The move to digital, and now hybrid, education has defamiliarised teaching practices and unsettled experiences of what it means to be and to engage at university. In this article, I examine what new questions evolving teaching and learning practices provoke with regards rethinking notions of the body, and concepts of presence and absence.…

Collaborative learning environments that support students' problem solving have been shown to promote better decision-making, greater academic achievement, and more reasonable argumentation about controversial issues. In this research, we developed a technology-based critical discussion platform to support middle school students' argumentation,…

Discussion forums are often touted as maximising student participation and learning but concerns around engagement counter any perceived benefits. Often participation is the measure of engagement, and students who do not post are deemed unengaged. To further examine engagement and forums as learning communities, we used analytic data from 270…

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has ignited debates regarding its potential benefits and detriments for education. Despite widespread discussions, insights into GenAI's impact on education have been limited because early studies have often been narrow in scope and focused on specific contexts. Therefore, the purpose of…

This article provides computational and rule-based approaches for detecting confusion that is expressed in students' comments in couse forums. To obtain reliable, ground truth data about which posts exhibit student confusion, we designed a decision tree that facilitates the manual labeling of forum posts by experts. However, manual labeling is…

Discussion board forums have become commonplace within online learning environments (OLEs). With student enrollment in online classes continuing to rise and the emergence of COVID-19, more students will be utilizing discussion forums within OLEs than ever before. Positive pedagogical support for the use of discussion forums abounds, but studies on…

Learning Management Systems (LSM) have been adopted to provide interaction between instructors and students in online learning courses. In these environments, large volumes of messages are exchanged, making it difficult for the participants to follow all the discussions. When messages are ignored, students' opportunities to effectively construct…

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…

This study emerged from my concern as module tutor over the lack of participation amongst my student teachers on an Initial Teacher Training degree in lively, reasoned debate. Traditional approaches to teaching, which see learning as primarily a cognitive, internally-driven process, rarely take into account learners' linguistic and cultural worlds…

This study presents a case study of asynchronous online discussions' (AOD) growth patterns in an undergraduate blended course to address the gap in our current understanding of how threads are developed in peer-moderated AODs. Building on a taxonomy of thread pattern proposed by Chan, Hew and Cheung (2009), growth patterns of thirty-six forums…

Research on multicultural learning has focused on formal and local settings, such as schools, but young people are interacting with, and therefore learning from, informal settings and nonlocal contexts, including online platforms. That is, multicultural education is no longer limited to formal institutions, local contexts, or the printed word.…

History Professors and instructors have a lot to do. They are supposed to "cover content," introducing students to the main events in history. They also need to teach skills, such as historical thinking, source evaluation, argument construction, and research techniques. Particular "student learning outcomes" or assessments are…

A large proportion of students in higher education report feeling bored during lectures, for example, Mann and Robinson (2009) put this figure at 60 per cent. This short article reviews our experiences of using a simple, free Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, Skype, to enhance the interest and engagement of students by holding a…

Videogames, such as "The Sims," are a digital media passion drawing adolescents to online spaces where they create and share content. This article explores how discourses and expectations are taught in one online, videogame-related fan site of adolescents who read and write "Sims" fan fiction. Using Bernstein's pedagogic…

This article includes a review of the literature on personal epistemology and the reflective judgment model and applies these theoretical concepts to undergraduate students who engage in service-learning projects. The application will provide instructors with greater understanding of students' abilities and limitations in their…