Working online together to enhance learner autonomy

Jérôme Eneau (1) , Christine Develotte (2)

1 CREAD EA 3875 - Centre de Recherche sur l'Education, les apprentissages et la didactique
2 ICAR - Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations

This study concerns the development of autonomy in adult learners working on an online learning platform as part of a professional master's degree programme in "French as a Foreign Language". Our goal was to identify the influence of reflective and collaborative dimensions on the construction of autonomy for online learners in this programme. The material used was 27 self-analysis papers in response to an assignment which asked students to review their distance learning experience (reflective dimension) and to highlight the role of others, if any, in their learning (collaborative dimension). In addition to these two major points, the analysis by category of the body of results shows principally that in qualitative terms, the factors of autonomisation for online learning are interconnected and include: the difficulties related to distance learning and the strategies that learners develop to face those difficulties, the importance of interpersonal relationships in social and emotional terms in overcoming those difficulties, the specific modes of sociability developed for distance learning and the related development of a new type of autonomy that is both individual and collective. The discussion examines the creation, over the course of time, of a new "distance learning culture" that is nonetheless never easy to create and share.

Mots clés: self-directed learning; online collaboration; reflective analysis; learner autonomy

Domaines: Education

Jérôme Eneau, Christine Develotte. Working online together to enhance learner autonomy. ReCALL, 2012, 24 (1), pp.3-19. ⟨halshs-00855376⟩