Decreasing the stratification influence to students' learning communities by asynchronous learning

In order to explore the effect of the school environment and students' individual characteristics to their virtual learning communities, this study conducts an experiment to observe two groups of students - one from an academic university and the other from a technical institute - taught by the same teacher under the same course and the same online learning system. Findings indicated that: (1) the categorization of higher education institutions in Taiwan indeed created a "differentiating" effect; (2) Both in traditional classroom settings and an asynchronous online learning environment, recognition of school environment and students' characteristics do affect how learning communities are formed; (3) In similar learning environments, an asynchronous online learning environment will lower the impact of the school environment and students' characteristics on interactive models of learning communities, thereby narrowing the gap between dominant and fringe groups.