what exactly is a learning community? At its essence, it’s just a group of people who meet regularly to learn together and collaborate on a shared learning goal.

Besides learning new things, why do people join them? At first, they help satisfy the third level in Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. They help us belong.

People want to belong to a community, and have status within it. They want Esteem, the second level in Maslov’s hierarchy of needs

Each member shares a common learning goal and when you make progress towards it, you feel respected. You keep pushing for new breakthroughs.

To encourage a busy exchange of ideas, he needed a critical mass of talented people. At Bell Labs, Kelly housed thinkers and doers under one roof

Kelly trusted people to create and help one another. All employees at Bell Labs were asked to work with their doors open, making collaboration organic and inevitable.

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

Students thrive when they’re allowed to interact with the curriculum and take part in their own learning. To him, education and learning are fundamentally social and interactive processes.

The purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a predetermined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good.

Teachable, Udemy, Thinkific, and others built a new business model by empowering individual educators, but the education itself hasn’t changed from the earliest MOOCs. Learning means pre-recorded lectures or text packaged together in a “course.” This is lonely and ineffective unless you’re incredibly self-motivated.

Students who participate in learning communities are more likely to persist to graduation (source), feel a strong sense of community and belonging (source), and have improved academic performance.