The purpose of this study is to develop instructional design strategies and a prototype for an online learning community that support graduate students' online collaboration.
A total of twenty graduate students participated in this study. Interview ...
The purpose of this study is to develop instructional design strategies and a prototype for an online learning community that support graduate students' online collaboration.
A total of twenty graduate students participated in this study. Interview and survey methods were used to investigate specific pictures of an online learning community that graduate students would like to engage in.
The study found that while graduate students learn by attending class or seminars, time and physical space constraints limit active interaction among group members. Therefore, three types of instructional strategies for developing an online learning community are proposed as follows:
1)Instructional design strategies for increasing a sense of a learning community: Providing asynchronous and synchronous communication tools, creating intellectual apprenticeship among online group members, and sharing group schedules online
2) Instructional design strategies for facilitating positive culture for learning community: assigning separate learning space, creating and evaluating knowledge, and encouraging participation in the learning community
3) Instructional strategies for supporting student learning: Assigning space for storing and sharing learning resources, creating convenience for searching learning materials, providing easy accessibility to learning community, and continuous and regular maintenance of the learning community.
Last, two suggestions are proposed for a follow-up study. First, a comprehensive needs assessment and learner analysis with more graduate students is necessary to generalize the proposed instructional design strategies for creating a solid online learning community. Second, the proposed instructional design strategies should be tested with empirical research. This research would contribute to designing and developing a solid online learning community.
Key words: Graduates, Online learning community, Instructional design strategies