Background: Instructors often try to promote student engagement with discussion boards in learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas. Although convenient, alternatives like the social media platform Reddit may be more effective. Method: A non-randomized controlled trial compared the use of Canvas and Reddit in two sections of two undergraduate…

Sentiments expressed on massive open online course (MOOC) discussion forums significantly influence learning effectiveness and academic performance. The evolution of learning sentiments on MOOC discussion forums is a dynamic process; however, a gap exists in the current understanding of the interplay between evolving sentiments and their impact on…

Teacher feedback is the key to online collaborative discussion. To investigate the effects of different forms of teacher feedback intervention on learners' cognitive and emotional interactions in online collaborative discussion, this study collected collaborative discussion text data of online collaborative learners. Based on the framework of…

Online discussion is one of the frequently used learning activities in an e-learning process. Learners can exchange opinions and thoughts with their peers through online discussion, stimulate their different viewpoints on the discussion topics, and enhance the learning effectiveness of e-learning. However, most learners mainly take an effort on…

This study uses self-determination theory to examine the effect of gamification on the students' behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement in online discussion forums by providing more instructor badges than automatic badges and using a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. Behavioral engagement was measured using the number…

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a 21st-century skill essential for learning gains, workplace success, and tackling increasingly complicated global problems. Group diversity plays a vital role during collaborative activities, especially in a digital space. Although CPS involves dynamic communication behaviors, few studies have considered the…

The free inquiry approach based on blended learning is a learning approach that is carried out by combining face-to-face and online lectures which gives students the freedom to find problems and solve problems independently, design procedures or steps collaboratively by sharing and discussing with friends. Hence, this learning approach is…

Having discussions and working together in groups with other learners is the indicator of the collaboration aspect of engagement. Collaborative engagement can be fostered through active learning approaches, since they provide more opportunities for interaction among learners. In Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) classrooms, small…

As the number of students learning in online and flipped contexts grows, an important question arises: to what extent is it necessary to have places or activities where students interact regarding course content? The present paper looked at three flipped learning environments: one with no online collaboration, one featuring an online discussion…

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…

Online community college instructors' failure to effectively utilize asynchronous discussion boards negatively impacts student course outcomes. However, it is unclear exactly what practices instructors use in their discussion boards. The purpose of this qualitative content analysis study was to investigate community college instructors' practices…

In this study, we examined a mathematics teacher's communicative acts on an instant messaging tool, WhatsApp, and its role in creating a sustained learning environment between secondary-school students and a teacher in Turkey. The interactions of a mathematics teacher and his students (n = 38) over two years were explored. The WhatsApp group…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

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 primary aim of this study was to investigate the impact of using online discussions on L2 learners' lexical complexity (LC) using a blend of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to measure how L2 learners' lexical variation, lexical density, and lexical richness can be influenced by online interactions facilitated in virtual…