Participation in an online community of high school physics teachers

Abstract

We use the theory of community of practice to describe high school physics teachers’ participation in the context of an online discussion board as part of a new online Master program in physics with teaching emphasis. In each class, the core component of the design, requires students to participate in weekly problem solving and bi-weekly reading discussion boards. We apply social network analysis measures to quantify the community interactions formed in the context of a nine-week summer course of classical mechanics for educators. Our findings revealed fluctuations in the problem solving discussion boards; a result of the structural features of the course. The participation in the reading discussion boards showed a less variation comparatively. To further analyze the results and reveal the course’s structural features, we characterized posts by looking for emergent themes.