Educational leaders are faced with multi-faceted dilemmas that place decision-making at the heart of their day-to-day work. For support, they often turn to collaborative networks of experienced educators, such as Project ECHO, for solutions to address challenges they encounter while working in the field. The availability of generative AI…

This research brief comprises three articles published in the three-article dissertation at the University of Missouri (MU) in February 2023. The three-article dissertation, "An Exploration of Online Information Spaces That Support Instructional Design and Teacher Professional Development," examined three online communities of practice…

This study focuses on how teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of mathematics may differ depending on teacher interactions in an online teacher community of practice (CoP). The study utilizes data from 26,857 posts collected from the South Korean self-generated online teacher CoP, 'Indischool'. This data was then analyzed using natural…

In this study, we work towards a strategy to measure and enhance the quality of interactions in discussion forums at scale. We present a machine learning (ML) model which identifies the phase of cognitive presence exhibited by a student's post and suggest future applications of such a model to help online students develop higher-order thinking. We…

Background/Context: As a major area of civic decision making, public education is a central arena for advocacy groups seeking to influence policy debates. An emerging body of research examines advocates' use of social media. While debates about policy can be thought of as a clash of large ideas contained within frames, cognitive linguists note…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

This study discusses the automatic coding methods of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework for multilingual contexts, in particular. In universities, foreign students cannot be overlooked, and learning systems are also required to work in multilingual situations. However, none of the existing work has addressed the lack of language-agnostic and…

This paper discusses a model for structuring resources for automatic assessment in scientific education by means of textual descriptions. This study aims to support instructors in extending teaching strategies and expanding formative assessment in virtual communities of practice. The strategy to achieve these goals involves the implementation of a…