Designing Online Communities: If We Build it, Will They Come? Yvonne Clark Instructional Designer Penn State University

Agenda Defining the support needs Goals of the Penn State Adobe Connect community Process of designing and implementing the community ( Results Then you’ll never guess what happened!

First, Some Questions Do any of you use Adobe Connect Pro? Is it a complex too? Do you blog? Wiki? Comment on others’ blogs? Contribute to Wikipedia? Do you use Google Docs? What for? What does community mean to you? Are you a member of any communities?

Defining the Support Needs Who is our audience? What do they need to be able to do?  Acquire meeting rooms  Initiate meetings  Invite people to attend meetings  Use the meeting room tools  Help other use the meeting room tools  Run meetings  Attend meetings  Participate in meetings  Provide technical support for all audiences

New Resource - Same Old Problems How do you determine if support should be central or local? How do you centrally support a new university-wide, central resource without adding more staff?

Support Considerations for Adobe Connect Penn State Help Desk provides centralized support Help Desk staff answer general questions Adobe Connect is too complex for general support to suffice Many user issues have to be resolved at the local level

De-centralized vs Centralized Support Need centralized support to reduce unnecessary duplication of efforts at the local level Need local support for immediate help and knowledge of customizations How do you combine the efficiency of centralized support with the personalization of local support? We used Drupal to create an online community

Goals for the Online Community To provide a place where IT support staff could share information and ideas To provide a place where training staff could share information and ideas To provide a place for posting announcements and pertinent information (instead of a listserv) To provide a place where users could network and share ideas

Theories Amy Jo Kim  A sustainable business model  A dynamic infrastructure  Earned status and privileges for members  A healthy “immune” system  A set of tools for “self-organization”

Theories Nancy White  Clarify the purpose  Define the audience  Define how members will interact  Set the time frame for the community to exist  Define the rules for the community

Theories Randy Garrison and Norm Vaughn (in the context of blended learning)  Content  Members  Teachers/mentors

Theories Etienne Wenger Community identity is defined by a shared domain of interest and competence Community members engage in joint activities and discussions Community members are practitioners who develop shared knowledge and history

Phases of Development and Implementation Planning Building Growing Sustaining Get the design document at

Planning Define the community  What is the mission and/or goal of the online community?  What are the objectives?  Who is the audience?  Are the benefits measurable and visible to members?  What tools are available for building the online community?

Planning Are you ready and able to build and sustain the community?  Do you have time?  Resources?  Leadership skills?  Is there interest in the topic?  Are content experts willing to participate?  Is the audience large enough?  Where will members come from?  Open or closed community?

Building Building tools  What tools are available?  What are the audience’s skills?  What are the audience’s Internet capabilities?  What are your tech skills?  What kind of staff and tech support will you need while building?

Building Content  Need content to seed the community  How will members become engaged?  How will members work together?  How will members make contributions?  Who will do the initial work of seeding content and setting up the environment?

Building Behavior models for members  Visibility of administrators and moderators  Contact information  Rules  Enforcement of rules  Copyright issues

Growing Managing members is as important as managing content  Conversations and relationships  Need structure and purpose  Seed the community with people  Define and assign roles  Tell members how to contribute  Cross post to increase traffic

Sustaining Share the workload  Have several moderators  Allow community members to guide the direction of the content  Plan activities  Provide opportunities for members to share a sense of ownership  Recruit members to help

Sustaining Celebrate and recognize members’ work  Highlight best parts of the community  Encourage a community culture  Keep archives of community history  Recognize quality contributions  Provide support and encouragement  Nurture members

Online Community Scales Well Immediate pay-offs of the online community are scalability, flexibility, and efficiency Community provides both central and local support instead of either or Everyone with the same or similar needs and questions have access to the same answers and information Scales across the Penn State community of 95,000

Success of the Online Community Our information is at the top of the page for most any Adobe Connect Google search you can think of We frequently get inquiries from other institutions who are also using Adobe Connect or just beginning implementation A couple of months into the project, we realized that the online community scales for a much larger audience than just the Penn State community

Training and Support Have Similar Needs Penn State Training Services staff are generalists -- Adobe Connect is complex Different units do things differently -- hard for centralized training to provide adequate instruction Remote training is an issue

Immediate Training Needs IT support staff needed more in-depth training than they could receive from the general, centralized training sessions Ag Sciences needed more extensive training and training for remote participants

Focus Group Information Feedback from focus group indicated a number of additional training needs: Short and to the point -- just in time Readily available Easily searchable Apply to all audiences Address all user roles High quality Customizable/flexible application Maintained Make source files available Work in Share pod both synchronously and asynchronously Work with various distribution methods

The Value is in the Source Posted materials are OK for Penn State users The real value is in the original, unpublished files If you have the original files, you can easily customize and brand the content -- even if you aren’t part of the Penn State community Adobe Connect Training Collaborative community design specifications: