Open source learning streams in online discussions in e-learning

The wish for a more engaging e-learning design and better utilization of the technology at hand has led to the pedagogic design in this study. We wanted to make a strong alternative to face-to-face teaching that was just as likely to facilitate learning as face to face teacher presentations and class discussions. The study investigates how online discussions in connection with teacher produced video presentations can generate an ‘open source learning stream’ in an e-learning course for teachers. We look at how an ‘open source learning stream’ can encourage students to give and receive peer feedback. We propose the idea that if learning in an online community is set up to follow the lines of identity building in social media (Larsen 2007) then we might get a natural momentum in the ‘open source learning stream’. We try to identify demographic factors that could influence the success of the ‘open source learning stream’. We found that some students in the demographic group that used computers in their childhood experience that they can learn more form video clips and online discussion than from traditional teacher presentations and face to face discussions. We also found that the demographic group that didn’t use computers in their childhood believes that they learn more for traditional face-to-face teaching. This divergence in belief calls for a better defined demographic categorization of the students before dividing them into groups in e-learning. The categorization might assist the diffusion of innovation in the persuasion stage (Rogers 2010) of the implementation of the new pedagogic design so that peers would persuade each other that they can adopt the new learning practices and participate in the ‘open source learning stream’. We propose the idea that significant demographic knowledge of the students in combination with learning analytics can generate a strong e-learning design. Furthermore we investigate inclusion/exclusion mechanisms in the pedagogic design and we found that a more rapid and multimodal type of reply would help some students. The study presents a critical realist analysis of the pedagogic design in question and tries to abduct a categorization of student demographics’ influence on learning progression and on the utilization of web-tools at hand in the students’ learning process.