Community Based Resources During Crisis | Community Engagement

What is Virtual Community Engagement?

Virtual Community Engagement is an instructional approach by which students participate in community-based placements and complete associated coursework online. Collaborative virtual partnerships are created between the coordinating institution, students, and their service placement (Strait & Sauer, 2004).

Virtual community engagement includes service learning, community-based research, and volunteer service completed in an entirely virtual environment.

List of Resources for Community Engaged Faculty During COVID-19

How does Technology Impact Community Engagement?

The introduction of technologies in experientially based curricula allows for the effect of service to extend well beyond the classroom (Guthrie & McCraken, 2010)

Online education brings students together from diverse geographic, cultural, social, and economic areas of the country and world.

Collectively, this adds great variety and diversity of experiences that inform social action, ethics, and leadership within the framework of community engagement activities.

Tasks are carried out differently compared to traditional in-person community engagement activities. While different, technology allows for the virtual communication, development of content, and progress management etc.

Below are two toolkits to digitalize common community engagement tasks:

Toolkit to Digitize Service Learning Tasks

A list of resources that support educators and students transition to digital spaces to communicate, develop content, manage progress and carry out common service learning tasks. For more information about CSUSB's software, visit csusb.edu/its/software

Communication

Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp

Community Data Collection

Google Forms, Qualtrics, Social Media Surveys (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

Collaborative Authoring

Google Docs, Slides, Sheets; Adobe Creative Cloud

Collaborative Resource Sharing

Google Drive

Media Sharing

Instagram, Facebook, Portfolium, Camtasia

Presentations

Zoom, Google Slides, VoiceThread, PowerPoints with Voice Record Feature

Digital Service Learning Reflection Tools

Review this guide to help identify software that best suits your service learning reflection activities. Software is categorized by its ability to share the reflection activity with different audiences.

Individuals (Only student and faculty)

Inside Blackboard: Assignment tool
Outside Blackboard: Email, Google Drive

Teams or The Entire Class

Inside Blackboard: Group Discussions, Class Discussions, Group Journal, Group Wiki, Group Blog
Outside Blackboard: Google Documents, Voice Tread, Vimeo, Microsoft Office

Anyone

Inside Blackboard: N/A
Outside Blackboard: Online Gallery (Flickr), Online Portfolio (Portfolium), Short Video Reflections (FlipGrid), Long Video Reflections (YouTube), Publications (ScholarWorks)

Benefits of Virtual Community Engagement [Strait &Sauer]

When conducting online courses, virtual community engagement offers excellent outreach to community organizations and fills a void in meeting community needs. Students will get the opportunity to gain real-world work experience and build long-lasting partnerships with their communities that will benefit their future careers. The experiences provide rich, authentic, hands-on training for students.

Virtual community engagement challenges students to think in new ways, explore new ways of problem solving, and raise critical questions about their learning and service. Students get the opportunity to wrestle with complex issues right in their own communities and to become a part of the solution. These solutions are shared with peers statewide, assisting other small towns and businesses that may have similar needs.

Best Practices to Overcome Barriers

Faculty Support Services provided by OCE

Planning Virtual Partnerships

For those of you wanting to virtually redevelop the strong relationships with your current partners, and those of you looking to develop new online partnerships, we have compiled a list of ‘best practices’ and resources for developing and maintaining remote partnerships.

The three main categories below identify ‘best practices’ and should be addressed during the partnership development phase:

Technology