Some courses benefit greatly from combining in-person study groups with online courses, or with breaking up large online courses into virtual and in-person study groups.  In the case of the School of Social Innovation, it is often very difficult to master skills for social innovation without some human interaction and engagement with your community.

Here are some ways you can get started.

Examples:

Local Open Government Innovation had 80 participants internationally, with local teams as large as 12 people forming in four cities.  To help with forming teams, they worked with existing local open government organizations who were already organizers local communities in different cities.  They envisioned each local group having participants take on one of six roles in their local citizen circles, from logistics to sponsorship, while working toward the goal of putting on a local open government event.  Members taking on each of those roles connected through subject-focused Google groups (e.g. all speaker organizers shared a google group).  This worked well for large teams, but in some cities there were not enough participants to fill all roles, so they created a second option, a google group shared by small teams where participants were wearing many hats.

Conflict Resolution had 42 participants signed up in an online course on P2PU.  The original organizer put together the syllabus covering all major theoretical aspects of conflict resolution involving watching TED talks, reading articles, and discussing them each week in an online forum.  At first, learners began forming virtual study groups based on their interests by asking for volunteers to organize each of those groups.  Each of those used a combination of skype or email to talk in more depth with each other whenever they needed.  But when the organizer began discussing the syllabus with her peers and experts in the peace building field, it became clear that learning skills for conflict resolution was going to require face to face interaction, simulation, and practice to put the theoretical concepts in action.  She encouraged participants who wanted to move past the theory to actual skill development to form local citizen circles to meet as many times as needed throughout the online course to practice the skills they most needed to work on (e.g. a week on exercises for nonviolent communication, another on peer mediation), and for those groups to select local projects to work on conflicts in their communities to tie all of their learning together.

Activities Ideas to get started:

1) Create a wiki with three pages labeled “individual activities,” “local shared activities,” and “virtual shared activities.”  Invite members to add to the wiki in their local groups, on a conference call, or even by themselves.  Once activities have been identified that several citizen circles want to participate in, nominate volunteers to organize these collaborations (e.g. “I’ll invite a guest expert to have a dialogue with us by skype about project management techniques we can use.”  “I’ll start a blog and organize a schedule of posts for all of us.”)

2) Open Space Technology ?

3) Create a shared project that spans many groups