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?

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)