Background: Online discussion is one of the commonly used tools to enhance students' interactions and engagements in online courses, but it is not clear how social presence in online discussions impacts students' learning and what kinds of interactions we should encourage. Social network analysis provides a new methodology to investigate how…

Disinformation has become a core concept in communications research, related to media, technological and political phenomena that complexify its definition and diagnosis. Although its approach has been mainly quantitative, focus groups have also been used to understand the perception of the audience of this particular issue. This research is part…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are purely online learning environments that are typically available for free for anyone with internet access. These courses have attracted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of learners around the world and the number of users has increased rapidly along with the growth of new platforms and a wide diversity…

Despite the potential of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers' everyday practice, its adoption has not been fully embraced due to the limited involvement of teachers as co-designers of LA systems and interventions. This is the focus of the study described in this paper. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach and guided by concepts…

Shared meaning-making across differences in today's polarized society requires a socio-political perspective toward conceptualizing and operationalizing collaborative competence. Thus, there is a pressing need for socio-political pedagogies and designs in CSCL to empower students as cultural-historical agents who can communicate and work…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide learners with high-quality learning resources, but learners drop out frequently. Learners' concerns (e.g. the topics in course content or logistics) and cognitive engagement patterns (e.g. "tentative" or "certain") are considered the essential factors affecting learners' course…

The intent of this research project was to address a perceived lack of capacity to address controversial topics or differences of perspective with civil discourse when engaged in learning in an online graduate course. Using carefully designed discussion prompts, students were asked to post, respond and reflect on their own research projects and…

This qualitative case study sought to explore the social construction of knowledge in the Change My View (CMV) subreddit online community. Few of the prior studies of discussion in online courses found evidence of the higher Phases of knowledge construction (up to four and five of the IAM framework), and it was hoped that the CMV environment would…