Date

2019-10-30

Author

STEPHENSON, SIMON
Sadık, Olgun

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Sense of community (SoC) is the feeling of belongingness and recognition from others that one gets in a group. SoC is especially important in distance education programs where students often feel a sense of isolation and which tend to have higher dropout rates and lower performance than their face-to-face counterparts. Discussion forums play a significant role in the development of SoC for online courses, yet despite this there is limited research into the best asynchronous strategies to foster a strong SoC. Social constructivist theory emphasizes the interactions people have with others in their community to create knowledge as they interpret their world around them. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework draws from social constructivism specifically for the online learning environment, explaining successful online learning outcomes through cognitive, social and teaching presence. In this research study these theories, as well as previous studies in the literature, have been drawn on to design six different asynchronous discussion strategies including problem based solutions, audio response posts, sharing of personal experiences, debate, high teacher involvement and peer facilitation. Social presence, which refers to learner’s feeling of self-projection and recognition of others as real people, was the most instrumental aspect drawn on from the CoI framework to develop SoC. However, aspects of cognitive and teaching presence were also taken into account. Each week fifteen students in a post-graduate, online class at a private university in Turkey will participate in these discussions as part of their course work. For each discussion, data will be gathered on the students’ experiences of SoC through a series of responses to ten open-ended interview questions delivered via a phone call by the researcher. The scope of this conference presentation will be limited to the first strategy, problem based solutions, due to the available data by the conference date. For this discussion task students will first read a chapter on instructional design, following which they will be presented with an instructional design case study problem. In groups of three they will communicate via a discussion board, posting potential solutions to the proposed problem and working towards a solution they all agree on. This discussion strategy was designed on the basis that the social negotiation required to construct a solutıon as a group would promote higher levels of cognitive engagement as well as social engagement between students through higher levels of interaction. Both higher levels of cognitive engagement and social interactivity have been shown to be strongly associated with SoC for online courses. Data will also be collected from the first discussion posts, including the total word count contribution, discussion content and frequency of the response posts. The available data will be analysed using content analysis, based on the codes that emerged from the theoretical framework and thematic analyses to identify themes that emerge from the data. Furthermore, the students’ participation frequency results will also be reported in a table. The process of gathering data has recently commenced and preliminary findings will be presented at the conference. It is the hope of the researcher that this study will contribute to the literature by providing evidence for which strategies best develop SoC for online learning communities, and may be drawn on by instructors when designing their courses.

Subject Keywords

Distance Education, Sense of Community, Isolation, Community of Inquiry

URI

https://2019.ittes.org.tr/dosyalar/files/ozetler.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96473

Collections

Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Conference / Seminar