“Technology has revolutionized the way we communicate, the way we live, and the way we learn.” (Maddix; 2010). During these recent years web- based learning has gained so much popularity that, online courses enrolments continue to climb, but retention and completion rates in such courses and programs are lower than traditional classroom schooling. Because of these problems educators have looked into the problems to see what can be done to reverse the trend. As more formal education courses become available online, quality and non-completion remain a problem. This brings me to ask the question, that how much relationship should I build into learning community that can help solve the drop out problem.
The researchers asked a lot of questions during the beginning of the project. Some of these investigations were how does online activity and discussion postings relate to learning and course completion. The researchers also investigated how student’s collaborative behavior and integration into the community related to success. “Although the quantitative indices measured shows highly significant differences between the gratifications of student performance, there were notable exceptions unexplained by the trends”. Nagel, Blignant, and Cronje. 2007. Discontent students in the learning community felt for invisible students who were absent without reason from group or who made shallow and insufficient contributions were also noted. Student online visibility and participation like read only participants who skim over or deliberately harvest others was also discussed. Students who had limited access due to poor connectivity, high cost or other reasons can manage their log in time effectively and gain maximum benefit. Absent and seldom contributing students risk forsaking the benefits of the virtual learning community and read only participants disrupt the formation of a virtual
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