Teaching online in Networked Learning Communities: A multi-method approach

The aim of this paper is to study the online tutoring styles of two teachers who each tutor a networked learning community (NLC), within the same workshop. The study is undertaking empirical work using a multi-method approach in order to triangulate and contextualize our findings and enrich our understanding of the teacher’s involvement in these NLC’s. We apply social network analysis (SNA) to visualise the social structure of the NLC, content analysis (CA) to identify learning and teaching processes, critical event recall (CER) to gather the teacher’s personal experiences and intentions. This paper reports some of the current findings of our work and discusses future prospects. This study is part of a continuing international study that is investigating networked collaborative learning as a way to develop a rich descriptive body of evidence of tutoring and learning processes in e-learning.