Designing a Pre-service Teacher Community Platform: A Focus on Participants’ Motivations

Abstract

Online communities (OC) have several applications in the domain of education with a special focus on teacher professional development. The development of OC of teachers enables knowledge exchange, reflection on teacher practice, sharing of educational resources, and emotional support. Nevertheless, several barriers have been found to affect community members' participation such as their time constraints due to teachers' busy schedules, the community moderation and social support, and their peripheral participation. This research aims to better understand teachers' initial motivations to participate in such OCs, and how useful is this information to tackle and reduce the barriers that affect their participation. We present how a supporting platform for an OC of teachers is designed following a design-based research methodology within a pre-service science teacher master course to explore, share, and comment learning designs. We gathered information about 40 preservice teachers' motivations to participate in the OC and their perceptions about the supporting platform. Results suggest that participants' main motivation is to gain knowledge and to use technologies to simplify designing and sharing of learning designs. In contrast, reputation is the least important motivation to participate in such an OC. These results provide valuable information to refine the designed platform as there is a relationship between participants' motivations and the perceived importance of the implemented features of the supporting platform. Further iterations will evaluate the refinements and the usefulness of the implemented features.