I've long felt I wanted to do more to teach people in our internal Jive SBS community about community management and development, but I never felt comfortable distilling such skills and knowledge into an hour or two of "training," let alone a PowerPoint deck. It just didn't feel right . . . antithetical, somehow, to the whole idea of communities.
Time, Assignments and Model Community
Finally it dawned on me that by making it more like a college seminar and stretching it out over weeks, including assignments or even projects, the potential for effective learning would be much greater. And when I realized that would also allow us to form, within the course participants, a community of our own in which we could model the kind of behavior I want them to learn, well, that was my eureka moment. This could really be an effective way to teach people to develop and manage their own online communities.
So, we are underway. I made the course open to any employee, no matter what their role or whether they have any community management responsibilities. If you're interested, you can join. I pitched it as a learning and development opportunity, making clear that it would be valuable for anyone working in our online community who wants to help make it a more effective and useful place.
Off to a Roaring Start
I expected 30, maybe 50 people to sign up, and at last count there were just over 100! Wow. And then I went away on a long weekend camping trip with no Internet connection, and when I got a signal back my Blackberry went crazy pinging in all the email notifications from our course community. In only a week, it has taken off so much that I had to teach people how to filter the course's email notifications to a folder instead of their inbox -- people were saying they would have to leave the course because they couldn't find their regular work emails among the flood.
Asynchronous Learning
We have employees all over the world, so there's no time of day that will work for everyone. And I don't see all that much value in gathering everyone together simultaneously to listen to me, anyway. I'm not their greatest source of knowledge: the community is. So I committed to posting a video "lecture" weekly as well as exercises for them to complete. I'm keeping the videos to about five minutes long (these people all have day jobs, after all) and I hope that with the exercises they'll only need to spend one or two hours a week on the course.
Learning by Doing
The exercises are designed to get them to learn by doing, as well as from each other. The first exercise was to respond to a discussion in our course's community and explain what they hoped to learn in the course. Since this is my first time offering it, their input is literally shaping the content I'm going to offer. This is another advantage of stretching the course out over time, as I can adjust the content to meet their needs. It's literally going to evolve, just as our communities do (subtle, eh?).
As they responded to that discussion thread, many people commented on what others had posted -- they were, in fact, exhibiting the behavior we want to encourage in communities. The next assignment was to read and then post a response to Andrew McAfee's blog post, Do's and Don'ts for Your Work's Social Platforms. This generated both routine "I agree" posts and quite insightful commentaries either challenging McAfee, qualifying his points or adding more that they felt he'd omitted. And then those posts sparked their own back-and-forth discussions.
The third exercise was to find a community within our site that they had not found before and tell us why they liked it. This proved to be a pleasant treasure hunt for many. My favorite response was from someone who found the Excel Tips and Tricks group: "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!"
In addition to the responses to exercises, people are taking initiative (and this is only the first week, don't forget) to start discussions about topics they want to learn about or to summarize in an organized way the ideas that have emerged in the long threaded discussions.
New Leaders Emerging
I quickly realized I was overwhelmed and wouldn't be able to respond as fully as I wished to such a large group alone, so I drafted my colleague, Tracy Maurer, to be the co-facilitator. But even the two of us are not enough, so I am delighted to see some of the more experienced people in the course stepping up and responding to their peers, too. They are modeling the behavior we want everyone in the course to learn.
We've Only Just Begun
This isn't an account of a successful initiative. It's a bulletin from the field while the initiative is underway. I'll try to keep them coming so you can follow our progress, and our inevitable setbacks, and so I can recall later what it was like at each step of the way.
I've just recorded the Week 2 video and will be posting it and the Week 2 exercise soon. I have to admit, recording my talking head on video is more uncomfortable than I expected. The first attempts I made were awful, with my eyes tracking back and forth while I tried to read my notes, or worse, random glances at the ceiling when I lost my train of thought. I'm not a pro. So, I acknowledged that upfront in the first video and moved on. These are not slick productions, but they are an attempt to connect personally with the people taking the course, since we can't be in the same room, face-to-face.
Here are the first two videos: the introductory one and then Week 1.
Community Development 101 - Internal: Week 0 Introduction from Ted Hopton on Vimeo.
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