The rapid transition to emergency remote teaching in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic altered public education as schools closed across the United States. Eighty percent of teachers reported interacting with students online, often utilizing free technology like Zoom and Google Workspace for Education. This article provides a comprehensive…

Scholars have often highlighted the intrinsic features of technology to support the generation and sharing of ideas (Craft 2011). By studying user interactions within informal online communities, researcher can elucidate the ways technology impacts creativity and learning within these groups. This qualitative content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon…

Background: Deep discussions play an important role in students' online learning. However, researchers have largely focused on engaging students in deep discussions in online asynchronous forums. Few studies have investigated how to promote deep discussion via mobile instant messaging (MIM). Objectives: In this study, we applied learning…

In recent years, the use of asynchronous discussion forums in online learning has increased rapidly. In earlier studies, content analysis is the most-used research method in exploring the discussion transcripts. However, conventional content analysis is a time-consuming task and requires experienced coders. There is a need for an automated…

We compared discussion posts from a data science ethics MOOC that was hosted on two platforms. We characterized one platform as "open" because learners can respond to discussion prompts while viewing and responding to others. We characterized the other platform as "locked" because learners must respond to a discussion prompt…

This study evaluated the online participation of 40 students who, while studying a graduate programme in a fully online higher education institution, were assigned to small online groups for a four-week period in order to develop a written task. The type and frequency of their postings in the online forums were analysed. In addition, knowledge…

Learning Management Systems (LSM) have been adopted to provide interaction between instructors and students in online learning courses. In these environments, large volumes of messages are exchanged, making it difficult for the participants to follow all the discussions. When messages are ignored, students' opportunities to effectively construct…

Online learning as a concept and as a keyword has consistently been a focus of education research for over two decades. In this paper, we present results from a systematic literature review for the definitions of online learning because the concept of online learning, though often defined, has a range of meanings attached to it. Authors and…

This study explores the combination of course structure, prompt type, and characteristics of discussion posts and their relationships with intersubjectivity. A content analysis measured the intersubjectivity of peer responses by analyzing the interaction analysis model (IAM) phase of each post and comparing with the IAM phase of the previous post.…

E-learning occupies an increasingly prominent place in education. It provides the learner with a rich virtual network where he or she can exchange ideas and information and create synergies through interactions with other members of the network, whether fellow learners or teachers. Social network analysis (SNA) has proven extremely powerful at…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of analysing online discussion and argue for the merits of mixed methods. Much research of online participation and e-learning has been either message-focused or person-focused. The former covers methodologies such as content and discourse analysis, the latter interviewing and surveys.…

Understanding the relationship between social presence and critical thinking is useful for gaining insight into the interaction and discourse of learners online. Further study of how these two presences interact is important because research has shown a wide variety of relationships, both positive and negative, between social presence and critical…

This pilot study sought to examine the mathematical knowledge for teaching that pre-service teachers used when participating in an online community, and to gain insight into their epistemological stance. The participants of this study were among the pre-service teachers in a large urban university, chosen as they were completing their mathematics…

This paper presents a study grounded in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework using qualitative content analysis and focus group interviews in an effort to identify aspects of learning presence in a blended learning course. Research has suggested that the CoI framework may need additional emphasis based on the roles of strategic learners in…

In this study, the authors analyzed all research articles published between 2002 and 2011 in the "Journal of Computer Assisted Learning," in order to understand the research topics methods, major contributing authors, and most-cited publications. Over the 10-year period, they found the journal has explored educational uses of computer…