Enhancing students’ knowledge building through utilising social interactions in an online learning environment

ABSTRACT In the new “open world” of information, educational systems should involve students in constructing new knowledge of value to a community out of fragmentary information. The already proposed Knowledge Building (KB) approaches typically support only a few general-purpose activities due to the constraints of the utilised web-based environments. To organise and facilitate students’ KB during course activities, this study incorporated services provided by DoosMooc social learning environment into a knowledge transformation model. This approach is completely adapted to an educational context and allows time for iterations, helping students to both contribute to social KB processes and take collective responsibility for improving their understanding of authentic problems. The features provided by the introduced environment support and assess students’ KB activities and facilitate processes of creating, representing, organising, and reviewing different types of knowledge artefacts. The results of a semester-long experiment indicate that the approach and the corresponding instructional design thereof could successfully organise students’ KB activities and facilitate the required interactions. This study reports the impacts of parameters such as learner expertise and quality of shared knowledge on the planned KB processes, and investigates the relationships between students' KB activities and learning achievements.