Managing Your Online Course

Creating Community Engagement for Online Courses - Guide, Tips, More

Table of Contents

Community Engagement is crucial if you want to sell your online courses to a diverse and larger audience. It helps you to target multiple markets and individuals at once.

But how do you do that? For that matter, we have compiled a list of things you can implement to create strong and interactive communities.

In this article, we will go over the following topics:

  • How to build an Online Community
  • Why you should build an Online Community
  • Direct and Indirect Benefits of an Online Community

Let’s get into it.

Guide to Build an Online Community

As an online course creator, a wide variety of people can utilize the service you provide. But you must do extensive research for better community service and engagement.

There are multiple community-based activities and tools that you can use to enhance online learning and the interaction among your community partners.

A community’s success is based on how engaged its members are. The engagement is not limited to academic purposes but on a personal level as well.

So, how can you build a community?

There are multiple strategies you can implement. Some of them are given below:

  • Online Zoom sessions
  • Training Webinars
  • Group Projects
  • Discussion Sessions

     

Zoom Sessions

Zoom is the leading program used by students, college teachers, faculty members, and even by average people for day-to-day communications.

You can access their website by clicking here.

How does Zoom help?

Zoom acts like an online classroom. You can use it to your advantage to execute collaborative assignments among class members.

Other than that, Zoom provides video services that you can use to effectively communicate with your community members.

Training Webinars

Apart from online teaching sessions, you can organize local webinars for your community members. These webinars can focus on actionable techniques or can be informational.

How can you target different communities?

You can easily target different communities around the world based on their profession and mutual interests.

For example, you have a handful of university students learning different modules of your online course. You can organize a webinar to explain the key points of your course.

The best way to hold webinars in the current state is on Zoom. It enables you to accommodate up to 100 people in one single online room.

Group Projects

Group projects are an essential part of community building and community engagement. It facilitates partnerships between individuals in your community.

As an instructor, you must develop modules that enable your community individuals to act as a team and work towards positive outcomes.

What are the advantages of community-based projects?

Community-based projects will help you and help the students, faculty members, and ease up the process of learning.

The key to developing a collaborative project is to monitor the behavior of your community members. It will save resources like time and money.

Discussion Sessions

One thing that acts as a catalyst for community engagement is discussion sessions. 

But you might be wondering, how is it important? 

You can check our extensive article on Essentials of Community Building in which we explain why discussions are important.

It is the instructors’ job to facilitate discussions. This will help you with engagement between community members on a group and 1-on-1 level.

What other benefits can you get from discussions?

This will also ensure that every single member has total participation in your online class and is learning effectively.

Besides that, it will move your community towards a positive environment where everyone is helpful.

It will also help you to adjust newcomers inside your community.

Resource Allocation

When you are building a community, it is important that you keep track of your resources. They are essential and should be used carefully.

Now, how do you determine how to divide your resources?

You can easily determine what type of resource is required in a specific area by running multiple surveys in your community. 

No matter how small your community is, it will provide you with an insight into your classroom, individuals, and the areas you need to improve.

Other Methods for Community Engagement

Let’s look into some other ways you can improve your service and learning process via community engagement.

Facebook groups

Facebook is arguably the largest social media platform on the planet. It has countless communities with their own mutual interests.

What are the uses of a Facebook group?

One way to improve community engagement is to create a Facebook group. It provides countless opportunities and tools for your members of the community.

Besides that, it also encourages them to interact with other communities. You can develop a program that facilitates other members to communicate with different communities.

It will not only bring a social change among your members but also promote your brand’s image in different communities.

Importance of Community Engagement

We cannot emphasize enough how important a community is to your brand as a whole. No matter how good your content is, without a community it is worthless.

We have made a detailed article on the Importance of Community Building

An online community serves the customers and providers equally. 

To summarize this, you can check the following points:

  • Feedback. The remarks and comments you get from your community members help you to further improve your shortcomings.
  • Validation. As a community, your members create a sense of authenticity for the new and curious members.
  • Sales. The word of mouth from your community members encourages new users to join without hesitation.

These are only the basic things that you can achieve through engagement service and learning among your community members. 

The areas you can improve are only limited to your own research.

Advantages of Community Engagement

All the strategies you use for community engagement have their own positive impact on the environment.

You can check our article on Benefits of Community Engagement to get a better idea. 

In summary, community engagement can help you to improve your community service.

Other than that, it will also enable you to effectively create a balance between your partners and your customers.

Some basic benefits of Community Engagement are:

  • Interpersonal Social Skills. Your community is better equipped to solve a problem if they act in a friendly way with others rather than acquaintances. 
  • Participation. Community engagement helps you to help individuals down to the personal level. It also makes sure that every single person has access to your course.
  • Word of mouth. An interactive community spreads your positive brand image faster than normal advertising.
  • Community Activities. Communities also help instructors to create an extensive teaching plan that consists of individual and group-based assignments.
  • Social Skills. Community participation enhances your social skills. Every single person has their own behavior and this helps you to deal with them in an easy way.
  • Positive and strong communities have an indirect effect on other communities. This helps you to spread your brand’s image without much advertisement.

Important Tips for Community Engagement

Even though we have explained pretty much everything there is to know about partnerships and to effectively engage your community. 

There are some other tips you can implement:

  • Always do a survey of your community. Be it about demographics or profession, you can extract a lot of information that is otherwise hidden from the naked eye.
  • Keep your course interactive. This will enable the course reader to get the most out of the course even without any training.
  • Devise assignments for teachers and students as well if your course is related to academic topics
  • Try to include local people as much as you can. They can help you form a small yet strong community.

Wrapping Things Up…

As a business that sells courses, community engagement is a vital part to access new horizons. You can do many things with very little effort.

On the other hand, your whole venture can lose more money than it can possibly make. You will have to spend money on advertisement and research which can be easily avoided.

We hope that this article proves to be helpful and informational for you. We also hope that you can implement these tips and increase your sales.

Let us know what you think about Community Building.