E-learning occupies an increasingly prominent place in education. It provides the learner with a rich virtual network where he or she can exchange ideas and information and create synergies through interactions with other members of the network, whether fellow learners or teachers. Social network analysis (SNA) has proven extremely powerful at…

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the rapid growth in the MOOCs offering brought about a new educational landscape, posing new challenges to teaching and learning, mainly due to massive participation, ubiquity and free enrollment. These courses embody a confluence of technological and pedagogical mediations yet to be fully…

In today's world, where online learning environments have increased their efficiency in education and training, the design of the websites prepared for education and training purposes has become an important process. This study is about the teaching process of the online learning environments created to teach Turkish in web based environments, and…

The researchers in this study examined the influence of questions designed with the Practical Inquiry Model (PIM), compared with the regular (playground) questions, on students' levels of cognitive presence in online discussions. Students' discussion postings were collected and categorized according to the four levels of cognitive presence:…

In designing online and hybrid courses, instructors should consider structure, student motivation, and interaction (per Moore's 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance). To motivate students to interact and to build course community, instructors may assign student introductions. However, after examining students' introductions in a hybrid…

This chapter describes a study of a blended language course that combines face-to-face (F2F) instructional time with an online component. The purpose of the study is to understand how teachers and students exploit the complementarity of the two delivery formats to improve the learning experience. The study first examines how the presence of an…

This paper presents a best-practice model for the redesign of virtual learning environments (VLEs) within creative arts to augment blended learning. In considering a blended learning best-practice model, three factors should be considered: the conscious and active human intervention, good learning design and pedagogical input, and the sensitive…

Designing and implementing successful online learning has been at the forefront of institutional agendas since digital learning increased in market demand over the last decade. However there is still ongoing debate as to the "how" of this arduous task. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) is one learning design method that has seen potential…

This dissertation examines the spatio-temporal practices of a distance learning class in a graduate institution in the Northeast United States. Guided by a multispatial and temporal perspective, the case study builds on Hine's (2003) and Leander and McKim's (2003) connective ethnography of offline and online research sites, and frames the research…

In recent years, social networking services (SNSs), for example, Facebook, have shown exponential growth in their number of users. Witnessing the popularity of these SNSs, educational researchers have also explored the potential educational value of using SNSs. Despite the few studies that have investigated learners' attitudes toward and the…

Facilitating students' critical thinking in asynchronous discussions is important in online learning environments. Since students need to be self-regulated in online learning, the instructors are expected to scaffold students by providing structure and guidance. This paper discusses critical inquiry in two groups of students' online discussions.…

This study examined students' internal management of their cognitive processing in an interactive online class. A mixed methods approach was used to explore students' strategy use in online discussions. The focus is on examining individual knowledge construction through active cognitive engagement, rather than the social interactions, in the…

The purposes of this study were (1) to develop a teacher training program that integrates knowledge management (KM) and blended learning and examine its effects on pre-service teachers' professional development in creativity instruction; and (2) to explore the mechanisms underlying the success of such KM-based training. The employed KM model was…

This study combined traditional classroom teaching methods and blogs with blended creative teaching as a new teaching method for the course "Design and Applications of Teaching Aids for Young Children." It aimed to improve the shortcomings of the traditional teaching approach by incorporating the "Asking, Thinking, Doing, and…

This article aims to demonstrate how the use of an online journal, a bilingual blog, can contribute to filling in the language and cultural gaps of foreign language learners. This case study focuses on the participation, interaction, motivation, language acquisition, feedback and cultural input improved by students of Spanish as a Foreign Language…