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required to understand the changing capacity of
the environment and the capacities of those who
learn and teach in them. However, a project such
as this, that has focused on the human elements of
relationship building, our sense of place, and our
capacity to know how to be in an environment,
has a great deal to offer the field of eLearning
particularly when it relates to the education of
social work and human services student. The
contributions from the students in these three
case studies to our understanding of “community”
certainly has much to contribute to those engaged
in designing tomorrow's eLearning environments.
In particular, for the next generation of course
management systems, which are the mainstay of
most university's commitment to online learning
and the typical online environment encountered
by social work and human services students.
The individual practice of teachers will always
shape the student's learning experience, however,
teachers work within the constraints of the learning
environments provided in both the on-campus and
online worlds. Just as on-campus teaching staff will
attempt to move the desks in a room to reshape the
learning activity into a more collaborative approach,
or struggle to work interactively in large lecture
theatres, the vast majority of teaching staff who
venture into the online environment use the Course
Management System provided by their institution.
The findings from this research are a challenge to the
designers of CMS to break out of the old paradigm
of providing separate electronic classrooms - into
creating rich online learning environments. These
online learning environments will not only be rich
in the various teaching tools educators like to use,
but will also be rich in the sense that they take into
account the way in which students engage with each
other outside the classroom. The following five
principles represent challenges from this research
for future developers of enterprise-wide online
learning environments. These principles bring to-
gether the various findings from this research and
translate them into core design elements critical for
improving the development of SLSN's:
•
Getting together outside the electronic
classroom.
Tinto's (2000) research into
the benefits of on-campus learning com-
munities found, amongst other things, that
members of learning communities devel-
oped their own self-supporting groups,
they spent more time together outside of
the classroom, and did so in ways students
reported as supportive. The students' expe-
riences from this research certainly support
Tinto's work, but more importantly, their
behavior in the MOO is a challenge to us
to think outside of the classroom and to
provide students with space to inhabit and
make their own.
•
Learning environments need to be integrat-
ed into the social environment, not the oth-
er way round.
To date the development of
online learning environments has been split
between CMS and content. Effectively, the
CMS has shaped the pedagogical approach
used by most educators. However, students
from these case studies owned and valued
the SLSN's they developed outside of the
formal learning environment. For students
in the MOO and for those in on-campus
courses, the learning environment is situ-
ated
within
the broader social environment
they encountered.
•
Performance anxiety in a text based class-
room: students need a space to bounce
ideas off each other in their own time.
The
provision of “classroom” only type online
spaces limits the opportunities for student
to engage with each other and heightens
the performance anxiety associated with
a written medium. The MOO case study
clearly demonstrated that students would
take their learning processes outside of the
“classrooms” provided and into the halls,
dorms and cafes of their virtual university
campus or other online sites. These inter-
actions outside the formal learning envi-
ronment provided them with a safe space
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