Key Concepts in the Landscape of Online Learning Communities (original) (raw)
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Abstract This paper discusses the notion of community as an outcome of working within an online environment. In particular, the paper explores the concept of users' development of a sense of community as an outcome of working within an online environment designed to support the professional and personal development of its users.
On-line teacher communities constitute a very popular and dynamic field while they foster a new philosophy for professional development which is characterised as associative, constructivist, reflective, situated, collaborative, and connectivist. This paper reports on the design and the implementation of a learning community consisted of computer science teachers teaching in primary and secondary public schools (K-9), in Greece. The conceptual and the operational dimensions of the on-line community design framework are presented in detail. The architecture of an integrated platform, developed to support the teacher community, as well as the tools and the features it incorporates are also outlined. Finally, we present the findings of a pilot study concerning teachers’ presence within the community as well as their views and perceptions of community learning. The results provided supportive evidence of the effectiveness of the design framework and revealed important information with regards to critical indicators of teachers’ learning presence within the community, i.e. members’ participation, engagement, interaction and cohesion.
The Design of Online Learning Communities: Critical Issues
Educational Media International, 2004
In this paper we discuss findings from evaluations we conducted and share lessons we learned as developers of online education during the last 10 years. The purpose is to analyse some of the complexities in the design of online communities for professional development and continuing education. We present STAR-Online (Supporting Teachers with Anywhere/ Anytime Resources), an online community designed and implemented as a model for continuing education and professional development for teachers. This online staff development provides teachers the training, support and communication links necessary for their continued success in the classroom. Teachers can access mentors, colleagues and resources via a web-based Virtual Teaching and Learning Community (VTLC) system. A brief history of the project is presented along with a vision for the future. Practical components of the project and guidelines for those interested in establishing similar initiatives are discussed in detail. Finally, some characteristics of successful online communities and suggestions for practitioners are addressed as they derived from our experiences and evaluation work.
A framework for developing and implementing an online learning community
Developing online learning communities is a promising pedagogical approach in online learning contexts for adult tertiary learners but this is no easy task. Understanding how learning communities are formed and evaluating their efficacy in supporting learning involves a complex set of issues that have a bearing on the design and facilitation of successful online learning experiences. This paper describes the development of a framework for understanding and developing an online learning community for adult tertiary learners in a New Zealand tertiary institution. In accord with sociocultural views of learning and practices, the framework depicts learning as a mediated, situated, distributed, goal-directed and participatory activity within a socially and culturally determined learning community. Evidence for the value of the framework is grounded in the findings of a case study of a semester long fully online asynchronous graduate course. The framework informs our understanding of appr...
Managing and Cultivating Professional Online Learning Communities
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Developing online teacher communities to support communication and collaboration
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Glow, the Scottish arm of the National Grid for Learning (NGfL), was created to connect each of Scotland's 32 local authorities, schools, teachers and pupils, as well as key stakeholders through a secure intranet. Since the official launch of Glow in 2007 it has received a mixed reception amongst the teaching profession and engagement has been variable. This study set out to investigate Glow's use. The initial online survey of teachers' perceptions of Glow, in 2009, indicated that respondents were making little use of Glow. This led to a refocusing ofthe research to investigate a group of teachers who had a history of communicating online, with a view to understanding how teacher communities evolve online. A case study approach was adopted using a variety of methods including e-participant observations of their asynchronous discussion forums, questionnaires and interviews. The research builds on previous work on member Life-Cycle models and online community models in ord...
MAKING IT HAPPEN: THE ONLINE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING COMMUNITY, FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
As with every decade, the 2010-2020's are not without their buzzwords and the one making the most noise at this time is the " Fourth Industrial Revolution " [1]. So much noise in fact, that it has come to the attention of those involved in higher education. Already under pressure to embrace a paradigm change which sees education going from a more content-centred to a learner-centred position [2], educators are now being asked to take into account their other major stakeholder – industry-and develop competencies on top of core subject knowledge in their students. The research presented here examines how a virtual community and can be used for collaborative learning, with a specific focus on how educators can make the leap from theory to practice successfully [3]. The methodology used was action research which, as per Dick [4], is a three-step process that can go through several iterations. These steps: intention, action, and review, were acted upon, in three iterations, over a three-year period. The sample comprised adult further education students (n=95) enrolled in a certificate course in management also doubling as a prerequisite to entry into an Executive MBA programme. The results, based on the analysis of the ensuing communities and that of a self-report questionnaire, provide insight into the student use of a virtual space for the development of a collaborative learning community and their perception of such a tool for collaboration. The changes made from one iteration to the next allow for a better understanding of what is needed to encourage students to embrace what, for them too, are changes in the learning experience. The paper closes with a discussion of the development of such a community and practical suggestions of how to make it work. .
Proceedings of Second International Symposium on Higher Education in Transformation: Designing Higher Education for the 21st Century, 2016
Online learning is having profound effects on institutions of higher education. Allen & Seaman (2014) report that in the U.S. in 2013, 33.5% of higher education students took at least one online course. While online courses are highly variable with respect to how they are constructed, ranging from blended learning, where students complete in-class or at-home tasks and assignments using an internet connection, to fully online courses, where students never physically come on campus but interact with each other using a variety of synchronous and asynchronous tools and affordances, they have, perhaps undeservedly developed a reputation of leaving students feeling isolated, disconnected and frustrated, resulting in retention and persistence issues (Lehman & Conceicao, 2014). Simultaneous to the rise in demand for access to online learning, an increasing number of calls for a paradigm shift in employment skills are coming from a variety of sources, such as the Conference Board of Canada (2016), eWeek (2015), World Economic Forum (2015) and the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (2015). All of these sources recommend, among other things, an increased emphasis on skill development in the areas of complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration. According to Miller (2014), these recommendations match a list of best practice principles for online learning including: allowing for group collaboration, promotes active learning, encourages active participation, knowledge construction, learner-centred fostering meaning making discourse and are based on higher level thinking skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation focusing on real world problem solving. This paper presents the Fully Online Learning Community Model (Childs, vanOostveen, Flynn & Clarkson, 2015), as developed in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). Along with a problem based learning (PBL) orientation, the FOLC Model serves as the basis for the fully online program, the Bachelor of Arts in Educational Studies and Digital Technologies (ESDT). The model was developed as a modification of the Community of Inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000), as a means of reducing transactional distance (Moore, 1993). It also incorporates newcomers into the learning community through the process of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In program courses, instructors, teaching assistants and students collaboratively function as co-creators of the learning environment, the digital space. Instructors begin the PBL process by publishing YouTube videos as modified Problem Based Learning Objects (vanOostveen, Desjardins, Bullock, DiGiuseppe & Robertson, 2010). Students in turn, use the YouTube video to create ill-structured problems. Students bring their thoughts and questions about these problems to the hour long facilitated audio-video conferencing tutorial sessions. Acting initially as facilitators, instructors and teaching assistants model a process of eliciting preconceived notions about the problems from the students and offering challenges to the conceptions (Bencze, 2008), gradually empowering control of these interactions to the students as they collaboratively investigate the problems and build toward solutions. This presentation argues that a learning community can be established in fully online programs and that these communities can have a democratizing effect on the participants. These communities have characteristics that are described in the South East quadrant of the Teaching- Learning Paradigm Model (Coomey & Stephenson, 2001). A variety of evidence drawn from a number of ongoing research projects will be shared during this session.
Cultural and organisational issues facing online learning communities of teachers
Education and Information Technologies, 2006
Collegial sharing and reflection about practice has been widely suggested as an effective form of teacher professional learning. Information and communications technology (ICT) has the potential to foster this professional learning through online community environments. Whilst the potential of self-sustaining online teacher communities to support professional learning through reflective sharing of practice is recognised, the journey to realising this potential is not straightforward. This paper identifies two key aspects of school culture that are acting as barriers on the journey—schools do not adequately value collegial reflective sharing of practice, and classroom teachers do not use online communications tools as an integral part of their professional practices. The paper suggests a framework for maximising participation in online teacher communities.
Designing for online communities of learning
2000
This paper will explore the development of online learning communities among postgraduate students at Deakin University who were studying while working. The main objective of the research project being discussed here was to identify impediments to the development of online communities of learning and to suggest how these may be overcome so that students could benefit from the enhancements that