Online Collaborative Learning Communities (OCLCs)

Abstract

With the dramatic and utmost advancement in a new paradigm shift of education, there is inevitably noticed that instructional designers (IDs) prioritize their professional development to help students gain their academic achievement and pursue their professional goals. Apart from that, technology, especially online learning, appears to play an important role to facilitate learning and becomes one of the popular ways to deliver instruction at any level of education with the flexibility to access anytime anywhere. With this ultimate goal, it is to bring IDs learning together rather than isolating them. This makes online collaborative learning (OCL) begin. The purposes of this study were to enrich OCLCs for promoting teachers’ professional development in a transformative educational system and explore attitudes towards the use of OCLCs to promote teachers’ professional development. The instruments used for this study were observation with a role of a participant observer and focus group interviews. The results of this study found that OCLCs can help enriching IDs to pursue their professional development based on three key constructs: interactivity, social context, and technologies proposed by Tu and Corry. For interactivity, IDs were found enthusiastic to express their opinions with their peers. They shared their knowledge, narrated their own experiences, and inspired each other. Next was social context. IDs learned how to manage their group. They selected one representative to act as a leader to manage the group and played respect to each other. Apart from that, they shared similar goals, interests, and experiences with others. Last but not least, technologies, they were comfortable to employ technologies to deliver knowledge, interests, and experiences for stimulating their knowledge development. Keywords—online collaborative learning communities, teachers’ professional development, transformative educational system