The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of three Structured Divergent discussion board prompt designs on knowledge construction in a graduate online course. According to Andrews (1980), the form of the question affects the extent of the response within a discussion. The Playground prompt, the Brainstorming prompt, and the Focal prompt…

This paper presents a role-play exercise and assignment that provides an active learning experience related to the system investigation phase of an SDLC. Whether using waterfall or agile approaches, the first SDLC step usually involves system investigation activities, including problem identification, feasibility study, cost-benefit analysis, and…

Young people's conversations about environmental and sustainability issues in social media and their educational implications are under-researched. Understanding young people's meaning-making in social media and the experiences they acquire could help teachers to stage pluralistic and participatory approaches to classroom discussions about the…

According to the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000), an enriching educational experience online in a collaborative learning environment requires three interdependent elements: social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. Social presence provides interaction in the online environment that allows…

As enrollment in distance education courses continues to increase, it is clear that online course delivery is here to stay. And all online courses today utilize a web- or cloud-based Learning Management System that includes a text-based discussion forum, commonly called a 'discussion board', which is the primary mode of communication within the…

The goal of the present work is to analyze the use of social networks as a tool for social empowerment by Spanish university students, and their perception of the university as an institution that contributes to the formation of a critical and active citizenship, that provides them with the relevant digital competences. The literature review shows…

This study explores the implementation of technology to facilitate students' persuasive writing skills within elementary school classrooms. Five teachers were interviewed regarding their experiences teaching persuasive writing to students using technology-mediated feedback. Teachers perceived the influence of technology on students' persuasive…

Language on the Internet and social media varies due to time, geography, and social factors. For example, consider an online chat forum where people from different regions across the world interact. In such scenarios, it is important to track and detect regional variation in language. A person from the UK, who is in conversation with someone from…

This article presents the development of a digital competency model of Distance Learning (DL) students in Brazil called CompDigAl_EAD. The following topics were addressed in this study: Educational Competences, Digital Competences, and Distance Learning students. The model was developed between 2015 and 2016 and is being validated in 2017. It was…

Political division in the United States is the subject of much analysis in the fields of political science and psychology. While political partisanship looms large over discussions of the national political climate's influence on schools and classrooms, very little work exists that directly examines the effects of high school students' political…

This study investigates a possible way to analyze chat data from collaborative learning environments using epistemic network analysis and topic modeling. A 300-topic general topic model built from TASA (Touchstone Applied Science Associates) corpus was used in this study. 300 topic scores for each of the 15,670 utterances in our chat data were…

The "Your Kid's Progress" public engagement process represented an unprecedented level of direct conversation between the Ministry of Education and British Columbia (BC) parents. A total of 5,531 feedback forms were submitted, and 379 members of the public attended 11 community open houses. In addition, 63 participants attended small…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…

Cyber threats can impact either the human (students, teachers, and staff) or the physical or virtual (e.g., information technology [IT] networks and systems) elements of schools and school districts. While there may be some overlap in addressing human versus physical/virtual threats, preparing for each type can require input from different…

Peer feedback is a central activity for project-based design education. The prevalence of devices carried by students and the emergence of novel peer feedback systems enables the possibility of collecting and sharing feedback immediately between students during class. However, pen and paper is thought to be more familiar, less distracting for…