How Voluntary Online Learning Communities Emerge in Blended Courses

  • Authors:
  • Robert Heckman;Qing Li;Xue Xiao

  • Affiliations:
  • Syracuse University;Syracuse University;Syracuse University

  • Venue:
  • HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 01
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

A comparative case study used content analysis to observe the emergence of voluntary online learning communities in two blended courses. The study developed an interaction-based approach to analyze such communities, and found interesting similarities and differences between the two classes. One similarity is the emergence of three categories of students in each class: Core, Active, and Peripheral. The distribution of students into these three categories was almost identical, and appears to be similar to the widely observed bibliographic distribution regularity known as Bradford's Law.