Online discussions in a doctoral research methods course: ‘Like a text by many authors’

In this mixed-methods study, we investigated how doctoral students used asynchronous online discussions that were added to a face-to-face research methods course. We focused specifically on what sociocognitive tools the students used and what they thought about the value of the online discussions for their learning. Our data included three online whole-class discussions from the course and students’ self-evaluations, which they completed three times during the semester. Our findings support the usefulness of online discussions in providing a site where students could draw on a rich repertoire of tools and strategies as well as on the knowledge of others to enhance their thinking and understanding of theory and research.     

Designing video feedback to support the socioemotional aspects of online learning

The COVID-19 pandemic required instructors to rapidly redesign subject delivery for the online environment. In dealing with this emergency situation, instructors may have focused their energies primarily on transitioning learning and assessment activities to the online context rather than working to support the socioemotional aspects of learning, such as belonging and motivation. As a result, online classes may have lacked social presence, leaving students feeling unvalued and demotivated. Research findings by Borup, West, and Thomas (Educ Technol Res Dev 63(2):161–184, 2015) indicate that instructors may be able to support positive socioemotional outcomes for online students through the provision of video feedback comments. The purpose of this short response is to briefly review the work of Borup et al. (2015) and, in doing so, highlight three key design considerations relating to the creation and provision of video feedback comments in order to bolster socioemotional outcomes for online students. Limitations and implications for future research are also discussed, including cultural and inclusivity issues.

     

Online Students’ Attitudes Toward Collaborative Learning and Sense of Community

ABSTRACT

Feelings of community increase information flow, cooperation, support, and a sense of commitment toward group goals. Many studies have explored the significance of sense of community and collaborative learning activities in online learning environments. Using a correlational study, the relationship between students’ sense of community and their attitude toward online collaborative learning was examined in this study. Results indicate that collaboration and sense of community were moderately correlated. A positive correlation between collaboration and students’ sense of community was determined. It was also noticed that the degree of correlation between sense of community and collaborative learning was higher among graduate students than among undergraduate students. Furthermore, a higher degree of correlation existed between a positive attitude toward collaborative learning and the dimensions of sense of community when compared to the correlation between a negative attitude toward collaborative learning and sense of community.     

An exploration of social regulation of learning during scientific argumentation discourse

Argumentation and scientific discourse are essential aspects of science education and inquiry in the 21st century. Student groups often struggle to enact these critical science skills, particularly with challenging content or tasks. Social regulation of learning research addresses the ways groups attempt to navigate such struggles by collectively planning, monitoring, controlling, and reflecting upon their learning in collaborative settings. Such regulation and argumentation can also elicit socioemotional responses and interactions. However, little is known regarding how regulation processes and socioemotional interactions manifest among students involved in small-group discourse about scientific phenomena. As such, in this qualitative study, we explored social regulation of learning, scientific argumentation discourse, and socioemotional interactions in the discussions of two groups of high school physics students (n = 7, n = 6). We found key qualitative distinctions between the two groups, including how they enacted planning activities, their emphasis on challenging other’s ideas versus building shared understanding, and how socioemotional interactions drove discourse. Commonalities across groups included how regulation initiation related to discourse, as well as how the difficulty of the content hindered, and teacher support augmented, the enactment of social regulation. Finally, we found overlapping regulation and discourse codes that provide a foundation for future work.     

Adventure Learning: Transformative hybrid online education

Adventure learning (AL) is a hybrid distance education approach that provides students with opportunities to explore real‐world issues through authentic learning experiences within collaborative learning environments. This article defines this online distance education approach, outlines an AL framework, and showcases an AL archetype. In AL environments, classroom teachers are not positioned in the role of teacher/facilitator/designer in the online learning spaces. AL online spaces are collaborative spaces where students, teachers, subject experts, and AL team members interact with one another; these are community spaces where traditional hierarchical classroom roles are blurred. Students' roles transform due to the flexibility and design of the AL learning environments as they move from student to reflective practitioner, providing for new ways of learning and teaching.     

Interrogating students’ perceptions of their online learning experiences with Brookfield’s critical incident questionnaire

This article discusses whether the very act of accessing online students’ experiences of teaching may itself foster students’ sense of belonging to a learning community. The article reports and reflects on the application of Brookfield’s critical incident questionnaire (CIQ) in postgraduate courses delivered online in 2008–2010 through the University of Newcastle in Australia. The anonymous CIQ is designed in part to access students’ views of teaching practice, and was deployed as part of an ongoing interest in quality teaching. The article makes recommendations for deploying the CIQ in online learning spaces and concludes with some reflections on unexpected opportunities thoughtful CIQ deployment may provide. The practice of sharing students’ anonymous responses may have helped to foster students’ sense of a shared learning community. This may be particularly valuable in an asynchronous online learning context where students are typically geographically isolated from one another.     

Turning Groups Inside Out: A Social Network Perspective

Most research related to learning in groups focuses on the unit of the group and/or group members. However, students may benefit from crossing the boundaries of their own group, as students in different groups may provide access to new, nonredundant knowledge and opportunities for learning. Whether boundary crossing between groups is beneficial for learning and academic performance has received limited conceptual and empirical attention. Using social network analysis and structural equation modeling, we contrasted pre/post network developments among 693 students (132 groups) across 4 modules at a UK business school. We examined whether it is better for students to invest in social relations in groups to learn and enhance academic performance or to (continue to) invest in social relations outside groups. Our findings indicated that students seemed to learn more from learning relations outside their group than from their own group members. Students with more intergroup relative to intragroup learning relations performed better on module assessments and throughout the academic year than students with more intragroup learning relations. Boundary crossing and intergroup learning deserves more empirical attention and experimentation on how to balance boundary crossing and effective group learning strategies.     

Pedagogical practices of NetNZ teachers for supporting online distance learners

A supportive online learning environment entails teachers using effective pedagogical practices to meet the needs of their students and developing a positive teacher–student relationship to foster learner motivation and engagement. This paper reports a study investigating how 32 secondary teachers in New Zealand taught their online distance classes and how they related to their students. These classes were administered by NetNZ, an online distance education community. An online survey conducted in 2016 found that NetNZ teachers used inquiry-based practices including flipped learning and knowledge-building pedagogies to support agency, autonomy, collaboration, and community development. They also used synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies to overcome barriers of relationship building in online settings. NetNZ was unique in delivering distance education in the New Zealand context in that it used a community approach to encourage a more active participation of its member schools and teachers in delivering distance courses to secondary students.     

New Model of Teacher Learning in an Online Network

While many researchers have examined teacher participation and professional development in online networks and communities, few have looked at the factors and contexts that shape how teachers learn in these online spaces. Examining teachers' learning processes within these online spaces can yield important insights for scholars, school leaders, and teacher educators who are interested in designing online networks and communities or supporting teacher professional development within these spaces. This study was designed to shed light on the multifaceted nature of teacher learning within an online network environment. Data were collected through an online survey and in-depth interviews of members in the Edmodo math subject community. A thematic analysis was conducted across the two data sets in order to identify patterns of actions and factors that shaped the participants' learning processes. A new model of teacher learning was developed to display teacher learning as an iterative, multistep process that is socially constructed, distributed, and situated in the contexts in which teachers work. Implications and ideas for further research are discussed.     

Understanding effects of COVID-19 on undergraduate academic stress,motivation and coping over time

The rapid and unprecedented shift from face-to-face instruction to remote online learning as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on teaching and learning in Higher Education: students had to adapt to a new way of learning, away from typical campus settings and their peers, and to new forms of assessments. This study examined academic stress, learning strategies, motivation and ways of coping from a sample of 177 unique students from a large London university, collecting primary data via survey at three time points during the academic year 2020/21 when teaching was remote and online only. Our findings show how patterns in academic stress, learning strategies, motivation and coping vary over the course of the academic year giving novel insight into how student learning and adaptation to the situation changed over time. We also report on differences in these patterns according to year group and for those students who are the first-in-family to attend university and those who are not. Based on these findings we identify priority areas where higher education institutions should support undergraduate students and provide evidence that some groups of students may need more and targeted support to secure their ongoing learning and well-being.     

A Student’s Guide to Strengthening an Online Community

Students usually have plenty of experience with online social technologies, but they lack understanding about how to use these tools and methods for course learning. This article is designed to help college students who are anxious about participating in an online learning community or do not know how to build one effectively. With ideas derived from research and practice, this guide has been written to inform online students about learning communities, the benefits they offer, and how students can assist in building a successful online community.     

The Impact of Blended Learning on Community of Inquiry and Perceived Learning among High School Learners Enrolled in a Public Charter School

Abstract

This study examined how blended learning impacts high school learners’ community of inquiry (CoI) and perceived learning in comparison to online instruction. Archival data collected from a public charter high school in the U.S. southeast was examined. The results demonstrate a statistically significant difference in social presence among students enrolled in blended learning courses as compared to online learning only. No statistically significant difference in perceived learning existed between groups. Findings are discussed in light of the community of inquiry framework and add to current understanding of the impacts of distance learning on K-12 student outcomes and the applicability of the CoI framework to K-12 learning environments.     

Group Projects: Student Perceptions of the Relationship Between Social Tasks and a Sense of Community in Online Group Work

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between specific social tasks and student perceptions of a sense of community during online group work. A survey instrument was developed, piloted, and deployed to 125 students in six different online classes. Results revealed few significant relationships between each of the five social tasks examined and student perceptions of a sense of community during online group work; however, students reported that some social tasks were important. Students seemed to focus more on completing a task for a grade than seeing group projects as part of developing community to enhance learning. This might reflect a lack of understanding by the students of the importance of social tasks to successful group project completion.     

Technology,learning and instruction: distributed cognition in the secondary English classroom

In this paper, we analyse interactions between secondary students and pre‐service teachers in an online environment in order to understand how their meaning‐making processes embody distributed cognition. We begin by providing a theoretical review of the ways in which literacy learning is distributed across learners, objects, tools, symbols, technologies and the environment in modern English language arts classrooms. This is followed by a case study where we identify how programme values, textual resources and cultural schema function as distributed tools. In traditional schools, with an emphasis on taking standardised tests, the learning environment is designed on the view that learning is a transaction that happens solely ‘inside the head’. Unfortunately, this pushes many students to the margins of classroom engagement and participation. By analysing students' and pre‐service teachers' online discourse, we argue that virtual spaces can facilitate critical dialogue and can act as catalysts for a distributed theory of mind.     

Using Facebook groups to support social presence in online learning

Building interpersonal connections in asynchronous online learning is important, but it is harder to achieve compared to face-to-face learning experiences due to its mostly text-based nature. Facebook is a popular social media platform and has been used as an outside-class communication space in formal learning contexts to supplement cognitive and affective aspects of learning. In this study, we used Facebook groups as supplemental social spaces in two asynchronous online master’s-level courses to understand if it impacted students’ perceptions of social presence (i.e., copresence, immediacy, and intimacy), learning interaction with faculty and peers, as well as sociability of the online learning environment. The results indicated that students felt more positively about social presence and learning interactions with other classmates and their instructor and perceived the course as having more sociability after they joined the class Facebook group. Findings have implications for supporting social impression formation in online learning.     

Enhancing the facilitation of online groups in higher education: a review of the literature on face-to-face and online group-facilitation

There still appears to be a gap between what online learning promises and what it can deliver in terms of student learning. Developments in online pedagogies and professional learning appear to lag behind the developments in technology and the promised benefits of technological transformation may not be realised. In this paper, we bring together perspectives that highlight vital aspects of online group-learning by reviewing the group-facilitation literature and the latest online learning literature to interrogate the pedagogical theories and practices currently used in online group-learning in higher education. We specifically focus on the interpersonal interactions between teachers and students, which are described in the online learning literature using the terms instructor immediacy, teaching presence, and social presence. We note differences in the literature regarding how teacher presence is interpreted and enacted and we expound the importance of the personal characteristics of the online teacher. Finally, we provide some signposts that might help course designers and teachers to improve online group learning: the intentional use of effective online learning pedagogies; a deeper understanding of what constitutes teacher presence; and strategies to enact that teacher presence with online groups. Recommendations for further research in online group facilitation are provided.     

Empowering Student Voice through Interactive Design and Digital Making

Over the last two decades online technology and digital media have provided space for students to participate and express their voices. This paper further explores how new digital technologies, such as humanoid robots and wearable electronics, can be used to offer additional spaces where students' voices are heard. In these spaces, young students are invited to shape the design of digital tools and artifacts through the inclusion of their unique perspectives. The authors argue that involving youth in the design and use of tools contributes not only to the creation of meaningful learning experiences but also to the future potential of youth as producers of digital learning technologies.