Online instructors have identified several issues that must be addressed to facilitate better online learning experiences, including authentic experiential education, building community, technology for remote learning, and supporting learners. Online forums are often used by users to express their frustrations, feelings, jokes, and even…

Human sexuality courses are common across many college/university campuses. The methods of instruction typically encourage discussion to increase knowledge and critical thinking about self, relationships, and professional pathways. However, often the pedagogical practices do not include methods to draw out students with a range of personalities,…

Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) software has been viewed as a promising tool for assisting writing. This study integrated AWE and its combination with peer review discussion into writing practice in a large college writing class in the Asian context. Adopting a mixed-method approach, this study employed a quantitative questionnaire to…

Previous research suggests that students can use exploratory talk to support their thinking and learning. However, students' own perspectives on such talk, and whether/how they value it, are rarely sought. Thirty 12-year-olds and their teacher used Talk Factory on an interactive whiteboard and iPads to support exploratory talk in English lessons…

Evaluation of "e-Learning", or arguably "e-Delivery", is difficult. One reason is that comparisons are often made between different courses delivered using various delivery modes, making such comparisons hard to justify. The Business School at a university in the United Kingdom reportedly delivers the same postgraduate course…

Using a convergent parallel mixed methods design, this exploratory study examined mathematics lessons in two third-grade classrooms to analyze the mathematical classroom discourse when using tutorial instructional software. A chi-square test for independence revealed statistically significant correlations between teachers use of the focusing and…

This qualitative research study is an exploration of the merit and shortcomings of using a combination of the music software GarageBand[TM] and an electronic bulletin board to facilitate musical and peer learning in a 3-month elementary music methods curriculum and instruction course. A pedagogical objective of this assignment was to increase the…

Active-learning activities can be successfully implemented into a course even when instructors are not in the same physical classroom as students. Technology can assist with synchronous distance education as well as facilitate active learning. This manuscript describes student perceptions of active learning activities in a re-designed drugs in…

Graduating physicians in all subspecialties have an increased need for competency in radiology, particularly since the use of diagnostic imaging continues to grow. To integrate the teaching of radiology with anatomy during the first year of medical school at Howard University, a novel approach was developed to overcome the limitations of resources…

This paper presents a pre-orientation program for incoming college students, Active Citizenship through Technology (ACT), that engaged students in civic dialogue early in their academic experience while fostering a long-term peer support network. It leveraged youth's interest in Internet technologies to engage them in civic discussions and…

Net-based collaborative learning discourses often suffer from deficiencies such as lack of coherence and coordination. It is suggested that the provision of two functionalities, referencing and typing, which learners may optionally use to ground their contributions during a chat-based discourse, can improve collaborative learning. In particular,…

Students from six countries collaborated on projects promoting social justice and aimed at international diplomacy. The collaboration included social work students in policy courses and international students in English courses. Students explored topics such as human trafficking and poverty. Students identified global strategies for addressing…

We compared classroom interactions during two episodes in a seventh grade virtual mathematics class. Both episodes were drawn from virtual live lessons utilizing different lesson layouts. We investigated how mathematical knowledge was negotiated in both episodes. The results show that the layout of live lessons had an effect on how students shared…

Macro scripts structure collaborative learning and foster the emergence of knowledge-productive interactions such as argumentation, explanations and mutual regulation. We propose a pedagogical model for the designing of scripts and illustrate this model using three scripts. In brief, a script disturbs the natural convergence of a team and in doing…

As course management systems (CMS) gain popularity in facilitating teaching. A forum is a key component to facilitate the interactions among students and teachers. Content analysis is the most popular way to study a discussion forum. But content analysis is a human labor intensity process; for example, the coding process relies heavily on manual…