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 [3], “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.