Identifying factors that influence the success of ICT in developing a learning community: the CELT experience

A learning community has been developing in a distributed environment amongst the members of the Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT) located in the Bathurst, Goulburn and Orange campuses of Charles Sturt University. This group is known by the acronym of GDMOB, with the purpose of the community to facilitate the professional development and learning of its members. To facilitate the learning ICT has been employed to enhance, through an improved sense of community and social presence of the more isolated members of the group, the learning of the members of the community. It is the intent of this paper to explore and identify factors that contribute to the successful implementation and use of ICT to enhance learning and the construction of a sense of community. Presenting the GDMOB experience as a case study it is intended to start to develop a model that can be applied and extrapolated into more generic learning and teaching experiences in distance environments.