During the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, instructors at a southeastern university had one week to convert their current face-to-face courses to an online format, under a time frame that did not allow for a "well-designed" online course. The current study investigates how some instructors were able to maintain social presence in…

This article provides a snapshot of the digital collaboration practices in a postgraduate master programme studio, focused on service and interaction design. It presents and discusses research from a student survey focused on evaluating the usefulness of the online collaborative software (OCS) 'Slack' and how it relates to a broader media ecology,…

Social presence is a popular construct used to describe how people socially interact in online courses. Online educators continue to try different ways to establish and maintain social presence in online courses. However, research to date has not identified which strategies, or types of strategies, are best for establishing social presence. We…

Recent technological developments have afforded a proliferation of flexible online opportunities for teacher education (e.g., Chen, 2013). Videoconferencing (VC) is one of the most effective ways to engage students in collaborative learning (Wegner, 2015), as it makes in-class interactions more feasible (Bannan-Ritland, 2002). This descriptive…

This research sought to determine if graduate students taking distance education classes desire student-to-student interaction. Over 200 graduate students who completed one or more distance education graduate classes in agricultural and extension education from North Carolina State University during the past three years were surveyed. While some…

Although the second language literature on Dynamic Assessment (DA)--the unity of assessment and instruction into a singular activity to promote cognitive development--shows promising results, very little has been written about how to educate teachers to use it. This two-cycle, exploratory action research study aimed to understand and address the…

This case study used qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate challenges of learning and teaching research methods by examining graduate students' use of collaborative technology (i.e., digital tools that enable collaboration and information seeking such as software and social media) and students' computer self-efficacy. We conducted…

Research has shown that the use of communication media in distance education can reduce feelings of distance and isolation from peers and tutors and provide opportunities for collaborative learning (Bates, 2005). The use of virtual worlds (VW) in education has increased in recent years, with Second Life (SL) being the most commonly used VW in…

Universities are seeking techniques that encourage students to become more globalised in their perspectives. One method of fostering globalisation is to incorporate cross-national asynchronous online discussions with students from different countries within courses. The purpose of this study was to explore if participation by American and Chinese…

The notion of synchronous office hours in an asynchronous course seems counterintuitive. After all, one of the tenets of asynchronous education is to not require students to be online and participating at any time during the course. Having taught higher education online asynchronous courses for twenty years, the researcher experimented with online…

This case study provides evidence-based suggestions for the use of Question and Answer discussion forums for improving quality and assessment of online learning. General online discussion forums are accessible at any time to all subscribers, making it possible for some learners to update, concur with or paraphrase discussions posted earlier by…

While experiential learning is recognized as an important pedagogical approach in Library and Information Science education, logistical hurdles can make implementing meaningful experiential projects challenging, especially in online courses. This paper will describe a project in which Library Science instructors were able to overcome common…

Sustained discourse is critical to the learning potential of online courses. And, while research has surfaced many factors that mediate interaction, it further suggests that sustained interaction remains elusive. In this paper, I propose that student facilitation may have an impact on the quality of facilitators' interactions following a week of…

This study examines the enhancing effect of peer annotation on the academic English reading of nonnative-Englishspeaking graduate students. To facilitate peer collaboration, the present study included the development of a strategybased online reading system. Through peer annotation, the students not only achieved enhanced reading comprehension but…

Online students use highly emotional language to describe their experiences, indicating that learners do feel a great deal online. This paper draws on Wetherell's exploration of affective practice to theorise learners' responses to the pedagogical and technological online environment. Findings of a research project that focused on two cohorts of…