A common practice for most online courses is to begin the semester with an "Orientation Week." During this time period, instructors typically encourage their students to post some information about themselves: where they work, what they work on, who they work with, and what they hope to get out of the course. Some students may post details about their hobbies, interests, and perhaps a personal photo. Thus begins the process of forming an online learning community. In courses where strong communities form, several things happen in the ensuing weeks. Instead of just reading through the course content, students share information and compare notes. Instead of simply giving rote answers to basic questions or completing problem sets, they learn about the different perspectives that their classmates bring to the topic at hand. Rather than shrug off differences of opinion or even open conflicts, they will try to make sense out of them. By the end of the course, students may gain an unexpected new appreciation for the subjects they have studied. And if the community is very, very successful, its members will want to continue to learn about the subject - often in the company of those they compared notes with, disagreed with, and made sense of new information with. There's just one problem: by the time the participants realize that they are beginning to value the online learning community that they have recently become a part of, class is dismissed. The infrastructure in which the students met and interacted for over three months is dismantled. Unless the students thought ahead and exchanged contact information, or perhaps arranged to register for the next class together, they are once again alone. Apart from the determined individual who gathers the contact information of fellow community members from the Alumni Office, the "distance" in distance learning becomes more omnipresent for online learners. How can a university help to maintain the "learning momentum" of students who may have just discovered that they like being part of an online learning community? Can a person's desire to stay connected to their classmates be balanced with the need to move on in their personal and professional lives after graduation? Can an online learning community infrastructure even be built to accomplish this balancing act? At Stevens Institute of Technology, the WebCampus online learning division began studying the issue in earnest. Ten years after offering its first online course, the division came to a crossroads. In order to support a growing operation in a more meaningful way, the division proposed a strategy to bring together all of the people, processes, and technologies together in a distance learning operations center. Its mission is nothing less than to promote the best possible online learning experience. Rather than just doing more of the same activities that have been done before, the Operations Center began crafting strategies to serve past, present, and future online learners. One of the initiatives the creation of an online series of webinars that could give alumni a chance to reconnect, prospects a chance to see what they might be missing, and current students a chance to get some extra learning time in preparation for upcoming assignments. Could this be the missing infrastructure that would give longevity to the online learning communities that took so much effort to build during the school year? And could it lead to broader online learning communities that include faculty members, potential students, government officials, and even members of the press? This piece of the formula for offering the best possible online learning experience, both inside and outside of the virtual classroom, involves (among other things) the production of timely, relevant, and engaging webinars that are open to the public. A group of the best online instructors at Stevens were selected to create webinars that related to both current events and to the content of their classes. A long list of webinar topics were explored: green engineering and world-wide efforts to curb pollution; healthcare systems and pharmaceutical industry issues as they relate to recent healthcare legislation; the deployment of advanced telecommunications systems in more and more segments of society; aerospace systems and the President's new directions for NASA; world-wide cyber-security threats to commerce; maritime engineering and security as it relates to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the challenges posed by modern-day piracy to shipping off the coast of Africa; financial engineering and the difficulties on Wall Street; shrinking budgets throughout the public and private sector and the implications for managing today's projects; and more. In a coordinated effort, word of the webinars was spread to the university community and beyond. The Admissions Office notified prospective students; the WebCampus Division notified current students, the Career Services Office notified its list of recruiters. The Public Relations Office put the word out through its channels. And the Alumni Office sent word to students who graduated within the last 25 years. In summary, building good online courses helps to build good online learning communities. But building better online learning communities is likely to require adding a new role for the online learning division: that of "producer." It might be helpful to think of it as all the pieces that go into the production of a documentary or mini-series being replicated in miniature within the online learning division. This is not your basic Orientation Week.
