Between and during courses, you can continue your learning journey and collaborate with your peers in a Community of Practice. This article describes what a Community of Practice is and how you can take advantage of its features.
What is a Community of Practice?
- The Community of Practice is a team learning environment designed to provide a space where people can collaborate and share knowledge around a designated purpose.
- Communities of Practice are formed around a shared purpose, such as pursuit of mastery in a topic area.
- Communities of Practice are designed to provide curated resources and information to help you and your fellow learners as you pursue mastery, and they include informal spaces to help connect and encourage grass-roots connections and the co-construction of knowledge.
- Communities of Practice provide opportunities during and between courses or programs for continued collaboration and information sharing among your peers and leaders.
- While courses provide a formal setting to learn about a topic alongside others in a cohort, the learning and collaboration should not stop when the course ends. Communities of Practice provide the informal space for your cohort, and potentially other cohorts with a shared purpose, to continue sharing best practices and learning from each other, as well as for leaders to disseminate key information.
What does a Community of Practice look like?
Communities of Practice contain content that your learning leaders wish to share with the members of the community. This can include videos from your Sponsor(s), articles relating to the topics you’re learning about or your organization, strategy documents, tools and templates for you to use, and much more. The content is contained in the Toolkit and certain content may be featured by your learning leader. See below for an example of what a Community of Practice may look like.
What types of activities take place in a Community of Practice?
In addition to watching videos, reading articles, and downloading resources shared by your learning leader(s) and/or Sponsor(s), you may partake in discussions and may be asked a question via a Ping. Learn more about the Ping feature.
Some resources posted to the Toolkit may include discussions, where you and the other members of the community can provide feedback or respond to the discussion prompt.