The emergence of digital communication channels has transformed faculty development, offering new opportunities for networking and collaboration. This paper explores successful practices for promoting connection and belonging among faculty members through platforms like Slack and Discord. Key strategies include creating dedicated channels for…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the role of key network actors in relation to the discourse structure of a microblogging hashtag stream within a global agricultural educators' conference over two years. Prior work in online networks suggests that participation is dominated by highly active members, and in this study, the authors focus on…

Online collaborative and content-focused professional development (PD) is becoming an increasingly important setting for supporting mathematics teachers' professional learning. The purpose of this study was to better understand the process by which a community emerges in such a PD setting by examining how the cohesiveness of 21 mathematics…

The Community of Practice framework has been used theoretically and empirically to describe the diverse ways people learn from one another through social interaction in a variety of specific contexts. To date, most research of this genre has favored investigating the community and domain constructs of the theory over the authentic practice…

Mobile instant messengers such as WhatsApp have become an essential part of everyday life and can be a transformative tool for teacher professional development. Several studies have addressed the use of WhatsApp in a community of practices. However, there is a lack of study on examining teachers' interaction in WhatsApp community of practices,…

Kindergarten through second grade (K-2) teachers have different experiences with support when teaching beginning reading. However, there is a problem with K-2 teachers having access to virtual collaboration to support beginning reading instruction. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the experiences and perceptions of K-2…

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.…

This descriptive case study explored the presence of a community of inquiry among 4492 secondary learners enrolled in four asynchronous online discussion forums over a full year. The forums (Ethics and Philosophy, Reading, Astronomy and Space, and General Debates, among others not studied) were external to the students' schools across England. The…

Sharing the same philosophy of "relations matter" with computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), social network analysis (SNA) has become a common methodology in the CSCL research. In this research, I use SNA methods from "relational ties," "network modes," and "integrated methods" perspectives to…

Social media with diverse functionalities enables people to communicate, make connections, exchange information, and transfer knowledge without time and location restrictions. The number of informal learning communities based on social media is growing, but the knowledge about how these communities work is still limited. Three main issues for…

Research in the field of collaboration in Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) has mainly focused in learning and social interactions. At the same time, research related to cyberbullying mainly refers to social media contexts. In the current research, bullying behavior was examined through the collaboration process between learning communities. Two…

Learning institutions in the Philippines employed online distance learning using the synchronous approach for real-time interaction among learners and teachers. While the arrangement is exploratory and contingent, and responsive to the continuity of learning during the pandemic, its impact remains uncertain. This is of interest including the…

As teachers' informal professional development is visible in social media, this study probes teachers' participation in self-organized Facebook groups in mathematics or Swedish-language education. In total, 553 posts from six Facebook groups were categorized using Shulman's knowledge-base framework, and analysed using systemic functional grammar.…

Purpose: This study investigated the role of experienced practitioners in promoting pre-service teachers' knowledge construction and social interaction in an online professional learning community. Design/methodology/approach: A repeated measures design with control and experimental groups was adopted. Two practitioners supported pre-service…

Recreating the social aspects of face-to-face teaching in an online environment became more challenging in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With limited or no face-to-face interaction with students, lecturers had to explore alternative ways to recreate aspects of an engaging and supportive face-to-face learning environment. This article focuses…