E-learning platforms are becoming more and more important and they are gradually changing people's learning ways. In the e-learning platforms, users actively create and join their favorite communities to share their questions and ideas. With the increase of users of e-learning platforms, the number of communities is increasing dramatically. In…

In this study, we examine the design process for a visual learning analytics (VLA) approach in addition to its effect on developing students' epistemic understanding of discourse and relationships to promote knowledge-building inquiry. Over a 3-month period, an experimental class of secondary school students took a visual arts course using a…

This study presents and evaluates the educational potentials that Social Network Services (SNS) offer to students in the higher education context. The first aim of this study is to explore students' perceptions of Facebook Learning Groups (ie, Facebook Groups that were created for learning purposes), and the learning and affective benefits that…

This descriptive study focuses on using voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms to extract student speech data in order to better understand the collaboration of small group work and the impact of teaching assistant (TA) interventions in undergraduate engineering discussion sections. Audio data were recorded from individual students wearing…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between clout and cognitive processing in massive open online course (MOOC) discussion forum posts. Cognitive processing, a category variable generated by the automated text analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), is made up of six sub-scores (insight, causation, discrepancy,…

Online discussion is one of the frequently used learning activities in an e-learning process. Learners can exchange opinions and thoughts with their peers through online discussion, stimulate their different viewpoints on the discussion topics, and enhance the learning effectiveness of e-learning. However, most learners mainly take an effort on…

In this study, we explore the potential of a natural language processing (NLP) approach to support discourse analysis of in-situ, small group learning conversations. The theoretical basis of this work derives from Bakhtin's notion of speech genres as bounded by educational robotics activity. Our goal is to leverage computational linguistics…

Over the past 20 years, researchers have begun to examine data from asynchronous computer-mediated student discussions in courses. Some results have shown students to demonstrate lower or mid-level thinking skills, while others suggest students routinely demonstrate higher-order thinking skills. The authors investigated the relationship between…

A discussion forum is a valuable tool to support student learning in online contexts. However, interactions in online discussion forums are sparse, leading to other issues such as low engagement and dropping out. Recent educational studies have examined the affordances of conversational agents (CA) powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to…

Online discussion forums represent "online collaborative learning spaces in which communities become engaged in the discourse on a topic about which they share common interests or goals" (Montero, Watts & Garcia-Carbonell, 2007, p. 568). This digital communication modality has been claimed to enhance second/foreign language (L2)…

This study explores and characterizes learners' participation patterns in MOOC forums, as well as the factors that correlate with learners' participation. Educational data mining and learning analytics methods were used to retrieve and analyze the learners' interpersonal interaction data, which had accumulated in the Coursera log files. The…

Research has shown that providing participants with high-quality learning material is not sufficient to help them profit most from online education. The level of interaction among participants is another key determinant for learning outcomes. However, merely proposing interaction does not automatically lead to fruitful discussion and…

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the use of an online discussion board as an assessment item on students learning performance in relation to group work based on Social Learning Theory. The study uses survey questionnaires at the beginning and end of semester together with student grade information. The data analysis consists…

Understanding the relationship between social interaction patterns and cognitive engagement levels has critical implications on collaborative learning theory, pedagogy, and technology. This study used a multi-method approach to examine the relationship between students' social participatory roles and cognitive engagement levels within asynchronous…

The influence of asynchronous discussion in a virtual learning environment, Blackboard, on subsequent coursework grades was examined with 166 psychology students to determine whether asking questions of the tutor online, and/or reading the questions and the given advice, influenced the grades on the report they were writing. A repeated-measures…