Participate communities combine the power of social networking groups with Learning Management Systems (LMS) in one collaboration space. Bring together your organization’s customer advocacy efforts and educational initiatives in a customizable, collaborative community. Our social learning platform is designed to support vibrant, multidimensional online communities that can be customized to grow your business and support your members.
Create virtual training and blended learning experiences through self-paced online courses. Our e-learning structure allows you to create courses from scratch or using existing content. Easily embed media, connect with community members in learning checkpoints and monetize courses with our built-in e-commerce functionality. Each course is accompanied with a peer-reviewed micro-credential saved to a community member’s profile and easily shared via a micro-credential link. Read more about micro-credentials.
Organizations use virtual courses for organizational upskilling, program management, workforce development, academic initiatives or educating constituents on how to best use your organization’s product or service.
As your organization grows, create groups, or cohorts, to target communications based on specific interests, projects, levels of ambassadors and more. Groups can be used for tailored announcements and private discussions within your community.
Long gone are the tedious days of creating segmented email lists. Send announcements to your organization’s community or groups of users within your community on upcoming events, experiences and ways to get involved in your organization. Announcements appear on the community home feed and automatically send emails to community members.
Have a quick question? Directly message members of your community or engage with other users on the Participate platform. Our direct messaging feature allows you to search and connect with users in effective, real-time communication. Use direct messages to welcome members to your community and start building connections that lead to advocates and engaged members from day one.
As organizations are adapting to online programming and training, most are merely migrating content to an online setting, somewhat forcing collaboration into a box. To combat this, we’ve designed our discussion threads to be collaborative and easily embedded into learning experiences within your community. Starting a discussion thread takes seconds and can be tied to receiving feedback on a product or initiative, getting to know community members, training courses and topics of interest. Embed media, tag users and subscribe to discussions for email updates so that you never miss a beat.
For one-on-one feedback and company advocate training, educational organizations leverage the formative feedback feature to learn alongside community members and interact at designated check-points in their community journeys. More than simply a space to request corrections, formative feedback allows community facilitators to engage in deeper dialogue to facilitate learning and push a community member’s understanding and lead to greater impact for your organization.
Organize your organization’s educational resources, documents and media in online resource collections. Similar to any online cloud folder, resource collections house all of the links and descriptions you need in one, privacy-safe space. Our resources tab also offers the opportunity to create customized webpages within your community. Collections can be hidden, public or private so that only members of the community or users of your choice can access them. Rather than merely migrating content, re-imagine the ways in which your members access resources from your organization. We offer strategic support around community design so that your organization can thrive.
For more than 30 years, Participate Learning has supported global education programs in schools across the country. To scale reach to their professional learning offerings and to connect their global educators in a collaborative environment, Participate Learning has several online learning communities. Participate Learning's community United We Teach is especially timely, as it provides resources, courses and discussions around remote teaching and learning due to coronavirus school closures. Because of their online communities with Participate, Participate Learning is able to provide collaborative community learning experiences for 1,000+ educators around the world.
Logics Academy, a Canadian leader in STEM education, uses a Participate community to grow their educator base and train company ambassadors. Because many of the products Logics Academy provides are student-facing, Logics Academy was looking for an educator-facing engagement tool. The Logics Academy community is used to provide networking opportunities for teachers and administrators on STEM education, robotics and how to best implement Logics Academy student tools.
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Read the blog →Resources, learning principles and templates for transforming your in-person events into online experiences.
Download here →Organizations rely on Participate because we’re a one-stop shop for learning and collaboration. Most organizations rely on Facebook groups and online course providers separately to organize professional learning initiatives and engage with community members, but in a Participate community, discussion threads, online courses, resource collections, direct messaging, and organized feedback come together to provide a holistic experience. This makes Participate an ideal tool for organizations looking for a suite of features that traditional educational LMS platforms or LMS software cannot offer.
As former teachers, educators, instructional designers and education researchers, our team designed our social learning platform to meet the needs of growing organizations and their constituents. We focus on mission-alignment and intentionally partner with organizations who share the same values of working together for the greater good, being kind, creating meaningful solutions and growing from successes and failures.
If your organization has existing content, events or training you’d like to move online, our instructional design team is here to help you transform those learning experiences. We’ll take you through a guided process of online learning experience design and draft courses alongside you. Most organizations come to us with some content, but if you’re just getting started that’s fine too! We can help you develop content and elearning experiences based on your unique needs and goals.
Most traditional learning management systems will focus solely on e-courses or forums to guide e-learning opportunities. Within a single learning experience in a Participate community, members have the opportunity to pick a personalized pathway of growth and engage with multiple users through courses, discussions, resource collections, direct messaging and more. Our tool was built for adult learning and collaboration, whereas LMS competitors were often built student-facing first then adapted for adults.
Participate communities are similar to a social network combining its power with an LMS. If your organization only needs electronic courses or forums, then an LMS software may suffice. If you need a genuine community to facilitate connection and collaboration, then a community will be a better fit.
201 Sage Road #100
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
communities@participate.com