Creating and Sustaining Online Learning Communities: Designing Environments for Transformative Learning

Abstract

Learning can be profoundly and personally transformative when it occurs within a community. Creating knowledge in learning communities can facilitate innovative solutions to increasingly complex problems in today’s knowledge society. Designing the right environment to sustain online communities is a complex task that has implications for designers, facilitators and participants. When the community is able to function effectively, learning for the individual learner can result in a deeply transformative experience where they are able to view their practice in an entirely new way. Two significant environmental factors that will sustain the learning community through constructive controversy and thereby nurture individuals through the transformative learning process are critical discourse and parallel leadership. These factors are intricately linked and take on different levels of importance in different phases of learning and community development. Establishing a community that can sustain itself through the constructive controversy of learning is essential if the community is to effectively engage in knowledge creation and personal transformation through learning.