asking everyone to share a strength, talent, or interest they bring to the community and find ways to bring that into your programs or events. Also, provide both synchronous and asynchronous options for students to engage with your community and accommodate different time zones. For smaller-sized gatherings, plan an activity that everyone in the group is expected to participate in and contribute to. 

We are all spending a lot of time online these days, and hours of stationary virtual activity can be exhausting. Providing physically active and engaging opportunities for students to connect can help to mitigate zoom fatigue while still offering experiences that will bring the community together.

Questions to consider

• How can you make community-building experiences feel active, participatory, and distinct from class time?

• What activities can give your community a shared sense of purpose?

• What new experiences might students be able to participate in an online format that they were not able to experience in person?

Possible practices

• Start events with music while waiting for others to join in. For communities that plan to meet multiple times, consider building a collaborative playlist.

• Incorporate physical and participatory components to offerings and events whenever possible such as cooking along with campus “celebrities,” lunchtime chats or brown bags, fitness and wellness offerings, offering stretching or breathing breaks in longer sessions, and other types of games or friendly competitions. Limit passive listening time as much as possible (ideally to no more than 15 minutes at a time).

• Foster connections outside of meetings: start a Charity Miles team or competition, create a remote scavenger hunt, or use collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Piazza to allow participants to co-create lists and ideas for shared offline experiences (such as books, movies, podcasts, video games, new skills or hobbies, and other things to do).

Students want to feel connected to each other and to the University. Particularly in this time, it’s important to establish a communication approach that feels both personal and informative. 

Questions to consider

• How and how often will you communicate with your communities?

• How can you personalize your communication to the needs and interests of the community, and promote authentic sharing by others?

• How do you want to handle questions and student-to-student communication?

• How will you differentiate essential information from other updates to ensure that your messages stay relevant? 

Possible practices

• Make clear up front how and how often your community can expect to communicate with you and with each other and keep your approach consistent. It’s likely that community members are juggling multiple modes of communication across their academic and non-academic activities -- maintaining one consistent communication channel can help to reduce confusion. 

• Meet them where they are: consider how you can leverage social media and other popular platforms to promote authentic communication and opportunities to engage or empower members of the community to support this work.

• Create a Canvas home page for your community. When surveyed in Spring 2020, 73.8% of traditional undergraduate students found a well-organized Canvas page to be a particularly helpful communication strategy. OLI has a template you can use for this purpose.

Penn has many technology tools and platform options that can be leveraged to support community-building strategies and practices.

Questions to consider

• What tools do you already have access to that might be useful for accomplishing your goals?

• What alternatives could you provide for students with access issues or those joining from countries that may have technology restrictions?

• How will you help your team and your students feel comfortable and confident about using the technologies you select?

Possible practices

• Explore Penn’s tools for online teaching and remote work. 

• Consult with your local technology support provider for additional tools and technologies that might accomplish your goals. 

• If considering a new tool or technology, contact OLI for resources that can help with evaluating new tools.

Regularly seeking feedback from students and colleagues will allow you to evolve your approach to fit the needs and wants of your community. 

Questions to consider

• How will you determine what is and is not working?

• How can you include student voices in this process?

• How will you use the information you gather to iterate and try new things? 

Possible practices

• Clarify how the community can provide feedback and be flexible and responsive to cues from your community.

• Create a short survey or feedback opportunity at the end of events using a Zoom poll or a Qualtrics post-event survey.

• Let us know if you try something that works well so we can add it to our list of practices.