Towards a new approach to managing teacher online learning: Learning communities as activity systems

ABSTRACT

Online learning communities (OLC) are increasingly used for the professional development of teachers; however, it is still unclear how to design effective and sustainable OLC, especially considering the social and cultural differences. This study proposed a practical, theory-driven approach to managing teacher online learning, taking the educational infrastructures and teacher characteristics of rural China into account. We explored the effectiveness of this approach in an OLC that created on a free communication software named QQ. A total of 117 primary school teachers that came from rural China participated in this study for two months. The results demonstrated that the participants had positive perceived ease-of-use, usefulness and satisfaction towards the online learning community. Besides, teachers experienced considerably more positive emotions than negative emotions. In terms of cognition, they involved in the activities of cognitive insight the most. This study informs the effective practice of teacher professional development (TPD) in rural China in several ways, including but not limited to fostering online learning beyond physical knowledge-sharing settings, leveraging the low-cost or free technologies in TPD, and creating reward mechanisms by stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Online learning community
• Activity system
• Teacher professional development
• Technology acceptance model