No abstract

The popularity of online learning has boomed over the last few years, pushing instructors to consider the best ways to design their courses to support student learning needs and participation. Prior research suggests the need for instructor facilitation to provide this guidance and support, whereas other studies have suggested peer facilitation would be better because students might feel more comfortable learning and challenging each other. Our research compared these two facilitation methods and discovered that students participated more in instructor-facilitated online courses where they wrote more notes, edited and reread notes more, and created more connections to other notes than students in peer-facilitated online courses. We identified student activity patterns and described differences in how those patterns manifest themselves based on the facilitation method that was used. Our findings also show that instructorfacilitated online courses had a stronger sense of community than peer-facilitated online courses.

No abstract

Despite the growth of its popularity in recent years, online learning has demonstrated high dropout rates compared to dropout rates in traditional face-to-face courses. Prior research attributes attrition to the physical isolation of students from one another and the lack of interaction between and among them—factors which foster feelings of alienation, isolation, and disconnection. The goal of this research study was to more deeply understand the causes of such negative feelings, which may eventually lead students to drop out of online courses. More specifically, this study adopted a qualitative approach by interviewing six graduate students to further explore which specific learner-learner interactions weaken online students’ sense of community. Seven learner-learner, interactions were identified: the keener, lack of meaningful data, selective listening, lack of attribution, going off on tangents, editing notes, and cultural exclusion.