There are over 152,000,000 blogs on the internet and a new blog is created somewhere in the world every half a second. Today’s internet user typically reads at least one blog post each day, and, more importantly, they also comment!
In this blog post, we aim to show how powerful blogging in an online course is, and how to create a blog using Docebo.
The main concern with online training, even today, is how to prevent learners from becoming bored and not learning at all! When we design online courses or elearning projects much of our time and effort is spent on creating an effective learning environment to ensure that training (and business) goals will be met!
A social learning strategy is an essential part of designing any learning activity. Whilst doing an online course is basically an individual activity, a social learning strategy is based on the assumption that learning together – collaboratively – is more effective than learning alone.
Building a course blog can be an interesting activity within a social learning strategy. We can safely assume that most readers would like to be authors as well, so we, as trainers, have to empower them to make it a reality and encourage learning in this way!
Technically speaking you can do this in one of 2 ways:
- build an external blog that you will integrate with Docebo (if you want to know more about our API for integrating Docebo and WordPress / Joomla / Drupal visit this page)
- build an internal blog using the new Docebo App for Blog
Both solutions are good in the end but not at all the same from the learner-community perspective. An external blog is open to the broader internet community and it’s possible that a learner’s comments will be confused with other (unrelated) reader’s comments. This brings up of course the debate as to whether or not learning will be positively affected by that in any case. Either way, it’s important that your LMS and your Blog be integrated so that users can take advantage of the SSO (Single-Sign-On) and synchronization of activities.
When you insert a Blog in a course directly within the LMS you not only create a social learning activity but you enrich the environment itself. This means that even your tests will be more readily accepted (and understood) by the learners because of the fantastic (!) environment you have designed (course area in the LMS). If you don’t have the opportunity to build fully interactive courses you can always use a Course Blog to reinforce your training. And don’t forget that the power of the blog lies in the fact that people can express their personal views – so don’t confuse the use of a blog with the use of a forum for example!
Tips on how to use a Blog within a course
3 tips on creating a Course Blog:
- plan carefully when to open the blog
- define a blog title
- share a netiquette for the usage of the blog
You can create a blog during a course or you can always do it once learners have completed at least 50% of the course – but you will achieve different goals of course! In the first case learners will start posting freely and you may find you have more contributions, but the downside is that (more relevant) content may be hidden. In the second case, learners will be more confident with the topic covered by the course and will likely post more focused contributions!
It’s important to define a good blog title – one that’s inspiring for learners! Don’t forget that in the end you are creating a blog to make your learning environment more attractive. So even if your goal is to obtain high quality contributions, do consider SEO and social media strategy in order to involve people more in building the Blog.
What about the rules? It’s important to have some, but not too many! So share some basic netiquette with the bloggers and don’t forget to invite them to read previous posts before writing a new one! It’s important that the blog as a whole appears consistent and in the end discussion will grow with each post!
P.S. You can do all of this and more within the Docebo LMS!
Docebo’s new app for Blog
Docebo’s new app for Blog helps you build a social environment for your courses, and your learners can follow more than one blog at the same time! This is one of our latest social learning apps to be released – don’t forget to also have a look at the Gamification app and our other social widgets. Read more about them here.
Want to try the these apps and widgets for yourself? You can do so with our 14-day free trial!
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