Much current research exalts the benefits of having students facilitate weekly discussions in asynchronous online courses. This study seeks to add to what is known about student moderation through an analysis of the types of questions students use to spur each discussion. Prior experimental work has demonstrated that the types of questions posed…

Instructional designers need to be able to assess the level of knowledge construction generated by participants of a virtual learning community (VLC). Such participants include the learners engaged in threaded discussions within online courses. Assessing the level of knowledge construction enables course revisions that scaffold such knowledge…

Threaded discussions represent conversational turn-taking in asynchronous, online learning environments. Given the crucial role that discussions play in the construction of knowledge within an online course, the quality of the interaction that occurs within threaded discussions is important to achieving the learning objectives of the designed…

In this paper, an application of one aspect of the Internet technology, namely Internet groups, into the teaching of American and British literatures is evaluated by means of a content analysis of the Internet group which was used as the course component. The aim of this paper was to see how students used the Internet group in the learning of…