Social and technical interaction improvement in creating online E-learning community

The booming e-tech have enabled not only universities to provide educational services to world-wide learners, but also broken the spatial and temporal barriers for learners to conduct e-learning in order to achieve their educational dream. Comparing to traditional face-to-face learning environment, some features of e-learning including social isolation and limited dialogue has been widely criticized by early e-education practitioners and researchers. As Gunawardena remarked, ¿Failures tend to occur at the social level far more than they do at the technical level¿. In this paper, the importance of creating learning communities in e-learning environment is discussed, and some basic approaches at both technical level and social level are proposed to assist online instructors to design more appropriate online courses to improve e-learning effectiveness.