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Co-design Activities Learning Communities

PACU Community of Practice

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, education institutions faced unprecedented challenges in transforming their ways of teaching and learning.  Committed to supporting their member institutions in navigating this situation, the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities (PACU), worked with us in co-designing an online professional learning community that brings together members across PACU’s network to encourage expertise and knowledge sharing as well as catalyze creative collaborations that connect backgrounds, resources, and disciplines.

Task

How might we encourage expertise and knowledge sharing within the PACU network?

  • Design

    A learning community initially managed by Habi to set up routines, rituals, and shared experiences, eventually turned over to community managers after a capacity-building workshop.

  • Client

    Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities (PACU)

Community Canvas for PACU
Gathering Norms PACU Online Community of Practice

Aligning on a Community’s Shared Purpose and Identity

For the first phase of the project, we used the Community Canvas exercise with higher education practitioners from PACU’s member institutions. Through these co-design sessions, we were able to come up with the community’s purpose, identity, shared values, as well as the success indicators. At the end of this phase we were able to launch the online PACU Community of Practice through an exclusive Facebook Group. 

Offering Shared Experiences and Rituals for the Community

We learned from successful learning communities that it is important to have regular activities as well as multiple options for engagement for the members. After setting up the online Facebook community, we designed experiences and rituals that would keep the community members informed, engaged, and connected. These include weekly asynchronous check-ins, resource-sharing, online discussion threads, a weekly new member welcome post, and a synchronous gathering fondly called PACUwentuhan Community Gatherings.  The PACUwentuhan Community Gatherings are 30-minute to 1-hour peer-led conversations held in FB’s Room function, or over Zoom. Topics are gathered from the members beforehand either by looking through past threads or by polling options in the group. We learned that community members enjoy these gatherings for the safe space, the light yet collegial interactions, as well as the rich conversations around the chosen gathering topic - something webinars and formal training programs sometimes fail to offer its participants.

Creating Structure that Enables Members to bring the Community to Life.

With the continued growth and expansion of the PACU Community of Practice, the third phase of the project focused on equipping community members with the skills and creative confidence to take ownership over the community. We had a capacity building workshop for community managers designed to orient interested members with the foundations of the learning community (i.e. Community’s Identity, Norms, Experiences and Structure).  With all the inputs, insights, and experiences throughout this project, we were able to create a Community Manager’s Playbook, a guide for members to ensure that the community is actively engaging in purposeful activities for collaboration in higher education.     
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