Student enrollment in online courses continues to grow as student retention rates continue to decrease. Student disengagement in learning directly impacts online nursing programs' attrition and retention rates. The problem addressed in this study was students' disengagement with learning in asynchronous online nursing courses. The bioecological…

Social Annotation (SA) is a learning technology that allows people to read, highlight, and comment on specific parts of text. SA tools like Hypothes.is enable users to highlight and annotate texts and documents online and respond to others' annotations via text, sharing links of documents, audio, or video. Research on SA in higher education online…

Informed by sociocultural theories, collaborative writing (CW), a writing activity that involved two or more writers who share and exchange knowledge and negotiate decision-making to complete a single written text (Storch, 2002, 2013), has been found to benefit the second language (L2) students' language learning by a substantial body of empirical…

Adaptive collaborative learning support (ACLS) aims to facilitate collaborative activities by providing intelligent feedback and support based on students' collaboration. Existing ACLS systems have been applied in various collaborative environments, ranging from co-located collaboration in the classroom to online learning environments. While these…

The relationships between social network centrality, social construction of knowledge, and nurse practitioner competency among adult gerontology acute care nurse practitioner students participating in asynchronous online discussions were explored. Social network centralities (betweenness, in-degree, out-degree, closeness, and eigenvector) were…

Despite rapid growth in online enrollment within higher education, persistence and completion rates remain lower for online courses than face-to-face courses. This discrepancy between the two modalities indicates a need to better understand students' self-regulated learning (SRL) within online learning environments. Students with higher SRL skills…

Research indicates that online education is becoming a more prominent platform for higher education. Using a constructivist pedagogical lens, this qualitative phenomenological study was designed to explore students' learning experiences within an online masters program. The study examined the extent to which effective engagement was facilitated by…

The effects of incorporating an online social networking platform, hosted through Wikispace, as a method to potential improve the performance of middle school students on standardized math assessments was investigated in this study. A principal strategy for any educational setting may provide an instructional approach that improves the delivery of…

This narrative inquiry collective case study investigated the experiences of six sixth grade American Indian males of the Lumbee tribe who struggle with reading. Bounded within an asynchronous closed wiki site, students from three sixth grade classes participated in online threaded discussions and created, posted, and viewed multimedia projects…

Previous research suggests asynchronous online computer-mediated communication (CMC) has deleterious effects on certain cooperative learning pedagogies (e.g., constructive controversy), but the processes underlying this effect and how it may be ameliorated remain unclear. This study tests whether asynchronous CMC thwarts belongingness needs…

The study compared traditional and nontraditional students' attitudes about the psychosocial learning environment and their influence on self-efficacy, enjoyment of online learning, and student satisfaction by using Moos' (1979) Model of Environmental and Personal Variables and the three dimensions of social climate as its theoretical framework.…

Online nursing education has been evolving at a rapid pace as it is recognized as offering the flexibility needed for practicing associate degree (ADN) and diploma prepared Registered Nurses to return to school to earn their BSN. At the same time, there is a paradigm shift in how nursing education is delivered. The focus has shifted from content…

Research has shown that simply linking learners from different countries using technology does not automatically bring about learning benefits; instead it frequently ends in tensions that, if not addressed, could potentially hinder learning. Using the lens of Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory, activity theory, and Engestrom's activity systems…

The purpose of this collective case study is to describe and explore a virtual learning community as experienced by women reentering higher education in an online graduate degree program. The grand tour question for this study was: How do reentry women in an online graduate program describe their experience in a virtual learning community? …

This dissertation investigates two specific research questions related to the effects of culture on "appropriation of affordances" and on "technological intersubjectivity." "Sociotechnical affordances" are conceptualized as action-taking possibilities and meaning making opportunities in a socio-technical system…