Communities of Practice and the Online Learning Environment
Brindley et al. 2009 argues that online courses can provide participants with a very social and engaging learning environment. The key word being social. Social is here about engagement. And engagement can take different forms, such as peer-to-peer collaboration or student-faculty interaction. It is about creating a space for active learning in which people can come together as a group and gain experience in how to work together in a more collaborative way (Brindley et al. 2009). Here it can be about the co-construction of knowledge. Yet they also point out critical factors, for example most people don’t have much experience with this type of learning (Brindley et al. 2009). This might mean that in addition to the learning goals of the course, the participants need also to learn new ways of approaching learning and develop new types of behaviours (that can be different to how interaction is carried out in in-person interaction. This highlights the role of the instructor according to Brindley et al. (2009) the instructors skill in managing the interaction in online courses are important. This role might become even more challenging when we add the findings of Capdeferro and Romero (2012). They find that students experience a host of emotions and the overriding feeling being frustration. Frustration can be felt at a high level and it often has negative connotations and emotions (Capdeferro and Romero 2012). It is most often concerned with the experience of not achieving a goal or completing plans, and this is a result from experiencing that there is an imbalance in workload or in level of commitment to solving a task or reaching a goal (Capdeferro and Romero 2012). One way of theoretically understanding collaboration in a group is to utilize the concept of communities of practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998; Wenger 2010). It is a concept that can highlight learning as social and situated (Lave and Wenger 1991). Being situated means that the context matters, in this case the online environment creates specific contextual challenges. In a context numerous practices are produced over time as the group work evolves and develops (Wenger 2010), and over time the group comes to share a common goal (Wenger 1998). In this development the teacher, or in the terms of Lave and Wenger (1991) the mentor faces challenges. For example Wenger (2010) mentions that the production of practices are not always straight forward and there can be obstacles such as practitioners being myopic or deluded (subconscious factors can undermine even the best intentions). On another note, there are also a number of limitations to the concept of CoP (Roberts 2006). For example, Roberts (2006) points out that the role of power in interactions are not put to the front, especially not in the early works of Wenger (1998) and Lave and Wenger (1991). But she argues that power is central to how the dynamics of a CoP can be understood, and further how knowledge is created and circulated. If power is the ability to master a set of tools, or achieve something and perhaps even control something then it has implications for how individuals use power and how power relations in the group develops. For example, in a group of online learners people bring different experiences to the group, and group members may have different levels of previous experience. Altogether this can influence the degree of participation. Ideally the group members will go from being a member that participates in the periphery to become a full member.
References
Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).
Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991).Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roberts, J. (2006). Limits to Communities of Practice. Journal of Management Studies, 43(3).
Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London.
Wenger, E. (1998).Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.