Online learning is growing rapidly and shows no signs of slowing down. This growth requires strategies to make online teaching as efficient and effective as possible in order to provide students with a quality education. One of the important factors that help support student learning is timely, quality feedback on assignments and in discussion…

Recent articles in this "Journal" have advocated for focusing instruction on core ideas of the discipline and moving assessment beyond content knowledge to also eliciting evidence about what students can do with their knowledge. Yet, the deep connected learning supported by this kind of instruction and assessment requires students to…

Virtual courses create a self-directed learning environment for students. Given that online environments provide anonymity so that the emphasis is on the content, rather than on the form of the message or the identity of the sender (Herring, 1993) this study assesses students' personal usages in an online collaboration across several states and…

The problem of low student completion rates in distance learning courses remains one of the major issues that institutions of higher learning face. Efforts by school administrators to reverse this trend have so far produced mixed results. The rapid expansion of distance learning has encouraged many institutions to move more courses online,…

This study explored the influences of relational elements and the background of communicators on the framing structure of email messages that were exchanged in an educational Institute in Malaysia. The investigation revealed that social distance played a more significant role than power relations as Malaysian respondents are, generally, more…

The purpose of this paper is to identify the types of students' interaction, as well as their discussion patterns in an online course. The study took place in a large Midwestern University and 17 graduate students participated in the study. The primary data was obtained from students' discussion forum postings. The researchers used both…

This paper presents the main findings of a UK study exploring graduate students' perceptions of web-based education, with a specific focus on their change over time, throughout an asynchronous course. Data were collected through online messages and interviews, and analyzed qualitatively, following content and thematic analyses. Participant pre-…

Interaction in online learning (OL) has been extensively studied over the past few decades. Today, courses following social constructivist (Vygotsky, 1997) based designs are widespread throughout higher education. These course designs place an emphasis on interpersonal interaction, which is largely viewed as beneficial to online learners, as a…

Both formative and summative assessment in online discussion-based courses have typically focused on the behavior of individual students. Metrics such as the number of posts or number of words are typical. While these metrics are arguably a reasonable proxy for the efforts of individual students, they give little insight into how successfully…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental, non-equivalent control-group design study was to examine and measure the impact of the opportunity to receive synchronous weekly instructor content on online students' sense of community, social connectedness, and perceived learning. The population for this study consisted of first-year undergraduate…

This study sets out to discern the students' perspective on the value/usefulness and importance of the e-portfolio, as well as their own performance and effort. The participants were 121 preschool and primary school initial teacher education students in a private university in Spain. They were enrolled in three asynchronous undergraduate sections…

Higher education has experienced a significant transformation from traditional face-to-face instruction to online instruction. The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to determine to what extent postsecondary online faculty utilized brain-based learning techniques as part of their academic practices in the online asynchronous…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of the multimedia annotations which were sent through instant messaging application WhatsApp on students' success in English vocabulary acquisition together with their opinions on the educational use of WhatsApp and the multimedia annotations. In the study, mixed method model, which combines…

This article presents an analysis of the orthographic errors found in university students' asynchronous digital writing. A university and a society belonging to the twenty-first century require students and professionals who can use their language correctly in any context, device and mode of communication. The research was based on a sample of…

Discussion forums are often a primary tool used for teaching and learning in asynchronous online courses. In this article, the author shares her experiences using discussion forums to promote learning, teacher presence, and community. In a retrospective microanalysis of discussion forums posts and interactions, the author identified five major…