Enhancing Foreign Workers’ Online Learning Interaction Strategy: An Action Research in Indonesia Open University Taiwan

Abstract

Indonesian workers in Taiwan have been taking synchronous online courses to enhance their education for several years. Still, the most crucial part of a synchronous course, the interaction quality, in the past, in general, was highly disturbed by the workers' busy daily work and had room to improve. Therefore, improving online interaction quality is a critical issue in workers' online courses. This study assigns an asynchronous learning strategy to supplement synchronous learning to enhance student interaction. Ten Indonesian workers as part of the Translation V course students of Indonesia Open University in Taiwan were involved. Action research was conducted to explore the effects of the asynchronous enhanced synchronous learning strategy on the students' interactions and perceptions. All the interaction threads were analyzed and described by social networking analysis, content analysis, and students' perceptions from their reflections. The results reveal that the students' interaction increased in the synchronous learning with informal assignment instructions directed by the tutor in the action research cycle II as an action to increase interaction in cycle I, which tended to be independent learning instructions. The study suggests implementing blended learning in synchronous online tutoring programs and providing asynchronous learning strategies to enhance online students' interaction.