It is well established in Australian research and policy literature that children attending schools in regional, rural, and remote locations will benefit from access not only to experiences and interactions offered in their own communities but also to the sorts of experiences available to those in more populated areas of Australia as well. Virtual…

Establishment of online communities in distance education has been linked to improved engagement, retention, and learning outcomes. This study investigates how online community building was fostered in the text-based Discussion Board (DB) and multimodal VoiceThread (VT) in one of the postgraduate units offered by Open Universities Australia.…

Increasingly postgraduate courses are delivered online to meet professionals' demands for life-long learning. The research examined the efficacy of students critiquing each other's seminal work, by either direct exchange or via online fora, as a structured part of their formal assessments. A total of 377 students across three experimental and two…

In 2020, the rapid onset of a pandemic related to the disease known as COVID-19 resulted in a widespread lockdown of societies across the globe. Universities rapidly closed campuses, forcing the transition to emergency remote teaching within just a few weeks. The distinct difference between Australian universities and those in the Northern…

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, most doctoral supervision moved online around the globe. Virtual meetings using videoconferencing technology (VCT) suddenly replaced in person encounters raising the question of whether supervisory interaction has been altered due to changing delivery modes. This article applies a practice-theoretical approach to…

Purpose: Communication technology is used in diverse ways in our everyday lives. This research aims to fill a gap in research into L2 learner psychology connected with using online communication tools such as messaging platforms. Approach: The article focuses on practitioner research into feelings experienced during online L2 text chat. Twenty-one…

This paper describes the experiences of doctoral candidates involved in the first year of a transnational research training partnership between Australia and the Philippines. It aims to ascertain how the partnership model of the programme has been perceived by doctoral candidates, and to understand its associated benefits and challenges.…

Schools are increasingly pivoting to the use of digital technologies to support both teaching and learning. In this study, the educational use of 360-degree video in the primary school classroom is investigated, focusing on a platform that was developed by an Australian university, which incorporates a chat function as well as an analytics tool.…

The university sector was hit hard by COVID-19 in early 2020 with global calls for universities to lockdown. The teacher education sector in most countries, including Australia, had not anticipated the shift to off-campus teaching of such a massive scale and the sector was not well prepared for the challenge. This paper reports how the Australian…

In this paper we explore and identify emerging patterns of synchronous digital discourse trajectories between dyads of native (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS), with a particular focus on (absence of) negotiated interaction. We will present a new model of L2 learning interaction that is a schematic representation of two main types of hearer…

Young people's online safety continues to be a high priority for educators and parents. Cybersafety policies and educational programs are continually updated and revised to accommodate for the innovative ways they engage with digital culture. However, empirical research has shown that despite these efforts young people, especially teen girls,…

This study explores the potential contribution of Eggins and Slade's (2004) Speech Functions as tools for describing learners' participation patterns in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (SCMC). Our analysis focuses on the relationship between learners' self-efficacy (i.e. personal judgments of second language performance capabilities)…

This study explores whether chat users are able to extend prior, apparently completed posts in the dyadic online text chat context. Dyadic text chat has a unique turn-taking system, and most chat softwares do not permit users to monitor one another's written messages-in-progress. This is likely to impact on their use of online extensions as an…

This article discusses a small-scale study that explores how members of one family based in Australia and the United Kingdom use remote technology to develop and maintain family relationships across generations and distance. Of particular interest was the manner in which Skype computer software was mediated to develop intersubjectivity between a…

Despite the importance of the non-task interactions in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments as emphasized in the literature, few studies have investigated online behavior of people in the CSCL environments. This paper studies the pattern of non-task interactions among postgraduate students in an Australian university. The…