Following the social turn in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1990s (Block, 2003), researchers have increasingly focused on the emic perspective of learners. As a result, identity, subjectivity, and agency have come to the forefront in SLA research. In an effort to afford learners the means to negotiate meaning more freely and to position…

In formal educational settings, such as online university lectures, instructional videos often consist of PowerPoint slides accompanied by a video or audio explanation from the instructor. It has been assumed that the social cues provided by the instructor's video may facilitate affective processes and affect learning outcomes. Research on…

Understanding how power is communicated by instructors and students is important to student motivation and learning. To examine how power is communicated online by instructors and how receptive (or not) students are to this, I examined four online graduate seminars using two analytical tools: community of inquiry (COI) theory and McCroskey and…

Following the pioneering work of Randy Garrison and colleagues, online teachers in the US and internationally see their discussion boards as communities of inquiry (CoI) which promote sustained communication and higher-level learning. The CoI approach to online discussions is based on John Dewey's conception of education in which teachers and…

The purpose of this case study was to explore Teaching Presence in the undergraduate online Business course environment. This study explored the following three Research Questions: 1. How do undergraduate Business students perceive Teaching Presence in online courses? 2. What Teaching Presence components do undergraduate Business students find…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a blended learning approach--involving the thesis, analysis, and synthesis key (TASK) procedural strategy; online Edmodo discussions; online message labels; and writing models--on student argumentative writing in a Hong Kong secondary school. It also examined whether the application of digital game…