Members in online communities of practice (CoPs) take advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to exchange practical or work-related knowledge in asynchronous online environments. Practical knowledge represents individuals' mental models allowing them to interact with the environment and perform tasks. With ICTs, practical…

This research brief comprises three articles published in the three-article dissertation at the University of Missouri (MU) in February 2023. The three-article dissertation, "An Exploration of Online Information Spaces That Support Instructional Design and Teacher Professional Development," examined three online communities of practice…

Online learning continues to grow in popularity each year. Colleges and universities need to provide online students with the same high-quality education that traditionally seated students experience. Course community, collaborations, and interactions provide students with quality educational experiences. This study reviews faculty perspectives…

The Introduction to Technology-Enabled Learning (TEL)MOOC was intended to engage teachers worldwide who work in any level of education and are interested in technology-enabled learning and Open Educational Resources. This paper investigates the response by participants from post-secondary educational institutions to the content presented in week…

Video is a rich medium that conveys more social cues than text. Use of video in an online discussion forum therefore has the potential to increase social presence in online learning environments. This experimental study compared a group using video for a portion of the required discussion posts to a group using only text in an online undergraduate…

Higher education faculty benefit from participating in communities of practice focused on developing and improving their own instruction. However, collaborators with common interests are not always located at the same physical location. In this article, we share how participation in a technology-facilitated lesson study provided the means for five…

It seems certain that blended learning will be on the rise in higher education, with in-person meetings increasingly precious time, and online synchronous and asynchronous sessions used to complement them. This paper examines Knowledge Building in two graduate courses conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were no in-person sessions;…

Online education and online video have both drastically increased in the 21st century, but previous research has not fully explored how video small groups might develop community in Christian education. For that reason, starting with relevant literature, then expanding through inductive coding of videos, this study determined which community…

University students use social media tools not only to connect with friends socially but also to collaborate with classmates. Many universities have embraced academically-focused social media platforms such as social question answering (SQA) applications to make student interactions easier. This study addresses how students in a face-to-face…

The notion of synchronous office hours in an asynchronous course seems counterintuitive. After all, one of the tenets of asynchronous education is to not require students to be online and participating at any time during the course. Having taught higher education online asynchronous courses for twenty years, the researcher experimented with online…

The nexus between paid work and study is important. Developing opportunities to facilitate this link is a key part of good course design especially in postgraduate programs. Strong communities of practice can also assist with improving links between research and practice. The online study environment affords some challenges to achieving these…

The ubiquity of online programs in higher education requires continued focus on designing instructional environments that improve students' learning. We examine students' perceptions of sense of community and learning, as well as academic achievement, using grades obtained from a final project and participation in asynchronous discussion forums.…

This paper investigates student responses to two tools used to create learning environments that encourage the sharing of ideas and discussion in online asynchronous university courses.

Purpose: This study aims to explore how the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (2000) is used to categorize students' and teachers' interactions in an asynchronous discussion and how these interactions are able to help students add quality to their narrative writing. Design/methodology/approach: The interactions were categorized based on teaching,…

In this qualitative study, we analyze postgraduate students' perceptions of strategic behaviors they developed during their online studies and their ability to extend this behavior to their own praxis. Findings suggest that strategic behavior centers around the development of four core skills: engaging in self-directed thinking; fostering…