The expanding scale and scope of online education options, both in terms of design and delivery, create significant questions that increasingly warrant research attention. Previous research has demonstrated that higher levels of teaching presence in online courses is positively related to student engagement, satisfaction and learning. Although…

Establishment of online communities in distance education has been linked to improved engagement, retention, and learning outcomes. This study investigates how online community building was fostered in the text-based Discussion Board (DB) and multimodal VoiceThread (VT) in one of the postgraduate units offered by Open Universities Australia.…

Online education led to the survival of many colleges and universities devastated by Hurricane Katrina. However, despite the subsequent recommendations of scholars to institutionalize distance education, many institutions found themselves ill-prepared for the shift to remote or online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. One university's…

We conducted a comparative study to evaluate the efficacy of synchronous and asynchronous interaction modes when providing feedback for improving academic writing, achievement motivation and critical thinking. The participants undertook an academic writing task, and were given feedback by a mentor using one of three interaction modes:…

Due to COVID-19, all courses at a regional comprehensive university in the southeastern United States transitioned online and were delivered remotely in the latter half of the spring semester of 2020. In this study, students' performance data from four graduate programs in social sciences and two graduate mathematics programs for the spring…

This study, in the context of peer-facilitated asynchronous online discussion, explored the characteristics and patterns of students' cognitive presence, and examined the practices that aim to enhance cognitive presence development. Participants were 53 students from a graduate-level online course that focused on the integration of educational…

The ability to convert face-to-face curricula into rigorous and equally rich online experiences is a topic of much investigation. In this paper, we report on the conversion of a face-to-face research mentor training curriculum into a synchronous, online course. Graduate students and postdoc participants from the Center for the Integration of…

In order to prepare new online students to be successful in the virtual classroom, many institutions opt to provide them with an orientation course. Academic institutions must understand the needs of their students in order to develop an orientation course that is best suited to prepare their students for success. In this study, online graduate…

With teacher shortages in both general and critical needs areas and constricting operating budgets, it is important for Colleges of Education to develop methods of providing alternative certification programs to reach larger segments of the population. One method of increasing the scope of potential preservice teachers is through the development…