Lei Du’s research while affiliated with Beijing Normal University and other places

The rise of teacher training in online interactive learning environments has contributed to teachers’ professional development and brought new vitality to the informatisation of education. Many researchers have reported that there is a participation gap in online interactive learning environments. Research on the factors influencing this is very important. Social network prestige, which measures the degree to which learners gain peer attention in directed social networks, is one of the important metrics to characterise the participation gap. In this study, we offered an online teacher training course, and 1438 in-service teachers from primary and secondary schools attended. Among them, we selected 457 in-service teachers who participated in the three peer assessment activities as the final participants. To analyse the factors influencing learners’ social network prestige in online peer assessment, we first conducted a partial least squares structural equation modelling analysis to construct a model of factors influencing social network prestige. Then, we adopted several semi-structured interviews to investigate learners' perspectives to provide an in-depth analysis of the factors influencing social network prestige. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the participation gap in online interactions and make effective suggestions on how to improve learning performance in online peer assessment. Implications for practice or policy: Course designers could improve the design of the introduction to peer assessment to motivate learners and enhance their acceptance of the activities. Course designers could reduce participation gap by assigning work from low-prestige learners to high-prestige learners in a non-mandatory way later in the course.

Online peer assessment has been widely applied in online teacher training. However, not all learners participate equally, detailed characterization and impact analysis of peer assessment is required. This study draws on a sociological term, social network prestige, to evaluate the participation gap of learners in online peer assessment. A teacher training course was offered to in-service primary and secondary school teachers, and 457 participants were ranked according to their prestige. Then, the top 30% of learners were considered the high-prestige group (142 participants) and the bottom 30% as the low-prestige group (128 participants). Social network analysis and behavioral sequence analysis were used to explore the differences in the learning outcomes of these two groups. The results showed significant differences in learning performance, social network structure and learning behaviors among learners with different prestige. High-prestige learners have better learning performance and are affected by their prior knowledge. Learners with different levels of prestige differ in social network structure and learning behavior. Based on these findings, this study suggests improvements to reduce the participation gap.

Online teacher professional development is widely regarded as a promising way to improve the quality of teachers and the effect of teaching. Micro-learning, which has the potential to fit the learner’s personalized learning needs through a variety of small educational resources and flexible learning opportunities, could be an efficient way for the online teacher professional development. However, the scattered knowledge points and fragmented learning time in micro-learning may limit the learner’s comprehension and the construction of knowledge. In this study, a knowledge map-based online micro-learning system was developed to solve this problem. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed system, a quasi-experiment was conducted during a three-week online course for teachers’ professional development. A total of 42 in-service Mandarin teachers participated in the course, and were divided into two equal groups. An experimental group learned by using a knowledge map tool while a control group learned the same contents in the form of the conventional list type. The results indicate that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of learning engagement, and showed a clearer and more complete knowledge structure. Furthermore, micro-learning coupled with knowledge maps was found to improve the teachers’ learning performance.

In this study, an integrated collaborative learning and knowledge map approach was developed for online teacher professional development. An online teacher education environment based on that approach was constructed. To investigate the interaction between the knowledge map and collaborative learning strategies on teachers’ learning performance and self-efficacy of group learning, a 2 × 2 experiment was acted out. The study subjects were 179 in-service teachers from primary schools in China. The participants were divided into four groups to learn theories and cases of educational research methods using different online learning strategies (individual learning or collaborative learning) and knowledge map strategies (using a knowledge map or not). The results revealed two notable findings. First, both the knowledge map and collaborative learning strategies were significantly conducive to enhance the teachers’ learning performance. Second, the interaction between the two kinds of strategies showed that the knowledge map strategy was potential to promote the self-efficacy of group learning among teachers who used the collaborative learning strategy. Thus, we conclude that the collaborative construction of group knowledge map could be an effective approach to promote teachers’ knowledge construction and provide visual interaction support for teachers’ online professional development.