ABSTRACT
Effective asynchronous interaction is a key element to build online learning community. Asynchronous interaction supports the teachers and students log in the network at different time for any specific discussion area, set up topics, post their opinions, or response to others viewpoints. Learners participated in the discussions have longer time to reflect and express their opinions, fully think for the discussed problems, and finally have a relatively comprehensive and profound understanding for a complex objects, through the collision and communication of different views. In the area of modern distance education, some provinces and cities have tried to set up special interactive learning areas in their platforms for online asynchronous communication for party members and cadres. And those interaction areas have played a certain effect of arousing learner’s subjective initiative, activating learning atmosphere, improving knowledge and skill of party building. However, it is not clear about the practical application effects of current online asynchronous interaction. It also needs more study to analyze the deep learning situation in those platforms and develop the solutions to improve the online asynchronous inter-
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, web 2.0 technology application in the field of network education has become increasingly widespread, with more focus on the interaction between users than web 1.0 (Yan & Fang 2009). Within the network environment, users could not only independently choose information and response to it timely, but also have communication and conversation with the disseminators. Computer supported interaction in collaborative learning is an information exchange activity, based on computer media and used for collaborative knowledge construction (Huang 2003). Chickering and Gamson emphasize the importance of interaction learning, since the five of total seven principles of best teaching practices are directly related to the interaction learning (Grandzol 2010). Modern education research results also show that, interactive education is an effective teaching mode, because that it takes education activities between teachers and learners as an exchanges and communication process, and the process is dynamic developing with mutual influence and activity by teaching and learning participants (Qu 2005, Zhang 2012). Therefore, the interaction is an important factor in determining the quality of modern distance
action in party and cadres distance education. Taking the case of Beijing party members and cadres modern distance education platform, this study quantitatively analyzed the contents of the posts and replies in its BBS (bulletin and board system) to explore the level and quality of online communication, and tried to generate solution and suggestions for improving the online interaction learning effect.
