Home Transform your Community into a Classroom - A Beginner’s Guide
Transform your Community into a Classroom - A Beginner’s Guide
It’s no doubt that turning your community into a classroom will increase your community engagement and will make it sustainable.
Summary: Learning with a community is the best way to learn nowadays. It inhabits peer learning which is a powerful tool for a transformative learning experience. It's no doubt that by turning your community into a classroom, which means making learning part of your community rituals, you will not only give more value to your members but will also sustain your community for the long term.
Communities are great especially when you meet like-minded people with shared interests. If you're like me who are working with technology, I bet you have more than one online community that you're part of. Sometimes, joining these communities that discuss topics in line with our interests is addictive. We get FOMO which makes us dig into rabbit holes.
If you're the community lead, the manager, or the builder, you always have this question in mind how you can make your community more engaging? What are the ways to sustain the engagement and make everyone participate?
One of the best solutions is to make learning happen in your community by transforming it into a classroom. Or I have to say, create a space where everyone can meet, share, and learn from one another. Some ideas to start with are:
In fact, this is the simplest thing you can do to start. Figure out the topic that members are eager to learn. Then either invite a speaker, a member, or a non-member, for a live discussion. Examples of this kind of discussion are:
If you can't figure out the topic and who to invite, create a poll in your community. Or if you count yourself as an expert, then you can be the best resource person on your first community event.
This is the best way to start transforming your community into a classroom. Now that you have members already, it will be easier for you to validate if you should add a course offering in your community. What do I mean? Not all communities can be learning hubs. Validation among community members is necessary by conducting weekly learning sessions.
Here are the steps to do that:
Bring the classroom inside your community by creating a cohort-based course. If the weekly learning sessions are successful, then it's time to do it longer and better, with structure.
The great thing about turning your community into a classroom style is you don't have to build everything yourself. You have your members ideate, iterate, and experiment with you. How can you do that?
Although the difficult part is to ask the community members to participate and give their time and energy to co-create the cohort-based course with you. Plus, if it goes well, how are you going to monetize it where everyone will earn from it? If you've built a community where you foster belongingness and camaraderie, this should be manageable for you.
A community where people are connected based on their shared interests or passions. Examples are those creative genres such as music, photography, gaming, sports, and many more. You can see most of these on Patreon and subreddits.
Other Examples:
This is the common type of community that is run by non-profit organizations, activist groups, and social entrepreneurs. This is mostly built to run fundraising events and purpose-driven activities that can help the community to support its mission and certain social cause.
Other Examples:
Startup companies nowadays are building a community for customers who love their products. It's also a good strategy to retain their customers and provide much more value than the products alone. One of the biggest product-based communities is Notion. They grew the company through their community-building strategy where their users became their ambassadors.
Other Examples:
This is also one of the common types where people with the same profession gather together to give feedback, share opinions, and learn from each other. This is mostly seen in Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram groups.
Examples are teachers who want to learn from each other to improve their teaching strategies. UX designers, software engineers, and marketers gather to improve their skills and grow their careers. In fact, these are the best communities to turn into a classroom.
Other Examples:
Transforming your community into a classroom isn't an easy task. Expect to have a long list of to-dos and months of validation to do it right. Using a learning platform to help you with the automation process can be a good decision.
Surely, you can choose from the thousands of learning platforms available out there, so don't forget to look for these important features to ease your work:
That's all, folks! Share this article with a friend who is also struggling to create engagement in their communities. You might help them a ton!
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