This study is based on the hypothesis that group cohesion and efficacy have significant effects on the academic performance of individuals in online (virtual) education environments no less than in-person education environments. To that end, this study explores the effectiveness of group activities in a virtual classroom environment using VC…

Lesson study provides an opportunity for teachers to improve their knowledge and skills of classroom teaching, where a group of teachers collaboratively research, plan, and observe a series of lessons followed by ongoing discussions and reflections. While social interaction between group members plays an important role in collaborative learning…

This study, which targeted students in Japanese universities, used a written questionnaire to examine student response behavior when their smartphones received a call or message during university lectures. Phone and message transmissions were taken as the transmission media and six types of caller/sender were set. Survey results showed differences…

Many concurrent variables appear to influence people when they interact anonymously, either face-to-face (F2F) or in computer-mediated communications (CMC).This paper presents the results of a small exploratory research, conducted in a medical company in Italy, to investigate how the use of pseudonyms influences CMC behaviours. The study involved…

This study reports on attention to meaning among 40 NNS pre-service EFL teachers as they collaboratively constructed a wiki in a 16-week online course. Focus is placed upon the nature of individual and group behavior when attending to meaning in a long-term wiki-based collaborative activity as well as the students' collaborative autonomous…

Current distance education benefits greatly from educational software that makes group work possible for students who are separated in time and space. However, some students prefer distance education because they can work on their own. This paper explores how students react to expectations on behalf of the course provider to do their assignments…

Most asynchronous computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments can be characterized as "functional" environments because they focus on functional, task-specific support, often disregarding explicit support for the social (emotional) aspects of learning in groups which are acknowledged by many educational researchers to…