Through the lens of the Community of Inquiry education experience (Vaughan & Garrison, 2006), this practice report provides guidance and examples for online instructors to engage students within discussion boards in the digital realm. Five elements will be discussed: embedding multi-media, affiliative humour and storytelling, Socratic…

This study aimed to identify factors influencing student engagement in online and blended courses at one Australian regional university. It applied a data science approach to learning and teaching data gathered from the learning management system used at this university. Data were collected and analysed from 23 subjects, spanning over 5500 student…

Increasingly postgraduate courses are delivered online to meet professionals' demands for life-long learning. The research examined the efficacy of students critiquing each other's seminal work, by either direct exchange or via online fora, as a structured part of their formal assessments. A total of 377 students across three experimental and two…

To combat high failure and student drop-out rates, universities have developed strategies to monitor online student engagement through measurable activities. In this study, we explore if and how these monitoring activities accurately measure online engagement. We interviewed nine highly engaged online third-year students throughout a semester to…

This research explores the perceptions of facilitators in asynchronous online discussion to improve practice and student engagement in Higher Education. Traditional didactic delivery of learning content may fail the expectations of student and academic stakeholders. The pressure to teach within constrained resources presents challenges, but also…

This study investigates how final year pre-service teachers (PSTs) from several countries use social media to support their online professional learning network (PLN) activities. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, it uses a global survey and interview methods to generate fresh insights into PSTs' informally-developed online PLN practices and their…

The University of Southern Queensland's online study environment continues to grow with over 16,000 students studying online. Pre-Covid-19, online enrolments typically represent around 67% of all students studying at USQ. This article usefully analyses quantitative data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot of an online peer-assisted…

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are increasingly completing university at rates higher than their male counterparts. However, the reasons for this trend, including factors that support Indigenous women's determination to persist with university study, remain undocumented in the literature. We applied a strengths-based approach to…

The opening up of online education in the Australian tertiary sector has made higher education accessible for a wide range of students, including those living in rural and regional areas. While student numbers continue to grow as a result of this opportunity, there are increasing concerns regarding low student retention and progression rates for…

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…

This study explores the process of Community of Practice (CoP) building for language teachers' professional development through the support of a WeChat group. WeChat is an instant messenger app that provides a multimodal platform for one-on-one and group interactions through text, audio and video. In order to support the implementation of flipped…

With the increasing diversity of pedagogic models of delivery in higher education, universities are continually exploring practises of learning and teaching designed to enhance student experience and retention. The number of courses provided online continues to grow through, among other reasons, an escalation of higher education (HE) students…

Early career academics around the world frequently see themselves as being in need of targeted career support to navigate the years directly following PhD graduation. The growth of discussion groups on Twitter that target these users raises questions about their potential usefulness to address career development support needs. This paper reflects…

Children's rights have been studied from several perspectives. The implementation of children's rights has been argued in a corpus of seminal works seeking to problematise ways in which rights may be integrated and visible, with a particular focus on children's participation. Research also exists in the areas of policy, democratic practice and…

This article documents the experiences of three early career academics trying to establish a network of early career academics (ECAs) in a middle-ranked university in Australia. The changing context of academia means that ECAs face considerable challenges in understanding and negotiating effective career paths. Some of the issues encountered…