Many different factors influence students' sense of belonging in an online learning. One area of the learning experience in which a sense of "belonging" is critical is in online asynchronous discussions, and the degree to which students feel that their contributions to those discussions are valued. Unfortunately, the structure of…

Online discussion forums are highly valued by instructors due to their affordance for understanding class activities and learning. However, a discussion forum with a great number of posts requires a large amount of time to view, and help requests are easily overlooked. Various machine-learning--based tools have been developed to help instructors…

With the growth of online courses, moderators can play a significant role in engaging and supporting learners in asynchronous online discussions (AODs). However, a synthesis of the research on moderators has not been performed in the 40 years since the term was first used in reference to online learning. We examined 76 studies to determine key…

In-service teachers, constrained by work commitments, adopt online learning methods for their graduate studies, emphasizing the significance of exploring the construction of online learning communities. Analyzing collaborative conversation texts within the online learning process of the "Learning Science" course at a university in…

Laboratory experience is critical to foster college students' collaborative problem-solving (CPS) abilities, but whether students stay cognitively engaged in CPS tasks during online laboratory sessions remains unknown. This study applied multimodal data analysis to examine college students' (N = 36) cognitive engagement in CPS during their online…

The purpose of the study was to examine (a) students' social annotation behaviors and engagement change in an undergraduate course throughout the semester, and (b) which social annotation behaviors impact active engagement time. A total of 91 university students' social annotation behaviors, as well as their active engagement time in readings,…

Nudging has been used in a range of fields to shape citizens' behavior and promote public priorities. However, in educational contexts, nudges have only been explored relatively recently, with limited but promising evidence for the role of nudging used to increase engagement in online study, particularly in higher education. This paper reports on…

Although the literature on feedback processes has identified two approaches to feedback--more transmissive or more dialogical--there is little empirical evidence of how students perceive feedback practices, particularly in online education. Moreover, there is a lack of research addressing previous experience with online feedback (frequency,…

Collaborative learning can be a worthwhile and valuable part of a student's online course experience, and interpersonal exchanges among members of an online course community often rely on greater intentionality within the design of the learning experience. We present a synergistic framework for strategic design of collaborative learning in the…

Although higher education institutions offer self-paced massive open online courses (MOOCs) on platforms like edX, little systematic effort has been made to examine their instructional design features. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to review self-paced MOOCs on edX and examine their instructional design features for those interested in…

The community of inquiry contends that meaningful learning occurs in the interaction among the teaching, social, and cognitive presences. Although studies have validated the close relationships among the three presences, the roles of teaching presence indicators in students' social and cognitive presences need to be further explored. Therefore,…

Collaboration is a conceptually ambiguous aspect of open education. Given inconsistent discussion about collaboration in the open education literature, this article suggests collaboration be defined and studied as a distinct open educational practice. A theoretical stance from the discipline of computer-supported collaborative learning helps…

Computer-supported collaborative argumentation is an online activity that can engage students in deep discussion and analysis of complex problems. Given the potentially confrontational nature of argumentation, using polite language becomes a strategic approach to prevent breakdowns in group communication and nurture productive dialogues. This…

Community and connectedness are important concepts in online higher education. However, researchers debate how they are defined, operationalized, or enacted in practice. A scoping study was conducted to review the research literature on the extent, range, and nature of research in community and connectedness in online higher education. A total of…

This paper discusses operationalization of open educational practices (OEP) using innovative, Internet-influenced pedagogies to expose dangers of post-truth narratives. The first part reviews interpretations of OEP (associated with open-access and tools, collaboration, problem-centered learning, and democratic pedagogy) and explores possibilities…