Creating a Course Community

By: Justin Ferriman • June 29, 2015
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board-room-trainingTaking an online course can be a little lonely. Because of this, it is common today to see communities developed around courses.

In most cases, course communities involve incorporating a forum with the course content.

This gives participants a chance to interact with one another and ask questions to the instructor.

In some situations, it is also a place where instructors can require participation (but not without setting proper guidelines first).

Online communities around elearning content can increase the value of the course and its effectiveness. Naturally, the amount of impact largely depends on the implementation as well as the course subject.

If the course content is around compliance then a forum is probably not going to add much value. If however the content is designed to teach people a new skill (that they should implement), then having a forum is a great way to help people after interacting with the material.

How To Create an Online Community

As I’ve mentioned already, forums are a great (and easy) way to create an online community around your course offering. If you are using WordPress and the LearnDash LMS plugin, you can easily set this up with our bbPress integration. There are other options as well.

For example, there are businesses that find the Facebook group feature to be quite useful. This requires some manual setup and maintenance, but the Facebook private group functionality will make it possible for people to interact like they would in a forum.

One advantage of this approach that most people are already familiar with Facebook so they don’t need to have a new or different account. The disadvantage is that the Facebook private group functionality is a little “messy”. It can be difficult to search the group’s past conversations. Also, you have to manually add and remove users to the private group, so there is an extra administrative step.

Nonetheless, if this is an approach you want to take then this article by Digital Marketer can help get you started.

Regardless of what you use to create your course community, do understand that it takes time and extra effort to implement. Take the time continually encourage participation and soon your forums will bustle with activity.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter