This paper discusses findings of a study investigating how students, in four online courses, engaged in inquiry-based learning with and without support from a facilitator. The investigation was conducted by analyzing discussions of the online courses using the community of inquiry model. The results of the study imply that students in online…

Various Web 2.0 technologies can be used to support pedagogy. Examples include wikis, blogs, and social media including forum discussions. Online class forum discussions involving electronic text can result in robust strings of data containing meta-knowledge, inherent meaning, themes and patterns. Based on instructional design, learning outcomes…

This study examined the effect of civil servants' Self-Directed Learning Readiness (SDLR) and network literacy on their online learning effectiveness in a web-based training program. Participants were 283 civil servants enrolled in an asynchronous online learning program through an e-learning portal provided by the Regional Civil Service…

The framework of this study is cooperation between students of English at a Chinese university and their counterparts at a Danish university, i.e. neither group of students are native speakers of English. The theoretical framework for the study is Vygotsky's sociocultural approach combined with the work by a number of researchers on the link…

This study explored the use of the Web-based virtual environment, Adobe Connect Pro, in a postgraduate online teacher education programme at the University of Waikato. It applied the tenets of Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance (Moore, 1997) in examining the efficacy of using the virtual classroom to promote quality dialogue and explored how…

Purpose: The rising popularity of social software poses challenges to the design and evaluation of pedagogically sound cross-cultural online collaborative learning environments (OCLEs). In the literature of computer-mediated communications, there exist only a limited number of related empirical studies, indicating that it is still an emergent…

Research into tutoring at a distance has a fairly long history and the functions of tutors in distance education institutions are well understood. Over the past 20 years research into online tutoring has advanced significantly as such institutions have "gone electronic": in this paper we cite published research from the UK Open…

This case study focused on whether women, enrolled in a graduate course, would engage in online debate, and if so, whether their postings would contain traditional elements of argumentation (i.e., argue, elaborate, critique). Content analyses for two debates were performed. For the most part, the overarching messages in both debates were…

Approximately 3.9 million students enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2007. According to Allen and Seaman (2008), online education growth rates have continued to outpace total higher education growth rates and there are no signs of online growth slowing down. As higher education institutions offer increasing numbers of online and…

The inclusion or not of chat services within Virtual Reference (VR) is an important topic for university libraries. Increasingly, email supported by a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database is suggested in the scholarly literature as the preferred, cost-effective means for providing university VR services. This paper examines these issues and…

Online class discussions have been studied from many perspectives; however, the literature is lacking that shows instructors how to help online students build social capital. Social capital is an information asset that stems from the interaction between agents. This study examines how social capital can be fostered through online class…

Fully online courses are becoming progressively more popular because of their "anytime anywhere" learning flexibility. One of the ways students interact with each other and with the instructors within fully online learning environments is via asynchronous discussion forums. However, student engagement in online discussion forums does not…

In this quasi-experimental case study, we compared five sections of a basic undergraduate technology course. Within an asynchronous web forum, pre-service teachers wrote short critiques of websites designed by their classmates. This peer feedback was provided anonymously by students in two classes (n = 35) whereas providers and recipients of peer…

This paper reported using the practical inquiry model as discourse guide to facilitate students' critical thinking in online discussion. It was found that almost all the postings of the students who had no knowledge of the inquiry model fell into exploration phase except three postings in triggering events phase and two in integration phase. In…

This study sought to discover what motivates undergraduate residential students to enroll in online courses. By exploring this question, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of why students would sign up for courses online which are offered right down the street from their residence. The present study revealed that students tend to enroll in…