CREATING AND SUSTAINING EFFECTIVE ALNS

Pedagogy, software, and student motivation form an interactive system that either supports the emergence and growth of a vibrant online learning community, or does not. This article briefly reviews some of the research that has been carried out at NJIT and elsewhere over the last 25 years that supports this view. It starts with collaborative learning pedagogy, since this is the foundation of a successful learning network. Whenever the quality of online courses is discussed, some faculty members give glowing accounts of active dialogue and better communication with students than in face to face courses. Others counter that they taught or observed an online class where there was little or no interaction, just “no new items waiting” day after day. Of course, there is great variability in the liveliness of traditional classrooms and the quality of the courses, too, but it seems even more marked in the virtual classroom. We know from over 30 empirical studies comparing the effectiveness of ALN (asynchronous learning networks) and face to face (f2f) courses that overall, ALN courses are on the average, as effective or more effective than FfF ones, but that there is much more variability within modes than between them [1, 2]. Though there are many, many variables that contribute to and help to explain the effectiveness of courses taught using the ALN paradigm [3], the most important is the pedagogy and the presence that the instructor brings to the course. The instructor’s success can be greatly aided, however, by a software platform that supports collaborative learning and allows forms of interaction that would be difficult to achieve in a traditional classroom, thus capitalizing on the power of computer-mediated communication. And of course, what occurs online is also affected by what the students bring to the course, especially their motivation in regard to the course.