Communication in Online Learning Communities: Digital teaching in higher education as reflected by pragmatism

The author discusses a media-didactic approach to digital teaching in higher education which has its origin in the pedagogical pragmatism of John Dewey. Dewey's approach is taken up and further developed in the concept of the Community of Inquiry, which contains fundamentals for an online community doing research. In this, communication among learners is considered an essential prerequisite for attaining the ability to reflect and judge on an academic level. Using the Hagen Open University as an example, the author shows how, in the field of open-university courses, the communicative exchange among students in the sense of a learning community can be promoted through the use of digital media (e-learning).