MOOC platforms provide a means of communication through forums, allowing learners to express their difficulties and challenges while studying various courses. Within these forums, some posts require urgent attention from instructors. Failing to respond promptly to these posts can contribute to higher dropout rates and lower course completion…

Online collaborative learning has been broadly applied in higher education. However, learners face many challenges in collaborating with one another and coregulating their learning, leading to low group performance. To address the gaps, this study proposed an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled feedback and feedforward approach that not only…

Collaboration scripts are widely employed in online collaborative learning to enhance student engagement and facilitate collaboration. However, the optimal level of scripting remains a subject of debate. This study aims to address this issue by designing and developing different types of collaborative scripts implemented through conversational…

Online discussion forums are highly valued by instructors due to their affordance for understanding class activities and learning. However, a discussion forum with a great number of posts requires a large amount of time to view, and help requests are easily overlooked. Various machine-learning--based tools have been developed to help instructors…

In this article, we investigate a systematic workflow that supports the learning engineering process of formulating the starting question for a conversational module based on existing learning materials, specifying the input that transformer-based language models need to function as classifiers, and specifying the adaptive dialogue structure,…

The rise of online programming education has necessitated more effective personalized interactions, a gap that PythonPal aims to fill through its innovative learning system integrated with a chatbot. This research delves into PythonPal's potential to enhance the online learning experience, especially in contexts with high student-to-teacher ratios…

Conversational agents (CAs) primarily adopt knowledge scaffolding (KS) or emotional scaffolding (ES) to intervene in learners' knowledge gain and emotional experience in online learning. However, the ill-defined design for KS and ES, as well as insufficient understanding of their interactive effects on learning outcomes, have hindered the…

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the educational landscape of institutions of higher education, which were predominantly face-to-face. In Malaysia, many universities converted their courses into online courses to keep up with the challenges of working from home during the pandemic, using web technologies and blended learning approaches.…

In a world awash in technology, what EdTech skills and strategies should educators focus on to ensure they are making the best use of online spaces for classroom learning? How can they sift through the overwhelming number of options in digital tools and platforms? How can they guide students in learning best practices--especially now that…

The "community of inquiry" framework examines the interplay between four kinds of presence (teaching, cognitive, social, and learner) to promote effective learning in online education. This paper investigates the impact of "instructor participation" ("IP"), a key component of "teaching presence," on student…

As technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of machine communication become more popular and readily available, the opportunities for use in an online class increase. This replication and extension sought to understand and test the use of AI versus human communication in an online learning space--specifically the learning…

Conventional nursing courses have solely adopted lecture-based instruction for knowledge delivery, which tends to lack interaction, rehearsal, and personalized feedback. The development of chatbot technologies and their broad application have provided an opportunity to solve the abovementioned problems. Some knowledge-based chatbot systems have…

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…

This study investigated: (a) how the task relevance of postings differed between anonymous versus identified online discussions in elementary school, and (b) how game-like conversations with story characters impacted the task relevance of postings. A total of 342 fourth graders in Slovenia participated in the study. During one and a half-hour,…

Although fully online learning is now the 'new normal' in many parts of the world, its implementation is often beset by challenges such as the lack of student self-regulation, and the sense of isolation. In this paper, we explored the use of chatbots to support student goal setting (Study 1) and social presence (Study 2) in online activities. In…