Elizabeth Brondos Fry (St. Catherine University) & Laura Le (University of Minnesota)
Abstract
Building community is essential for creating a learning environment where students feel safe, supported, and heard, and it doesn’t just happen. In this session, we will share how we intentionally build a community of learners throughout a course in a variety of learning environments, including online. We will present get-to-know-you activities so students can practice engaging informally with their peers and establish a sense of camaraderie. We will then share an approach for getting students to work collaboratively as a class to create “answer keys” for content-related activities. Lastly, we will present examples of collaborative projects where students work in groups based on topics of interest.
During this session, participants will interact with each other by experiencing some of our activities. We will also build in time for participants to contribute ideas on how they build community into their courses. This session should be of interest to instructors of any statistics or data science course, in any type of learning environment. Our goal is for participants to walk away with ideas for how to build community into all aspects of their course, including activities and assessments.