There was once a time when I thought that online learning communities needed to be carefully structured in order to function. I based this on the dearth of comments in the typical unstructured course-based community. I am now of the opinion that the reason why course-based communities failed was that there weren't enough members and and that they did not exist long enough to generate any sort of community awareness. This paper, a proposal for a research project, meets these two difficulties by describing a multi-university Problem/Project based learning community that would extend in time after graduation. But the thing is: if you have the essential components for a successful community - enough people and enough time - do you need the structure that PBL imposes? Or would the imposition PBL in fact turn what would otherwise be a functional community into a dysfunctional one? This seems to be a theme for today...
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