Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have been growing in popularity with educational researchers, instructors, and learners in online environments. Online discussions are as important in MOOCs as in other online courses. Online discussions that occur in MOOCs are influenced by additional factors resulting from their volatile and voluntary…

In this paper we examine aspects of the construction of authentic membership, competence, and sense of shared purpose within a professional community of educators accomplished by a class of pre-service teachers during a spontaneous electronic conversation. Implications for teacher education are considered.

In this article we examine the development, over 1 year, of mathematical discourse communities in 2 eighth-grade mathematics classes in a suburban public middle school. The curriculum topics included probability, functions, graphing, data analysis, and pre-algebra. The 50 students were heterogeneously placed; most were from upper-middle-class…