During the last years online education, in particular Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), has contributed to spread and popularize educational methodologies such as peer-review, automatic assessment, self-paced courses, self-evaluation, etc. Although these techniques can benefit face-to-face courses, most of them are not yet widely used in these…

There is increasing interest in the provision of online professional development (OPD) for teachers. This case study contributes to the field of research on professional development in the context of activities and discourses relating to mathematics teachers' synchronous oral communication online. The purpose of this article is to explore the…

Systematic reviews of literature are studies that strategically search for published research on a specific topic in order to synthesize what is known about the topic. This systematic review describes 157 articles on synchronous online learning (SOL) from thirty-four different countries on instructional setting, content areas, participant…

Evaluation of instruction has typically occurred during development, before implementation, and after course completion. The problem is that evaluation is typically post delivery; courses are not traditionally updated in real time with feedback from students in the classroom. However the potential to evaluate and modify instruction during delivery…

This case study examined student preference for delivery mode of online courses in two graduate degree programs in Library and Information Science. Within-group and between-groups comparisons indicated a distinct preference across the institutions. Findings from focus groups conducted with two cohorts of students enrolled in a federally funded…

Online learning environments can offer learners opportunities for flexibility, interaction and collaboration distinctly different from face-to-face learning environments. However, the integration of educational technologies also presents challenges and concerns in relation to students' learning. This article attempts to develop a better…

The present study examines the professional growth of three Chinese English teachers by analyzing their interactional patterns and their social and cognitive presence in an online community. The data from social network analysis (SNA) and content analysis revealed that computer-mediated communication (CMC) created new opportunities for teachers to…

The goal of this study was to explore the processes of group role formation in online class settings. Qualitative analysis was used to code chat logs and discussion threads in six undergraduate Family and Consumer Sciences online courses that required online group projects. Four themes related to the process of group role formation emerged:…

This paper presents a quantitative approach to multimodal discourse analysis for analyzing online collaborative learning. The coding framework draws together the fields of systemic functional linguistics and Activity Theory to analyze interactions between collaborative-, content- and technology-related discourse. The approach is used to examine…

The web has the potential to offer an environment that can support standardized medical education to students dispersed in time or place and, in the process, respond to reduced availability of patients for practice. This exploratory article describes how we evaluated critical thinking in an online collaborative Problem-based Learning (PBL)…

This paper compares the processes of Face-To-Face (FTF) teams and Online Learning Teams (OLTs) and proposes methods to improve the performance of OLTs. An empirical study reviewed the performance of fifteen FTF teams and OLTs and their communication patterns were coded by the TEMPO system developed by Futoran et al. (1989) in order to develop a…