Building Learning Communities: Online Collaboration and e-learning

The past decade has shown an increased interest in the concept of learning community. This interest is mainly based on the complex interplay of economic, social and technological changes. Today, education faces the challenges of the knowledge-based transformation in both society and economy in order to get a competitive advantage in the global world. The focus in the future knowledge-based society will be on lifelong learning and collaborative knowledge construction which cannot be driven by a fixed, structured curriculum but by knowledge work in a networked learning community. Advances in technology offer enormous opportunities for individual and group learning. New technologies indeed enable powerful collaborative learning environments to be created by facilitating communication. The rapid growth of the Internet and increasing use of ICT, specifically computer-mediated communication (CMC) have pushed teamwork and team-oriented processes both in business and education through online collaboration. With ICT and Internet development and popularization and experiences in computer-supported learning environments, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has recently emerged as a new field (Koschmann, 1996). Online collaborative learning environments have revolutionized the approach to education, training and learning at a distance. Today, the new forms of “web-based learning”, “online learning” or “e-learning” hold promises for both distance education and conventional education on behalf of lifelong learning. Providing interactive communication and collaborative construction of knowledge reflects the potential of e-learning for building online learning communities through online collaboration. In this connection, there is a need to understand what community means in virtual classroom environments so that we can promote a better sense of community (Rovai, 2001). In recent years, the demand for the research related with building learning communities has grown as more and more institutions seek group support technology as a way to enhance the delivery of education and to improve both teaching and learning productivity