Critical factors towards analysing teachers' presence in on-line learning communities

Publication date: Available online 30 September 2015 Source:The Internet and Higher Education Author(s): Panagiotis Tsiotakis, Athanassios Jimoyiannis On-line teacher communities constitute a very popular and dynamic field while they foster a new philosophy for professional development which is characterised as associative, constructivist, reflective, situated, collaborative, and connectivist. This paper reports on the design and the implementation of a learning community consisted of computer science teachers teaching in primary and secondary public schools (K-9), in Greece. The conceptual and the operational dimensions of the on-line community design framework are presented in detail. The architecture of an integrated platform, developed to support the teacher community, as well as the tools and the features it incorporates are also outlined. Finally, we present the findings of a pilot study concerning teachers' presence within the community as well as their views and perceptions of community learning. The results provided supportive evidence of the effectiveness of the design framework and revealed important information with regards to critical indicators of teachers' learning presence within the community, i.e. members' participation, engagement, interaction and cohesion.
Source: The Internet and Higher Education - Category: Information Technology Source Type: research