Just as teachers carefully organize their physical spaces and the learning activities conducted within them to meet learning goals, designers of online learning environments must also attend to interface structures and the types of interactions afforded by them. Here we highlight user interface design patterns commonly found on social learning networks, using examples and make connections to our frameworks.

For designers, we hope to provide this pattern library for ideas about types of interactions among users. For educators, we hope that this resource can help provide insight about features in online learning systems and lend guidance on how they can be used meet learning goals.

We believe there is a need to further develop and improve these kinds of design patterns, as well as a need to share them with others that are facing similar problem and have similar goals. We invite others to contact us to suggest new patterns, share insights, or provide feedback on this work.