Funded by a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning grant from a University in western Canada, this paper reports on findings from an educational design research study (McKenney & Reeves, 2012) investigating the ways, and the extent to which, particular technological supports and other interventions impacted the acquisition of academic writing…

Collaborative writing is a task commonly used for learning and assessment in higher education. The complexity of this type of task requires special support for learning contents. Feedback can be used as a key element to improve students' learning and engagement. This paper presents and evaluates a teaching innovation that sought to design a model…

Wikipedia is an open educational resource that connects writers and editors to diverse discourse communities around the world. Unwarranted stigma is attached to the use of Wikipedia in higher education due to fears that students will not pursue rigorous research practices because of the easy access to information that Wikipedia facilitates. In…

Online collaborative writing tools provide an efficient way to complete a writing task. However, existing tools only focus on technological affordances and ignore the importance of social affordances in a collaborative learning environment. This article describes a learning analytic system that analyzes writing behaviors, and creates…

Given the fact that more and more universities stress on using English as medium to teach students with diverse backgrounds, the content and language integrated learning approach (CLIL) is now frequently introduced to faculty to support effective instruction and learning. Inspired by a CLIL workshop I attended, in which the instructor offered an…

This exploratory study aims to analyse the nature of teacher feedback during a collaborative writing assignment, and to identify the possible effects feedback has on the revision of a text written by university students in an asynchronous online learning environment. Under analysis are three editions of a master's course in e-learning, during…

The paper explores the relationship between formative assessment and social software. Formative assessment practices though beneficial for student learning become marginalised and constrained in open and distance learning environments in higher education. Feedback is a key factor in formative assessment and learners can benefit from the deployment…

The assessment of oral language is now quite commonly done in pairs or groups, and there is a growing body of research which investigates the related issues (e.g. May, 2007). Writing generally tends to be thought of as an individual activity, although a small number of studies have documented the advantages of collaboration in writing in the…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…