Researching online learning activities: what counts?

Researching online offers endless possibilities for educators regardless of how the environment need to be understood and analysed. The emergence of the internet creates accessibility and opportunities for asynchronous and synchronous communication. Despite its advantages, research on online teaching and learning do represent problems in terms of observing the activities as meaningful learning are concerned. The activities of teaching and learning often vary and sometimes misunderstood. Teachers should no longer be viewed as the main source of knowledge. Likewise, students should no longer be seen as individuals who only absorb what is taught. Through discussion, students mutually learn from each other (peer-learning). This study investigates ‘teaching’ behavior evidenced in activities involving a group of university students using the Learning Management System (LMS) as a tool for discussion. This paper aims to address part of the problems that are faced by researchers when exploring the online tasks in the teaching-learning process, namely in trying to find meaningful contributions from learning participations in non-experimental conditions. Taking a sociocultural perspective, an argument is offered for the theorisation of peer to peer learning as a variety of ‘assisted performance’. Using this theoretical lens, a case study is then offered which uses this model to frame an analysis of the nature and occurrences of online exchanges between students and the tutors. Assisted performance categories were used to analyse the message transactions and they are: Scaffolding, Feedback on Performance, Cognitive Structuring, Modelling, Contingency Management, Instructing and Questioning. The problems discussed in this paper focus on the difficulties when facing a unique form of qualitative data for indication of activities particularly the ‘assistances’ and the capacities of assistance in the learning tasks, which is analysed by quantitative means – Content Analysis. Analysis reveals the problems in researching online learning tasks in the aspects of methodology which is in trying to find what is most significant for evidence of meaningful postings. Instead of looking at the number of messages or number of assistances, researchers have found the solutions by taking ‘proportions’ of assisted performance in the learning performance. Teaching behaviour could be occurring in peer learning in students’ interactions that were evidenced in online learning tasks in this study.

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