Forums are essential components facilitating interactions in online courses. However, in large-scale courses, many posts generated, which results in learners' difficulties. First, the posts are poorly organized and some deviate from the topic, making it difficult for learners' knowledge acquisition. Second, learners cannot receive timely feedback…

Basic English and maths skills are crucial for Londoners to access further education and good work, and to support them to participate in their communities and improve personal wellbeing. Supporting Londoners to achieve basic skills is a priority for the Greater London Authority (GLA). However, we know that too many Londoners are without these…

In the field of learning analytics, mining the regularities of social interaction and cognitive processing have drawn increasing attention. Nevertheless, in MOOCs, there is a lack of investigations on the combination of social and cognitive behavioral patterns. To fill in this gap, this study aimed to uncover the relationship between social…

Improving social presence has long been a goal for online instruction; with the shift to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus on improving social presence has only become more imperative. In asynchronous online courses, social interaction typically relies on discussion groups. Despite this, little research has been…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting university students' participation in discussion forum of electronic learning platforms of teacher--student interaction. Design/methodology/approach: One-stage cluster sampling was used and a cross-sectional survey of 113 university students from four courses was done.…

This qualitative study aims to improve accessibility and equity in digital spaces by identifying the prevalent mismatch between online course design, student culture, and its connection to instructional design for teacher preparation programs. Utilizing feminist theory, we explore the intersection between community, identity, and learning within…

Online courses have become widespread in higher education. Yet, despite their prevalence, they may not suit all learners. Personality influences learner satisfaction and therefore affects learning experience. This study explores the relation between personality traits (using Costa & McCare's Big-Five model) and student satisfaction with…

Online courses frequently use discussion forums to enhance student engagement, an approach that is critical to fostering positive student learning outcomes. Because discussion forums are common in online classes, many instructors rely on summary statistics and self-reported measures to assess student engagement. However, these metrics overlook the…

The absence of instructional support during peer feedback prevents students from engaging with peer feedback. This study adopted regulated dialogic feedback as the instructional foundation and investigated its impact on students' engagement using an experimental research design. Students in the experimental group (n = 26) performed the feedback…

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…

Online learning environments and activities via learning management systems have become the new normal in most educational institutions after the COVID-19 pandemic. An online discussion forum is ideal for online and hybrid courses to enhance collaborative participation between learners and instructors. The problem addressed in this study is the…

Despite several advantages of online education, lack of effective student-instructor interaction, especially when students need timely help, poses significant pedagogical challenges. Motivated by this, we address the problems of automatically identifying posts that express confusion or urgency from Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) forums. To this…

Discussion boards are a common component of asynchronous online courses. While many teacher preparation courses utilize traditional text-based discussion boards, university faculty are increasingly designing innovative approaches to asynchronous online discussions. There is significant research regarding the effectiveness of varied discussion…

Discussion forums are often touted as maximising student participation and learning but concerns around engagement counter any perceived benefits. Often participation is the measure of engagement, and students who do not post are deemed unengaged. To further examine engagement and forums as learning communities, we used analytic data from 270…

In the COVID-19 era, "Yellowdig" (an online discussion board with social media-like features) has increasingly risen to prominence in higher education. Reflecting on a multi-year experiment involving 14 international business and marketing courses, I argue that Yellowdig remains a valuable tool for learning even after returning to…