Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Working With Online Learning Communities

Tēnā koutou katoa – Greetings to you allWorking With Online Learning Communities
This article was first published on Futurelab in January 2008. I've reproduced the text of the article here. Some links to resources are now no longer current.

What is an online learning community?


Since the end of last century, government initiatives throughout the world have sponsored the development of online learning communities in schools and other learning institutions.

A community can be classified as a group of people, each with different expertise and with access to diverse resources, in which a sharing occurs so that individuals within the group can benefit from each other.

Wikipedia defines an online community as “a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face”[1].

An online learning community can be described as a common place online where its members can engage in community activities in areas of learning guided by a leader. It is widely accepted that such communities hold promise for the effective sharing of skills and knowledge.
This review looks at a number of key factors important to growing successful online learning communities and provides some relevant strategies for this.

Non-participating members of an online group

One behaviour in online groups that has been extensively studied is that of the non-participating members, termed the ‘lurkers’. Etienne Wenger[2] calls them Legitimate Peripheral Participants.

Lurkers are widely known to be among the majority of defined members and they have been found to make up over 90% of most online groups. They are perhaps the most important members in view of their potential to contribute to online groups.

Blair Nonnecke and Jennifer Preece have studied the ‘silent participants’ of discussion forums and have extensively researched[3] many of the reasons why lurking occurs. Though these have implications for the expected success of collaborative learning, it would appear that lurkers are not necessarily non-learners.

Takahashi et al have found that intentional learning seems to occur with so-called active lurkers[4]. If lurkers can be identified, it is found that some of them can be enticed to become active participants. Non-active lurkers are apt to be members with online capability but who do not log on. Though proportions vary from group to group, non-active lurkers tend to make up the largest proportion of all members in an online group.


Perceptions of online student communities

In a series of in-depth studies with online student communities,
Caleb Clark examines and identifies key learning success factors[5] in working with those. He cites findings confirming that the technical infrastructure and user interface (the online environment) “must provide the means to communicate social cues and information”, and other studies by Kaplan[6] and by Schwier[7] reinforce these results. For instance, Clark asserts that “just because it's online, doesn't mean the effects of (page) design disappear.”


Clark’s work is well sourced, and within it he develops three guiding principles:
online learning communities are grown, not built

online learning communities need leaders

personal narrative is vital to online learning communities.
Clark identifies that “online learning communities grow best when there is value to being part of them”. He further elaborates that, “one of the hardest things to do in any online community is to get people to give information. One reason is that people just don't naturally think their way of doing things has value, when in fact it is the very heart of a community's value! This is especially true in online learning communities where the exchange of information is key to keeping students coming back.” He stresses the need for doing the groundwork that makes for successful student engagement in online collaboration, an opinion also shared by Mohr and Nault[8].

Clark contends that “leaders are needed to define the environment, keep it safe, give it purpose, identity and keep it growing”. He gives a set of mantras for teacher/leaders in any online community:
all you need is love

control the environment, not the group

lead by example

let lurkers lurk

short leading questions get conversations going

be personally congratulatory and inquisitive

route information in all directions

care about the people in the community; this cannot be faked

understand consensus and how to build it, and sense when it's been built and just not recognised, and when you have to make a decision despite all the talking.

He cites confirmation that “personal narrative is vital to online learning communities. Personal stories and experiences add closeness, and provide identity, thus strengthening online communities.”


William Klemm has a more pragmatic approach[9, 10] to student participation, one that tends to coerce the engagement of post-secondary students in online collaborative learning. A minimum level of online participation as well as a deliverable piece of work relevant to the community activity is a mandatory course requirement. Many universities adopt a similar approach in order to ensure minimum online engagement of each student in collaborative study.

Challenges to student learning in online communities

Marcy Bauman reports on the challenges[11] posed in working with online communities. She identifies that “many of the interaction strategies both [teachers] and students use face-to-face simply will not work online” and she gives reasons for these.

She identifies that “students often do not have the necessary skills to survive in an online class” and that persistence, application and other key skills that are required to learn from the online platform may not be there in every student. These are quite different from the assumed equivalent skills required of the student in a face-to-face environment.


Bauman recognises that “in face-to-face classes, it is rare for students to be put in the position of having to rely solely on the written word in order to perform the work of the course”. She further justifies this by outlining that “when all the information comes to students via texts, they need to become proficient in reading those texts for meaning, and in order to be able to use the information they read in another context”, a circumstance not unknown to distance educators. She asserts that “this kind of reading is demanding in a different way than the kinds of reading students usually do in their classes; it requires considerably more effort and commitment than students may be used to giving to their reading.”

Bauman elaborates on the difficulties faced by the teacher, highlighting the lack of verbal and visual clues from students leading to a lesser understanding of student “attitude” while there is a need to monitor this feature. She explains her guidelines for growing communities within a class of students:
communicate frequently with the class

make as much interaction public as possible

create a space for non-classroom-related interaction

understand the limitations and strengths of the technology you're using in terms of fostering interaction

ask questions often, and interact with students in the forum you have devised for class interaction.

E-learning manuals and e-books elucidating much of the common practice upheld by Clark and also by Bauman are becoming more numerous. Many of them are freely available online such as the eBooks from The eLearning Guild[12].

References (some links are no longer current)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community
2. http://www.ewenger.com/
3. http://www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/
4. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=958160.958162
5. http://www.noendpress.com/caleb/olc/3Principles_Online_Comm.pdf
6. now not available - www.learningcircuits.org/2002/aug2002/kaplan.html
7. http://cde.athabascau.ca/ISEC2002/papers/schwier.pdf
8. http://www.astd.org/LC/2004/0504_mohr.htm
9. http://technologysource.org/article/creating_online_courses/
10. now not available - cid.byu.edu/tutorials/EightWays.pdf
11. now not available - kolea.kcc.hawaii.edu/tcc/tcc_conf97/pres/bauman.html
12. http://www.elearningguild.com/


Ka kite anō – Catch ya later

14 comments:

John Darling said...

Superbly done, thank you.

My company Q2Learning has been in the online learning community business for a number of years now, and the thoughts contained above pretty much capture the essence of the challenge facing all of us.

John

V Yonkers said...

You might also want to look at the research done by Ruth Brown (in JALN). She has a very good model of the process of online community building which is very useful.

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Tēnā kōrua John and Virginia!

In this article, I brought together only a few of the many resources that were around at the time of writing. There are lots, like this article on Producing an Online community, and this PP on The Temporal Dimension of Building Community Online: Is Time on Your Side?

@V- thanks for the lead to Ruth Brown.

Catchya later

Claire Thompson said...

Ken, thanks for sharing this article. Your summary of Marcy Bauman's work was very interesting to me. It suggests that I need to implement more ways to build community with my on-line learners. I also like the validation of 'lurkers'. Lurkers are learners too! So many adults I know feel bad if they are just lurking. Of course it's is always enjoyed if people give back, but it doesn't work for everyone.
Cheers!

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Kia ora Claire!

I was a lurker for years before I became a blogger. I used to wonder what they were talking about when they said that lurkers were missing out on so much learning - that they couldn't possibly make the best use of the information - that their learning was limited.

Frankly, I've never felt this. Now that I no longer lurk, I fully understand how lurkers can learn - lots - from lurking. It's really quite funny.

Catchya later

character education said...

online learning can be a good way but e-learning could not give character education. Any ways concept is perfect.

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Haere mai Character Education!

David Wiley, the pioneer of Learning Objects, was careful to include contextualisation as one of the attributes of a learning object.

I tend to agree with you, at least up to a point, that what may be recognised as 'the character of a school' is difficult to portray in elearning. I'm not saying that it is impossible though.

Catchya later

Judy Jacob said...

I completely agree with all that you say on online learning.As for blogs,there are so many lurkers, and the main fact is that unless you speak up... you will not be learning... which is pretty much how it works in classrooms too!

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Kia ora e Judy!

Welcome to Middle-earth!

Blair Nonnecke and Jenifer Preece refer to lurkers as Silent Participants. They found that despite their lurking, some do learn from it. Similarly Etienne Wenger refers to community members who do not speak up as Legitimate Peripheral Participants.

I agree that there's a lot of lurking on blogs. My daily and monthly statistics on this blog shows this clearly.

Hey it's great that you dropped by. Do come again and check out Middle-earth!

Catchya later

Paul Husser said...

Online learning communities are an awesome educational tool. I have learned so much from online learning communities. For example I found out about flash cards which I have been using daily! They are such a great educational tool.

Dre said...

Working with online communities can be very beneficial to your education. My friend on another blog was just trying to help me out, and he pointed me in the direction of this site that is helping me improve my SAT score. It offers a way to get some sat practice in and it has helped! At the same site you can check out the gre practice exams if you need help with that subject. An online learning community helped me with these subjects and I hope this post helps somebody else!

online ged diploma said...

Well summarized article.

Online High School Diploma said...

Thank you for sharing such relevant topic with us. I really love all the great stuff you provide. Thanks again and keep it coming.

Online Diploma said...

A best performance to education fields. Thanks for info.