Social presence is a popular construct used to describe how people socially interact in online courses. Online educators continue to try different ways to establish and maintain social presence in online courses. However, research to date has not identified which strategies, or types of strategies, are best for establishing social presence. We…

Studying at university can be a very stressful experience. Although the literature provides some information regarding different sources of stress among students, studies have not addressed the issue of changes over the course progression. This study aimed to obtain a deeper understanding of the sources of stress for first-year students and…

The paper examines educational potentials of "Facebook" groups that are created and managed by students without any involvement from teachers. The objective is to study student-managed "Facebook" groups as a "third space" between the institutional space of teacher-managed "Facebook" groups and the…

This study explores the use of language learning apps as a didactic tool for vocabulary building in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. It was developed through a mixed-methods approach, with a concurrent design in order to collect, analyze and validate qualitative and quantitative data. Although there was controversy on the use of…

This study reports on the first stages of a larger project to develop an ICT-supported cyberbullying prevention programme that fosters development of children's communication skills for the safe use of social media. To establish baseline data on the incidence and growth of cyberbullying in Bogotá, Colombia, we applied a Revised School Violence…

The inclusion of online elements in learning environments is becoming commonplace in Post Compulsory Education. A variety of research into the value of such elements is available, and this study aims to add further evidence by looking specifically at the use of collaborative technologies such as online discussion forums and wikis to encourage…

Universities are seeking techniques that encourage students to become more globalised in their perspectives. One method of fostering globalisation is to incorporate cross-national asynchronous online discussions with students from different countries within courses. The purpose of this study was to explore if participation by American and Chinese…

Technology is recognised as playing a part in the changing landscape in higher education; altering delivery modes and providing flexible opportunities for learning. Research into the use of wikis has shown that they provide many opportunities for student learning and the development of twenty-first century skills, however, there has been limited…

Social network sites (SNSs) have become a popular technology in recent years and are currently used in educational environments. Although SNSs have attracted much scholarly attention, students' experiences with and expectations about SNS uses in education have not been deeply explored. This study investigates educational uses of SNSs by analysing…

This dissertation is comprised of three linked studies investigating integrating online feedback practices into traditional classrooms. It focuses on one innovative practice, that of online peer-to-peer feedback, and highlights aspects of the process of developing this practice in each article. Each article relies on separate but connected…

Sustained discourse is critical to the learning potential of online courses. And, while research has surfaced many factors that mediate interaction, it further suggests that sustained interaction remains elusive. In this paper, I propose that student facilitation may have an impact on the quality of facilitators' interactions following a week of…

Research has established that students often consider the delivery of instructor feedback to be a face-threatening event. To minimize the potential negative effects of feedback, verbal and nonverbal face-threat mitigation (FTM) strategies are utilized by instructors. Advances in digital feedback systems, like online documents and learning…

This action research case study evaluates the effectiveness of using "flipped" instruction in a secondary social studies classroom. The researchers used mixed methods data to determine if flipping the instruction in a social studies class through the use of screencasting increased student learning as measured by pre- and post-unit…

This study aims to clarify the relationship between task types and foreign language learners' social presence (SP) in text-based SCMC learning modes. The participants in this study comprised 38 high-intermediate level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from different disciplines of a university in Taiwan. They were divided into two…

Feedback has long been utilised as an effective tool to enhance learning. Between students and teachers; students and students; students and schools, feedback provides a channel of communication between all parties within an education system. With the emergence and development of social networking sites (SNSs) over the past decade, it has become…