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The Behavior Of The Teacher-student Interaction In Online Learning Community Case Studies

Posted on:2008-12-12Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y HuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2207360212488135Subject:Curriculum and pedagogy
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Internet is changing our social lives including education increasingly. Higher schools all round the world attach great importance on the effect of internet on education, many universities provide some kinds of internet communication mode as a complementarity of traditional face-to-face teaching model, or offer entire online courses.However, through which way, to what extent can the potential advantage of internet be fulfilled? Some researches find that many instructors only use internet to facilitating low level tasks such as posting the syllabus, distributing lecture notes, or administering multiple-choice exams. in some cases, internet technology is used for communicating conceptual information and testing conceptual knowledge, teaching methods used in some online courses are monotonous, and the teaching qualities aren't very good. Some studies on online learning indicate students didn't develop successfully in the fields such as critical thinking capacity and problem-solving skills, Higher level social knowledge building researcher expected is difficult to realize. Researchers show that potential advantages of internet can' t be realized automatically.In the research, the author intitule the group developed by learners using online forum as learning community,at the same time, the authour summarize the researches round the World on learning community, combine related research problem, defining learning community from the perspective of class and instructor-student interaction, and from the perspect of academic support among interaction and social knowledge construction within group interaction. based the definition of learning community, the authour developed coding categories, and analyzed an online course "theories and practice of cognitive apprenticeship" set up by education technology department of capital normal university for 38 grade 2003 education master. The author use social net work analysis method, content analyisis method,qulititive method, literature analysis method, integrating quatititive analysis method, we coded and analyzed 490 messages posted by teacher and students on learning forum. Firstly, the author analyzed the references , topics discussed , relationships among messages. The results show that learners' discussion focus on educational themes central to the course, and they had academic dialogue relationship, they could integrate outside references with new and enriching discussion topics in some extent, thereby providing viewpoints alternative to and sometimes critical of those expressed by the instructor and other students, students can get time feedback when they discussed with others on online forum。Secondly, the author use social network analysis method to investigate the participative characteristics of learners, results show that some students develop close relationship, learners tended to interact with other classmates outside his group, the discussion has obvious heterogenous characteristics, the discussion show a shift tendency from teacher-centre to learner-center model. the interaction has a core, Semi-periphery, Periphery structure which is a definitive charater of learning community. thirdly , the author use Gunawardena's interaction model to analyze group' s social knowledge building. Result show that knowledge construction level of learners isn' t high, major messages rested on information sharing and comparion of viewpoints. At the same time, the learners didn' t extend their references resources enough, and mutual challenge aren' t enough, and the discussion is focus on some core participants, the discussion is manipulated by some participants to some extent, so the author concluded that interactive forum partially succed in promoting and building an academic learning community。In the end , the author points out the limitation of this research and suggest future research plan.
Keywords/Search Tags:online Learning Community, Content Analysis, Social Network Analysis
PDF Full Text Request
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