This study examines faculty perceptions of creating learning communities at a virtual university. Through online focus groups with 18 participants, 3 themes emerged: institutional-level community building as creating a learning culture; instructor-level community building as creating respectful interaction; and learner-level community building as…

Professional development programmes that include teacher collaboration can help teachers meet their professional needs and control their professional lives. They can voice their needs and expectations to peers who share similar experiences. Moreover, teachers can discover new teaching roles and opportunities, develop new skills and find motivation…

The online course offerings have grown exponentially globally since the turn of the 21st century--be they as a primary mode of instruction or as a supplement to traditional face-to-face classroom instruction, and this phenomenon is most noticeable in higher education. More recently, the new technology has also been integrated into the English as a…

In this study, the author specifically focused on the most popular social media website--Facebook--and investigated the nature of student learning engagement associated with Facebook activity. Data pertaining to student Facebook use and activities were collected. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to measure the relationships between…

The article is a literature review on cyberbullying from 2007-2013. Topics covered in the review have been categorized starting with definition of cyberbullying; roles of persons involved and statistics of who is being targeted; reasons for cyberbullying; differences between traditional bullying and cyberbullying; and gender comparisons related to…

Sixty university students in three different participant roles--perpetrator, the target and the bystander--took part in a role-play incident of bullying. Participants were asked to describe (i) their perspective on the incident; (ii) their views of the target and the perpetrator and (iii) their solution to the problem. The findings suggest that…

A considerable number of research studies that have involved mainly primary and secondary school students have shown that students' participation in collaborative projects through digital communities contributes to the positive development of intercultural interaction. The present research report examines the validity of the previous findings in…

Nursing in Western countries has become increasingly more theoretical, and nurse education has been integrated more often with the higher education system. Historically, nursing has been viewed as a non-academic domain. Establishing Nursing Science (NS) in Finland in the 1970s has meant that the new discipline is defined as the core of nurse…

Although study abroad is viewed as an ideal environment for interaction in the target language, research in this area has relied mostly upon self-reported data, which pose challenges regarding recall bias and participant commitment. This article shows how Facebook data can be used to analyze naturally occurring learner interactions during study…

Online learner profiles have diversified such that now, they include all types of participants from a variety of backgrounds. This study analyzed online learner profiles in regard to their entry characteristics, participation behaviors and achievement of course outcomes. The sample consisted of 186 participants from an online course that required…

Although distance language education has been widely adopted in university learning, very few researchers to date have looked at off-screen behaviors of second/foreign language learners in their physical environments while they engage in synchronous (real-time) online courses. This study examined one focal student's off-screen behaviors while…

For nearly as long as students, teachers, and community members have been adopting social media--more than a decade--community college leaders have sought ways to harness the power of online applications to improve fundraising and advocacy efforts. Dedicated Facebook pages and Twitter feeds were among the most logical starting points--if a college…

This article reports on part of the author's PhD action research study. It examines the complexity of features that social media and Web 2.0 offer when combined with face-to-face teaching and learning. Action research was used to help redesign the learning programs of XXX's thirteen Middle Years classes over an eighteen month period. These…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the "state of art" of organisational blogging. It also aims to provide a critical review of the literature on organisational blogging and propose recommendations on how to advance the subject area in terms of academic research. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review…

Organizing and implementing telecollaboration projects in foreign language curricula is not an easy endeavour (Belz & Thorne, 2006; Guth & Helm, 2010), as pedagogical, organizational and technical issues have to be addressed before cross-cultural interaction sessions can be carried out (O'Dowd & Ritter, 2006; O'Dowd, 2011). These issues make many…