In this chapter, we identify design considerations and strategies for creating online learning communities. Learning communities encourage integrated understanding and develop a common set of criteria for evaluating ideas. We report on four distinct learning communities focused on teacher professional development, curriculum authoring, scientific inquiry, and peer review of projects. The examples illustrate the design considerations and strategies that we use to facilitate the transformation and sharing of resources to support integrated understanding within learning communities.
Design considerations are general guidelines for creating effective communities. This chapter illustrates four design considerations for creating successful learning communities:
Support the actual practices and daily tasks of the participants,
Collect experiences and represent them in an accessible and equitable manner,
Provide a framework to guide the learning process,
Represent the identities of the community members.
We implement these design considerations in our communities using various design strategies. For example, a strategy for representing the identities of community members involves displaying photographs alongside comments in discussions. These design strategies, based on the underlying design considerations, encourage community members to share their ideas, build on each other's views, and refine their own understanding. Our instructional framework, called “scaffolded knowledge integration” (SKI; Linn & Hsi, 2000), inspired our design considerations and guided the learning process in the communities.
In this chapter, we describe how our design considerations and strategies scaffold four teacher and student communities as they exchange resources, develop coherent ideas, and support individual understanding.