Social networking sites have become affinity spaces for teachers. Many teachers use them with different intentions and motivations, including learning. On social media platforms there are active teachers who have developed a certain leadership and recognition from many teachers. In some areas, like marketing or fashion, people with influence are…

Social media has been shown to be an efficient way to engage in networked participatory scholarship (NPS), which is defined as the use of online social networks to share and further develop scholarship. As leaders in the field, educational technology scholars should be at the forefront of this practice. We used social network analysis (SNA) to…

The theoretical framework of communities of practice (CoP) is often used for framing research into online communities. However, there is an absence of measures and empirical work that evaluates knowledge-sharing within such communities. This represents a substantial gap in our understanding of informal learning for diverse people and in the case…

Although researchers recognize the importance of discussing support for math learning within online learning communities, there is a lack of relevant network classifying methods and analyses at the group level to understand the behavioral differences between groups with varying levels of activity, including their mathematical literacies. In this…

Networked and digital technologies are increasingly being used for learning in formal and informal contexts, and participant engagement occurs primarily via online discussions. In this paper, we describe an ongoing research project that focuses on examining and understanding student engagement in collaborative online discussions within a formal…

Studying the networked nature of social and cognitive aspects of learner interactions is the key to understanding how successful collaborative learning occurs in asynchronous online discussion forums (AODFs). Guided by network science and multiplex network analysis, this study compared the differences of network structure and properties between…

Online discussion research has mainly been conducted using case methods. This article proposes a method for comparative analysis based on network metrics such as information entropy and global network efficiency as more holistic measures characterizing social learning group dynamics. We applied social learning optimization analysis of networks…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of material incentives on the knowledge-sharing networks and information lifecycles of a public online forum. The users' interaction data were collected from two similar sub-forums, and one of them provided material incentives for sharing knowledge. After collecting user behaviors for one natural…

Background: Online discussion is one of the commonly used tools to enhance students' interactions and engagements in online courses, but it is not clear how social presence in online discussions impacts students' learning and what kinds of interactions we should encourage. Social network analysis provides a new methodology to investigate how…

Educational researchers have pointed to socioemotional dimensions of learning as important in gaining a more nuanced description of student engagement and learning. However, to date, research focused on the analysis of emotions has been narrow in its focus, centering on affect and sentiment analysis in isolation while neglecting how emotions…

This research aimed to explore (1) the characteristics and patterns of student interactions on online discussion boards throughout a course using social network analysis (SNA) and (2) the mediating effect of social presence, as the underlying mechanism, on the relationship between these interactions and students' learning outcomes. Eighty-four…

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic brought changes and efforts for adaption to the new environment in every industry, including higher education. The present study, drawing on crisis management theory as a framework, aimed to understand information and communication sharing behaviors of the higher education community during the pandemic by…

This dissertation examines the interaction patterns that happen in an online learning environment. While many studies look at online learning through the lens of the learner or the learning environment, few studies look at the interaction patterns that happen through the digital traces captured by computational tools. Based on the conceptual…

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…