The purpose of the study was to examine (a) students' social annotation behaviors and engagement change in an undergraduate course throughout the semester, and (b) which social annotation behaviors impact active engagement time. A total of 91 university students' social annotation behaviors, as well as their active engagement time in readings,…

Computer-supported collaborative argumentation is an online activity that can engage students in deep discussion and analysis of complex problems. Given the potentially confrontational nature of argumentation, using polite language becomes a strategic approach to prevent breakdowns in group communication and nurture productive dialogues. This…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer many opportunities for research into several topics related to pedagogical methods and student incentives. In the context of over 20 years of online learning research, we discuss lessons to be learned from observational comparisons and experiments on randomly chosen groups of students. We target two MOOCs…

Recent research on online learning has explored the dense fabric of social presence giving us a better understanding of the rhythms of the teaching-learning exchange. Quantitative studies, especially, have concluded with calls for deeper, more intensive explorations into what happens in online learning environments (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, &…