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Community overview

Guidance for leveraging Maven's built in community feature as a powerful course asset.

Chelsea Wilson avatar
Written by Chelsea Wilson
Updated this week

Summary

Use Maven's community feature to:

  • Engage with students outside of live sessions.

  • Facilitate peer-to-peer connections among cohort students.

  • Provide feedback on submitted projects.

  • Organize your content for a rich learning experience.

  • Share key announcements or questions for discussion.

Your course community

Maven's community platform helps bring together students, course content, and projects all in one place. With one link, your students will have access to their Home page where they can chat with you and their peers, share their work, ask questions, connect with others, and view course content.

The community is designed to help students connect with each other. And, with your facilitation it can become a powerful resource space for students during and after the course. We sent several automated notifications during the cohort to drive students to the community - coursework nudges, reflection prompts, and activity notifications.

Channels overview

Every course comes pre-set with a group of channels (details below). These channels are designed to help you facilitate discussion and support students, even outside of your live sessions.

#admins - exclusively for instructor and course admins. Students cannot see this channel.

#announcements - instructors and course admins can write announcements for the entire cohort. Often, you'll use these for pre- and post-workshop instructions. Each time you post an announcement, an email is sent to all enrolled students.

#general - where most discussions will take place related to your course content. Also a great place to share articles, videos, and any other related resources.

#intros - a good place for students to start, you can get students to fill out the template and introduce themselves at the start of the course.

#questions - students ask questions to each other which often prompts lively discussion. You can also prompt students to ask questions in here during your live workshop instead of Zoom chat which can often get overwhelming quickly.

#submissions - when you add projects to your course syllabus, each one gets a dedicated submission channel for you to provide feedback and encourage peer feedback.

#reflections - Reflections are a series of prompts to support student's active learning and share their takeaways at three key moments in the course experience. Students will share their: (1) pre-course goals at cohort start, (2) mid-course takeaways at cohort midpoint (only added for cohorts 2+ weeks in length), (3) post-course wrap-up at cohort end.

Facilitating engagement

Your community can become a powerful resource and space to supplement student learning. Maven has set up the logistics for you, so you can focus on fostering engagement and teaching. Best practices for facilitating engagement:

  1. Kick off the cohort experience by posting your own intro in the #intros channel.

  2. Respond to every post with an emoji or short comment. Acknowledging and interacting with what students share is powerful!

  3. Ensure you're checking the community at least 1x per day. Maven sends email notifications to you when you are tagged, DMed, or someone comments on a post or thread you're in.

  4. Follow up your live sessions with recap #announcements and build excitement about what's upcoming in the course.

  5. Respond promptly to all posts in the #questions channel so students know you're there to support them.

  6. Give feedback on all projects with a reaction, comment, or short Loom video. Encourage peer feedback as well!

Using an external community

If you elect to opt out of using Maven's built in community feature, we'll instead direct students to an external community (if you're using something like Slack or Discord). Limited channels and all of your course content will remain visible in Maven. Students will still see the #submissions and #reflections channels, so you can review projects and gather student goals and feedback.

Here's a view of a course Home where the community is hosted off Maven's platform:

FAQs

  1. Can I add more channels?

    1. Please reach out to [email protected] if you have an idea for an additional channel. We'd love to hear your ideas!

  2. Can I customize the messaging in each channel?

    1. Each channel comes pre-populated with a description message:

      We've built these to streamline students' experience interacting in the community. Right now, this messaging is not customizable.

  3. Does the community close when the cohort end date passes?

    1. No, the community remains open so students can review questions, feedback, and content. You can expect that the activity in the community will naturally reduce once the cohort is closed.

If you have further questions about your course community, please reach out to [email protected].

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