Rekonstruktion der Kommunikation des betrieblichen Ausbildungspersonals in Online-Foren. Eine computerlinguistische Analyse des Online-Forums foraus.de

The article deals with trainers in vocational education. While teachers at vocational schools are relatively highly professionalized, trainers often only complete short formal qualification measures according to the Ordinance on Trainer Aptitude (Ausbildereignungsverordnung). To compensate for the lack of pedagogical qualification offers and the absence of professional in-house communities, trainers use alternative communication spaces (e.g. online forums) for discussion, information exchange and problem solving. Despite their great importance for vocational education, empirical studies of in-company training personnel are relatively rare, in part because there is often a lack of appropriate field access. For this reason, the article analyzes the publicly accessible, authentic communication of trainers in online forums in order to reconstruct the discourses in training practice over time and to analyze connections with educational policy and training market developments by way of example.

The study aims to identify topics of training practice and quantify their significance. The sample consists of 4827 posts from the years 2000 to 2022 from the training forum foraus.de. Topics are inductively identified using computer linguistic methods (structured topic modeling). The developed topic model (k = 16) reflects central fields of action of the trainer activity as well as educational and professional policy issues. For example, problems with trainees, the qualification and professionalization of in-company training personnel or didactic questions regarding the planning and implementation of training are discussed. The findings of this prototype show that such methods are suitable for reconstructing the discourses of educational practice and can be transferred to comparable communication formats for teachers.