Given the prominence of online teaching over the last few years, mobile instant messaging (MIM) has grown in importance for students studying English outside of class. Applications like WhatsApp have the potential to provide language learners the opportunity to practise communicative strategies while receiving feedback from a teacher. To explore…

Framed from positioning theory and dynamic systems theory, the paper reports on a naturalistic study involving four Chinese participants and their American peers in an intercultural asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) activity. Based on the moment-by-moment analysis and triangulation of forum posts, reflective essays, and…

The current study describes the development of a content analysis coding scheme to examine transcripts of online asynchronous discussion groups in higher education. The theoretical framework comprises the theories regarding knowledge construction in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) based on a sociocultural perspective. The coding…

Peer moderation has been used as a beneficial strategy in asynchronous online discussions to assist student learning performance. However, most studies in peer-moderated asynchronous online discussions (PMAOD) have focused only on learning effectiveness and perceptions of students rather than on students' knowledge dimensions and cognitive…

This article explores the issue of quality in online career mentoring. It builds on a previous evaluation of Brightside, an online mentoring system in the UK which is primarily aimed at supporting young people's transitions to further learning. The article notes that participants in Brightside's mentoring programmes reported satisfaction with…

Although the second language literature on Dynamic Assessment (DA)--the unity of assessment and instruction into a singular activity to promote cognitive development--shows promising results, very little has been written about how to educate teachers to use it. This two-cycle, exploratory action research study aimed to understand and address the…

According to our experience, facilitating online reflective writing via Facebook motivates students to improve their writing skills and reflective thinking. Six students and a teacher from an urban school in the northern region of Malaysia were involved in this study. The qualitative data in the form of online archives were categorized as…

In this study, the kinds of shares made by science teachers in a WhatsApp group as an online community of practice to support professional development were examined. The netnographic research method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. The messages shared by 12 science teachers, who worked at a private school between…

Emotions have been confirmed to be a critical component of the process of learning. In the online Community of Inquiry theoretical framework, and the recently suggested online Relationship of Inquiry framework, emotions are considered a subsection of social presence. In this study, the concept of emotional presence is examined. This examination…

With the adoption of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in educational institutions, a lot of data has become available describing students' online behavior. Many researchers have used these data to predict student performance. This has led to a rather diverse set of findings, possibly related to the diversity in courses and predictor variables…

This article aims to investigate how university students perform agency in an online course and whether the collaborative nature of the course affects such expression. A total of 11 online web forums involving 18 students (N = 745 posts in total) were qualitatively analysed through the use of a codebook composed of five categories (individual,…

Background: Despite the accumulating evidence highlighting the significant roles of an effective facilitator and appropriate pedagogies that a facilitator employs in shaping the professional learning environment, there is a paucity of research that explores how facilitators learn to facilitate. Purpose: The overall purpose of this study was to…

This study reports on a qualitative small-scale exploratory study which examined the factors influencing 32 Iranian pre-service language teachers' participation in online asynchronous text-based discussion forums. By adopting a multiple case study design and analysing data gathered through semi-structured interviews and participants' online…

Dynamic assessment (DA) as an alternative to psychometric-based testing focuses on the collaborative dialogue between the learners and the mediator to move the learners from their current capabilities. This study represents a web-based qualitative inquiry in online DA which aims at addressing the inadequacy of the diagnostic feedback of the…

This article reports a study on collaboration within an action research project that was conducted by university researchers and elementary school teachers in the Azores, Portugal. More specifically, it examines how different kinds of participants worked together in different phases of the project. The notion of mutuality (i.e., the relative…