Abstract
Online communities (OC) have several applications in the domain of education with a special focus on teacher professional development. The development of OC of teachers enables knowledge exchange, reflection on teacher practice, sharing of educational resources, and emotional support. Nevertheless, several barriers have been found to affect community members’ participation such as their time constraints due to teachers’ busy schedules, the community moderation and social support, and their peripheral participation. This research aims to better understand teachers’ initial motivations to participate in such OCs, and how useful is this information to tackle and reduce the barriers that affect their participation. We present how a supporting platform for an OC of teachers is designed following a design-based research methodology within a pre-service science teacher master course to explore, share, and comment learning designs. We gathered information about 40 pre-service teachers’ motivations to participate in the OC and their perceptions about the supporting platform. Results suggest that participants’ main motivation is to gain knowledge and to use technologies to simplify designing and sharing of learning designs. In contrast, reputation is the least important motivation to participate in such an OC. These results provide valuable information to refine the designed platform as there is a relationship between participants’ motivations and the perceived importance of the implemented features of the supporting platform. Further iterations will evaluate the refinements and the usefulness of the implemented features.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been partially funded by the EU Regional Development Fund and the National Research Agency of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project grants TIN2017-85179-C3-3-R and PID2020-112584RB-C33. P. Santos acknowledges the support by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the Ramon y Cajal programme. D. Hernández-Leo (Serra Húnter) acknowledges the support by ICREA under the ICREA Academia program.
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Gutiérrez-Páez, N.F., Santos, P., Hernández-Leo, D., Carrió, M. (2021). Designing a Pre-service Teacher Community Platform: A Focus on Participants’ Motivations. In: De Laet, T., Klemke, R., Alario-Hoyos, C., Hilliger, I., Ortega-Arranz, A. (eds) Technology-Enhanced Learning for a Free, Safe, and Sustainable World. EC-TEL 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12884. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86436-1_34
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