Explain how a strong sense of community can be established and maintained in an eLearning environment

Discussion: Evaluating Virtual Learning Communities A fundamental task for educational professionals is to help companies and educational institutions utilize appropriate technologies to run their businesses and stay competitive and responsive to the demands of their consumers. As a thought leader, this requires you to be familiar with emerging teaching and learning tools for the delivery of collaborative courses and training. For this Discussion, you will analyze the concepts of sense of community and collaboration in eLearning environments. You will also evaluate virtual delivery systems to determine which system best suits the needs of a virtual learning community in your workplace. To prepare: Read A Framework for Collaborative Networked Learning in Higher Education: Design & Analysis, which explores the framework for planning, designing, and implementing collaborative learning systems. Review Using Social Network Analysis to Understand Sense of Community in an Online Learning Environment and the research findings of the unique interaction patterns for students in online courses. Finally, view the media piece in this module’s Learning Resources with a focus on the “Delivery” (green) section. Consider the variety of virtual delivery systems, which exist for the creation of learning communities (e.g., mobile and micro learning, social media, massive open online courses, called MOOCs, learning management systems and online learning spaces, virtual worlds, and video conferencing). Research and choose one or more delivery systems that you believe are best to create a virtual-learning community in your workplace. By Day 7 of Week 7 Post the following: Explain how a strong sense of community can be established and maintained in an eLearning environment. In addition, contrast the concepts of a sense of community with collaboration. Explain why your choice of a virtual delivery system(s) is the best delivery model for your workplace. Include in your explanation how the delivery system maximizes access for your audience and how it enhances the ability of your audience to connect and share a sense of community. Defend your choices from personal experience, a learning theory, and at least one research study (PhD, EdD, and EdS students) or dissertation (PhD and EdD students); use module resources as applicable. By Day 3 of Week 8 Read a selection of your classmates’ postings. Respond to at least two classmates’ postings in one or more of the following ways: Directly address your classmate’s choice of virtual delivery model to promote sense of community and defend or ask questions about your classmates’ choices. Ask additional probing or clarifying questions pertaining to their ideas for accomplishing sense of community. Share an insight you gained from reading the colleague’s posting and study. Validate a classmate’s comments with your own experience. Note: You have the option to use the Kaltura Media Uploader to add audio postings to the discussion to replace the normal text post. For information about this tool, refer to the Kaltura Media Uploader area of the course navigation menu.