Social media has been shown to be an efficient way to engage in networked participatory scholarship (NPS), which is defined as the use of online social networks to share and further develop scholarship. As leaders in the field, educational technology scholars should be at the forefront of this practice. We used social network analysis (SNA) to…

Students always suffer from burnout during online learning. Although social support and cognitive engagement are associated with learning burnout, limited information is available on whether and how these relationships change over time in an online learning setting. This study investigated the longitudinal relationships between social support,…

The emergence of digital communication channels has transformed faculty development, offering new opportunities for networking and collaboration. This paper explores successful practices for promoting connection and belonging among faculty members through platforms like Slack and Discord. Key strategies include creating dedicated channels for…

Online discussion research has mainly been conducted using case methods. This article proposes a method for comparative analysis based on network metrics such as information entropy and global network efficiency as more holistic measures characterizing social learning group dynamics. We applied social learning optimization analysis of networks…

In an era where digital platforms increasingly shape the educational experiences of learners, this dissertation examines activity in the Mathematics Discord Server (MDS), an expansive online learning community used by hundreds of thousands of mathematics learners worldwide. Daily interactions, numbering in the tens of thousands, focused on…

This research brief comprises three articles published in the three-article dissertation at the University of Missouri (MU) in February 2023. The three-article dissertation, "An Exploration of Online Information Spaces That Support Instructional Design and Teacher Professional Development," examined three online communities of practice…

The rise of modern socio-digital technologies has fundamentally changed the everyday environments in which young people communicate with each other and cultivate interests. To gain a more sophisticated understanding of this phenomenon, this study provides in-depth, qualitative insights into adolescents' experiences of their socio-digital…

Reading is a fundamental skill that is critical for later academic success. Despite extensive research on its development, reading remains a challenging skill for students in the U.S. to master: recent data from the National Assessment of Education Progress showed that 65% of fourth-grade students score below the level of "proficient" in…

Understanding the relationship between social and cognitive engagement has critical implications for collaborative learning theory, pedagogy and analytics. This study proposed a three-layered social-cognitive network analysis framework for examining the relationship between students' social and cognitive engagement from summative, epistemic and…

This study, which aims to find out the positive and negative aspects of the usage of social networking services in the management of schools, was designed as a qualitative research. Open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interview forms were used together with multiple data collection techniques in this study. It was found that some of the…

Emotion has long been a question of great interest in a wide range of fields. As a general rule, emotions are categorized as positive, which we seek, and negative, from which we turn away. However, empirically-backed connectivists claim that even negative emotions produce positive effects on student performance. What is less clear is how this…

The widespread adoption of digital e-learning environments and other learning technology has provided researchers with ready access to large quantities of data. Much of this data comes from discussion forums and has been studied with analytical methods drawn from social network analysis. However, within this large body of research there exists…

The aim of this investigation was to gain an understanding of the use of institutional social media accounts by graduate departments. This study focused particularly on the social media accounts of instructional design (ID) graduate programs. Content and statistical analyses were conducted to examine 24,948 tweets posted by ID programs (n = 22) on…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced school closure thus shifting teaching and learning towards full home-based learning (HBL). Technology plays a key role but the considerations to design online learning environments that meaningfully engage students are complex. This exploratory, qualitative study attempted to elicit eight mathematics teachers'…

Taking into account prior research suggesting a lack of student participation in online discussions, this study examines the influence of peer moderator (PM) role assignment on students' participation and that of their peers' participation in online discussions. Eighty-four participants operated in a moderator role, reciprocally. Moreover, the…