While enrollment has been declining across higher education over the last decade, online education is one sector consistently enjoying enrollment gains, making its success indispensable to many institutions. Transactional distance theory has been used to study the experiences of online students and faculty and asserts that dialogue reduces the…

Online learning is one of the fastest growing trends in education. A practical problem faced by instructional designers and online instructors is how to design an interactive learning activity that benefits content mastery without adding technological barriers. The online discussion forum provides quick solutions because it is usually ready for…

What is interesting is virtual learning seems to go against the very nature of teachers and teaching. For example, many teachers are in the profession to change the lives of students, to have an impact, for interaction, to motivate and aspire students. Some teachers find that these are all diminished and even sometimes eliminated in the virtual…

Understanding the relationship between social presence and critical thinking is useful for gaining insight into the interaction and discourse of learners online. Further study of how these two presences interact is important because research has shown a wide variety of relationships, both positive and negative, between social presence and critical…

With the increased affordances of synchronous communication tools, more opportunities for online learning to resemble face-to-face settings have recently become available. However, synchronous communication does not afford as much time for reflection as asynchronous communication. Therefore, a combination of synchronous and asynchronous…

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.…

As enrolment in online courses has grown and LMS data has become accessible for analysis, researchers have begun to examine the link between in-course behaviours and course outcomes. This paper explores the use of readily available LMS data generated by approximately 700 students enrolled in the 12 online courses offered by Pamoja Education, the…

Many research studies have highlighted the low completion rate and slow progress in PhD education. Universities strive to improve throughput and quality in their PhD education programs. In this study, the perceived problems of PhD education are investigated from PhD students' points of view, and how an Information and Communication Technology…

The Community of Inquiry framework has been widely supported by research to provide a model of online learning that informs the design and implementation of distance learning courses. However, the relationship between elements of the CoI framework and perceived learning warrants further examination as a predictive model for online graduate student…

In college settings today, learners have increasing availability of choice between participating in Traditional group attendance courses, and participating individually in those same courses asynchronously Online. This study investigated the relationship between learner's characteristics and their performance in an educational psychology course.…

This study examined predictors of students' intentions to access face-to-face (f2f) or online options for lectures and tutorials in a buffet-style blended learning 2nd-year psychology statistics course ("N" = 113; 84% female). Students were aged 18 to 51 years ("M" = 23.16; "SD"= 6.80). Practical and technological…

Various Web 2.0 technologies can be used to support pedagogy. Examples include wikis, blogs, and social media including forum discussions. Online class forum discussions involving electronic text can result in robust strings of data containing meta-knowledge, inherent meaning, themes and patterns. Based on instructional design, learning outcomes…