Improving social presence has long been a goal for online instruction; with the shift to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus on improving social presence has only become more imperative. In asynchronous online courses, social interaction typically relies on discussion groups. Despite this, little research has been…

Background: Online discussion is one of the commonly used tools to enhance students' interactions and engagements in online courses, but it is not clear how social presence in online discussions impacts students' learning and what kinds of interactions we should encourage. Social network analysis provides a new methodology to investigate how…

Discussion boards are a common component of asynchronous online courses. While many teacher preparation courses utilize traditional text-based discussion boards, university faculty are increasingly designing innovative approaches to asynchronous online discussions. There is significant research regarding the effectiveness of varied discussion…

Forum discussions have been utilised widely as a means of facilitating learning interaction and social-knowledge construction in online learning. Much research has been conducted on the instructional interventions that benefit asynchronous discussions. Role-playing, or assigning roles to discussants, has been proven effective in promoting…

The growth in online education has prompted a focus on ensuring students are engaged, persistent, and successful in their studies. A recognized challenge with online learning is developing a community of learners, where students feel connected to their peers and instructor and experience a sense of belonging. In this article, we highlight using…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the following questions--What are the types of discussion prompts in a fully online graduate course? What are the key characteristics of students' discussion initial posts and replies in a fully online graduate course? In what ways, if any, do discussion prompts influence the types of initial posts and…

Incivility in the college classroom distracts from the learning process. Students who are uncivil to their peers often shame and embarrass them in front of others, and uncivil students distract from learning opportunities by arguing with professors and coercing them for grades that were not earned. Incivility by students is counterintuitive to the…

Online discussion board activities have traditionally been a primary method of providing student-to-student interaction, especially in asynchronous online classes. This study examines the impact of an alternate online discussion tool on student participation in online discussion assignments. Three identical discussion assignments were examined…

This article provides several strategies for using a learning management system to engage online students and to promote the development of self-regulated learning skills in a 4-week accelerated summer course.

Effective face-to-face (F2F) classroom discussions are those in which learners discover and explore dissonance or inconsistency among themselves. The learners are the ones asking and answering the questions with the instructors serving as guides on the side. Laughter emanates from these noisy discussions and as the semester progresses, friendships…

The relationship between quantity of instructor to student interactions in online, asynchronous, course-specific courses at the community college level is under-researched. This quantitative, correlational study examined the relationship between the weekly number of instructor-generated posts and two course outcomes within fully online history…

Discussion forums are important components of online courses because of the collaboration and community they foster, and the language used within the discussion forums may be influential in this development. In particular, studying the gendered language patterns of discussion forums can help gain insight into students' state of mind and propensity…

Due to the predominance of test-oriented practice, one major challenge faced in Japanese high school classrooms is the lack of learning activities to develop higher order thinking. The purpose of this action research study was to explore an extracurricular blended learning program created to develop the higher order thinking of English language…

Each year students spend thousands of hours participating in discussion forums. Yet there has not been sufficient scholarship on the observable effects of discussion forums on learning outcomes, and there is not a clear understanding of the role discussion forums play in transmitting knowledge of course concepts to students. This study…

Online courses often include discussion forums, which provide a rich source of data to better understand and improve students' learning experiences. However, forum messages frequently contain private information that prevents researchers from analyzing these data. We present a method for discovering and redacting private information including…