Online education research has long employed the concept of social presence to study interactions in technologically mediated spaces. Yet, a precise shared definition of social presence does not exist. This article traces how the concept of social presence has been developed and appropriated in the online and distance education literature. We do…

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to "story" their experiences of this virtual environment,…

Like many other industries, private tutoring is now being transformed by the growth of information and communication technologies (ICT). An increasing number of educational entrepreneurs in different countries are incorporating Internet tools in their professional practice. While the popularity of online tutoring in countries with widespread…

This article reports on key aspects of a theory generative study into social presence in text-based online learning environments. The focus of the article is the nature of social presence as experienced by online learners in those environments. Employing a collective case study design, the study accessed online learners' experience-based heuristic…

This article addresses the ways in which learners' silence plays out within asynchronous and synchronous text-based, online communication. Our study takes an ethnographic perspective in examining how learners and instructors in two online courses use and interpret silence. The ways in which those learners and instructors eventually integrated…

This article addresses the use of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) to foster communication and interaction and to facilitate cooperative learning in an online course. The authors delineate the definition and history of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), and describe current uses of MMORPGs in education, including…

This mixed-methods study probed the effectiveness of three kinds of objects (video, theory, metaphor) as common reference points for conversations between online learners (student teachers). Individuals' degree of detail-focus was examined as a potentially interacting covariate and the outcome measure was learners' level of tacit knowledge related…

This longitudinal study evaluated the amount and type of interaction and interpersonal content in messages posted by online graduate students in small group asynchronous forums. It also assessed the relationship between interpersonality and interactivity. To achieve this, a new coding scheme was developed to categorize the content of online…

This investigation of student perceptions of mediated presence in an online college class yielded two key findings. First, perceptions of the instructor's mediated presence were significantly higher than perceptions of the other students' presence. Second, students identified a set of communication behaviors that influenced their perceptions of…

This study explored student-led facilitation strategies used to overcome the challenges of instructor-dominated facilitation, enhance the sense of learning community, and encourage student participation in online discussions. It presents a series of cases of students' facilitation strategies and using qualitative data analysis of discussion…

This study examined the effects of pre-structuring discussion threads on group performance in computer-supported collaborative argumentation where students labeled their messages as arguments, challenges, supporting evidence, and explanations on a threaded discussion board. In the pre-structured group students were required to post supporting and…

Productive pedagogies (PP) is an influential framework for teaching and learning that has featured well in current reforms of teacher education. The present study was designed to examine principles of PP adopted by a cohort of beginning mathematics teachers. A networked online learning environment, WebCT[TM], facilitated the teachers'…

Discusses research that examined the issues and challenges experienced by facilitators in cross-cultural group discussions in a Web conferencing program, using action research methods of data collection and analysis. Considers questioning, participation, interpersonal and group dynamics, facilitator expectations, and student expectations.…