Successful early childhood education requires close collaboration between parents and preschool teachers. The purpose of the study was to implement a mobile application to foster parent-teacher communication (PTC) in a remote preschool. Being the teacher of the preschool, I conducted a four-cycle action research to crystallize problems, introduce…

This study aims to explore the application of Transactional Distance theory in distance teaching in the post-epidemic era. COVID-19 has brought us unprecedented challenges in all schools in the world. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can solve the technical problems of distance learning, but cannot bring efficient learning just…

COVID-19 has forced many universities to adopt online teaching. However, the design discipline attaches great importance to on-site operation and face-to-face design discussions, causing teachers to face major challenges in the implementation of distance teaching. The purpose of this study is to investigate the suitability and teaching strategies…

Teacher collaboration through networking needs to be promoted due to its positive effects on the world of teaching. Teaching collaboration in virtual environments affects the professional learning of teachers in their initial and in-service training, being potentially beneficial for instructional processes. The purpose of this paper is to know…

Interactive Learning Environments (ILE) is a leading international journal in the design and use of interactive learning environments. In this study we conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis spanning three decades to objectively examine the journal's impactful authors, citation patterns, collaboration networks and emerging trends.…

The purpose of this study is to uncover factors that affect participation in online classes from the student's perspective. Interest in the online environment has been increasing and renders the opinions of students participating in online courses more important since the opinions of students in this environment are closely related to interaction.…

A synchronous blend of online learning and "face-to-face" teaching is becoming a feasible instructional approach in higher education with the advent of technology. Although this learning mode is not new in higher education, little research has been done to contextualise social presence experiences in which effects of interactions were…

Interactive relationships in online learning communities can influence the process and quality of knowledge building. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between network structures and social knowledge building in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums in a learning management system. The…

This paper reports on a naturalistic study of peer-to-peer learning, in a live, online video meeting context. Over a six-month period a group of international students of animation attended 99 live, online "study group" events amounting to around 120 hours of live "broadcast meeting time". Some meetings were very large, with up to 34 participants,…

Metaphor appears to be an innate tendency in human communication and can be shown to have significant potential when applied to the design of online learning environments. This paper describes and discusses an example of an online research methods learning resource that employs metaphoric navigation. Feedback from the tutors who design and…

This article presents a Web 2.0 approach for the arrangement of peer tutoring in online learning. In online learning environments, the learners' expectations of obtaining frequent, one-to-one support from their teachers tend to increase the teachers' workloads to unacceptably high levels. To address this problem of workload a self-organised peer…

The establishment of an online community is widely held as the most important prerequisite for successful course completion and depends on an interaction between a peer group and a facilitator. Beaudoin reasoned that online students sometimes engage and learn even when not taking part in online discussions. The context of this study was an online…

There is a body of evidence supporting the claim that informal interactions in educational environments have positive effects on learning. In order to increase the opportunities of informal interaction in online courses, an instant messaging tool, called CENTERS, was developed and integrated into online learning environments. This tool provides…

Between 2001 and 2005 the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) and the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC) conducted surveys into issues relating to the acquisition, use, management, and support of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). A number of other studies provide information on these issues during this…

Achieving student participation, it has been argued, is one of the most important challenges in distance education. This explorative study examines whether a synchronous communication medium, instant messaging (IM), may enable students to participate more actively in online group work. When comparing two groups that adopted IM with two groups that…