Dr Elena Riva, Head of Department at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning – (IATL) – University of Warwick reflects on Co-creating wellbeing activities for students.
Abigail Ball
26 Feb 2024 09:00
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Tags: Co-Creating Ntf Teaching Wellbeing
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Building digital communities is seen as a way to create connectedness and a sense of belonging and at the same time is seen by digital marketers as a tool to create brand loyalty and drive business. This year - for the first time - we have created a module at WBS that provides students with insights on how to create digital communities. Based on three weeks of teaching, here are some key things to keep in mind when creating a digital community (for any educator reading this blog who teaches year 1 undergraduate students, what about creating a digital community for ‘commuting students?’).
One example of a digital community that defines its purpose and target audience well is Barry’s Bootcamp. The purpose is defined as providing high-intensity, boutique physical and digital fitness experiences that cater to individuals seeking challenging workouts and a dynamic community environment. Its target audience primarily includes fitness enthusiasts who value being part of a motivated, like-minded community that holds each other accountable.
Equinox Fitness sells a sense of belonging to achievement-oriented metropolitan influencers who want to define their life by both vitality and success. They strive to promote an ethos of achieving equilibrium between physical discipline, career ambitions, creative pursuits, and relationships by offering programming spanning mediums like dance, art, podcasts and more alongside Founder training.
It is important to identify the right platform to reach your audience while creating digital communities. The current social media landscape hosts a variety of channels including Facebook, X, Instagram, Blog posts, Newsletters and TikTok among others. Different platforms appeal to different people based on age, interest, location etc. The focus should begin with first identifying your audience, then deciding on the most appropriate platform and communication channels to build a community.
We thought that the Kenyan company Healthy U chose their platform (Facebook) well. Questions that informed their decision-making for creating a digital community included: How can we best reach a community of individuals in Kenya and Uganda that is keen on living a happier, healthier life by consuming alternative health and organic food products? What product or service are we providing? Who is our audience? What platform do they commonly use to interact socially? What is the best way to engage with them and is this achievable on that platform?
We suggest creating a sense of belonging from the start: When you create a community, it's essential to provide a sense of belonging to ensure that participants feel welcomed. For instance, consider Asian Beauty's approach: when you join their community, they ask several questions about your preferences, such as 'What do you believe this community is about?', 'What is your skin type?' and also instead of ‘what is your name’: 'How would you prefer to be called?’
Another important thing to consider when creating digital communities is creating interesting content and fun activities to get each member engaged and interested in participating. To illustrate, our chosen industry was the racecourse industry. Here, the community owners offer members first-hand access to events and shows through displaying them on the membership apps and newsletters. Members are also given intel on renovations ongoing at the racecourse to ensure that they get first-hand access to the exclusive renovated spots by seeing them through an interactive map.
Building relationships, connections, and networks among the wealthy seems to be one trend that we saw across many communities, and it is one of the primary aims of racecourses, such as the Warwick Racecourse. It can certainly be linked to capitalism and reflects how economic and social capital often intertwine. The influence of wealth in this community, and in many others, influences the access to opportunities.
To know the performance of one of the digital communities that we reviewed, we measured the engagement rate of Asian Beauty on discord and found that the community has a relatively high engagement rate with 14,3% of members online at the exact time when we checked out the community (1 Feb 2024 12.30pm).
While Asian Beauty has very engaged members, we felt they could do better in promoting their community. Some suggestions:
Market your community through various channels to increase membership, e.g., for google search unlocking first page visibility.
Level Up Online Presence: Dive into the Digital Dialogue
The one aspect successful communities have in common is that they do create a sense of belonging - with members feeling safe to communicate. This leads to our final tip: Be responsive: Address member concerns, be transparent and keep the community informed. This might require a good team of moderators across various time zones. It might also require AI, something we are going to focus on in the coming weeks.
For the next four weeks, we will drill down on specifics of important concepts and technical aspects in digital communities. For example, understanding user behaviours is essential to manage digital communities. Theoretically, we will discuss users’ innate psychological needs that motivate them to come to digital communities and how users engage with different affordances (action possibilities) provided by digital communities to satisfy those needs based on academic research. Practically, we will develop hands-on skills to analyse and understand user behaviours in digital communities, such as regression analysis and sentiment analysis with user data. We will explore other important agendas in a similar manner, such as user social networks, AI considerations (e.g., chatbots), and current challenges to digital communities (e.g., fake news).
Disclaimer: We wrote this blog collectively in one workshop. We used GenAI to provide us with the structure and found illustrative examples through internet research.
For further questions on the Creating Digital Communities module, please contact Isabel Fischer: Isabel.fischer@wbs.ac.uk
Abigail Ball
19 Feb 2024 09:00
| Tags: Amira Badri Angie Nasirumbi Anindya Dena Boluwatife Buraimoh Bowen Zhang Community Digital Isabel Fischer Jingya Wen Milind Bage Qinyao Li Samantha Reindorf Seyoung Seol Swara Kalghatgi Tiang-Bahumi Kgothule Yichen Zhao Yimeng Zhu Zhiping He Zhuochen Wu
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Have a look at this L&T Chat Show podcast featuring Dale Mineshema-Lowe talking about digital technologies and student engagement.
Abigail Ball
12 Feb 2024 09:00
| Tags: Digital Student Teaching
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Have a look at this website and blog dedicated to exploring perspectives on integrated practice and third space professionalism in Higher Education:
https://thirdspaceperspectives.squarespace.com/
Abigail Ball
05 Feb 2024 09:00
| Tags: Research Space Teaching Third
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The Learning Development Project podcast explores the scholarship of teaching and learning within the field of learning development. The purpose of the LD Project podcast is to foster conversations around what makes LD a unique scholarly field.
Abigail Ball
29 Jan 2024 09:00
| Tags: Development Learning Teaching
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Have a read of this post by Nalina Brahim-Said a student at the University of Bolton looking at inclusive education in the UK curriculum and integrating AI for SEN and neurodiversity:
https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2024/01/09/ai-empowering-inclusive-education/
Abigail Ball
22 Jan 2024 09:00
| Tags: AI Inclusion Teaching
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This blog considers some of the misconceptions, and misunderstandings around generative AI:
Abigail Ball
15 Jan 2024 09:00
| Tags: AI Research Teaching
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Welcome to the new year and a new term. We hope that you have managed to have a good break and spent some time with your families/friends.
Is one of your new year's resolutions to start your research journey? Ever considered blogging as a first step?
The WJETT blog or Warwick Journal of Education - Transforming Teaching blog is designed to encourage staff and students to disseminate good practice and to engage with their peers on academic cultural critique or areas of research that they find interesting. With the increased focus on ‘teachers as researchers’ in the sector, many qualified teachers are expected to publish the outcomes of any action research projects they undertake. The WJETT blog can be the first step on your journey towards publishing and enables you to experience publishing and reviewing in a friendly and supportive environment.
Yes pretty much. Academic cultural critique (Thomson and Mewburn, 2013) is always a good source of content for academic blogs. This can include (but is not limited to) comments and reflections on funding; higher education policy or academic life. You might also want to consider blogging about:
Each individual blog post should be no longer than 500 words. Long blocks of text are sometimes hard for readers to digest. Break up your content into shorter paragraphs, bullet points and lists whenever possible. Also include a list of keywords or tags as this makes it easier for Google to find your work.
No, this is a reflective piece so it does not need to include citations (but you obviously can include them if they are relevant).
We would encourage you to include links to any articles that you have considered whilst writing your blog post. We also welcome the use of images (as long as you have permission to use them) as they can often help to illustrate a point and obviously will not be included in the word limit. Please remember this is a public site so if you want to include images of your students in your classes then you will need permission to do this.
Your blog post should be emailed to me at A.Ball.1@warwick.ac.uk. Once the submission has been reviewed it will either be uploaded at the beginning of the next available week or sent back to you for editing if it requires amendments. You should then send the amended work to me once again and I will then upload it onto the WJETT site.
Abigail Ball
08 Jan 2024 09:00
| Tags: Happy New Year
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We would like to take this opportunity to thank our readers and our authors for their continued support throughout another busy year. There will be no new posts across the Christmas period but we will be back on 8th January 2024. If there are any topics you are interested in, or you have a post that you think might be appropriate, please let us know by emailing A.Ball.1@warwick.ac.uk.
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
The WJETT Blog Team
Abigail Ball
18 Dec 2023 09:00
| Tags: Christmas
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Please see this podcast by Petia Petrova on stress, burnout and wellbeing in academia.
Abigail Ball
11 Dec 2023 09:00
| Tags: Pedagogy Teaching Wellbeing
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