Evautation of an Online Community

This chapter considers the development and implementation of Australia’s National Quality Schooling Framework (NQSF: www.nqsf.edu.au), created particularly for teachers and others involved in improving school education. This large-scale, highly-structured and outcome-focused community space, funded by the Australian Government, was developed as a means of building and testing knowledge. Using Wenger’s infrastructure for communities of practice, the chapter evaluates the NQSF in light of its capacity for engagement, imagination and alignment. Although these three are often intertwined, we conclude that firstly, users value the space for engagement, and that this needs to be supported by a national telecommunications infrastructure. Secondly, in terms of imagination, a community of this scope and purpose benefits from management that shares the same purpose in order to develop the profession. Finally, alignment is achieved through visionary leadership and a rigorous process to maintain the quality of the resources introduced to and generated within the community.

Promotion of Self-Assessment for Learners in Online Discussion Using the Visualization Software

This chapter describes a method of self-assessment for learners in a collaborative discussion. The authors propose this method of self-assessment in an online discussion and examine its effectiveness through the development and evaluation of a software program in order to visualize the discussion on a Bulletin Board System (BBS). The software, referred to as the “Bulletin board Enrollee Envisioner” (i-Bee), can visually display the co-occurrence relation between keywords and learners. Thus, i-Bee can display content-wise contributions made by each learner to the discussion. In addition, i-Bee can display the recent level of participation of each learner and the frequency of the learner’s use of each keyword. Through the evaluation, the authors revealed that i-Bee enables students to assess and reflect upon their discussion, understand the condition, and reorganize their commitment in a discussion that reflects their learning activity.

Understanding Participation in Online Courses

This chapter reports the results of the case study of online interaction. Prior to conducting the case study, the author conducted a pre-study to understand how students and instructors view the problems they face in online courses. After that, the author used Hillman et al. and Moore’s four types of interaction and Henri’s analytical model as a framework to guide the investigation in order to understand the nature of interaction in an online course. The results of this study showed that combination three of the types of interaction and the analytical model help teaching and learning become more effective. Furthermore, this study provides recommendations and practices that would be helpful for online instructors to design and deliver online courses effectively.

User-Centered Design of Online Learning Communities

This chapter aims to introduce User-Centred Design and its basic concepts associated with online learning communities. Another aim is to search for guidelines to ensure Quality in online learning. Human Computer Interaction for Education provides the missing holistic approach for online learning. Functioning in a socio-technical framework, online learning communities combine information and knowledge stores situated in shared social spaces using social learning software. In recent years, educational technologists linked the theory and systems design in education. However, several disciplines combine in online learning. User-Centred Design provides the cross-disciplinary approach that appears to be essential for Quality in online learning. Thus, seven guidelines for experts’ evaluation are proposed as signposts: intention, information, interactivity, real time evaluation, visibility, control and support.

Quality Models of Online Learning Community Systems

The main goal of this chapter is fourfold: to review key theoretical models underpinning the design of Online Learning Community Systems (OLCSs); to identify and evaluate quality models for OLCSs; to better understand the feedback loop between evaluation of OLCSs and their redesign; to develop a generic framework for user interface quality models for OLCSs. Specifically, we have reviewed a set of software quality standards, quality models and literature on human-centred design, usability, information technology quality assurance, accessibility, security and trust. Several empirical case studies are described to illustrate our arguments and views. We have developed the generic framework that comprises four levels – factors, criteria, guidelines and metrics.

Evaluation of Attitudes Towards Thinking and Learning in a CALL Web Site through CMC Participation

Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) is fast becoming a big part of our daily lives. More and more people are increasingly using the computer to communicate and interact with each other. The internet and its advantages of connectivity, enable CMC to be used from a plethora of applications. Most common uses of CMC include email communication, discussion forums as well as real time chat rooms and audio/video conferencing. By communicating through computers and over the internet, online communities emerge. Discussion boards and other CMC applications offer a huge amount of information and the analysis of this data assists in understanding these online communities and the social networks that form around them. There have been various frameworks by different researchers aimed at analyzing CMC. This chapter’s main objective is to provide an overview of the models and frameworks available that are being used for analyzing CMC in e-Learning environments. The significance of the proposed presentation is that it aims to provide the reader with up-to-date information regarding these methods. Advantages and disadvantages of each of the CMC analysis methods are presented and suggestions for future research directions are made. Finally, these suggestions are applied to a characteristic scenario in e-Learning.

Exploring the Influence of Instructor Actions on Community Development in Online Settings

This chapter presents an exploration of the community experience in online settings where the development of a learning community was a key instructional aim. The inquiry used the Learning Community Development Model (Brook & Oliver, 2003) to guide the study and measured the individuals’ community experience using the Sense of Community Index (Chavis et al., 1986) supported by observations and open ended questions. The chapter reports the findings of a multi-case study that explored instructor actions in the process of community development in online settings.

Evaluation

Our emphasis in this chapter is on the sustainability of online educational communities, particularly the role that evaluation has to play in promoting sustainability. From the literature on online communities and evaluation of technology, we select and extend models of online community and technology acceptance that inform and enable the design and evaluation of sustainable online educational communities. Sustainability is a key issue that highlights the sociotechnical nature of these communities. Collaboration Across Borders is an online learning community that has received EU Socrates-Minerva funding to establish international collaboration between tutors and students and investigate sustainability of online learning communities. We present a case study of the development of the CAB community and its associated portal http://moodle.cabweb.net as a chronology of significant events. We then chart the evaluation process, using examples of tools and data to highlight the role of evaluation in the development of CABWEB and the sustainability of the CAB Community. Finally, we offer practical advice to those who wish to develop online learning communities, either small-scale collaborations between two groups of students or international networks of students and tutors.

Iterative Design and Evaluation of a Web-Based Experimentation Environment

Nowadays, Web-based experimentation environments provide an excellent instrument to add flexibility in traditional engineering curricula. This paper presents a model for the evaluation of such environments. The proposed model relies on an iterative evaluation paradigm. It allows the integration of different analysis methods including quantitative, qualitative and social network analysis. The paper also describes the iterative user-centered design and development of the eMersion environment developed at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), as well as the results and analyses of the evaluation process carried out in the automatic control laboratory courses using the eMersion environment from the 2002 winter to the 2005 summer semesters at the EPFL. The evaluation has been performed to study different aspects relevant for an online learning community in engineering education, such as participation, flexibility, learning performance, collaboration, and community social structure.

Online Communities of Practice as a Possible Model to Support the Development of a Portal for Science Teachers

This chapter looks at how the ideas discussed in the literature on online communities and communities of practice have been applied to the development of two European ‘blended’ communities: communities with both online and face-to-face components. The chapter discusses the development and support of two communities of science teachers located in Ireland and Bulgaria as a way to support the development of an online portal. We discuss the communities in relation to recognised criteria and features that may be conducive to the success of small communities and specifically online communities and how these relate to the different stages of resource development. Socio-technical findings indicate the need to blend the face-to-face meetings with electronic communications. The role of a key respected teacher/educator was also a pivotal feature in gaining the trust and respect of other participants at an initial stage.