Understandability and completeness are essential in modern collaborative digital platforms and their learning systems. These platforms have shaken up the traditional education setting, particularly in leveraging the coauthoring approach in problem-solving and streamlining the learning behavior of cowriting or corevising. Such a learning context…

Authentic dialogue demands that we respond, interpret and sometimes disagree with others' ideas--a key component of participation in a democratic society. Yet the sharing and uptake of different ideas can be hampered by traditional online platforms which divide students into isolated threads. To tackle this issue, we introduce two novel online…

For online doctoral students, learning the habits, cultures, and practices of the academy can be particularly challenging without informal, in-person interactions. As novice scholars and educators, engagement in the culture of the academy is an important component of the scholarly formation process. In this conceptual article, three online…

Computer supported collaborative writing (CSCW), due to the potential to enhance online collaborative writing performance, has received more and more attention in educational settings in recent years. However, the lack of social presence results in learners not being able to construct group awareness to reduce participation rate and even appear…

Aim/Purpose: This study investigated the integration of Google Docs in facilitating undergraduate students' interactional collaboration in an online translation course. The study also explored the engagement patterns that emerge when students use Google Docs and evaluated their experience of using this platform in collaborative translation.…

This study examined the effects of pretask training to promote peer collaboration, encourage learning opportunities, and foster individual L2 writing development in web-based L2 collaborative writing (CW) tasks. The participants were 48 students from two junior English composition classes at a Taiwanese university. One class (n = 24) was assigned…

This qualitative study explored digital technologies that promote educational experiences and achievements of culturally diverse learners via interviews with 46 culturally and linguistically diverse students across different academic programs. A qualitative research design using semi-structured interviews was used to collect the data for the…

E-learning experiences are widely becoming common practice in many schools, tertiary institutions and other organisations. However despite this increased use of technology to enhance learning and the associated investment involved the result does not always equate to more engaged, knowledgeable and skilled learners. We have observed two key…

The support of multilingual content becomes crucial for educational platforms due to the benefits it offers. In this paper we propose a concept that allows content authors to use the power of the crowd to create (semantically) structured multilingual educational content out of their material. To enable the collaboration of the crowd, we expand our…

Based on the explicit principles of connectivism (autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity) and on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward resources and learning, connectivist Massive Open Online Courses (c-MOOCs) have made a large impact in online education since 2008. Ideally a great part of c-MOOC…

A digital learning and performance support environment for university student design tasks was developed. This paper describes on the design rationale, process, and the usage results to arrive at a core set of design principles for the construction of such an environment. We present a collection of organizational, technical, and course-related…

The growth of technology and the inclusion of "digital natives" as students in the education world have created a demand pull for the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education. Dominant among these tools have been wikis, blogs and discussion boards. Distance education experts view the use of these tools as differentiators when compared to…

The initial phase of undergraduate engineering degree programmes often comprises courses requiring mathematical expertise which in some cases clearly exceeds school mathematics, but will be imparted only later in mathematics courses. In this article, an approach addressing this challenge by way of example within a "fundamentals of electrical…

There is a dearth of research into teaching strategies and learning approaches for units involving sensitive topics that can provoke an emotional response in students. In a business ethics unit, attempts to strike a balance between conceptual knowledge and theory and skills training can be challenging because the unit can involve personal,…

Google Docs, a free web-based version of Microsoft Word, offers collaborative features which can be used to facilitate collaborative writing in a foreign language classroom. The current study compared writing abilities of students who collaborated on writing assignments using Google Docs with those working in groups in a face-to-face classroom.…