Abstract
Education is under a radical transformation in the current innovation-driven knowledge age. The instructor-student collaborative partnership has the potential to transform education from traditional instructor-directed, transmissive teaching to active, participatory student-centered learning. However, relevant inquiry indicates the conceptual, analytical, and practical gaps on the instructor-student collaborative partnership. This study aims to conceptualize, analyze, and foster the instructor-student collaborative partnership in higher education contexts. To achieve this purpose, we empirically investigate the instructor-student collaborative partnership in an online course where the instructor uses a learning-community approach to foster learning. Using mixed methods, we examine the instructor-student collaborative partnership from the participation frequency, engagement move, and participant perception perspectives. Results show that the instructor and students not only actively participate in learning, instruction, and social environment building processes, but also maintain mutual interactions, communications, and actions to construct knowledge, to design and facilitate discussions, and to build a social learning environment. In addition, most participants perceive a sense of an online learning community in this online course. Based on the results, we provide theoretical, analytical, and pedagogical implications to advance the theory, analysis, and practice of the instructor-student collaborative partnership.
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Acknowledgements
F.O. acknowledges the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Youth Program) (61907038) and from China Zhejiang Province Educational Reformation Research Project in Higher Education (The 13th 5-year plan, the second round) (jg20190048). F.O. and P.J. acknowledge the financial support from the Startup Foundation of the Hundred Talents Program at the Zhejiang University.
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This study is exempt from the IRB committee review of University of Minnesota (IRB study number 1512E81044). The data of this research is existing data, eligible for exempt category 4 review. The custodian of data sources, namely the instructor of this online course, provided a written agreement for the use of the data in this research. The researchers did not have access to identifiers or identified data. All names used in this article were anonymized.
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Ouyang, F., Chang, YH., Scharber, C. et al. Examining the instructor-student collaborative partnership in an online learning community course. Instr Sci 48, 183–204 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-020-09507-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-020-09507-4