Communities of Practice - Leadership Academy

This article describes how to navigate to a Community of Practice (CoP).

1. From the home page, hover over Communities in the site header.

2. Click the name of the community you would like to view. If you do not see your community listed, click View More Communities at the bottom of the list if available. If you still cannot find your community, contact your organization’s learning leader to make sure you are a member of the community.

This article, for learners, outlines the Ping feature and how you can reply to a Ping when you receive an email that a Ping has been created for you.

What is a Ping?

Ping is a real-time feedback tool that allows groups of learners to collectively answer questions, make decisions, and resolve issues by working together in a shared, feedback-rich environment. By allowing leaders to collaboratively explore a decision and converge on preferred solutions in a matter of seconds, Ping boosts their ability to make well-informed choices that increase their odds of successful execution.

Leaders use Ping to prompt their teams to make a prediction, answer a question, or to get immediate feedback on an idea. Pings consist of a single multiple-choice question so you are only able to choose a single response.

Using Ping allows you to provide your leaders valuable real-time information and an opportunity to quickly assess community members’ ongoing attitudes and beliefs. 

What happens when you receive a Ping?

After a Ping is created, you will immediately receive an email containing the question and potential responses. After clicking a response, you are immediately taken to the Community of Practice page, where you will see the current results of the question updated in real-time. You will also have the ability to discuss the topic with other community members via a discussion. Sometimes, based on the dialogue in the discussion, you may change their original position. Ping allows you to update your vote during the one to three day window the Ping is open. 

Example of a Ping

The following is an example of a Ping. 

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.