Community of Practice

Learner-Centered Principles/Practices Guide

http://www.educause.edu/nlii/keythemes/lcp/

LCP	Descriptor
Learner-Centered Principle
Active	Active learning involves real world problems through which learners practice and receive reinforcement for their efforts by peers and experts. Images, language, and scenarios should look and feel real and utilize processes in which learners interact.
	Community members address real world problems that are organized as cases requiring higher order thinking
	Community members debate, research, inquire, solve problems
	Discussions are learner member focused
	Community members generate products for their own and others’ use
	Peers provide positive critical analysis and feedback
	Learner-generated products are used in real world settings (field-testing, prototyping)
Social	Learning that is social requires feedback and interaction between community members and feedback may be situated in the technology as well.
	Community members engage in mentoring, collaborative learning, cooperative learning, and base their behavior on a shared model of social capital
	Community offers both structured and informal recognition of individual contribution, and provides for encouragement of less active members.
	Where appropriate, automated responses can be provided to member queries (FAQ’s etc.)
	Facilitators and moderators participate in discussions, chats and provide structure where appropriate
	Individual community members have private one-on-one interactions, groups have private group interactions
Contextual	Learning that is contextual requires a learning-centric design as opposed to content-centric design. An environment structured to support deeper learning requires that the learning design take into consideration the learner’s context of practice, ways of learning, as well as experience in the world. What is learned or understood in one context may not be readily transferable to another; which holds implications for how learning resources and objects look, act, and operate, for example.
	Community members make and have choices about content and resources
	Models, examples, schemas, concept maps, conceptual frameworks and taxonomies are provided to provide context for the content
	Content is seldom stand-alone, but is generally packaged and wrapped around by one or more learning experiences/activities.
	Readings, video, news media, artifacts, guest speakers come from real world
	Prerequisite knowledge or skills are identified
Engaged	For learning to be engaging, it must be individualized to consider the learner’s preferences and styles in order to motivate and challenge. Individualized learning provides the learner multiple learning paths, multiple representations of content, multiple strategies, and multiple options for engagement and motivation to meet one objective. An engaging community is active, dynamic, fresh.
	Community members are given a wide range of choices for their role and activities within the community.
	The community has explicit goals, objectives, norms and standards
	Community resources are continually being refreshed, providing something new to look at, review, or engage with.
	Periodic synchronous community events provide an opportunity to drive participation, by giving people a reason to come together.
	Auditory, visual, graphic, and text are used to convey information
Ownership	For community members to have ownership over their community and their learning they must have independence and a degree of self-determination that permits them to explore and evaluate community domain, purpose and activities, as well as opportunities for independent thinking and reflection situated in the community.
	Community members can keep their own private developmental logs and journals, self-critiques and personal development plans, as well create and maintain shared community logs/journals
	Community work is ultimately placed in public places for review
	Community calendar provides clear timelines/schedules for activities, projects and other opportunities to participate
	Community members identify and prioritize community topics, problems, cases and activities
	Community members use and create learning objects to illustrate, demonstrate, simulate
Design	Community goals and outcomes, assessment, usability, diverse materials and formats, environments and practices, feedback and interaction, varied and open problems
	Site organization illustrates scope and sequence of the community
	Navigation system represents community activities (communication, content, structure)
	Community member makes choices about how they enter, view, organize and interact with the community
	Interface identifies user location in site
	Site provides multiple supports and options for community member/learners
	Menu and icons mean what they represent
	System provides prompts to user errors
	Threaded discussions and e-mail are used to communicate for specific purposes
	Content offered in different formats: video, audio, texts, or graphic
	Site design is organized as a learning environment
	ADA compliant design
Community Learning Activities	Higher order thinking, discovery and experiential assignments; group and real world projects, formative and self-assessment
Thinking & Reflection	Deeper learning requires higher order thinking that involves not just remembering and recalling information but analyzing and evaluating as the learner solves problems.
	Activities require comparing and contrasting, evaluating, or synthesizing
	Problems require data collection and evaluation of quality and usefulness of data
	Structures and frameworks are provided to facilitate community members’ individual and joint tracking and understanding of patterns, underlying causes, relationships, and emerging themes.
Activities	When projects are organized around discovery and experience in a field setting, learning becomes more apprentice-like as learners assume postures, roles, behaviors, and ways of thinking that are characteristic of a practice in which feedback is continual and comes from peers at the same level of development as well as experts.
	Learners engage in simulation, virtual field trips, role playing
	Community members have pportunities for peer coaching, mentoring
	Learners present work publicly, teach others, give peer feedback/support
	Opportunities for informal/organic activities are supported as well as more formal/structured activities.
	One key community learning activity is the construction of narrative – stories, scenarios, use cases about practice and bridging research and practice.
Projects	Case studies that are situated in real world scenarios and events provide a focus for group-generated products through which community members reflect on their own thinking as well as learn from the thinking of others.
	Community members can work on individual and group projects
	Community members collaborate, cooperate
	Learners have an opportunity to construct products within the community, and share products and resources from outside the community
	Products may be used outside of the community
Assessment	Assessment is a critical activity. Formative assessment is a continuum integrated throughout the community and individual learning experience, as the individual community member considers where they are in their development process and what they have achieved, and as the community as a whole considers where it is in its own development process and what it has achieved.
	The community will construct its own rubrics for evaluating progress and achievement of purpose and goals, and will review these on a periodic basis.
	The sponsor will construct, in consultation with the community, rubrics for evaluating achievement of purpose and goals, and will review these on a periodic basis.
Facilitation & Moderation Practices	Facilitators will work with sponsor to design structured learning experiences for community members that build on prior knowledge, research in cognitive and learning science, and institutional contexts. Experiences must build on the diverse ways and knowing and learning of the learners while providing them choices and independence in a collaboration and interactive learning environment.
	Some discussions may be facilitator/moderator-supported, and objective-driven, others may be more informal and unmoderated.
	Timelines, deadlines, calendar support learning provide a map for the structured learning experiences.
	Discussions engage, extend dialogue
	Chats engage learners in purposeful interaction
	Facilitators have a role to harvest knowledge or solicit others to play that role.
	Facilitators and moderators are learners too.