Building learning communities: Facilitating interaction in computer mediated online courses.

摘要

This study concerns the design and development of online instruction and specifically targets interaction and communication between online learners. Facilitating appropriate and meaningful interactions in designing instruction is a major goal for anyone developing a course, especially an online class. The research subjects and courses were taken from the College of Education, College of Business, College of Arts and Sciences and College of Health Sciences. The findings of this study suggest that the interactivity in an online class depends on group size, grade weight for discussion, use of web 2.0 technologies and multimedia and the discipline it belongs to.;The following conclusions were drawn from this study: (a) There is a statistically significant negative relationship between group size and overall interaction. The smaller is the group size, the higher is the overall interaction. (b) There is statistically significant positive relationship between the grade weight for threaded discussions and the overall interaction. (c) There is no statistically significant relationship between use of chat sessions and overall interaction. (d) The differences in discipline made a unique contribution in predicting the overall interactions.