In the last few years, social learning, i.e., learning based on the analysis and discussion of topics by means of social collaborative systems, mainly social network services such as Facebook or Twitter, has acquired a great importance and led many instructors and institutions to deploy courses that include activities to be performed in them. For…

In just a short period, social media have altered many aspects of our daily lives, from how we form and maintain social relationships to how we discover, access, and share information online. Now social media are also affecting how we teach and learn. In this paper, we discuss methods that can help researchers and educators evaluate and understand…

This section offers a compilation of 16 extended abstracts summarizing research of the doctoral students who participated in the Second Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI 2014) held at Harvard University in July 2014. The abstracts highlight the motivation, main goals and expected contributions to the field from the ongoing learning…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are courses offered for free for any students with an internet connection. Many institutions now offer free MOOCs, including prestigious state universities and private schools. MOOCs are differentiated from ordinary online classes in several ways. Some MOOCs may have as many 50,000 students enrolled in a course…

Community, while inherent in assumptions about online education, rarely materializes as an integral component of the experience. Misconceptions and misguided motivations can derail participation and engagement in the online setting. Creating a successful online community is dependent on knowing what works in the face-to-face environment and…

In education business, proper interaction is a crucial factor for learning effectiveness. However, it is difficult to successfully guide the participants to achieve the appropriate interaction in an online learning environment. That is, the interaction as well as internal dialogue should be systemically performed under a valid control. In this…

Lane County, Oregon, has 16 school districts, and up until last year, every one of them had its own online learning program. Some were more like correspondence courses, while others were closer to online curriculum delivery. No one had ever explored the options available, the cost savings that district collaboration might provide, or the benefits…

Some professors of online courses are posing as students, infiltrating online course to collect information about students by blending in with them. The deceit has provoked questions about faculty ethics. Two professors admit that their unreal students teeter on an ethical precipice, because the technique could be abused. Others in the…

This paper reports findings from research that set out to explore virtual action learning (VAL) as an emerging variety of action learning (AL). In bringing together geographically dispersed individuals within and across organizations, and possibly across time, VAL has obvious potential in both educational and commercial contexts. Whilst there is…

This column posits enhancing professional development through uses of digital tools to create professional learning communities (PLCs) designed to support collective inquiry and action research leading to schoolwide improvement. These digital tools include a social networking/discussion forum for teacher collaboration; teachers' individual…

In distance education and online learning, the exponential growth of programs and the need for instructors has forced proper analysis of instructor teaching and learning to the background. To meet the immediate needs of students and technical operations, distance learning institutions often fail to evaluate how well instructors follow needed…

This paper connects an online learning model to the rights to education that the online educational environments can provide. The model emerges from a study of ninety-two online learners and is composed of three kinds of inquiries, namely, independent inquiry, collaborative inquiry, and formative inquiry towards expert knowledge. Online learners…

This study uses social network analysis (SNA) in an innovative way to describe interaction and explain how interaction influences sense of community of students in online learning environments. The findings reveal differences on sense of community between two similarly structured online courses, and show unique interaction patterns for students in…

Online discussion plays a unique role in face-to-face and distance teaching and learning. Interaction and student cognitive engagement during the online discussion are critical for constructing new understanding and knowledge. This article analyzes types of interaction that occur during online discussions, examines levels of student cognitive…

Sophisticated software such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are rapidly being deployed by universities. Despite widespread use of such systems, experience shows that there is frequently poor pedagogic development, leading primarily to use of VLEs as electronic document repositories rather than as online learning systems in which the…