ABSTRACT. Key Words: Virtual learning, e-learning, online learning, virtual communities of practice, learning community INTRODUCTION

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1 ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY FOR EXAMINING VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITY Sushil K. Sharma, Miller College of Business, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, 47306, , Subhash Chander Sharma, GZSCET, Bhatinda, Punjab, India, , Arya Kumar, BITS, Pilani, India, , ABSTRACT Many schools are using virtual learning environments such as; Web based synchronous and synchronous, blogs, Wiki development, and podcasting for their e-learning. Virtual learning environments demands strong interactions between students and teachers as well as among teachers. Virtual communities of interest and virtual Communities of Practice have become relatively common in business, but are yet to make a similar impact in education. This study use ethnographic approach to study four different schools both in India and the United States of America to examine whether students and teachers in these schools are member of any virtual learning community or virtual Communities of Practice groups. The preliminary findings suggest that students in these schools have still not adopted virtual community culture for their learning. Key Words: Virtual learning, e-learning, online learning, virtual communities of practice, learning community INTRODUCTION More and more schools are delivering their education through virtual learning environments or using electronic space [1], [2]. networks, instant messages, blogs, and integrated handheld communications technologies have taken over the face-to-face meeting for learning. The virtual learning communities have evolved in the last ten years due to growth of the Internet and related technologies [3]. Teachers and students worldwide have been becoming a member of these virtual learning communities to enhance their learning by sharing their experience, expertise and knowledge [4], [5]. Virtual learning has changed the landscape of learning and learning styles. Virtual learning in this paper is referred to as "virtual communities of interest" and Virtual Communities of Practice ([6] Members in "virtual communities of interest" and Virtual Communities of Practice for virtual learning rarely meet in person but share a similar interest and communicate through electronic means such as blogs, listservs, instant messaging (IM), networks, and interactive Web sites [7]. They utilize both synchronous and asynchronous electronic tools. Community networks, virtual learning communities, communities of practice, all are conglomerations of individuals, who aggregate mainly to share common ideas, pursue common interests and goals in cyberspace. These individuals make use of information technologies to connect and relate to each other, because they need one another to reach their goals [8]. These can be goals for building knowledge, goals for socialization, goals for learning, and goals for

2 solving pressing problems that require more than one person to solve. Central to the functioning of these communities is mutual support built on mutual understanding, the need to reciprocate in order to sustain membership and friendships and avoidance of social sanctions. For the scope of this study "virtual communities of interest" and Virtual Communities of Practice are defined as; virtual communities serve a diversity of groups, including people with common interests; groups fostered by particular organizations, industries or marketplaces; those who face similar life circumstances (such as a medical problem); as well as those who simply wish to socialize, play games or participate in fantasy experiences together on-line. Virtual communities, by definition, depend on technology, but often are only using limited tool sets to support specific types of interaction. Communities of Practice are groups which form among peers for sharing knowledge and information about the tasks they perform or other aspects of their professional activities and interests [9], [1], [10]. The term communities of practice (CoP) was introduced by Wenger in 1991 and since then have been used in the literature [11], [12], [13], [14], [15]. The definitions refer to the idea of sharing information and knowledge within a small group, as well as to the value of informal learning for a group and an organization (Mitchell, 2002). For the scope of the study, we understand CoPs as; a community who share their experiences and knowledge to enhance and deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area for their learning by interacting on an ongoing basis; a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on their common interests for learning. A community of practice is really a group of people engaged in a challenge who use their experience as curriculum. Members of the group teach and learn with each other [15]. Virtual learning is assumed to be learner-centered learning [16]. According to Bransford et al the learning environment not only respects and accommodates the particular cultural attributes, but learner-centered activities make extensive use of diagnostic tools and activities, so that these preexisting knowledge structures are made visible to both the teacher and the student. The success of learning communities relies mainly upon engagement, imagination, and alignment [17]. Unless learners actively involves through some form of engagement, the learning goals may not be accomplished. Wenger (1998) in their study suggests engagement patterns through networked learning systems. The present study use ethnographic approach to study four different schools both in India and the United States of America to examine whether students and teachers in these schools are member of any virtual learning community or virtual Communities of Practice groups. LITERATURE SURVEY Many schools are moving away from a traditional model of teacher centered face-to-face learning model to student centered learning community model. Kilpatrick (2003), defines learning community as a group of people, where a common purpose is shared; they collaborate to draw on individual strengths, respect the variety of perspectives and actively promote learning opportunities. The proposed outcomes are the creation of a synergistic environment where the potential of the members is enhanced, and enabling the creation of new knowledge [5] Virtual learning communities are self organized groups; cut across organizations, time zones, countries, and disciplines and build relationships in the process develop a sense of belonging and mutual commitment and exhibit engaged co-learning [11]. Learners in virtual learning environments remain highly engaged in the learning process and actively search for information, engage in

3 critical discussion, ask questions, discuss answers, make proposals and reply to other proposals [17]. Virtual learning environments are knowledge generating because everyone participating bring their prior knowledge, experiences and personal beliefs and values into the discussion. Virtual communities are global in nature in terms of time and space. Many researchers have been studying various aspects of virtual learning communities [18], [19]. Learner centered model is becoming popular and many learning communities have been already in place [20]. In this study we study virtual learning community and virtual communities of practice. The base theory for both of these learning communities is Social Constructivism. Learning is a constructionist and often social activity that takes place through knowledge building: contributing to, authoring within, discussing, sharing, exploring, deploying, and collectively building upon this collective knowledge base [18]. RESEARCH QUESTIONS The objectives of the study are to research the following research questions: Do learning communities exit among the students and teachers in USA, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, India and Canada? Do the learning community participants form and maintain social relationships with each other in a virtual learning environment? In what activities do participants engage to stay current with a virtual learning environment? Does the virtual learning environment help students as well as teachers in their learning goals? How do they assess their learning outcomes? Does a virtual learning community environment suit students learning styles? How do they measure or assess this? METHODOLOGY This study aimed to investigate discursive and social practices of a virtual learning. The data is collected from four (4) different schools from two different countries. The research questions that are addressed in this study are whether students and teachers in these four schools have found virtual community of interests and virtual community of practice in their virtual learning environment for teaching online courses. The study used ethnographic methods to examine participant understandings and meanings about their practices and learning. Ethnographic studies are more effective in analyzing the social aspects of system usage for the purpose of bringing a real world perspective in the system design process [21]. Nardi (1997) emphasizes that for studying the usage of electronic media for learning communities, the ethnographic approach is not only effective but is an essential [22]. The four main methods of data collection employed

4 were; observation, interviews through s, face-to-face interactions and discussions. The study used qualitative methods of interviewing, observation, and interpretive analysis in an effort to understand social practices from the point of view of participants themselves, after explaining to them the subject topics. We used our undergraduate and graduate students in business and engineering schools for our data sample [23]. Some of the graduate students were part of distance learning education and were off campus students. All the students have broadband Internet connectivity. Most of the students were on campus students but they also were using blackboard, chat, message boards, , and discussion forum. The data was collected between 2003 to Over 200 students and 20 faculty members from four different schools in India and the United States of America were involved in the study. The data sample includes few students who had few classes that were completely taught over the Internet. Data was collected using interviews, participation and observation through discussion boards and participation observation. DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS The detailed findings of the study will be presented at the conference. Through this ethnographic study, we gained a much deeper understanding why or why not students and teachers becoming member of learning communities. Informal interviews and conversations with students and teachers even though they were extremely time consuming helped a lot to understand the dynamics of virtual community of learning. This study is still a research-in-progress at this stage. Data has been collected. Data validation is in progress and soon the data will be analyzed for final findings. However, the preliminary data findings suggest that majority of respondents to this question have mixed feelings about the success and usefulness of the community, even though they think theoretically it has a merit. The participants both students and teachers were not very enthusiastic about becoming a member of learning community. The teachers thought they would prefer to be part of VCoPs rather than being a member of virtual learning community. Only 3 % respondents indicated that they have been member of learning community on irregular basis. Those 3 % respondents who are member of a learning community were asked to share different aspects of their learning community experience. It was interesting to know that these respondents did experience learning from other people through their exchanging and sharing information and knowledge. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the majority of participants thought that they had learned more from others than had contributed to the exchanges themselves. All the respondents expressed that most of the time they were passive participants and did not contribute much by sharing their knowledge and expertise [24]. Many Indian schools respondents expressed that lack of the Internet connectivity at home was one of the major factor that they did not spend much time on the Net for becoming member of any group. The United State of America respondents expressed their busy work schedule and family time as reasons for not spending enough time on the Internet. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION The virtual learning environments offer opportunity to learners to work together to solve problems or teach themselves through self-initiated study. However, the culture for self-initiated study is still not common among teachers and students. Virtual learning environment through virtual community groups offer opportunities for freedom of expression, attainment and exercise

5 of power, and opportunities to create meaningful relationships with others along with learning but the drive to continue and maintain relationship with community members on ongoing basis requires more discipline and motivation which was missing among the respondents of the study. Understandably learning is considerably difficult to measure and the scope of the study was not to measure the learning in virtual community settings. However, we did assume that participation in learning community automatically may result in a learning experience (Swan, & Shea, 2005). REFERENCES [1] Kimble, C., Hildreth, P., and Wright, P, (2000) Communities of Practice: Going Virtual (2000) Knowledge Management and Business Model Innovation. K.P. Mehdi. Hershey (USA)/London (UK), Idea Group Publishing, pp , 2000 [2] Andrews T. & Schwarz G. (2002) Preparing students for the virtual organization: an evaluation of learning with virtual learning technologies. Educational Technology and Society 5(3), [3] Brukman, A. (2006). Learning in online communities. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp ). Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press. [4] Bellarby, L., & Orange, G., (2006). Knowledge sharing through communities of practice in the voluntary sector. In Coakes, E., & Clarke, S., Encyclopedia of communities of practice in information and knowledge management. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference. [5] Kilpatrick, S., Barrett, M., Jones, T. (2003) Defining Learning Communities, AARE 2003 Conference Papers: International Education Research Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, (2003). [6] Ellis, D., Oldridge, R. and Vasconcelos, A. (2004), Community and virtual community, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, [7] Chang, C. K., Chen, G. D., & Li, L. Y. (2008). Constructing a community of practice to improve coursework activity. Computers & Education, 50, [8] Hodkinson, H and Hodkinson, P (2004). Rethinking the Concept of Community of Practice in relation to Schoolteachers Workplace Learning. International Journal of Training and Development, Vol 8 (1), pp [9] Kimble, C. and Hildreth, P. (2005) Virtual Communities of Practice. Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology. K.-P. Mehdi. Hershey (USA) /London (UK), Idea Group Publishing, pp ,

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