As the higher education landscape has shifted and calls for change and improvements have grown louder, researchers have turned to empirical investigations of what makes change possible in higher education. Recent studies on the impact of informal interactions for promoting change have given impetus to social network analysis as an approach to…

At many research-intensive universities in North America, there is a disproportionate loss of minoritized undergraduate students from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors. Efforts to confront this diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) challenge, such as faculty adoption of evidenced-based instructional approaches that…

Background: We examine the efficacy of an online collaborative problem-solving (CPS) teaching approach in academic performance and student connections with other peers, among first-year engineering calculus students at a Latin American university. Our research uses communities of practice (CoP) to emphasize the social nature of learning and the…

This study aims to identify the formulation differences of groups in two online activities in a university course with different strategies by using social network analysis. Specifically, the connections within the members and identification of brokers were analyzed. Whilst the group enhancing a "community of practice" in WeChat by…

This paper explores the nature of integrated networks of practice, and in particular, the important role of "hubs" within networks. Hubs are individuals or groups that energize cross-connections, improve knowledge flow, enhance learning across small clusters of expertise, and play critical roles in building and sustaining robust…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges and opportunities for knowledge management systems (KMS) in various domains and sectors. This research explores the strategies to manage expectational knowledge in higher education after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study employed a qualitative research method with a case study design to…

The Social Work integrative Research Lab (SWiRL) provides opportunities for undergraduate students to engage meaningfully with research and allows graduate students to develop mentoring skills. We conducted a survey of alumni (N=20) to learn whether: a) alumni endorsed the benefits of participation and b) SWiRL experiences contributed to…

After the transition to university, students need to build a new peer network, which helps them to adapt to university life. This study investigated to what extent students' prosocial attitudes and academic achievement facilitate the embeddedness in friendship and help-seeking networks, while taking structural network characteristics into account.…

This study empirically investigated: How will various aspects of students' prominence (i.e., betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities) in the social network interaction of online discussion change over time? And how will Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) skills moderate the trend over time on various aspects of students' prominence in…

Background: Knowledge brokers in higher education are described as requiring a broad range of skills and characteristics, leading to both role conflict and ambiguity. Although existing studies report broad concepts regarding the role of knowledge brokers, the activities that they actually perform to broker knowledge are not systematically reported…

In this collaborative analytic autoethnography, five researchers and teacher educators from various contexts describe how their participation in a network of critical action researchers led to rhizomatic growth across their landscapes of praxis. Through the authors' narratives, we learn how Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) concept of the rhizome and…

The Teaching and Learning Network (TLN) at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, represents an effective network model for faculty and educational leadership development. Grounded in the principles of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), the TLN is a collaborative network that fosters interdisciplinary dialogue, relationship building,…

Lesson study (LS) is an effective means of improving teachers' facility with teaching design. This research designs a case study of online to offline (O2O) LS and explores the social interaction and behaviour patterns in the process of the LS. The participants included 29 chemistry teachers from 10 secondary schools and two educational technology…

Creating sustained, transformative change within and across organizations is challenging, particularly when those undertaking change act as individuals. COMmunities of Practice (CoPs) are organically created collaborations among like-minded participants, working toward a common set of goals (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger-Trayner &…

Transnational research involves research in one country that benefits that country, and where the findings are compared to the extant studies in the larger field. It also involves the search for common effects and situational influences (i.e., country and culture-specific) toward a particular research topic. In this study we examine the…