Pedagogical Strategies for Creating an Online Community

MOOCs is synonymous with information-overload and can result in bad learning experiences. This is the case when thousands of learners engage in a discussion forum with many entries and long threads. The forums are challenging to engage in for learners and overwhelming to moderate for educators. These factors cause difficulties when trying to establish a well-working community of practice and can in fact discourage effective online learning. To meet this challenge, MOOCs are often designed to be self-directed, meaning that educators are released from taking responsibility for the social learning processes in the forums. Instead, educators have a digital presence in videos and are actively involved in the instructional design, which can be an effective online pedagogical strategy to fertilize social learning in open online courses and create the illusion of being seen as a student. Therefore, this short paper reports from an educator’s experiences when organizing an online course where such pedagogical strategies were enacted in a prepaid online course. The educator had a significant online presence and deployed a variety of online pedagogical strategies to create community awareness of the learning content in an online course about digitalization and its impact on society at large