This week’s readings focus on online community users’ psychological factors and motivation on participating in the online community. Tedjiamulia (2005) and Java (2007) both addressed the amount and pattern of participation. People who seek information but rarely ask or answer questions are considered lurkers and people who provide information for other community members are considered veterans. Ling et al. (2005) proposed a concept social loafing, which can describe the phenomenon of lurkers. Java held that there is another type of people who aim at making friends or keeping friendship with other people. Tedjiamulia held that there is a type of people whose contributions are between lurkers and veterans. They asked questions as well as answer others’ questions. The salient difference between this type of people and veterans lies in the depth of the questions and answers.
Tedjiamulia also addressed the influence of efficacy on participation; namely self-efficacy, information efficacy, and technology efficacy. The concept of information efficacy is similar to what Ling et al. said that a person believing his contribution to the community is unique will contribute more. In addition, the concept of technology efficacy could explain what LaRose (2001) mentioned that novice internet users, because unfamiliar with technology, are easily stressed out. Tedjiamulia believed that a person who has higher self-efficacy tend to cooperate more. I think there might be a precondition that the goal one perceives needs to be considered a valuable and a little challenging one. For example, I have taken a writing course required by the university. For me, the student learning outcomes were quite easy and I knew that I would achieve them without difficulties. Therefore, I have to admit that I did not participate much in the class. Schrock (2009) did an interesting study on the relationship between psychological, affective, and behavioral factors and the use of technology. The findings show that a person with computer anxiety will less likely seek information online, but that a person with computer self-efficacy tends to seek information online. Take me for example, when I was a novice computer user, I did not know very well how to search the right information for my assignments, the more I searched, the more I got confused and felt that I was lost in the cyber sea. As a result, I felt anxious when doing assignments which required information search online. There were times that I had a feeling of anti-computers. However, with the help of my friends who knew computers better than me, I started feeling comfortable when using computers.
I am interested in the interaction of online learning courses, so I observe an online reading course of UH. The students, registering the online reading course, are assessed to need help for improving their reading abilities in order to deal with the high demands of academic reading. The online course focuses on the development of critical reading strategies and field-specific vocabulary. According to Gefen (2007), the participants in a virtual community share interests and frequent the online community. The students in the online course have common goals; however, the current My UH Portal does not allow students to continue using the online course site if the semester is over. In other words, the online reading course users intensively participate in the site only during one semester. Tedjiamulia said that if an online community wants its users continuously share knowledge, its users should participate in the community for a long period of time and engage in the online activities intensively. The restriction of short-term use for students may affect the sense of belonging to the online course and further affect their motivation and participation. In the sense, the online reading course may not 100% meet the standards of a so-called online community; however, there are four online reading courses open this semester, with 45 students enrolled. If all the current students, or even previous students, could gather and share the same online platform and use the facility offered by the online platform for good, I am curious about how the online community of these reading courses will end up with and what the students’ motivation will be.
What modes of participation are there?
There are 11 topics, 139 posts on this online reading course. The modes of participation are as below:
1. The instructor posts questions and the students answer.
2. Some students post questions and other students answer.
3. The instructor responds to the students’ questions and answers.
Among 139 posts, 118 posts are contributed by the students and 21 by the instructor. The interaction mode of the online course does not follow the traditional classroom dynamics; that is, the teacher initiates the questions, the students respond to the questions, and the teacher evaluates the students’ answers. In this online course, students are able to initiate questions and evaluate other students’ answers. In this sense, the students in the online course are entitled more autonomy than those in the traditional classrooms. Compared to other types of online communities, the mode of participation in the online course is quite different. Given the term of use and the design of Laulima, the students in the course do not send messages to each other and friend people, but they do comment on others’ posts. Another difference is that participants in other online communities ask questions based on their own interests. The participants in the online reading course ask questions based on the instructor’s guidelines. For example, the instructor may ask the student discussion leader to put forward evaluation questions rather than literal questions for the weekly reading article to let other students answer the questions.
How is participation encouraged?
The instructor (or the “designer” of the online course) posts every week, giving students a variety of tasks to engage in. In the first week, the instructor asked the students to create a profile. This is the first step the instructor encourages the students to participate in the online course and get to know each other. This is quite similar to what the designers of other online communities do. The site members are always encouraged to post their own profiles to let other members know who they are. Week 2 and week 3 are the practice of reading circles. The student discussion leader needs to select an article and ask comprehension questions and discussion questions to help other students comprehend the article. Week 4 and week 5 are the practice asking different types of questions, such as literal, reorganization, inference, prediction, evaluation, and personal response. Each student has the chance of being a discussion leader and selecting a reading of her/his own interest. She/he posts questions and other students as well as the instructor respond to the questions. In addition, each student is in charge of creating her/his own vocabulary log and a vocabulary test based on the log. Based on my observation, the more autonomy students have in learning, the more contribution they give to the course, which accounts for 85% of the posts. The students from this online course have common and specific goals. It is similar to what Gefen said the members in a virtual community mostly focus on information exchange about specific topics.
Which types of content draw the most responses?
The most popular topic is the reading circles, accounting for 50 posts. The student discussion leader posts her/his questions based on the article of her/his selection and other students as well as the instructor participate in the discussion. The questions in reading circles include comprehension questions and discussion questions. Comprehension questions are the literal questions that the answers are easily found from the article. The discussion questions ask for students’ personal experience and making inferences form the article. The length of the responses to the discussion questions is obviously longer than that to the comprehension questions. The second popular topic is self-introduction. There are 36 posts about this topic. Many students posted more than once either telling more about themselves or responding to other students’ questions.
The purpose of participation in the online reading course is mainly for information sharing and friendship-wise relationship, if any (Java, 2007). No social support is founded. I wonder if the previous students are allowed to participate in the online course, how the classroom dynamics will be different.
References
All of the articles for this week
Echoing your idea, I feel the same like you in the virtual sea when I get to my graduate program. I almost think that I am so stupid just for understanding the easy way on navigating Laulima and the library account. Almost every key word that I put on the search box just hit no result for almost a week. Sit down and keep playing with the navigation, email my friends to get assistants, and went to the library to get assistants from a librarian really help. Surfing or swimming in the virtual ocean is almost the same like surfing and swimming in the real ocean. We will sink if we do not know the suitable techniques. Learning from an expert and keep practice make we easily get into the rhythm of the wave on this new ocean.
ReplyDeleteHi HansomeAvatar,
ReplyDeleteYour response brought me to think of another problem--the user friendliness of the interface and functions of a website. It is obvious that if the interface is too complicated to figure out, the website is going to lose its members, which is detrimental to the sustainability of the website. Less members results in less contribution; in return, less contribution is hard to attract new members and keep the old members. I have heard a couple of friends complaining the usefulness of Laulima. For me, Laulima is a place to submit assignments (however, some instructors simply ask students to submit their assignments by email, not through Laulima) or download readings, if any. Honestly speaking, I do not log in very often. So, I have been thinking what else I can do with Laulima. Probably, incorporating certain functions from popular SNSs can be an option. For example, most courses are offered more than one semester. Those courses have not only current students (participants) but also previous students (participants) and potential students (participants). If Laulima allowed previous students to keeping using the course sites, sharing their ideas with the current students, it may be helpful to solicit potential students; meanwhile, the information delivered in the course online community may also help the instructor think about how to make the course better ^^.
I use Laulima quite a bit, but I wonder if students with low computer confidence are disadvantaged. In a class environment you not only learn from those discussions, but are sometimes graded on them. Like you said, if somebody isn't sure how to use a specific site (or the internet in general) it can make them very anxious and sometimes they will avoid it altogether. In the example you give, I guess the students have signed up for the course knowing it is online so hopefully they are comfortable with it, but there are a lot of regular classes where the professor makes heavy use of Laulima. It would be interesting to know if anybody's grades have suffered because of their technology efficacy.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrea,
ReplyDeleteThe students’ motivation for the online course varies a lot. Unlike other SNSs, in which its users participate in the online communities due to their own interests, some students take the reading course because it is requested, so in the beginning they might not have high motivation. However, how to enhance their motivation after taking the course is an interesting and important issue. In addition, some students take the online course because they do not want to go to the class regularly. If they choose the online course, they can “go to the class” without time-and-space limitation. Among them, some students may have high technology efficacy, while others may not. Therefore, the instructor of the online reading course especially wrote down this on the syllabus: “Computer problems” are not a valid excuse for late work, so please plan ahead and do not wait until the last minute to submit your assignments. :)
You brought up an interesting question: whether anybody's grades have suffered because of their technology efficacy. The instructor of the online reading course also thought of the possibility. Therefore, the instructor asked the students to get familiar with Laulima in the first week. Besides, the instructor writes down the instruction in detail for weekly assignments. In this sense, she tries her best to avoid the inconvenience of students’ low technology efficacy. Since this class is also an online course, I am curious about Dr. Gazan’s viewpoints of using the blog rather than Laulima as a platform for communication ^^.
Bug, I think your post is great, especially when you select an example so close to our experience on Laulima and what we are doing in this class now. When we are discussing a class of students as the members on an online community, it is quite like in that article when the author said a group task is more motivated than an individual task, especially if the task is "appropriate hard', like class assignments.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, I find your point of "restriction of short-term use for students may affect the sense of belonging to the online course and further affect their motivation and participation" very interesting and agreeable, and I just wonder if a short-term popular topic will cause the same effect as well :)
You're right that a time-limited online interaction such as one that happens during a course doesn't precisely fit the definition of an online community, but I think looking at Laulima as an online community was an interesting and valuable approach. The primary motivation for participation is presumably to receive points toward your overall grade, but I like that you pointed out how for some topics people post more than once. In an online course, the goal is to provide tools and an environment where people can become a learning community.
ReplyDeleteTo address Bug's comment, I chose not to run this course through Laulima for a few reasons: it's a closed-end system, and you don't have the chance to access your content when the course is over, I want you to become familiar with common blog and reader tools in the real world, and while I think Laulima is serviceable for most purposes, I don't think that mastering its quirks will translate to other systems as well as the tools we're using now. Nice post!
I haven't thought of Laulima as an online community before, but it makes total sense. The point about it being inaccessible after the course is over is the most interesting. If it weren't for the motivation for a grade, I would think that the time-limited aspect of this community would result in less participation. I am also curious to know if knowing that the community would be shutting-down caused any of the members to move their community elsewhere after they lost access. It may not happen in a class setting, but its possible that other online communities would migrate somewhere else if they lost their original community.
ReplyDeleteI also wonder what would happen on Laulima if there was the possibility for previous semester students to join with the current students in their discussions. I'm sure the current students could learn from the student that already took the course, but at the same time I wonder if any of the older students would want to join after their course is done.
ReplyDeleteFrom my understanding, it seems hard to look at an online class as an online community.
The participants in those online course are not truly voluntary participants. The participation is pushed by the requirements of the class - post this, respond a certain number of times, by a certain date.
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ReplyDeleteHi Nan,
ReplyDeleteAs you mentioned whether the short-term popular topic will lead to less motivation and participation, I think the answer is yes. An example I can think of is that Yahoo Taiwan (http://tw.yahoo.com/ ) keeps updating the hottest key words based on the frequency of a string of words searched during a period of time.
Oftentimes the hottest key words in today and yesterday are different. It shows the online community users change their interests soon.
To motivate students to participate, the instructor of the online reading course, in an interview, said that she kept relating the reading course to students’ content courses, trying to get students feel the course is a supplement not an extra course. In this sense, even if the students know that they will not have access to the online course after the semester is over, they may still contribute to the online course because the “short-term” topics discussed in this class are useful to them. However, just as Dr. Gazan said Laulima is a close-end system. Only the instructor and the students of a certain class can use the class electronic platform. Given the fact, it is hard for an online course in Laulima to form a learning community. I think the design of Laulima is more for instructors’ class management than for students as well as instructors’ information sharing, which is common in most SNSs. For me, it is a pity that an online course system, like Laulima, is unable for the students and the instructor in one course to share knowledge with the students and the instructor in another course which has similar learning goals or learning interests.
Hi Hey Jude,
ReplyDeleteYou’re right some participants do not have high motivation to participate in online courses. I think this problem also happens in face-to-face classes. You also mention a good point that how to get the previous students of an online course to believe that it is worthy to keep participating in the online course. One of the possible solutions I can think of is to refer to how the popular SNSs motivate their previous participants to keep using the SNSs. For example, if the online course stores some information which can help them find out the answers when they have difficulty in their academic work or if the online course is a place that they can meet their friends or people who have similar interests, etc.
This session’s task is interesting to me. I learned some theories and research results of the motivation for participating in an SNS. Since being allowed to observe an online reading course via Laulima, I thought it could be a good idea to examine the online environment of Laulima and regular online communities. The comments on my blog give me some thoughts, helping me think more and clarify the unclear viewpoints in my original post. First, I need to admit that Laulima is a semi-online community because it has certain functions similar to the regular online communities, such as Facebook. Laulima users are able to post questions and comment on others’ posts, and store and retrieve information. However, these functions will be unavailable when the course is over. It is harmful to a newly built community—the online reading course. Despite the current limitation, I agree with Dr. Gazan by saying that the goal of an online course is to provide tools and an environment where people can become a learning community, so I think it will be interesting to investigate the following questions:
ReplyDelete1.What are the types of students in the online reading course (i.e. Lurkers or veterans)?
2.What kinds of topics are more popular than others?
3.What are the differences of the online reading course and its counterpart (the face-to-face class)?
4.What are the differences of the online reading course and regular SNSs, such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other online learning websites?
5.How to make Laulima a more open-ended system than it is now?