A Framework for Understanding Online Learning ...

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A framework for understanding online learning communities 1

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C. Sousa , David Ribeiro Lamas , José Braga de Vasconcelos , Ilya Shmorgun 1 Institute of Informatics, Tallinn University, Estonia. 2 Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia, Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Porto, Portugal. [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract: This paper attempts to provide a deeply understand of how a community are developed in an online learning context. This research was developed as a part of a broader research purpose that aims to deeper understand how does trust relate to the activity patterns of the online learning contexts. Results gather there from supported a survey design on relate trust with online activity patterns as well supported the development and implementation of an ontology that aims to facilitate a systematic recording of online learning community manifestations as an effort to understand their life cycle. The relevance of this paper is grounded in the changes that are taking place in today learning and teaching contexts. Among other relevant aspects a key features of this conceptualization – on “what are online learning communities” – is to provide a broader perspective and understand on possible potential effects that those changes can have in our daily relationships, in the way we seek and acquire information, or even in the way we teach and learn. Keywords/Key Phrases: Online learning communities, Concept maps, Community development

1. Introduction Our social relations with the online media in general or to any technological medium ever since enabled the connection of people with corresponding interests, regardless time or space restrictions and always allowed alternative forms of communication for people who already know each other primarily in real life, also served as support to a variety of social and professional goals, set a ground for flourishing social networking and collaboration. That is why community is quite possibly the most over-used word in the Net industry nowadays, community is the ability to connect with people who have similar interest, it may well be the key to the digital world, but the term has been diluted and debased to describe even the most tenuous connections, the minimal interaction. More, as the Internet has afforded a proliferation of community building tools and organizations, communities assumed the participation factor for granted, leading some online community initiatives to emptiness and dissent. What points to the fact that although firmly routed into Internet’s tradition, online communities are inherently fragile which leads to the necessity of understanding what fosters the success of an online communities. This is especially within a teaching and learning community environment, where learning continuous to be an essential social process, despite the tendency of some of us to shut ourselves away and sit in Rodinesque isolation. The success of the learning outcomes depends strongly on the online learning environment’s ability to support a sense of community. On the other hand, it is now a widely belief that communities, societies and culture as a whole are tailored by the diversity of individuals, who contribute to the intellectual climate and technological infrastructure of society, rather than the effects of media itself.

2. Fundamental notions of building community-learning environments The development of communities has been an aspect of the Internet since it beginning, and it has ever since enabled the connection of people with corresponding interests, regardless of time and space restrictions. And, in spite of in the beginning the Internet was know or seen as a mere repository of information and data where online community members does not

necessarily implied a strong bond among the community, that has changed with the increased availability of user-generated content mechanisms and with the growth of social networking services. The Internet become the hub of socialization; become the logical extension of our human tendencies toward togetherness, that have been tailored our society and our cultures. Those reflected tendencies towards an individual-centered approach whereas group-centered activities, creating context where each individual contributes to the intellectual climate and technological infrastructure of society, rather than the effects of media itself. Online learning communities one of the examples of such phenomena usually built upon multidisciplinary and innovative collaborative communities. Our social relations with online media in general or any technological medium ever since enabled the connection of people with corresponding interests, regardless of time or space restrictions and always allowed alternative forms of communication for people who already know each other primarily in real life, also served as support to a variety of social and professional goals, set a ground for flourishing social networking and collaboration. In that perspective communities, societies and culture as a whole are tailored by the diversity of individuals, and each one contribute to the intellectual climate and technological infrastructure of society, rather than the effects of media itself. Notions that are connected with the community development process as the duality between the human need for participation, based on their daily social experiences and on the reunification of those experiences, i.e describe the learning performed in terms of participation and reification (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wegner and Snyder, 2000). From that point of view and according to Lave and Wenger (1991) there is no such thing as "learning" suis generis, but only changing participation in culturally design settings of everyday life. And this participation process occurs as a process of changing understanding in practice that is learning. In other words learning emerges from the duality between the human need for participation, their daily social experiences and on the reunification of those experiences, i.e the learning is performed in terms of participation and reification processes as Wegner and Snyder (2000) describes it. An online community then, can be seen as a facilitator of the knowledge construction process. As online communities and their environments can provide the needed resources for their members to learn, can facilitate the learning process, as in this virtual spaces learning occurs as part of each individual network and their shared relations and interactions (i.e. results within a specific social context and results from their interactions with their media artifacts) (Pudelko, 2003). Following that idea, the idea that a virtual learning community-environment can assume an important part of toady’s virtual learning process, as a learning communities per si as their participants learning while act in community. In other words a virtual community beside provide members a space for participation also provide the necessary tools and support for knowledge construction environment, and that is what shapes individual development and learning (Paavola et.al., 2004; Bandura, 1969; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Brown and Duguid 2000). The main rational of this paper is built on the belief that by understanding online learning communities we will be able to better foster their inherent formal and informal learning processes in a number of contexts. This paper describes and discusses the development and implementation of a research framework designed towards a deeper understanding of what are online learning communities and how they are seen nowadays within the education contexts.

3. Research approach The framework designed here is based on a design-based research approach which is focus on characterizing on the understanding of community development and influence in all its complexity, when in online-learning situations, focusing especially in ways to potentiate

people’s learning activities that demands co-working actions and collective learning and sharing activities. This research approach is focused on a participatory approach design. The major contributions of the research herein depicted are twofold: On one hand, we identify the main components of community-learning environments, built on top of an extensive literature review. On the other hand, we outline a collaborative research strategy to explore people’s perspective of community-learning environments. This approach included two distinct participatory design sessions: one session deployed with eLearning expertise and another session deployed with eLearning practitioners. Both participants were given a focus question: what are online learning communities – and to both were asked to design a concept map that answer that question. This concept maps provided preliminary exploratory insights that leaded to the development of overall concept map that defines an online learning community.

4. Results discussion Results gathered indicate similarities between experts and non-experts views of online learning communities, especially when representing the teacher, learner and technology role within the community space. But, there were as well divergent views in some on how these roles interconnected with each other and how they are represented within the concept map structure. Also, we argue that most virtual communities can be considering as learning communities. From that point of vie makes little sense referring to online learning communities, but more as online communities. Although not all communities can be classified as emerging communities of practice, as Wegner and Snyder (2000) argues, since not all involve same learning goal activities and therefore provides distinct ways of learning. For example there are those that are developed on a based of a common interest, for example on a relationship based or just for knowledge exchange purpose. There are those who are formed for answer a specific goal or purpose, to solve a project or solve a specific problem. Or, there are those who are formed to serve specific education contexts, like support learning or teaching activity in a formal learning context. Agreeing that there are three main points that define a online community: (1) community goals, associated with the activity that will involve the construction of knowledge, (2) their level of engagement and (3) their evolution and sustainability through time.

4.1. eLearning practitioners View The concept map seen on

Figure 1 was created based on feedback of eLearning practitioners. Their ideas were collected and a concept map created to illustrate their understanding of the domain. The primary concepts have been marked with yellow. These are: online learning communities, learners, teachers, Internet and networks. The same primary concepts are present in the other concept maps as well, which represent the understanding of the domain from the perspective of experts and researchers.

Figure 1: The eLearning practitioners view on what are online learning communities

4.2. eLearning expert View The concept map seen on

Figure 2 demonstrates the experts’ understanding of the domain of online learning communities. Here the same primary concepts are marked with yellow as well.

Figure 2: The eLearning experts view on what are online learning communities

4.3. eLearning researcher View The concept map from

Figure 3 demonstrates the research’s understanding of eLearning. The same primary concepts are identified although the diagram offers a slightly different perspective on the topic than the one seen on

Figure 1 and

Figure 2.

Figure 3: The eLearning researcher view on what are online learning communities

4.4. The overall view Based on the Figures 2, 3 and 4 an overall view concept map was created, see figure 5. The creation of the overview concept map was conducted according to the following procedure:

1. The concepts on the each original concept map were assigned a unique color. Thus the concepts on Figure 2 were assigned a red color, the concepts on Figure 3 – a blue color, and the concepts on Figure 4 – a yellow color. 2. The three original concept maps were then copied onto a single canvas and duplicate concepts, found on the original maps, were merged together. 3. As the duplicate concepts were found and merged, they were assigned a new color. The merging of yellow and blue concepts was marked as green; red and yellow concepts were marked as orange; blue and red were marked as purple; red, yellow and blue were marked as white.

Figure 4: The eLearning practitioners, experts and researcher view on what are online learning communities

5. Closing remarks As a result of this procedure the three original concept maps were put together and all the duplicate concepts eliminated. The produced concept map is rather dense, as a lot of concepts needed to be put together on a single canvas. The purpose of this new concept map is to fully demonstrate the understanding of the eLearning domain by the three initial groups: the practitioners, the experts in the field of eLearning and the researcher. The concepts marked as green, orange, purple and white stand out visually and signify the concepts that two or more initial target groups share, when describing their understanding of online learning communities. In sum, input gathered from the present research approach provided preliminary exploratory insights that helped on the design of a survey questions that relates trust with the online learners activity patterns.

References Bandura A. (1969). Social Learning theory of identificatory process. Goslin, David A. Handbook of socialization theory and research / edited by David A. Goslin Rand McNally, Chicago.

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The Social Life of Information. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press. Henri, F., and Pudelko, B. (2003). Understanding and analysing activity and learning in virtual communities. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (19), 474-487. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991), Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press , New York . Paavola, S., Lipponen, L. and Hakkarainen, K. (2004) Models of Innovative knowledge Communities and Three Metaphors of Learning. Review of educational research 2004. Vol. 74, 4 (pp. 557-576) Wenger, E., and Snyder, W (2000) Communities of Practice; the organisational frontier Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb, pps 139-145. Sousa, S. C., Lamas, D., & Dias, P. (2011). The interrelation between communities, trust and their online social patterns. In SCA2011 - International conference on Social Computing and its Applications. IEEE Computer Society. Sousa, S., Laanpere, M., Lamas, D., and Tomberg, V. (2011). Interrelation between trust and sharing attitudes in distributed personal learning environments: The case study of Lepress PLE. In Leung, H., Popescu, E., Cao, Y., Lau, R., and Nejdl, W., editors, Advances in Webbased Learning, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 72–81. Springer Verlag. S. Sousa and D. Lamas, “Emerging trust patterns in online communities,” in CPSCom 2011: The 4th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing. IEEE Computer Society, 2011. Sousa, S. and Lamas, D. (2006). Reflections on the influence of online trust in online learners performance, Conference proceedings on eLearn 2006: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education.

Sousa, Sonia; Lamas, David Ribeiro; de Vasconcelos, José Braga; Shmorgun, Ilya (2011). A Framework for Understanding Online Learning Communities.In: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on e-Learning: (Eds.)Sue Greener, Asher Rospigliosi. Academic Publishers, 2011, 1000 - 1006.