Hi Julie, You are doing a number of very good things in terms of trying to create a learning community online. The meet and greet is a good way to kick off a new course. I don't have a host of strategies I can share with you. I am still working on different ways of helping the class to "gel" myself. I do a lot of one on one communicating and follow up and this helps a lot. All of us that teach online are still refining the "human" side of online teaching in conjunction with the actual content. We have a ways to go. By continually talking with each other and sharing what works we will be able to learn how we can draw our students into the class setting in a much more personal way. Gary