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Juxtaposing community with learning: The relationship between learner contributions and sense of community in online education environments
Shane Dawson 
The integration of community-centred teaching practices within the higher education sector has been demonstrated to facilitate student learning and reduce attrition rates. Despite an intensive investment in strategic initiatives to enhance student sense of community, there is a lack of scaleable evaluative measures to assess the accomplishment of intended outcomes. This study developed an evaluative method merging data mining techniques with a theoretically grounded community scale. The study demonstrates the capacity for cost effective data mining techniques to guide and evaluate implemented teaching and learning practices designed to enhance student sense of community.
Transcript
Interviewer: I would like to welcome Shane Dawson who is in his final stages of his PhD in Education. Welcome Shane.
Shane Dawson: Thank you.
Interviewer: Shane I wonder if you could share with us what your research title is and give us a brief explanation of what studies you have been currently enrolled in?
Shane Dawson: Certainly. The title of my PhD research is Juxtaposing community with learning. The relationship between learner contributions and sense of community in on line environments. It’s a bit of a mouthful but basically what I’ve been looking at is the relationship between student perceived sense of community with their classes that they’re currently studying and how that relates to communication not in your actions, mostly in an on line environment.
Interviewer: How did you identify this gap in the research?
Shane Dawson: My research is built upon my previous work. I was an instructional designer for the university and I was extremely interested in developing a sense of community within classrooms. A sense of community has been shown to facilitate student learning whilst also contributing to reduced rates of attrition, increasing student satisfaction, which are all very topical at the moment, especially in terms of government funding. Most of the studies that have been undertaken looking at students sense of community have been more qualitative in nature, so that they’ve actually looked at research that’s gone through communication artefacts of students postings and then tried to determine whether students have a sense of community or not. I wanted to develop an alternative approach where perhaps we could monitor students sense of community as it developed using more quantitative approaches. Such as the use of ICTs in education, on line discussion forums and so forth.
Interviewer: And what did you find from this research that you’ve done? Are students engaged or are they, maybe not so engaged as they should be and what can be done?
Shane Dawson: Mostly students are engaged. The more that they’re communicating with each other the stronger their sense of community. While that’s not rocket science, what we did find out was that, it’s not necessarily the quantity of those interactions; it’s the quality of those interactions. Where staff have contributed a lot, that hasn’t necessarily facilitated a strong sense of community within the classroom. It’s where there’s been a diversity of student opinions and debates that have been undertaken within that classroom, that’s promoted a stronger sense of community. Essentially from that we built on, looked at social networks as well and we noted that external social networks also influenced that student sense of community.
Interviewer: Thank you for that. Are there any other implications that your study has found while you have been doing this research?
Shane Dawson: There’s been a lot of implications deriving from the research. Mostly, as I mentioned before, that students sense of community relates back to how students feel about the university in terms of their satisfaction. That’s a very, very strong driver at the moment in terms of government funding and how much the university potentially receives from the learning and teaching performance fund. By doing this we actually have a quantitative lead indicator of student satisfaction. We can monitor the types of ICT interaction students are having on line and be able to get an indication of their levels of community and, from that, their levels of student satisfaction, which may give us an indication then of what potential funding sources. It also gives us an idea of where we may be able to target our staff development processes. It gives us an indication of where students, the trouble they may be having in transitioning, the types of social networks their developing and even if we want to go down into an assessment practice, what are the types of behaviour on line that a 7’s student, a high distinction student does versus a student who’s struggling and may be a potential attrition concern.
Interviewer: With this study that you have been undertaking, is there a specific age group that you were looking at?
Shane Dawson: We looked at undergraduate and post graduate students and within that we looked at the different age demographics from mature age down to first year school leavers and there was no discernable difference in terms of the community and the drivers for developing community.
Interviewer: That’s really interesting to hear that there is no difference between a student who has just come out of school and a mature age student, although automatically you would think that there would be. It’s really interesting to hear that. Thank you very much for sharing that with us and we look forward to your final seminar. Thank you.
Shane Dawson: Thank you very much.
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