Basic English and maths skills are crucial for Londoners to access further education and good work, and to support them to participate in their communities and improve personal wellbeing. Supporting Londoners to achieve basic skills is a priority for the Greater London Authority (GLA). However, we know that too many Londoners are without these…

Online courses frequently use discussion forums to enhance student engagement, an approach that is critical to fostering positive student learning outcomes. Because discussion forums are common in online classes, many instructors rely on summary statistics and self-reported measures to assess student engagement. However, these metrics overlook the…

Online learning environments and activities via learning management systems have become the new normal in most educational institutions after the COVID-19 pandemic. An online discussion forum is ideal for online and hybrid courses to enhance collaborative participation between learners and instructors. The problem addressed in this study is the…

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…

Online discussions tend to be more effective when they are purposefully structured. In this article, we describe how the design of a photo-based protocol influenced community interactions within an online discussion in an undergraduate course. Students were asked to take and share a photo related to a course concept, respond to a peer's photo, 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…

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…

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…

This qualitative study aims to improve accessibility and equity in digital spaces by identifying the prevalent mismatch between online course design, student culture, and its connection to instructional design for teacher preparation programs. Utilizing feminist theory, we explore the intersection between community, identity, and learning within…

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…

Forums are essential components facilitating interactions in online courses. However, in large-scale courses, many posts generated, which results in learners' difficulties. First, the posts are poorly organized and some deviate from the topic, making it difficult for learners' knowledge acquisition. Second, learners cannot receive timely feedback…

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…

In the field of learning analytics, mining the regularities of social interaction and cognitive processing have drawn increasing attention. Nevertheless, in MOOCs, there is a lack of investigations on the combination of social and cognitive behavioral patterns. To fill in this gap, this study aimed to uncover the relationship between social…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting university students' participation in discussion forum of electronic learning platforms of teacher--student interaction. Design/methodology/approach: One-stage cluster sampling was used and a cross-sectional survey of 113 university students from four courses was done.…

This study investigated the impact of using a discussion strategy with learning analytics on the level of student cognitive presence and interaction. The study used a quasi-experimental design with control and experimental groups. The experimental group applied open-ended discussion and elaborated feedback with learning analytics while the control…