Læringsplatformens rolle i det almene gymnasium: en analyse af læringspotentialet i skolens digitale platform

Abstract

Siden 2002 har e-læringssystemet Fronter været til rådighed på de fynske gymnasier. Systemet er designet til at understøtte on-line læring, men da danske gymnasieelever ofte bor inden for en relativt kort afstand er det virtuelle møde ikke en forudsætning for samarbejde om lektier og andre af skolens opgaver. Til trods for dette er anvendelsen af systemet eksponentielt voksende målt på forbrugt diskplads. Projektets formål er da at undersøge læringspotentialet i den digitale platform med henblik på, hvordan vidensopbygning understøttes for såvel elever som lærere set i relation til forskellige læringsteorier. Jeg tager her udgangspunkt i et systemteoretisk læringsperspektiv i henhold til Niklas Luhmann og Lars Qvortrup kombineret med Mikhail Bakhtins teorier om dialogens læringspotentiale og Lave & Wengers teori om læring i praksisfællesskaber. De empiriske undersøgelser kombinerer kvalitative og kvantitative metoder, i form af spørgeskemaundersøgelser, udarbejdet på baggrund af eksplorative fokusgruppeinterviews. Elever og lærere på to gymnasier har deltaget i undersøgelsen. Undersøgelsen afslører at den digitale platforms primære funktion består i at kompleksitetsreduktion med henblik på at skabe struktur og overblik over undervisningens elementer både for lærere og elever. Selvom platformen tilbyder megen funktionalitet med hensyn til såvel dialog og kollaboration samt til oprettelse af kurser og tests, udnyttes disse muligheder kun i mindre grad. Selv om lærerne til en vis grad bruger platformen til samarbejde og videndeling, er platformen ikke systematisk integreret i lærernes praksisfællesskaber.

Since 2002 the learning management system Fronter has been available at the ”gymnasiums” of Funen. The system is designed to support online education, but since the students at the Danish gymnasiums live within relatively short distances from each other they do not have to meet online to cooperate about school exercises or other kind of homework. Despite that, the use of the system is increasingly growing according to the use of disk-space. The purpose of this project is therefore to study the learning potential of the virtual platform, to see how it supports the building of knowledge for students and teachers and analyse it with respect to different theories of learning. I consider the learning theory of systems according to Niklas Luhmann and Lars Qvortrup, combined with Mikhail Bakhtins theory of the learning potential of the dialogue and Lave & Wengers theory of communities of practice. Since the purpose of the empirical investigation is to discover the “good stories” about the use of the digital system I decided to do qualitative focus group interviews inspired by the method “appreciative inquiry”, which is a method for organisational development focusing on bringen the best of the past into the future. This method is combined with a quantitative survey for both students and teachers. The investigation revealed that the primary potential of the digital platform is to make structure and awareness of the curriculum for teachers as well as students, in other words reduction of complexity, primarily by sharing documents. But the platform also has a lot of funcionality for dialog and collaboration, for making courses and tests, but even though it does not generally serve as a medium for dialog between the students or medium for practising or testing the skills of students. The platform is not systematically integrated in the community of practice of the teachers even though it has the potential to share knowledge and make cooperation more flexible.

A master programme thesis from Aalborg University

Læringsplatformens rolle i det almene gymnasium: en analyse af læringspotentialet i skolens digitale platform