Article Review - Book Report/Review Example

Read-Only Participants: A Case for Communication in Online es" According to the article, online community is fundamental for the successful course completion and depends on an interaction between a peer group and a facilitator. However, online students experience a discontent from the invisible students and those who made shallow and insufficient contributions. Indeed, student online visibility manifests in read-only participants and highly visible participants who offer no contribution. Actually, read-only-participants demean learning and hinder the establishment of a virtual community.

However, we can eliminate the read-only-participation by communicating the required number of online classroom postings, encouraging discussions, encouraging participants to submit high quality postings, awarding successful participants, and offering augmented facilitation via the internet to the participants. Online education lowers the quality of education and leads to non-completion of courses while compared to classroom education. Online participation relates to learning, influences the learning community, and is significant to a successful course completion.

Hence the need to establish a virtual learning community that offers adequate interaction among peers and facilitators for purposes of ensuring learner satisfaction, cognitive outcomes, and perseverance. Well-facilitated online discussions that constitute the online community involve introverted students with high quality sense of interaction that offer well-considered contributions and valuable cognitive learning. Online community has the benefit of developing critical thinking skills, shared understanding, and continued learning.

Participation in the community is measurable by the number of times they read discussions, open pages, or post online. Notable is the fact that the feeling of isolation, procrastination, and illiteracy in technology lead to non-participants in an online community. In addition, poor infrastructure, poor internet connectivity, and regular electricity cuts hinders interaction with reliable technology thus poor participation. More so, the significance of facilitators in the community manifests in offering guidance, encouragement, critique, and feedback.

Indeed, the interaction with facilitators, the content, and co-learners promotes learning. At the same time, discussions encourage participation and the most dominant contributors tend to become the highest performing in a community. Such participants are very active online, contribute more posts, and involve themselves in the virtual community. Most assuredly is the fact that unconnected students cannot improve their learning experience even with deep online coaching. As such, students must interact with the facilitator and actively contribute in class discussions to perform well and complete the course successfully.

Hence, contributions, discussions, and interaction with the facilitator guarantee the establishment of a virtual community, high performance, and successful completion of a course.ReferenceNagel, L., Blignaut, A., & Cronje, J. (2009). Read-only participants: a case for student communication in online classes. Interactive Learning Environments, 17 (1), 37–51.