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Learning communities are communities in which entrenched patterns of thought are challenged with a view to constructing a more viable kind of understanding
quality of an online learning community. Among these is his assumption that learners will be provided with a stimulating, welcoming and challenging introduction to the course content when they first encounter the online course.
He then assumes that they will make progress by using different principles and structures to create their own knowledge as their journey progresses. He also believes that it will be necessary for learners to establish themselves properly themselves in the community of practitioners by assimilating some of the rhetoric and traditions of the community. This they do by becoming apprentices in the community. Because most learners arrive with prior knowledge and assumptions, they will need to be willing to challenge their own ʺknowledge comfort zonesʺ.
He maintains that it is the responsibility of the tutors and instructors to facilitate a creative disturbance in the thinking patterns of neophytes so that new learners will be able to reconstruct their own understanding of the field. He believes that this will happen as new modes of thinking are cultivated and as cognitive development is stimulated. Because it is important for learners to be confident, self‐assured and self‐sufficient, such qualities will have to be nurtured within the teaching context.
Shared activities lead to shared understanding
Roschelle (Roschelle, 1992) studied how students were able to construct meaningful interpretations of scientific concepts through coordination of social interaction and perception‐action processes and concluded that coordination between social and neural processes is important. Shared activities lead to shared understanding. Pea (Pea, 1994) supports this view and says symbols both represent and create reality.
Taxonomy of an eLearning community
Instead of following the usual convention of presenting the literature about learning communities conventionally and discretely, I decided rather to present a taxonomy of this aspect of eLearning because it seemed to me that the literature could best be presented in this form and because it contains the common elements of what an online community (or an eLearning community or an e‐community) looks like when one relies on the literature. The word icommunity is not appropriate here because an i‐community may include the computerization and administration of a whole community such as one finds in Hewlett Packards “e‐Inclusion” (HP_i‐community, 2004) – their vision of a future in which people have expanded access to social and economic ICT opportunities to learn, work and develop themselves.
The result of condensing, combining and distilling the elements in the grid is depicted in the table below. There are seven main themes in current academic thought about learning communities. They are active interaction, collaboration from an independent base, lively discourse and discussions, a sense of community, information sharing, real quality learning and an attitude of open involvement. All these are summarised in the table below.
Facilitating discourse is a key task of the facilitator
For Anderson (Anderson, 2004c), one of the critical ways in which teachers exercise presence is by facilitating discourse. He deliberately uses the term discourse rather than discussion because it conveys “the process and power of reasoning” rather than the more common social connotation of mere conversation. Discourse also helps students to elucidate misconceptions in their own thinking or disagreements with the teacher or with other students. In his view this kind of conflict indicates a cognitive dissonance that is critical to intellectual growth (cf. the theories of Piaget). Teacher presence requires that students’ contributions be read regularly and replied to with a view to developing the understanding of the learning community. If the teacher is to be successful in Anderson’s key task of facilitating the content of an online subject at postgraduate level, the amount of work that he or she would have to contribute would be comparable to writing a doctorial thesis (Murnane, 2003). Difficulties intrinsic to online learning should be addressed as part of the continuing business of education. Le Roux (Le Roux, 2003) reports that it is the opinion of leading officials at European universities in those European countries that are in the forefront of Internet teaching,that online teachers are buckling under workloads that are so overwhelming that the problem needs immediate attention. One of the reasons why this happens is that academics are under great deal of pressure to produce research results at the same time that they deliver courses to vastly increased numbers of students. The same will probably be said about high school eLearning in the future.
1. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH PROBLEM
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Background
1.3. Problem identification
1.4. Purpose and objectives of study
1.5. Relevance of and need for the research
1.6. Research question
1.7. Research context
1.8. Rationale and background for the study
1.9. Uniqueness of the study
1.10. Purpose statement
1.11. The scope of the study
1.12. Related research
1.13. Research approach
1.14. Research design
1.15. Value of the research and beneficiaries
1.16. Overview of the research report
2. CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Structure and principles of this literature review
2.2. The eLearning landscape and models.
2.3. Theme 1 – Pedagogical theories that inform an eLearning resource
2.4. Theme 2 – A learning community
2.5. Theme 3 – Communicative, collaborative and social issues
2.6. Theme 4 – Issues of technology and the interface
3. CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Research problem and motivation for the study
3.3. Research questions
3.4. Research paradigm
3.5. Research approach
3.6. Research strategy
3.7. Research design
3.8. Research methodology and data collection.
3.9. Implementation of the case study
3.10. What does the eLearning environment look like
3.11. Limitations and delimitations of the study
3.12. Issues of validity, reliability, procedures of authenticity and trustworthiness
3.13. Summary
4. CHAPTER 4 ANALYZING THE CASE, EVIDENCE AND DISCUSSIONS
4.1. Answering sub-question 1 : To what extent do certain pedagogical theories and eLearning theories inform a high school eLearning resource?
4.2. Answering sub-question 2 : Why do certain community elements in an eLearning resource contribute to creating and sustaining high school learning?
4.3. Answering sub-question 3 : In what way and why do certain communication, collaboration and social elements influence a high school eLearning resource?
4.4. Answering sub-question 4 : How and why do certain technological aspects and instructional design issues affect a high school eLearning resource?
5. CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Summary
5.3. The answers to the subsidiary questions
5.4. Discussion
5.5. Recommendations
5.6. Conclusion
6. REFERENCES
