Examination of the personal characteristics (i.e., gender, participation styles) of participants and the technical infrastructure (i.e., device type, internet connection type) of Instructional Discussion Forums (IDFs) can provide functional clues for mitigating social anxiety in these settings. In this context, this research investigated variances…

Academic institutions need to enhance online and virtual learning strategies to ensure student engagement, satisfaction, and feedback in online classrooms. Providing online education has become the need of the hour because it enhances learning without regard for distance or the need to travel to school. The present study conducted a qualitative…

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…

Educators constantly wrestle with the question of how to engage students in an environment in which students are increasingly distracted. This issue has become more relevant as instructors have been forced to pivot to the use of a variety of online learning modalities to administer instruction. While the synchronous online class session allows for…

Collaborative learning can be a worthwhile and valuable part of a student's online course experience, and interpersonal exchanges among members of an online course community often rely on greater intentionality within the design of the learning experience. We present a synergistic framework for strategic design of collaborative learning in the…

Nationwide, postsecondary institutions are seeing the need and searching for ways to prepare their students for life in an increasingly complex and often polarized society. Since its development in the 1980s, intergroup dialogue (IGD) has become a nationally prominent social justice pedagogy that brings together small, diverse groups of college…

Examination of social annotation during assigned readings in this study brings together research about digital reading, learning communities, metacognition, and critical literacy. Social annotation allows readers to engage with text collaboratively to build understanding during reading. The authors conducted a content analysis of over 400…

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…

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,…

Discussion boards have been around for more than two decades. They are a feature of most learning management systems (LMS)2 and are one of the earliest tools used in fully online classes, particularly for asynchronous classes. The goal of this article is to provide guidance to instructors in using discussion boards to create an engaging and…

We used the design-based research approach to test and refine a theoretically grounded goal-access-feedback-challenge-collaboration gamification model. The testbed was a 10-week, university-level e-learning design course offered in two consecutive semesters. In Study 1, we implemented the initial goal-access-feedback-challenge-collaboration model…

Creating an engaging online course where students feel part of an online community can be challenging even for the most experienced online educator. Online discussions are a common tool used to connect students in online courses, but it is often limited to text-based posts. This international research study compared the use of text-based versus…

Learning metabolic pathways is vital for understanding biochemical processes and all of their implications for life. Their learning in the virtual environment is complex and generative learning strategies, such as the construction of online conceptual maps, can help in this process. This article presents a proposal for the collaborative…

Help-seeking is an essential tool for student success. Still, students, especially those underrepresented in STEM (UR-STEM) and those underrepresented in chemistry (UR-Chem), may be reluctant to employ help-seeking for academic success. Understanding help-seeking in online courses is crucial for developing equitable learning environments where…

With the rise of the internet, work from the of fields of digital sociology, communications/social media studies, and online research methods have become increasingly relevant for music education scholars both investigating and facilitating music teaching and learning in online contexts. While opportunities for online music making, teaching, and…