Background: We examine the efficacy of an online collaborative problem-solving (CPS) teaching approach in academic performance and student connections with other peers, among first-year engineering calculus students at a Latin American university. Our research uses communities of practice (CoP) to emphasize the social nature of learning and the…

Collaboration is the key element of maker movement. Online maker community is a new environment for makers to collaborate with one another voluntarily. This article selected one of the largest open online maker communities in China as the research sample. A total of 1292 postings selected from 19 threads were coded using Schaefer et al.'s (2019,…

Purpose: This study aims to uncover divergent collaboration in makerspaces using social network analysis to examine ongoing social relations and sequential data pattern mining to invesitgate temporal changes in social activities. Design/methodology/approach: While there is a significant body of qualitative work on makerspaces, there is a lack of…

A learning community works with a collective knowledge space where members contribute and interact with one another's ideas to advance their community's knowledge. This study aims to explore designs of collective knowledge space to support cross-community interaction. A design experiment was conducted in four grade 5 classrooms with the support of…

Purpose: Founded in sociocultural theories of learning, the authors argue that engaging learners in collaborative knowledge building is critical. When responding to others' ideas, research shows that learners in online settings more frequently focus on surface-level aspects of colleagues' contributions -- sharing, comparing and praising -- rather…

Lesson study provides an opportunity for teachers to improve their knowledge and skills of classroom teaching, where a group of teachers collaboratively research, plan, and observe a series of lessons followed by ongoing discussions and reflections. While social interaction between group members plays an important role in collaborative learning…

Creating collaborative working and learning experiences has long been at the forefront of computer-assisted language learning research. It is in this context that, in recent years, the integration of social networking sites and Web 2.0 in learning settings has surged, generating new opportunities to establish and explore virtual communities of…

As funding for institutions of higher education becomes tighter, state and federal entities have turned to student retention and graduation rates as measures of success to determine levels of financial support. A concept, supported by student development theories, used to increase retention and graduation rates is creating living learning…

Teacher professional development (PD) that supports the emergence of professional learning communities (PLCs) is effective for teachers' learning and instructional improvement. Our work focuses on supporting the emergence of online PLCs and an emergent issue in this work is how to maintain the quality of teachers' experiences in online PLCs when…

Introduction: This paper aims at understanding virtual communities of learning in terms of dynamics, types of knowledge shared by participants, and network characteristics such as size, relationships, density, and centrality of participants. It looks at the relationships between these aspects and the evolution of communities of learning. It…

This study uses Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Network Analysis to examine an online peer mentoring site created to unite first-year and third-year preservice teachers enrolled in an undergraduate teacher education program. The peer mentoring site was developed to provide both first-year preservice teachers and more experienced peers the…

This paper introduces the scientometric method of main path analysis and its application in an exemplary study of the paths of knowledge development and the roles of contributors in Wikiversity. Data from two scientific domains in this online learning community has been used. We see this as a step forward in adapting and adopting network analysis…

Cooperative learning (CL), in spite of extensive research and documented benefits, is not widely used in England. A review of the literature shows that it requires a staged and sustained approach to implementation, which has led to a gap between its potential and actual use. The case study cited here provides one example of bridging that gap…

Collaborative learning has become a dominant learning apparatus for higher level learning objectives. Much of the psychological and social mechanisms operating under this complex group activity, however, is not yet well understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of college students' communication competence and degree…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation of university students' participation and learning presence in a blogging activity, designed to support collaborative learning. There are three main reasons justifying the current research: to better understand the structure and the dynamics of students' blogging subgroups; to…