Building community in your courses is important for encouraging students to be socially present in the course. Below are some suggestions for fostering community and encouraging students to engage in the course in personal ways.
One practice for building online community in your course is to make the invitation and benefits of participation explicit. Highlighting how participants benefit from participating and how the class as a whole benefits from individual participation is a great way to encourage participation at the outset of a course.
Clustering students together for discussion groups, particularly if those groups are tailored for a particular reasons such as students with similar goals or reasons for enrolling in the course, can help make it easier for students to build familiarity and relationships within the course. In Moodle you may want to have small and large group discussions, or situations where groups have a reporter who summarizes and shares the key points of the group discussion with the class.
Collaboration and play are powerful motivators in a course. Setting collaborative challenges for a course (e.g. students in an economics class fictionally buying stocks and attempt outperform the course instructor; or a flower photography scavenger hunt for a botany course). Giving students challenges, particularly challenges that do not have students compete against each other, are a great way to foster engagement and build community in your course.
One Higher Ed Global - Community Building Activities
Professors Share Ideas for Building Community in Online Courses
Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu- kai Chou