Gamification is the use of game mechanics to drive game-like engagements and actions. It applies game mechanics, dynamics and frameworks to promote desired learning behaviours. Positive and effective gamification could enhance learning and engage learners in more social and context-rich decision-making for problem-solving in learning tasks.…

Today's generation often seeks help from each other in online environments; however, only a few investigated the role of Internet technologies and the nature of online help-seeking behavior in collaborative learning environments. This paper presents an educational design research project that examines college students' online help-seeking…

Social media is widely considered to improve collaborative learning among students and researchers. However, there is a surprising lack of empirical research in Malaysian higher education to improve performance of students and researchers through the effective use of social media that facilitates desirable outcomes. Thus, this study offers a…

This study aims to extend a previous work on the role of peer facilitation of asynchronous online discussions. Specifically, in this paper I report three cases that examine students' preference for peer or instructor facilitation of online discussion forums, as well as their respective reasons for it. These three cases involved the following…

For many people, mobile phones are a part of modern life. Although the purpose of this technology revolves around language and communication, its application to language learning still appears to be underutilized. This is changing, as the widespread use of this handheld technology offers numerous opportunities to use functions that are ideal for…

Student engagement is critical to student learning, especially in the online environment, where students can often feel isolated and disconnected. Therefore, teachers and researchers need to be able to measure student engagement. This study provides validation of the Online Student Engagement scale (OSE) by correlating student self-reports of…

Being actively engaged in a task is often associated with critical thinking. Cultivating critical thinking skills, such as purposefully reflecting and analyzing one's own thinking, is a major goal of higher education. However, there is a challenge in providing college students opportunities to clearly demonstrate these skills in online courses.…

It is often observed that the globalization of social media has opened up new opportunities for informal intercultural communication and foreign language learning. This study aims to go beyond this general observation through a case study that explores how discourse analysis tools might be used to uncover evidence of language and intercultural…

The very information structure of written communication depends not just on the writer's meaning and purpose but rather on the extent to which writer and reader share knowledge of pragmatic features of the language. To assess the actual effect of developing target language pragmatic competence through telecollaboration on improving English as…

This paper uses Language Management Theory (Nekvapil and Sherman, "Language management in contact situations. Perspectives from three continents". Peter Lang, Frankfurt/Main, 2009) to investigate Facebook pages as a site and instrument of behavior-toward-language, focusing specifically on the use of humor. The language in question is…

This research explores the ability of grade 2 students to engage in productive discussion about the state of their knowledge building using group-level feedback tools to support their metadiscourse. Two aspects of knowledge work were common to the comparison and experimental classes: "Knowledge Building talk" (KB talk) involving…

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to analyse the use of Communities of Practice and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to enhance knowledge sharing between researchers and advisors. The associated research question is to what extent ICT supported a virtual Community of Practice and has been effective in counteracting fragmentation…

In modern language (ML) distance learning programmes, teachers and students use online tools to facilitate, reinforce and support independent learning. This makes it essential for teachers to develop pedagogical expertise in using online communication tools to perform their role. Teachers frequently raise questions of how best to support the needs…

The human desire to join and participate in communities can be seen as an attempt to satisfy some of our universal human needs. The theory of communities of practice has been widely used to explain how and why humans participate in multiple communities, and a key requirement of a community of practice (CoP) is that members engage in "joint…

This paper outlines the redesign of an MSc module to enhance students' engagement and learning through embedding social media technologies into the academic curriculum as a learning and assessment strategy, and in a complementary manner that facilitated and enhanced the achievement of the module's learning outcomes. This paper describes the…