Research On Content And Behavior Of Online Asynchronous Interaction In Distance Education

As the development of core information technology, the internet has been changing people's life and study style at a phenomenal speed. It provides us a new educational space. The distance education, which is mainly in the form of web-based education, has played an important role in accomplishing higher education in a popular style and life-long educational system. As the development of the internet technology and the education concept, we should provide not only the learning sources, but also the student support services in distance education. What's more, we should construct the social virtual learning community which emphasizes on the students' actively participating and knowledge sharing. It's a social learning community which has good relationships and harmony between members.The purpose of this study is to explore how to construct the virtual learning community based on the internet. The precondition is that we know the description of the students' community participation. In foreign studies on the virtual community and online interaction, most study samples have few students and short research period. In our country, the number of the distance education students has become more than 3 million. TVU (TV University) and school of network education of colleges and universities are the main parts of distance learning. It's an important research subject providing online support services for such big number of students. Anyway, there are few cases which study this group.This study combines the TVU (TV University) teaching practice in our country, which takes the platform of CRTVU (China Central Radio and TV University) and OPENEDU as the research environment. Based on the research on the literatures, the study describes the status of online asynchronous interaction in the course of "Introduction to Linguistics" from Sep.2005 to Aug.2006. In this study, the number of the students comes to above 700, and the analyzed messages come to about 1800. The writer analyzes the content and behavior of the online asynchronous interaction, applying the content analysis method, the Excel table and the software of qualitative data analysis. The study also uses the method of interview and evaluates the virtual learning community.The results indicate:(1) The time that the students participate in the discussion on the internet has the characteristics "more time in weekend, less time on weekday; more in day, less at night; more in middle of the semester, less in end";(2) The interactions between the teachers and the students include the cognitive interaction, the social interaction and the teaching interaction. The cognitive interaction accounts for the largest proportion, the 73.4%;(3) The cognitive content mainly stays at the realization level;(4) "One question, one answer" is the main mode of the interaction between teachers and students, and lack of group study and interaction;(5) The teachers' timely support guaranty the widely participation of the students; the affective interaction between teachers and students is also the main factor to activate students' participation. Through the study, the writer gives several advices to improve the quality of students support services and construct the virtual learning community:(1) Set down the time management rules of student support services, provide timely feedback for the students;(2) Improve the evaluation mechanism to activate the students' actively and deeply participation;(3) Program the student support services, improve the asynchronous interactive instructional design, and activate students' collaborative learning according to the characteristics of different time period.