Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

30 – Supporting E-learning through Communities of Practice
topics, chat rooms, multiplayer games, virtual worlds, a
website, or some combination of these spaces;
• profiles: ways to introduce members to each other,
develop and maintain their identities, and build trust
and relationships;
• roles: member roles such as newcomer, old-timer,
and leader, each of which may have unique interaction
and contribution needs within the community;
• leadership: those who take on roles to animate and
organize the community. Kim’s examples of their
tasks include greeting newcomers, coordinating
events, managing programs, maintaining the infrastructure,
and keeping activities lively and civil;
• etiquette: behavioural standards or social boundaries
that are explicitly stated and agreed on by the community;
• events: planned and facilitated events that bring people
together and help to define the community and
move it forward;
• rituals: welcomes to new members, celebrations and
other observances to help members feel at home and
create an online culture;
• subgroups: member-run small groups with common
interests, to help create a sense of intimacy and common
purpose.
More simply, CoP participation becomes a function
of roles and rules. Everyone has something to contribute,
whether coordinators, novices, local experts, experts
from outside the organization, or something in between.
However, there must be some structure related to how
the contributions are made. In the online education
sphere, we also have to remember the expert-novice
paradigm, where “experts” forget what it is like to learn
particular information or skills. Often fellow novices
have better explanations or advice regarding how to
solve a problem, because they themselves just figured
out how it works. Including people from outside the
organization can inject new ideas into the group and can
also help prevent “groupthink.”
SOFTWARE SUPPORT
Face-to-face communities can hold physical meetings
and events, but how is a virtual community supposed to
interact? Technology plays a pivotal role in enabling
online communities of practice to grow, to share knowledge
and ideas, and to allow members to support each
other as people. Choosing which technology to use for
these purposes is not an easy task. If you start with a list
of your desired activities and resources, you can often
find help from technical support staff and Internet sites
that review online tools.
Case Study: Technology Decisions for ScoPE
The process of choosing a suitable platform for the
SCoPE community facilitated by Simon Fraser University
was unexpectedly complex. Although organizers had
decided that their most important criteria were ease of
use, flexibility, ability to customize, and good communication
tools, their preliminary research did not yield any
existing community platforms that met their needs.
The technical support staff at SFU’s Learning & Instructional
Development Centre (LIDC) considered
several different solutions, starting with building an inhouse
solution, then moving to the open source community
platforms Sakai and TikiWiki, and finally settling
on Moodle (www.moodle.org). Moodle stood out
as satisfying most of our user requirements. Moodle
took (literally) eight minutes to install, and following
initial installation has required very little maintenance
by the LIDC technical support staff. Although Moodle
was developed as a course management system, branding
and customizing its interface and language was straightforward,
and making the changes that made SCoPE feel
like an online community rather than a course space were
easy. The community coordinator has the access privileges
necessary to deal with day-to-day operations.
What’s the lesson? Select tools that match your specific
community requirements and context. There is no
single ideal community platform, so plan for a good
foundation to build as new uses and needs emerge. This
example demonstrates that a cost-effective tool does
exist that could be used by an instructor, with minimal
support from technical experts.
If your community does not have a technical support
staff, do not worry. Since your community is interacting
over distance, there is no need to host the community
site yourself. Just as some face-to-face communities find
a public or private space to meet, you and your online
community can use public or private web-based spaces
for communication, activities, and more. For example,
the SCoPE project hosts its own installation of the Moodle
learning management system, but different companies
can host Moodle for you for a range of fees, depending
on how sophisticated you want to get. The following
case study discusses another hosted solution.
Case Study: Technology Decisions for BCcampus
As a new organization in 2003, BCcampus was, and remains,
a small organization relying on outside partnerships
for provision of services (see the BCcampus Case
Study above). Providing an online community was really
only feasible via an application service provider (ASP)
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