The website Reddit has received scant attention from educational researchers despite the presence of numerous teaching-related subreddits that host thousands of threaded conversations. The purpose of this study was to provide an initial comparison of discussions occurring in several different affinity spaces on Reddit. Because of the lack of…

Globalization has increased the demands placed on higher education and increased competition among universities. In response, institutions of higher education have started to consider their online presence as a potential competitive advantage. The aim of this article is to analyze and compare Facebook activity and content created by the world's…

Discussion is a crucial component for learning in a college classroom. Increasingly, university and college faculty are using online learning management systems to facilitate and assess course discussions. Given this reality, are there ways to frame prompts to generate normatively better discussions, or discussions where students are better able…

The purpose of this study is to examine if providing an intercultural online collaboration experience is beneficial to enhance pre-service teachers' self-efficacy for technology integration, intercultural sensitivity, and communication and collaboration skills. The authors compared the experiences of two groups (intercultural group vs.…

As an overt expression of internal mental processes, discourses have become one main data source for the research of interactive learning. To deeply explore behavioral regularities among interactions, this article firstly adopts the content analysis method to summarize students' engagement patterns within a course forum in a small private online…

Advanced computer technology has transformed the way instruction is designed and delivered at all education levels including college. However, today's younger "digital-native" generation may often take their computer skills for granted, which impacts their interaction patterns with university professors who often encourage electronic…

This original study presents a content analysis of 100 primary and post-primary school anti-bullying policies in Northern Ireland using a 36-item scoring scheme. Overall schools had 52% of the items in their policies. Most schools included reference to physical, verbal, relational, material and cyberbullying but a minority mentioned racist,…

This study explores the combination of course structure, prompt type, and characteristics of discussion posts and their relationships with intersubjectivity. A content analysis measured the intersubjectivity of peer responses by analyzing the interaction analysis model (IAM) phase of each post and comparing with the IAM phase of the previous post.…

Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem in schools, negatively impacting children's wellbeing, even having disastrous outcomes such as suicide. An absence of studies was noted on parents' communication needs and preferences with their child's school regarding cyberbullying. This study attempts to gain insight on the communication between home and…

Universities are seeking techniques that encourage students to become more globalised in their perspectives. One method of fostering globalisation is to incorporate cross-national asynchronous online discussions with students from different countries within courses. The purpose of this study was to explore if participation by American and Chinese…

An asynchronous online discussion (AOD) is one format of instructional methods that facilitate student-centered learning. In the wealth of AOD research, this study evaluated how students' behavior on AOD influences their academic outcomes. This case study compared the differential analytic methods including web log mining, social network analysis…

Gamification offers potential for improving students' online discussion quantity and the depth of discussion content. However, very few studies have examined the social network patterns when students are posting and providing peer-feedback to each other in gamification-based environments. In response to those gaps, this study used a learning…

The focus of this study was to answer the following overarching question: How does a Twitter discussion format compare to a Facebook discussion format in terms of promoting collaborative argumentative discourse? Data analysis focused on the difference in amount of arguments, counter-arguments, reasons, and elaborations generated by participants…

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…

The aim of this study was not only to help pre-service English language teachers (PS-ELTs) to design vocabulary learning materials for a web-supported situated learning (SL) environment but also to have them learn the vocabulary they used to prepare those materials in the web-supported SL environment. Also, the effects of this process on the…