Study Of The Index System For Assessing Asynchronous Social Interaction Quality In E-learning

The booming of information technology, as well as the development teaching and learning theory, makes the construction of learning society possible. As the E-learning attracts extensive interest in our country, people more focus on its quality.As we all know, internet facilitates the distance education, but it brings the trouble for the interpersonal interaction. Some studies show that the interaction between students is a key of the learning effect, so the study of it is very important. Just in order to help online instructors and researchers assess the quality of the asynchronous social interaction, we try to propose an index system, which may be helpful for online teaching.Several methods are used including literature analysis, questionnaires, expert interview, etc. The procedure is mainly consisted of: (1) Generalization and analysis of literature. (2) Asking specialists for advice. (3) Design of the draft of the index system, which involved 5 dimensions 46 indexes. (4) Inviting 20 experts on distance education to discuss the efficiency of this index system, such as definitude and necessity for each index, scale of each dimension, and their holistic suggestion, then deleting some unnecessary indexes and revising others according to the opinions of the experts. (5) Designing questionnaires in which all indexes are arranged randomly tests the reliability of the index system. The study shows that the index system is of high validity and reliability.We wish that the index system can be a useful assessing tool for distance education in practice.