This semester, I decided to take my first online course partly for the experience and partly to take more credits without further disrupting my worklife; I currently leave work early twice a week for school. Given that online learning/distance education has such potential, I am extremely disappointed to discover that I don’t really like taking classes online or at least I don’t like this particular online course. My biggest issue by far has to do with the lack of true interaction and lack of community. It doesn’t feel very social. In fact, it feels a bit isolating. So, this has prompted me to take a deeper look at online learning.
I would like to write a literature review of the research that is available on online/distance learning. Initially, I thought I would focus my review on effective online learning environments: what are the best practices?. But now that I’ve started searching the databases, I’ve come across other aspects of online learning that I also find interesting that connect with effective online learning. These other aspects include: teacher preparation (are they prepared to use the technology effectively?), motivation (what motivates some students but not others in an online course?) , and student perceptions (how do students feel about online learning?). I would also like to review the literature around social presence theory, a theoretical framework for awareness and communication in CMCs.
Sample Resources:
Allen, I. E., Seaman, J., Group, B. C. B. S. R., & Consortium, B. C. S. (2010). Learning on demand: Online education in the United States, 2009. Sloan Consortium.
ChanLin, L. J., & Chan, K. C. (2010). Group learning strategies for online course. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 397–401.
Richardson, J. C., & Swan, K. (2003). Examining social presence in online courses in relation to students’ perceived learning and satisfaction. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7(1), 68–88.
Rovai, A. P. (2004). A constructivist approach to online college learning. The Internet and Higher Education, 7(2), 79–93.
Selvi, K. I. (2010). Motivating factors in online courses. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 819–824.
Shea, P. (2007). Bridges and barriers to teaching online college courses: A study of experienced online faculty in thirty-six colleges. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(2), 73–128.
Your topic is very interesting and I think it’s certainly worth to investigate this issue. Distance learning has been around for a long time now, yet it’s still not as successful as the normal face-to-face class is no matter how advanced the technological tools implemented in the lesson are. My desperate hope for the online learning in the future is that the gaming approach would be used instead of directly translating what would be instructed face-to-face to an online format. For example, there is a mission (what you have to learn) of this certain task that all students have to accomplish (achieve the objectives/goal of the class) by the end of week 14 (typical length of Fall or Spring semester), and each week students have to go through stages/levels to get a badge or a pass in order to pass through to the next level (which means they have to somehow master that content to excel). Just a random thoughts :)
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