Initial Stages to Create Online Graduate Communities: Assessment and Development

Introduction

Online communities, with the technology changes over the past two decades, have been gradually integrated into education and have become a growing feature in the field of using information technology in education (Mason, 2000; Santos & Hammont, 2007; Thorpe, 2002). Terms like “virtual community” or “online community” have received more and more attention in the literature. A key word Google search with “online community” can result in 327,000,000 link items in 0.23 seconds. Most studies on this theme have explored the potential needs of online communities (Fernback, 2007; Neumann, Hogan, & MacDonaill, 2005), areas where online communities can be used to facilitate or improve educators’ work (Aviv, et al., 2003; Ginossar, 2008; Lau, et al., 2007), and strategies and methods to effectively use online learning communities (Ke & Hoadley, 2009).

A community usually serves a particular group of people with common characteristics and interests. The rationale for creating online communities for graduate students is based on the characteristics of this special population in universities. According to the latest Council of Graduate Schools report, more students enroll in the field of education than any other field, accounting for 25% of total fall 2007 graduate enrollment in the United States; in fact, of the 321,433 graduate students currently enrolled in colleges of education, 64% are part-time students (Bell, 2008). Numerous researchers in the area of academic persistence have identified involvement and emotional connectedness to the institution as key factors in predicting academic persistence (Lin & Lee, 2006; Norris, 2002). Specifically, the more often graduate students involve or integrate into the life of the college, the more likely they will persist (Tinto, 1997; Zhao & Kuh, 2004). Involvement also influences learning; the more they participate in the academic life of the college, the more successful their learning will d be (Davenport, 2001; Ke & Hoadley, 2009; Santos, 2007). Since involvement is often at a minimum among education-major graduate students working full-time as teachers and administrators, it is to be expected that teacher education programs register these dismal degree completion rates.

However, situation could be different if graduate students have a platform or a convenient environment that enables them to socially and academically be involved in college life. According to the technical functions, operational tools, and administrative flexibility of online communities (Farooq, et al., 2007; Henderson, 2007; Lutters & Ackerman, 2003), a well designed online community should be able to serve as one solution to this problem.

Procedures to design an online community are similar to the design of an information system, which should be guided through the five stages of the ADDIE design model: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (Gagne et al., 2005; Smith & Ragan, 2005). This chapter introduces the authors’ experiences with creating three online graduate communities, using mainly the stages of Analysis, Design, and Development. First, results from a pilot assessment on student needs and preferences for an online community are reported. Second, initial steps to design and develop the following three online communities are described: