The Designment, Organization And Management Of Online Learning Forums (Olf)Based On Ecological Theory

With the rapid popularization of network learning, the OLF has become an essential factor in education websites and online courses. Because of the flexibility without restricted by space-time, the broadness of reflecting space, the openness of expressing thoughts and the supportability of communication, the OLF has become an important virtual learning environment where teachers and students could communicate and share knowledge. The OLF is viewed as a ecological system in paper which consists of people and surrounding environmental factors, they interact and coordinate with each other. Through the analysis of the constituent and the relationship among the elements of the OLF, an ecological model is constructed and some ecological attributes are analyzed.Based on the analysis of the ecological model and attributes, some ecological problems appeared in the OLF, they are mainly characterized as the disordered and excessively free discussion activities, the lower-generation of discussion topics, the lack of emotional communication and participation etc. The OLF is a system in the perspective of ecology where people and environment moderately and appropriately interactive. People, topic and activity are important ecological factors, they coordinate with each other and adapt to each other, they are collaborative symbiosis and conditioned by one another, any imbalance of one factor will limit the whole function of OLF, and then caused the disordered survival state in it.In order to effectively solve these ecological problems, some relevant strategies of designment, organization and management are analyzed and explored from the theory and practice facet, in the final, some theoretical strategies about people, topic and activity are put forward, they are characterized as these three aspects:1) develop the leading force of elite groups, establish the regulation mechanism of discussion environment;2) broaden the designing space of topics, promote the dynamic generation of topics;3) establish a incentive mechanism with cooperation and competition coexist, enhance the participative vigor among students. In order to verify the effectiveness of these strategies, an OLF is constructed in the online course which is named as "The Introduction Theory of Educational Technology" in Zhejiang Normal University, and these theoretical strategies will be carried out on it. At last, the effectiveness of these strategies are verified by looking at the qualitative and quantitative information which is calculated by students’ final activity report forms and post-reply situation etc, and the degree of participation, performance and contribution of student’s are also improved as expected.