DESIGN AND PILOT OF AN ONLINE LEARNING COMMUNITIES TOOL AT TECNOLOGICO DE MONTERREY (MEXICO)

In this project, a learning community is defined as a temporal social network with a common topic of interest where participants may share references or ask for orientations about a particular subject. Our goal is to facilitate and enrich learning communities through an online tool where selected resources may be indexed, such as bibliographic references (books and papers), website links (including YouTube videos), and cloud storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.).

When designing this online tool, we attempt to disrupt the traditional roles of teacher/instructor and student/trainee. In our learning community environment, all users have the same privileges. They are able to create references for personal use (level 0), share references with another user (level 1), with a public/private learning community (level 2), or with all users sharing the same topic of interest (level 3). Additionally, they may request orientations to other users at the different levels to enrich their learning resources.

Our learning community is directed to Tecnologico de Monterrey potential users, which includes about 9,000 professors, 80,000 current students, and over 200,000 of former students working in professional roles. This work includes the design of the tool; its technological, logistical and ethical implications; and the pilot runs with graduate, undergraduate, and high school students, as well as with a set of professors from selected cities in Mexico where Tecnologico de Monterrey has campus.