The COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting in-person research a health risk for interviewers and participants. Near the start of the pandemic, many universities pivoted to emergency remote teaching where courses were delivered remotely in observance of safety guidelines. The safety guidelines also necessitated that research be done remotely. We…

The goal of this study was to examine the professional development experiences of two contrastive participants while they were creating standards-based individualized education plan (IEP) goals using a virtual world called TeacherSim. Two specific focuses of the study were on how special educators engaged with the task of creating standards-based…

Although collaboration skills are highly valued by employers, convincing students that collaborative learning activities are worthwhile, and ensuring that the experience is both useful and enjoyable, are significant challenges for educators. This paper addresses these challenges by exploring students' and tutors' experiences of a group project…

Online environments, particularly virtual worlds, can sometimes complicate issues of self expression. For example, the faculty member who loves punk rock has an opportunity, through hairstyle and attire choices in the virtual world, to share that part of herself with students. However, deciding to share that part of the self can depend on a number…

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to "story" their experiences of this virtual environment,…

In Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), struggling learners often seek help by posting questions in discussion forums. Unfortunately, given the large volume of discussion in MOOCs, instructors may overlook these learners' posts, detrimentally impacting the learning process and exacerbating attrition. In this paper, we present YouEDU, an…

cMOOCs, which are based on connectivist learning theory, bring challenges for learners as well as opportunities for self-inquiry. Previous studies have shown that learners in cMOOCs may have difficulties learning, but these studies do not provide any in-depth, empirical explorations of student difficulties or support strategies. This paper…

In this paper we explore the data gathered from a group of nine in-service teachers who were trained online to become future telecollaborative teachers. Participants from different countries worked in two small groups in a wiki designed specially to facilitate discussion and collaboration. Tasks included reading and reviewing articles on…

This conceptual paper critiques the popular Community of Inquiry framework (CoI) that is widely used for studying text-based asynchronous online discussion (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). It re-examines the three main aspects of CoI (cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence) and their relationship, and further highlights…

The ability to work in groups across time and space has become a frequent requirement for the workplace and is increasingly common in higher education, but there is a surprising lack of research on how online groups work. This research applies analytic approaches used in studies of face-to-face classroom "talk" to multiple groups in two…

A synchronous blend of online learning and "face-to-face" teaching is becoming a feasible instructional approach in higher education with the advent of technology. Although this learning mode is not new in higher education, little research has been done to contextualise social presence experiences in which effects of interactions were…

While our understanding of student engagement in the compulsory schooling sector is well developed in face-to-face contexts, the same cannot be said for online and distance learning environments. Indeed, most of what is currently known about online engagement has come from research with older students in tertiary education contexts. This study…

Current theoretical models of distance learning are driven by two impetuses: a technical CMC element, and a pedagogical foundation rooted strongly in the Western world, and driven by social constructivism. By and large these models have been exported throughout the world as-is. However, previous research has hinted at potential problems with these…

The present study examines the professional growth of three Chinese English teachers by analyzing their interactional patterns and their social and cognitive presence in an online community. The data from social network analysis (SNA) and content analysis revealed that computer-mediated communication (CMC) created new opportunities for teachers to…

Participation is a complex process, engaging the whole person, implying cognitive, emotional and relational aspects. In online open and distant learning, group work is a commonly used strategy, given its collaborative nature and constructivist framework ([Bates and Poole, 2003], [Garrison and Anderson, 2003] and [Jonassen, 2005]). In this context,…