Online discussion boards are commonly used to help students collaborate and engage in interpersonal and social behavior. However, students often report dissatisfaction with discussion boards which can have a negative impact on course dissatisfaction due to the students' lack of motivation to complete the learning activity. Based on…

Participation in online courses has become essential for training language professionals in under-resourced contexts with skills in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) (Godwin-Jones, 2014). Most online CALL courses use asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) to facilitate meaningful learning for participants. Although…

In CSCL contexts ("Computer Supported Collaborative Learning") collaborative activities with different levels of structuredeness are often used to foster discussion and exchange among students and enhance collaboration. In this field the debate around whether and to what extent it is useful to structure the activities proposed to students, is…

This study compares four learning environments: face-to-face learning (F2F), fully e-learning (EL), blended learning (BL), and flipped classroom (FC) with respect to students' learning performance. Moreover, this present research studies changes in perceived flexibility, intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy beliefs of students, and the interaction…

This study investigated the online practices of students enrolled in graduate-level distance education courses. Using interviews and a questionnaire as data sources, the study sought to: (a) identify common practices that students adopt in asynchronous discussions, and (b) gain an understanding of why students adopt them. An analysis of the data…

The present study attempted to investigate whether young learners who were new to knowledge building approaches could work towards advancing both individual and collective knowledge, and whether knowledge building could be beneficial to both high-achieving and low-achieving students. Findings reported in this paper are from one and a half-year…

Project-based learning using online learning environments is becoming increasingly popular. To in-depth explore the behavioural patterns and limitations faced by students in project-based learning where online forums are used. This study conducted an empirical case study of an online project-based learning activity in a management course, in which…

This study reports on intercultural learning during telecollaboration from the perspective of student participants in a five-country online teacher education partnership. The student perspectives reported here were drawn from one intact class in the partnership, five students who completed this partnership as part of a sociolinguistics course in a…

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…

We conducted research within a program serving future mathematics and science teachers. Groups of teachers worked primarily online in an asynchronous discussion environment on a 6-week task in which they applied learning-science ideas acquired from an educational psychology course to design interdisciplinary instructional units. We employed an…

Choosing the "right" type of technology, either synchronous or asynchronous, to facilitate learning outcomes is a new challenge as the pace of emerging technologies increases and diversifies. Teachers are encouraged to design courses that require collaboration in online learning communities to facilitate the development of higher order…

Online dialogic communities have become a ubiquitous tool that transforms student learning and course delivery. Threaded Discussions extend classroom learning by providing an asynchronous method of communication for the exchange of meaningful ideas that promote critical thinking and develop thoughtful reflective learning. Threaded Discussions…

Asynchronous text based discussion boards are included in many online courses, however strategies to compare their use within and between courses, from a disciplinary standpoint, have not been well documented in the literature. The goal of this project was to develop a multi-factor metric which could be used to characterize discussion board use in…

This article described the experiences of an inservice professional development program for teachers with a focus on online synchronous discussions. Transcripts of six online synchronous discussions containing 3600 messages from an online teacher professional development course were analyzed. In addition, the researchers interviewed 10…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is a cultural gap in student perceptions of online collaborative learning and to investigate to what extent student perceptions, motivation, and learning strategies change over time due to the actual involvement in a collaborative e-learning environment (ELE).…