Online learning communities are becoming increasingly popular as they are known to support collaborative dialogue and knowledge building. Previous studies have typically focused on small, closed learning communities from an individual, static, and aggregated perspective. This research aims to advance our understanding of open and large online…

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, online learning has gained popularity among educators and learners, where Community of Inquiry (CoI) has caught researchers' attention. To bibliometrically analyze the framework of CoI over twenty-five years, we adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine the framework of CoI in online…

Online collaborative and content-focused professional development (PD) is becoming an increasingly important setting for supporting mathematics teachers' professional learning. The purpose of this study was to better understand the process by which a community emerges in such a PD setting by examining how the cohesiveness of 21 mathematics…

This study empirically investigated: How will various aspects of students' prominence (i.e., betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities) in the social network interaction of online discussion change over time? And how will Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) skills moderate the trend over time on various aspects of students' prominence in…

Environmental educators exchange ideas in social networks, which may in turn impact their practices. This study uses social network analysis, surveys, correlation analysis and interviews to examine the relationship between network and practice change in three professional development programs. In the first program that used face-to-face…

This study investigated the impact of using a discussion strategy with learning analytics on the level of student cognitive presence and interaction. The study used a quasi-experimental design with control and experimental groups. The experimental group applied open-ended discussion and elaborated feedback with learning analytics while the control…

Professional development programs provide an opportunity for environmental educators to develop networks to exchange ideas and practices in professional learning communities. This study investigated how diverse educators develop professional networks for exchanging information through online and face-to-face professional development activities. We…

The purpose of this research is to better understand community formation in MOOCs through employing combined lenses of connectivism, rhizomatic learning, actor-network theory, community of practice, and community of inquiry. In a sequential explanatory mixed methodology design, social network analysis and nethnography were used to analyze and…

This paper presents the Integrated Methodological Framework (IMF) which uses social network analysis (SNA) to structurally identify communities in higher education online learning (HEOL). Decades of research speaks for the value of community-based learning albeit in traditional, blended, or online environments. The communities of practice (CoP)…

This article aims at characterizing the research community of Distance Education (DE) with respect to coauthorship, a special kind of collaboration among researchers, according to publications of 11 relevant DE journals. This article identified who the central researchers are, the topological properties of the coauthorship networks analyzed, the…

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…

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…

This article explores whether a learning community can affect students' learning achievement and engagement. Besides, this study also analyzed whether degree centralities of peer interaction affect learning achievement and learning engagement based on social network analysis. While the experimental group combined the English learning system with…

This study aimed to analyze the student's behaviour in relation to their degree of commitment, participation, and contribution in a MOOC based on a social learning approach. Interaction data was collected on the learning platform and in social networks, both of which were used in the third edition of a social MOOC course. This data was then…

This article contributes to the literature on connectivism, connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) and rhizomatic learning by examining participant interactions, community formation and nomadic learner behavior in a particular cMOOC, #rhizo15, facilitated for 6 weeks by Dave Cormier. It further focuses on what we can learn by observing Twitter interactions…