In the COVID-19 era, "Yellowdig" (an online discussion board with social media-like features) has increasingly risen to prominence in higher education. Reflecting on a multi-year experiment involving 14 international business and marketing courses, I argue that Yellowdig remains a valuable tool for learning even after returning to…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)--in part, because of their free, flexible, and relatively anonymous nature--may provide a means for helping overcome the large gender gap in Computer Science (CS). This study examines why women and men chose to enroll in a CS MOOC and how this is related to successful behavior in the course by (a) using k-means…

Visual bookmarking app Pinterest, known for its aspirational and consumptive qualities of users' "pinning" work, has recently made concerted forays into the online advertising and marketing space. At the same time, its visual and collaborative qualities offer unique potential for application in pedagogy. This paper describes a…

This study explored the impact of integrating ChatGPT into asynchronous online discussions. The analysis encompassed students' log data from Canvas and their perspectives on using ChatGPT. Results revealed a significant enhancement in overall discussion participation when ChatGPT is encouraged, emphasizing its potential as a catalyst for…

Our first-semester organic chemistry class focused on structured group work to enable active learning in class. When Smith College switched to online learning after spring break, the class was adapted to fit into an online learning model while retaining active learning. Using feedback from students, we implemented two tracks, one focused on…

The increasing prevalence of students' use of Google Translate has been the catalyst for re-developing the language classroom. Through progressive adaptations, Google Translate has been integrated to help support meaningful language learning, academic rigor and intellectual curiosity. Five key steps form the foundation of the ADAPT approach:…

This paper explores the effective online teaching practices and activities used for an asynchronous online learning environment. During the 15-week semester, students had various opportunities to learn rigorous content while utilizing various technological tools. The course, called "How People Learn," offered diverse and exciting…

We have developed a set of tools for improving online collaborative learning including an automated expert that monitors and moderates discussions, and additional tools to evaluate contributions, semantically search all posted comments, access a library of hundreds of digital books and provide reports to instructors. The technology behind these…

This paper considers the social value of anonymity in online university student communities, through the presentation of research which tracked the final year of life of the social media application Yik Yak. Yik Yak was an anonymous, geosocial mobile application launched in 2013 which, at its peak in 2014, was used by around two million students…

Online instructional design and how to engage students cognitively in online asynchronous courses have been an ongoing question. This case study presents an intentional design of an asynchronous online graduate course to foster cognitive presence. The research questions investigate students' cognitive presence (CP) captured by two measures:…

With the rise of e-Learning in engineering education, understanding the impact of individual differences on the ways students communicate and collaborate on-line has become increasingly important. The research described here investigates the influence of cognitive style on the interactions within student social networks in an on-line learning…

Since MOOC is suffering high dropout rate, researchers try to explore the reasons and mitigate it. Focusing on this task, we employ a composite model to infer behaviors of learners in the coming weeks based on his/her history log of learning activities, including interaction with video lectures, participation in discussion forum, and performance…

Online education is a modality of teaching that has proliferated throughout higher education in such a rapid form and without any guidelines that its quality and merit is largely unknown, hotly debated, and still evolving. Institutions have used online education as a method of reducing costs and increasing enrollments and students have flocked to…

Gamification offers potential for improving students' online discussion quantity and the depth of discussion content. However, very few studies have examined the social network patterns when students are posting and providing peer-feedback to each other in gamification-based environments. In response to those gaps, this study used a learning…

As course management systems (CMS) gain popularity in facilitating teaching. A forum is a key component to facilitate the interactions among students and teachers. Content analysis is the most popular way to study a discussion forum. But content analysis is a human labor intensity process; for example, the coding process relies heavily on manual…