CSCCE

Nurturing Online Communities (NOC)
2025-09-30 - 2025-11-14
Building and nurturing a community in an online environment comes with specific needs and challenges. This seven-week course is designed with community managers of scientific communities of practice in mind, and will explore a variety of social science claims about how people behave in online communities to inform actions that you might take to support increased engagement, commitment, and constructive behavior.
In this seminar-style course, participants will engage with instructors and each other in regular discussions, guided by the course textbook, Building Successful Online Communities by Kraut and Resnick. The course will cover 6 topics related to managing online communities and each week we will review the corresponding chapter of the textbook, focusing on key themes identified by staff, and work together on a case study to apply the concepts. Later the same week, learners will spend a 90-minute Co-Lab working in breakouts on a CSCCE-designed activity to apply a translation of the core concepts to their own community, followed by a debrief.
Our fall offering of Nurturing Online Communities (NOC25F) will run on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning Tuesday, 30 September until Friday, 14 November 2025.
The key dates are:

Tuesday lessons: 30 September; 7, 14, 21, 28 October; 4, 12** November at 12pm – 1:30pm ET / 4/5pm – 5/6:30pm UTC*
Friday Co-Labs: 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 October; 7,14 November at 12pm – 1:30pm ET / 4/5pm – 5/6:30pm UTC*

*Note that daylight savings may affect the timing of live sessions for those outside the US in the final week two weeks of the course).
**CSCCE will be closed on Tuesday, 11 November 2025 in observance of Veterans Day. To accommodate this, our week 7 lesson will take place in the same time slot on Wednesday, 12 November.
Registration deadline: Friday, 5 September, 2025
REGISTER FOR NOC25F
