The Virtual Classroom for Educational Activities: Understanding Infrastructures for Learning

Abstract

Online learning is a reality for higher educational institutions around the globe. Since the beginning of the 21st century, many universities in Sweden have begun to offer online courses at a variety of levels completely online, including synchronous meetings. This study aims to contribute by investigating (a) how space, in terms of educational infrastructure with a range of affordance for learning, is co-created by the participants in a open online course and (b) how a range of activities are mutually shaped by the course design and by the learning space(s) where the course is offered. The data we focus upon come from project KSLL (combination course for students and lifelong learning) and consist of recordings of online seminars from a course in Pedagogy in higher education. The seminars were conducted through Adobe Connect, a multimodal environment which offers synchronous oral communication, with cameras for (limited) access to paralinguistic cues, and textchat. Students’ texts and the transcriptions of the asynchronous discussions in the course homepage are part of the data along with the course homepage, as well as tracking of the social media presence of the course in Facebook and Twitter. By using an (n)ethnographic approach, the analysis highlights the ways in which learning spaces as infrastructure shape and are shaped by the range of activities that are part of the course, but also by the openness of the space itself, which affords the emergence of alternative pathways for participation and thus, we argue, for learning.