lesson-4-SP-2017OLD
Lesson 4: Online Learning Community
Goals
Examine the concept of online learning community.
Distinguish "learning community" from "community learning"
Examine online collaborative learning community.
Emerging Topics: Mobile Learning; Augmented Reality.
Instructor's Notes
Welcome to Lesson 4!
Online learning community is one of the most important concepts in distance education. Researchers and practitioners are trying to create online community to enhance learning. Although most of people are aware of the importance of online learning community, people take it very loosely, "we learner together so it is learning community." This is a weak aspect to view learning community. Learning community is more like an organic products. It does grow naturally; however, with appropriate nurturing, learning community can be maximized to enhance learning.
Tu and Corry's e-Learning community framework is a good start to understand how community can be integrated into online learning. Under each dimension, there are several important issues to be pondered. Collaboration, knowledge management, and social factors are main issues under each dimension. Although we do not have more readings for each important issue, it is highly recommended that you should select one(s) that are interest to you. As you can see, we introduce you many theoretical frameworks in this course, each of them covers many critical issues and research questions. There is no way we can cover every one of them. It is important that students should select issues that are related or important to them. In other words, this course serves as a foundation of literature in distance education. Solely finishing required readings will only provide basic understating in DE researches. Students must do more readings to gain better understanding on DE.
Gunawardena's article provides a good example of research in online interaction, online collaboration, and learning community. After finishing reading this article, you should have better ideas what future researches should be done?
Readings (Powered by Del.icio.us. Consider to subscribe RSS to keep updated on reading resources.)
Required Readings (Finish the required readings before the lesson starts)
Optional Readings (More readings for you to enrich your learning, to prepare for discussions, assignments, projects etc.)
Resources (Resources from our classmates, ETC students, and ETC faculty.)
Activities
Lesson Discussions (4 points) Lesson Discussion Guidelines
Based on what learning psychology, how online learning community enhance learning?
TECH: What is mobile learning? Please share the example with us. If you have any research in mobile learning, please share with us as well.
TECH: What is augmented reality? How and what it may support DE?
Quality Matters (QM): QM Rubrics for Evaluation & Design of online/blended learning
QM is an organization that to support online educators, online instructional designers, and online education providers to improve their the quality of online education. Currently, Arizona has Arizona Quality Matters Initiatives. NAU is part of this consortium.
Read:
Visit QM website to understand the missions of QM
Create a free account to obtain QM rubrics
Read/Study either one or both of QM Rubrics based on your own interests.
Discuss:
To this point, you should have very good ideas what effective online instructions and online instructional design should be.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of QM rubrics?
How will you improve the QM rubrics?
Do you agree/disagree with the "point allocation" for the standards/sub-standards?
Are there any missing areas should be included in the rubrics?
See the discussion board for the question(s) posted by the weekly moderator(s)
ETC777 Discussion Statistical Analysis
Assignment
No assignment for this lesson.
For Due Dates: See Assignment Page
Prepare upcoming assignments
Assignment 3: Web 2.0 Learning Environments (Due Lesson 7)
Assignment 4: Final Paper Proposal
Assignment 5: Final Paper (See Lesson 7 for the instructions)