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How Do Distance Learners Connect?

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Distance learners often experience social isolation and impoverished social interaction with their remote peers. To better understand the connections that distance learners are able to build with peers, we interviewed them about whether and how they perceive or cultivate connections with one another. Our analysis reveals how connections in an online learning environment are formed and experienced across different social contexts and technology affordances, and what strategies and practices enable and inhibit these connections. We discuss the implications of our findings for concepts of shared identity and evolving peer relationships among online learners and for design directions that might address their social needs.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2019
9077 pages
ISBN:9781450359702
DOI:10.1145/3290605
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 May 2019

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  1. connection strategies
  2. distance learning
  3. online learning community
  4. shared identity

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CHI '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 703 of 2,958 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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