STUDENTS' E-SATISFACTION EXAMINED ONLINE COMMUNITY LEARNING, TECHNOLOGY FIT, AND COMPATIBILITY SEM – MODELLING DURING COVID19 PANDEMIC

Pandemic outbreaks in student and teaching society have changed seriously. Now, with the influence of COVID19 infection fear, students have dramatically changed their orientational approach. Purposefully, University students aimed at connecting the virtual community for learning, interact, exchange information, and share knowledge. Numerous researched has examined the significant effects of the virtual community, although the present study aims to investigate the collective's e-satisfaction with the student e-learning environment at the university level as regards virtual community interaction, technology fitness, and compatibility. The study attempts to investigate the useful component for strengthening digital learning e-satisfaction by SEM modelling. This study focused on students from universities who take part in UG, PG and PhD programs from various parts of Indian higher education institution or universities. A total 384 number of responses were collected from the above academic intuitions. The study disclosed the importance of virtual community interaction, compatibility, and technology fit to measure e-satisfaction.

Content Developers as Stakeholders in the Blended Learning Ecosystem

Within the blended learning environment, it is important to consolidate expert content and pedagogy inside and outside the classroom. Subject experts who serve as content developers play a vital role by contributing quality controlled subject content covered by the curriculum, which can be made available to students on digital platforms. However, in developing countries and in communities where resources are limited, good and complementary digital content may not be accessible to all learners. Teachers are often left to their own devices to develop teaching content. When considering Afrikaans language teaching in South Africa specifically, there is a great need within the language community for learning and teaching support. This chapter reports on the role that the Virtual Institute for Afrikaans (VivA) is playing as a content provider of quality Afrikaans linguistic material in the blended learning environment. The aim is to present VivA as a case study or prototype of an independent organisation acting as a key stakeholder in the blended learning ecosystem.

Com-educational Platforms: Creativity and Community for Learning

Education is at a time of redefinition and transformation, in line with an era characterized by considerable technological development and profound social changes. One would expect it to be accompanied by a media context in which narrative models are transformed by the impact of digitalization, affecting student-teacher interactions. However, it has been observed that the media usage of an entire generation emphasizes the gap between formal education and young people's everyday digital life. Within this framework, and at the international level, a series of innovative pedagogical proposals have emerged, which approach education from the field of communication: Minecraft Education, NFB Education, Educ'Arte, Scratch and 7 de Cinema. We have called them com-educational platforms, because of their investment in the education-communication vector, based on an educommunicative idea. The proposed study implements a multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to gain an in-depth knowledge of its characteristics. Beyond their individual idiosyncrasies, our analysis reveals a common central feature: the placement of community-creativity combination as the core phenomenon for learning.

‘Community of Learning’ for African PhD students: Changing the scene of doctoral education?

African PhD fellows who are interested in completing (part of) their research in Europe cannot always afford to leave their place of residency for prolonged periods of time. Yet, young researchers from African countries might be searching for particular guidance from experts in their field that might not be accessible in their home countries. Consequently, both PhD fellows and universities and postgraduate research institutes require more flexible educational formats that cater for these circumstances. With the growing availability and potential of online tools and methodologies, it is possible to choose from a range of options for PhD education. Communities of Learning (CoL) have emerged as an approach to support the exchange of knowledge and experience among participants on the Internet. Participants can collaborate in developing research skills, while at the same time creating a feeling of belonging, which helps individuals to establish personal ties and relations. The paper introduces the research and educational project: Community for Learning for Africa (CoLA). It was designed to help participating actors from Africa and Europe to get and to stay connected online, to collaborate in joint training activities and projects, as well as to openly exchange ideas and thoughts, all in relation to underlying PhD research trajectories via the Internet. The paper offers results from a needs assessment undertaken in spring 2015, among PhD fellows and supervisors in Africa on what they would need CoLA to include, as well as template of what CoLA could include.

Scratch Commuinty Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists

In this paper, we present Scratch Community Blocks, a new system that enables children to programmatically access, analyze, and visualize data about their participation in Scratch, an online community for learning computer programming. At its core, our approach involves a shift in who analyzes data: from adult data scientists to young learners themselves. We first introduce the goals and design of the system and then demonstrate it by describing example projects that illustrate its functionality. Next, we show through a series of case studies how the system engages children in not only representing data and answering questions with data but also in self-reflection about their own learning and participation.