Aurora Leaning Community Association

ALCA has identified seven stages of community growth within an ALCA Community. These stages include engagment, needs, model, approval, development, promotion, and collaboration.

Initial engagement of a prospective community often occurs by members of ALCA who are interested in sharing or conducting ALCA activities with them. Due to the flexibility and extensive empowerment experienced by ALCA members within their own ALCA communities, they are typically anxious and excited about sharing their experiences.

ALCA has a variety of resources available to its members to help them "package" their story. The stories are seldom the same. In fact, most often they are nothing alike. As Dr. Don Wilson from Southwestern Oklahoma State University has said, What is it that you want it to be, and it is!

Each new prospective community typically has unique educational or administrative needs that can not be met by standard software packages. No Child Left Behind, unique needs for online learning, new NCAT requirements, new data requirements, and many others are stretching administrators to the limit.

Unlike other solutions which require an institution to fit in a predefined "box", ALCA's Community Facilitators can quickly conduct a needs analysis and tailor one's ALCA Community around that one need or many needs. We encourage our communities to focus on addressing, to the extent possible, one need at a time. Facilitators often hear the phrase, Oh man, we could do this too! Everywhere our members look within their Community, they see empowerment for themselves and their students.

Based on the needs identified, a Community Model can be created which can address that need. A model can consist of just a few ALCA resources up to an entire ALCA Community consisting of online organizations, courses, projects, and up to 18 different ALCA resources. As an ALCA Community consists of content and learning objects which are sharable across ALCA Communities, a Community Facilitator can quickly create these models from these resource objects.

These ALCA resources or objects can consist of access keys, bookmarks, checklists, files (32 file types), folders, forms and resulting data sets, curriculum lessons, lesson plans, locations, portfolios, work samples, presentations, procedures, rubrics, surveys, test banks, text, and web pages. These objects can be integrated into each other, into calendar events, messages in discussion boards, internal email, courses, projects, and community organizations.

Based upon the demonstration of how a prospective community can have its needs met through improved quality, saved resources and time, it is at this point that a learning institution becomes an ALCA online community.

A variety of options are available for a learning institution or other non-profit including establishing their own ALCA Community locally or be hosted by ALCA through its Application Service Provider (ASP) solution. It is even possible for an institution to join other organizations in forming an online community consortium.

Once a new ALCA Community is online, the development of the online community is facilitated through content and professional development. ALCA staff or professional development providers from nearby ALCA Communities can provide ongoing face to face or online support.

Significant, ongoing development of new, public resources will be available within these new communities from other, more mature ALCA Communities. It is possible for "newbies" to participate from within their own community with projects and activities being conducted from other ALCA Communities. This is extremely powerful!

As an ALCA Community becomes established and successful in new quality content and process development, ALCA is committed to supporting those efforts. A primary focus of ALCA is to promote its members' activities, learning products, and unique, useful models that will benefit other ALCA Communities.

As new community models evolve, ALCA will support the dissemination of those models. These models could include eSchool communities complete with vertically and horizontally aligned curriculum, higher education, elementary, health services, Native American, among other models. As an association, ALCA would like to expand into other countries. As this happens, models will be developed specific to the needs of members within those countries.

As a non-profit association, ALCA is dedicated to supporting collaboration between its member communities. This will take on a variety of forms. Online, ALCA will promote collaborative activities in which educators and learners alike are able to share data results for comparative studies across the United States and other countries. It is even possible for educators to collaborate in the curriculum development for online courses. Imagine 50 Ecology courses being conducted using curriculum jointly developed and implemented. Awe, the data sets they will be able to create for comparative studies.

ALCA higher education communities will be able to collaborate with K12 communities in student teaching activities. Pre-service teachers will be able to collaborate online with elementary and secondary students and their teachers on authentic projects. It is simply wide open the learning activities that can be done. Members in ALCA Communities can create with ease new learning paradigms!