Elements of Quality Online Education cation

Engagement in Online Learning Communities1. Blogs and WikisBlogs (Weblogs) create a personalized communications channel to a group of people interested in thesame topics. Sometimes the groups are very small; sometimes they may be quite large, as with a politicalor technology-related blog. Frequently, the blogging software provides ways that others can reply to themessages from the original blogger. At this point, the blog can become the focus of the community.Wikis enable groups of people to work collaboratively on online documents. Many proponents of Wikisextol the communities that can develop as individuals, perhaps distributed around the country or theworld, collaborate on creating the content stored in the software.2. Sharepoint and Other Web-based SystemsThe most common way to create spaces for learning communities uses the World Wide Web. In theorythese sites could be as simple as some static pages with a simple discussion board, but in the last fewyears a variety of companies have developed complex systems that provide a variety of tools forcollaboration and community building.One such system is Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Services. This system provides such basic tools as athreaded discussion board, a place to store and share files, a calendar, and others. As a web-based service,SharePoint is available through an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer anywhere that the user canaccess the Internet. But it can seem sluggish, and by itself it offers no synchronous communications orpresence awareness features. Other systems may use Java applets or other means to add these features.3. GrooveGroove (www.groove.net) exemplifies a peer-to-peer approach to the problem of collaboration andcommunity. In Groove an instructor can set up a class space, with a variety of tools for the students touse. There are synchronous communications (text and audio) facilities, a threaded discussion board, easyfile sharing that displays the date, time, and originator of the most recent changes in files, co-editingcapabilities (wherein two or more people work on a document together while discussing it), and a varietyof more specialized tools. Groove has excellent presence awareness and a more realistic feeling of bothimmediacy and common space than most systems. The peer-to-peer nature of the communications avoidssome of the drawbacks of having a server mediating all the interactions.VII. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONSThis paper is a preliminary attempt to affect the direction of research on engagement and learningcommunities by looking primarily at the terms themselves and the lack of common definitions, especiallyoperational definitions of them. Frequently, our discussions of these concepts and their effects on learningappear to be almost circular. Engagement may both define a learning community and explain it, forexample. Right now, we have growing literatures on both engagement and learning communities withoutmuch consensus on what those key concepts mean. Hence, we may have research studies as well aspractical guidelines that appear related but that actually refer to very different concepts and constructs.Common problems in educational research and practice are the lack of standard operational definitions ofkey concepts so that research can build reliably over time, instead of jumping from one movement toanother without fully understanding them and their effects. Online learning is developing into animportant trend, especially in higher education, but we have only about a decade of experience with it.65