Abstract

This article focusses on graduate level students’ interactions during asynchronous CMC activities of an online course about the teaching profession in Turkey. The instructor of the course designed and facilitated a semester-long asynchronous CMC on forum discussions, and investigated the interaction of learners in multiple perspectives: learners’ views, participation in terms of quantity, participation in terms of discussed issues and collaborative construction of new knowledge. 14 graduate students were participated in the study and 12 of them were interviewed. Meanwhile, 345 messages sent by the learners and the instructor were analyzed in order to identify discussed issues and social construction of knowledge. The results of the study showed that according to the message numbers and views of the learners, learner-instructor interaction was ahead of learner-learner interaction. Meanwhile, learner-content interaction was sustained by various discussion topics. Though learners’ views related to learner-learner, learner-instructor and learner-content interactions were positive in general, analyzing the contents of the messages didn’t reveal higher levels of co-construction of knowledge according to the Interaction Analysis Model.

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