Quality Assessment of Online Programs

Knowledge building: Reinventing education for the Knowledge Age

by Don Philip

This paper examines the Knowledge Age and how economic factors are causing educators to rethink and reinvent... more This paper examines the Knowledge Age and how economic factors are causing educators to rethink and reinvent education. Two key factors in education in the Knowledge Age will be education for an economy of innovation, and the increasing virtualization of education.
We present knowledge building pedagogy as a model for education in the Knowledge Age and discuss Knowledge Forum, online knowledge building environment designed to facilitate and support the knowledge building process.
Built into Knowledge Forum is a suit of online tools that track the interactions that students have with Knowledge Forum. We focus on the social network tool that allows us to examine communication patterns among the students when working online.
Using the data obtained, we examine the growth and development of online community formation during the first week of class for a group of naïve users in a third-year university class. Examining the note reading and response networks, we see that the note reading network develops more rapidly than the responding network, and that it is more symmetric than the responding network. However, by mid-term, a highly connected network has developed for both note-reading and responding.