Nowadays, blended learning represents a combination of both e-learning and Face-to-Face learning approaches, which has been considered as an emerging concept of modern education. It has been regarded as a prominent alternative learning approach compared to the conventional e-learning approach. The degree of satisfaction of students with blended…

Purpose: With the growth of digital education, students increasingly interact in a variety of ways. The potential effects of these interactions on their learning process are not fully understood and the outcomes may depend on the tool used. This study explores the communication patterns and learning effectiveness developed by students using two…

With the rapid growth of online learning at community colleges and the low course completion and performance associated with it, there has been increasing need to identify effective ways to address the challenges in online teaching and learning at this setting. Based on open-ended survey responses from 105 instructors and 365 students from…

Contribution: This paper has demonstrated that the use of blended learning in an electrical machines course has increased student engagement, pass rate, and scores across the GPA spectrum. Background: Lack of engagement by students in electric machine courses have been reported across the world. Interventions however, usually take the form of…

This paper describes a research study that investigated foreign language students' collaborative practice in a blended, authentic learning environment. A group of intermediate and advanced level students of Italian at an Australian university interacted and collaborated with each other and with a group of native speaker mentors through a web-based…

National efforts have been made to encourage technology integration in teacher preparation with expectations for frequent and successful applications with K-12 learners. While online learning has become pervasive in many fields in education, it has been somewhat slow to catch on in K-12 settings. The "Handbook of Research on Emerging…

Online discussions have been widely utilized as an educational activity, and much research has been conducted on the process and behaviors involved in asynchronous discussions. However, research on behavioral patterns in learners' synchronous discussions, including the process of social knowledge construction and project coordination is limited.…

Net-based collaborative learning discourses often suffer from deficiencies such as lack of coherence and coordination. It is suggested that the provision of two functionalities, referencing and typing, which learners may optionally use to ground their contributions during a chat-based discourse, can improve collaborative learning. In particular,…

Teachers are searching for new venues through which they may meet stringent professional development requirements. Under competitive funding from NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Office of Education and the NASA Explorer Schools Project, U.S. Satellite Laboratory, Inc. created a series of live, online, interactive…

This article described the experiences of an inservice professional development program for teachers with a focus on online synchronous discussions. Transcripts of six online synchronous discussions containing 3600 messages from an online teacher professional development course were analyzed. In addition, the researchers interviewed 10…

At Dalarna University, Sweden, modes of communication are offered at many points of Kenning's continuum with a web-based learning platform, including asynchronous document exchange and collaborative writing tools, e-mail, recorded lectures in various formats, live streamed lectures with the possibility of text questions to the lecturer in real…

Argumentative activity has been found beneficial for construction of knowledge and evaluation of information in some conditions. Many theorists in CSCL and some empiricists have suggested that graphical representations may help in this endeavor. In the present study, we examine effects of type of ontology and of synchronicity in students that…

Is tutoring online more than just email? Two yearlong studies explored tutoring online in two different modes. One, from Atlantic Community College in New Jersey, looked at asynchronous (not real time) tutoring online using a discussion board. The other, at Pima Community College in Arizona, used synchronous (real time) online software. The…

Schools and universities all over the world are continuously exploring ways to use the web technology in improving teaching effectiveness. The use of course web pages, discussion groups, bulletin boards, and e-mails have shown impact on teaching and learning in significant ways, across all disciplines. e-Learning has emerged as an alternative to…

We examined a novel formative assessment and instructional approach with 89 students in three electrical engineering classes in special computer-based discussion sections. The technique involved students individually solving circuit problems online, with their real-time responses observed by the instructor. While exploratory, survey and…