Building an online learning community

Introduction The Internet was not invented for education at beginning (Pett Grabinger, 1995), but it has influenced educational systems considerably, especially by providing another way for distance learning. This powerful communication function is superior to any other educational media. Students can conduct their own self-directed learning without interacting with others in an online learning environment. However, several scholars asserted that interaction would increase the learning quality in online learning. People who advocate Constructivism also claim that knowledge is built through interaction with environment, including materials and people (Jonassen, Peck & Wilson, 1999). Moreover, because of physical separation, it is more important to have social support due to the fact that we are human beings, and societal animals (Winn, 1997). In recent years, the MIT Media Lab (http://persona.www.media.mit.edu/SMG) has been devoted to develop online tools which will facilitate online communication to eliminate the “sociable spaces ” (Karahalios & Donath, 2003). Therefore, the current trend of studying online learning has developed into the study of online learn ing interaction (Hung & Chen, 2001; Hung & Nichani, 200; Tu & McIsaac, 2002; Conrad, 2002), switching from technical to social aspect. Along with the development of the Internet, some virtual communities have grown up, too. These virtual communities are groups where people share common interests (Rheingold, 2000) and discuss through computermediated communication (CMC). Some virtual communities survived and still operate well, while some of them disappeared. What kind of characteristics do these survival communities have? What contributes to their success? Online learning community is also one kind of virtual communities. The purpose of this paper is to discover the feature of virtual communities and propose some suggestions from experiences of successful virtual communities to building learning communities. The research questions are as follows: