Facilitating Peer Connections

Facilitating peer connections, enabling peer learning, is a critical part of effective pedagogy. Courses that establish a community of learners will likely see improvement in performance in the class and after, they will go further toward meeting the expectations of contemporary students, and they will increase the odds of retaining those students within the course and program.

Peer community is both an explicitly documented High Impact Practice Links to an external site. and a critical part of many others. Further, research has demonstrated sometimes surprising effects of peer-to-peer connections, such as how peer tutoring can be more effective that professional tutoring Links to an external site., or how important "friendship groups" are to learning Links to an external site..

How to Facilitate a Learning Community

There is a large body of research into creating learning community within institutions, programs, and individual courses. But a simple framework for thinking through your approach to it is to:

1. Integrate explicit "meta" activities into your course to help students get to know each other
2. Create opportunities for anyone in the class to interact with one another
3. Explicitly use techniques to have students work with one another, particularly in groups

In this course we will look at addressing these three methods through:

1. Introduction and familiarization activities
2. Course-wide discussion boards
3. Collaborative group assignments (adding to techniques you've already seen, including peer reviews and graded discussions).