The move to digital, and now hybrid, education has defamiliarised teaching practices and unsettled experiences of what it means to be and to engage at university. In this article, I examine what new questions evolving teaching and learning practices provoke with regards rethinking notions of the body, and concepts of presence and absence.…

Online academic communities are valuable spaces where participants can share information, find and provide support, and even be entertained. Online academic communities refer to hashtag-specific chats or other forms of affinity groups. Although these communities have been researched in the literature, more studies are needed to understand the…

Literature has suggested numerous benefits of online learning. In this study, we focused on asynchronous online discussion in higher education. We defined effective online discussions as making social presence known and conducting multidimensional discussions. Three dimensions were used to define multidimensional discussions: time, learning space,…

Growing interest in online learning has instructors looking for new ways to engage learners in asynchronous discussions. Building on experiences with hashtag use to connect on social media platforms, the purpose of this study is to investigate the contexts of hashtag use and its associated impact on learner engagement in asynchronous online…

Sociocultural perspectives of learning emphasise the role of social interaction and activity in the process of knowledge construction and foreground the social-cultural settings in which knowledge construction occurs. This paper examines how in-service language teachers co-construct technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) in…

In this exploratory, descriptive study we examined how discussion goals were accomplished during face-to-face and online case-based discussions facilitated by the same co-instructors. An analysis of discussion transcripts suggests that despite different instructor and student participation patterns across contexts, the instructors' goals of…

This paper aims to analyse if virtual forums set up in an environment specifically designed to improve collaborative learning can effectively influence students' discourse quality and learning when compared with those forums set up in a general environment. Following a coding schema based upon the set of scaffolds offered in the Knowledge…

With the increasing diversity of pedagogic models of delivery in higher education, universities are continually exploring practises of learning and teaching designed to enhance student experience and retention. The number of courses provided online continues to grow through, among other reasons, an escalation of higher education (HE) students…

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. These assignments are designed to add fuel to oral and written persuasion, including the practical use of rhetorical tools. Ideas to advance learners' professional development are presented.…

Online learning is a growing field of education with a corresponding increase in the use of asynchronous discussion. Asynchronous discussion is a form of interaction that is mediated rather than direct and where there is a time lag in the interactions between discussants. In this paper we conducted a brief narrative review of the literature on…

Is it possible to teach pastoral care online? McGarrah Sharp and Morris describe their process of transforming a residential on-campus pastoral care course into the first online offering of the course at their seminary. They begin by describing a series of pedagogical choices made with the intent of facilitating dynamic movement between…

This article focuses on heavy cognitive load as the reason for the lack of quality associated with conventional online discussion. Using the principles of cognitive load theory, four online discussion strategies were designed specifically aiming at reducing the discussants' cognitive load and thus enhancing the quality of their online discussion.…

This study examined the gender difference in students' perceived discussion strategies in face-to-face and online asynchronous contexts. A survey of 363 university students and follow-up interviews of 20 participants was conducted to examine any gender differences within each context and between the two contexts. The Discussion Strategies Scale…

A number of factors may affect student interaction in an asynchronous online discussion forum used in learning. This study deals with student preferences for the subject line of messages and in what ways the choice of subject line contributes to coherence and interaction reflected in the textual and interpersonal functions of the linguistic items…

This research investigated how differently elementary school students participate in synchronous online collaborative learning by analysing their discussions with their partners. Two hundred and seventy-eight Taiwanese students, ranging in age from 11 to 12 years old, were involved in this study. The students were randomly arranged within-class…