Role Analysis And Cultivation Research Of Opinion Leaders In The Online Course Forum

Online course forum as the "first dialogue space", have the properties both online courses and forums. Opinion leaders as the most active and influential group in the forum, plays a pivotal role in the development and upgrading of the online course forum. As a new perspective to analyze the role and cultivation of opinion leaders on the online course forum environment, there are still a number of issues need to be explored:What’s the role of opinion leader in online course forum? The qualities? how is the opinion leaders formed? How to promote the generation of opinion leaders? Based on those, this study attempts to combine the properties of forums and online course to outline the role of opinion leaders and refine its integrated character, analysis the formation process of opinion leaders, then propose strategies which opinion leaders play an important role in online course forum.This study define the concept and content of online course forum and online course opinion leaders, analyses the six roles of opinion leaders combining attributes to forums and online courses, including gatekeepers and transmitters of information, leaders and organizers of topics, collectors and solvers of problems, guiders and supervisor of learning, regulator of attitudes and emotions, defenders of order and culture, so as to clarify the role of opinion leaders in the online course forum; further, extract four qualities of the opinion leaders:solid knowledge base, strong learning abilities, strong communication skills, excellent personal qualities, to laid theoretical foundation and guiding ideology for propose foster strategies of opinion leaders in online course forum.Then, the study analyze the formation process of opinion leaders based on the interactive nature of online course forum from a sociological perspective, that is, (1) infancy:communication of creation and strengthening, opinion leaders in its identity; (2) growth:communication of optimization and selection, determinations of leaders identity; (3) maturity:communication of consolidation and maintenance, Guarantee of opinion leaders identity. The study design concrete strategies to cultivate opinion leaders from three aspects:building of environment, creation of interaction, stimulation and evaluation, including:the combination of technologies and creation of Activity space facilitates the generation of opinion leaders; the combination of creation of activities and effective guidance promotes formation and development of opinion leaders; the combination of incentives and effective evaluation maintains activity motivation of opinion leaders. Finally, this paper design specifically and implement the cultivating strategies for opinion leaders, based on "Introduction To Educational Technology" online course, then analysis and verify the effect by observation, social network analysis, interviews. The results shows that the cultivating strategies for opinion leaders promote the generation and role playing of opinion leaders. Further, the paper summary the shortcomings in study and propose the ideas and directions in the following study.