Learning studies show that collaborative based learning experiences improve course completions by 16x (compared to solo learning). The powers of community-based learning has been recognized by global training brands as a way to:
Some organizations build communities within third-party websites such as Facebook. However most community managers that we speak with agree that the lack of control in Facebook communities – and the collapsing reputation of Facebook – mean that there is a real desire to bring community tools inside of their learning platform.
And while there are dedicated community platforms that you can use, they are often subject to per-user fees, require users to download another app, or log into yet another platform at the cost of your user experience.
So for Megagen, it was clear that we had to build a custom Communities platform inside of their LMS. For end-users, this means that there is a single login for engaging with the learning and the community, and a consistent design language means that it looks and feels like a unified platform.
At the heart of the community is the feed, which aggregates popular posts from the communities or topics that an individual is interested in, similar to Reddit’s front page or Facebook’s community feed.
Users can follow topics that they are interested in to personalize what appears in their feed. With LMS integration, users are also automatically added to communities that match courses they enrol in, so communities can become a huge value-add for your courses. These may be communities separated by course, subject/topic or even by cohorts.
Users can contribute to any community they’re a part of by posting text, video, images or links. And other community members can respond with a comment or a like, with the ability to tag other users. A notification system ensures that users never miss a comment or reply on one of their posts, and prompts users to come back and further engage with the website.
Megagen is a pharmaceutical company, so it was important that any posts in the community followed strict content guidelines. We developed a suite of moderation tools designed to protect against the most common types of disallowed posts. But it was important to automate as much as possible to avoid the cost of moderation:
