Towards a new approach to managing teacher online learning: Learning communities as activity systems

This study proposed a practical, theory-driven approach to managing teacher online learning, taking the educational infrastructures and teacher characteristics of rural China into account. We explored the effectiveness of this approach in an OLC that created on a free communication software named öQQ’. A total of 117 primary school teachers that came from rural China participated in this study for two months. The results demonstrated that the participants had positive perceived ease-of-use, usefulness and satisfaction towards the online learning community. Besides, teachers experienced considerably more positive emotions than negative emotions. In terms of cognition, they involved in the activities of cognitive insight the most. This study informs the effective practice of teacher professional development (TPD) in rural China in several ways, including but not limited to fostering online learning beyond physical knowledge-sharing settings, leveraging the low-cost or free technologies in TPD, and creating reward mechanisms by stakeholders.
Source: The Social Science Journal - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research