Online Communities of Learning

The usual idea of an online community of learners is an online distance-education class, with students distributed across the country receiving instruction from a professor located at an accredited university. Participation in online programs is increasing as more people gain access to the Internet and use it in their daily lives. For example, in 2001 the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 5 percent of the 111 million Americans who have gone online—about 5.5 million people—have taken an online class for college credit.

However, an online class does not necessarily involve a community of learners, which requires interaction among the students, so that students build relationships [Page 1034]that go beyond the receipt of information. Students must be engaged with one another and with the material, and they must feel they are working with others toward similar goals. While this can happen in an online class (and when it does, students feel they belong to a community bounded by membership in the class), it can also occur among members of an online degree program or an online university.

Online learning communities also exist outside university settings. Students in grades ranging from kinder-garten through high school may engage and share work with a class in another region via e-mail, bulletin boards, or Web pages; they may also engage with experts around a collaborative online space. Business communities and professional organizations may form online learning communities to support their communities of practice—groups whose members are actively engaged in productive inquiry, focusing on a problem and motivated to finding a solution. Individuals may become part of online learning communities when interest groups gain the necessary critical mass of participation to sustain a community, for example, the many communities organized around programming languages.

Learning communities can be structured around discussion and understanding of existing knowledge and practices or around the creation of new knowledge. Experts, advanced researchers, and scientists create learning communities when they interact online to share and explore new areas, develop new techniques, engage in new research, or communicate across disciplinary boundaries. Learning communities can cross many traditional work, school, age, and expertise boundaries as they bring together people with similar interests. For example, the MathForum, an online environment of 1.6 million Web pages, brings together people “committed to using computers and the Internet to enhance what they know about learning, teaching, and doing mathematics,” with 800,000 visitors a month “ranging from world-famous mathematicians to elementary school children” (Renninger & Shumar 2002, p. 60).

What is crucial in all these environments is that learning occurs and that individuals acquire or create new knowledge, solidified and evaluated through interaction with others. The important factor in creating, sustaining, or experiencing an online community of learners is that the interaction engages learners with one another, the instructors or experts, and the material or topic to be explored. This situation is different from online discussions, where contributions may wander or be fluid in topic and tone. Online learning communities—also called e-learning, electronic learning, asynchronous learning, or computer-mediated learning communities—are purposeful, with members who share interests and also have a common goal, that of learning the material, understanding a new area, gaining course credit or a degree, or winning a promotion and new responsibilities at work.

...