دانلود رایگان مقاله ساخت فضای آموزشی و مطالعات یادگیری غیررسمی آنلاین

Abstract

A report from the market research firm Ambient Insight indicated that by 2015, 25 million post-secondary students in the United States could be enrolled in an online course (Adkins, 2011). As a consequence, they argued, we will see a decline in student enrollment in physical classrooms. In fact, the report estimated a five-year decline of 22 percent (from 14.4 million in 2010 to 4.1 million in 2015) in students attending traditional classrooms. Yet, in the face of these projections and despite innovation in educational technologies, there remains a consistent number of academics who are concerned that the quality of online instruction is not equal to face-to-face (f2f) encounters (Allen & Seaman, 2011). It is this question—a question of learning and how to facilitate high quality experiences—that we take up in this article. This question forces us to consider simultaneously: 1) what are the conditions that are necessary for learning to occur in online spaces, and 2) what are the best practices associated with effective learning these environments? To these ends, we focus on the characteristics of digital informal learning environments and on how these environments are constructed rhetorically and primarily discursively via deliberate facilitation strategies focused on encouraging learning.

8. Conclusion

We started this article with two questions in mind: 1) what are the conditions that are necessary for learning to occur in online spaces, and 2) what are the best practices associated with effective learning these environments? Questions such as these are among many important questions to ask given the current dynamics in educational technologies. If Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by education ventures such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity are the future, then we have to reassess our understanding of e-learning and strategies for facilitating learning in online environments. Nevertheless, the increase in the prevalence of these online experiences only underscores the concern for designing quality learning experiences. Designing high quality experiences necessitates that we inquire as to the conditions necessary for learning to occur in online spaces and what are the best practices associated with effective learning in these environments.We believe that our discussion offacilitation during Experimonth is usefulfor deepening our understanding of how informal digital spaces can serve as robust learning environments. Moreover, our data from Experimonth offers key considerations for the computers and writing community. First, we must recognize that the rhetorical work of facilitation is what constructs digital environments as learning spaces. Technologies, structure, and culture matter a great deal, but central to these dynamics is the rhetorical work of constructing a culture of sharing, which leads to learning. We have to understand the pre-existing architecture of any platform and carefully weigh the affordances and consequences. This will affect how participants interact with each other. While our data suggest that technologies can act as facilitators, what makes experiences like Experimonth meaningful is how we made use of the digital infrastructure to promote a level groupness where participants engaged in sharing experiences and objects, making their ideas public, and were attentive and accountable to each other. We believe that facilitation is what made these conditions possible. Second, we believe that facilitation can be seen, taught, and learned. Through our study—and specifically our analytical practices—we saw that facilitative moves could be easily identified within the discourse of a digital space (invitations, constructions of connections, etc.). More importantly, these facilitative moves could be indexed and operationalized to draw specific learning outcomes in many different settings.