Improving social presence has long been a goal for online instruction; with the shift to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus on improving social presence has only become more imperative. In asynchronous online courses, social interaction typically relies on discussion groups. Despite this, little research has been…

Background: Investigating emotion sequence patterns in the posts of discussion forums in massive open online courses (MOOCs) holds a vital role in shaping online interactions and impacting learning achievement. While the majority of research focuses on the relationship between emotions and interactions in MOOC forum discussions, research on…

Basic English and maths skills are crucial for Londoners to access further education and good work, and to support them to participate in their communities and improve personal wellbeing. Supporting Londoners to achieve basic skills is a priority for the Greater London Authority (GLA). However, we know that too many Londoners are without these…

This study examined the relationship between an individual learner's background, social network position, and interaction within a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC). Prior research has largely focused on the effects of background and social network position on quantitative features of interaction. This research considered qualitative features…

Computational risk detection holds promise for shielding particularly vulnerable groups from online harm. A thorough literature review on real-time computational risk detection methods revealed that most research defined 'real-time' as approaches that analyze content retrospectively as early as possible or as preventive approaches to prevent risks…

Online courses frequently use discussion forums to enhance student engagement, an approach that is critical to fostering positive student learning outcomes. Because discussion forums are common in online classes, many instructors rely on summary statistics and self-reported measures to assess student engagement. However, these metrics overlook the…

Dialogic education advocates varied forms of interactional management by teachers. In the context of whole-class discussions, teachers are encouraged to both prompt student involvement through direct mediation, and "step back" to give students a greater sense of agency and responsibility for turn-taking when appropriate. However, it is…

Forum discussions have been utilised widely as a means of facilitating learning interaction and social-knowledge construction in online learning. Much research has been conducted on the instructional interventions that benefit asynchronous discussions. Role-playing, or assigning roles to discussants, has been proven effective in promoting…

Asynchronous discussions have been widely used in education to support learning. Exploring the reasons why threads in asynchronous discussion forums die may help us improve our understanding of asynchronous discussions and lead to a more effective learning process. This study explored why threads in asynchronous discussion forums shut down. Two…

This report presents the compilation of interaction analysis of a month long online discussion that supplemented regular FAIMER fellowship programme for health professional teachers. Online discussion forums are considered as an effective means and if conducted using appropriate protocols and activities will help learners to share and gain…

Online discussions tend to be more effective when they are purposefully structured. In this article, we describe how the design of a photo-based protocol influenced community interactions within an online discussion in an undergraduate course. Students were asked to take and share a photo related to a course concept, respond to a peer's photo, and…

Group supervision, a common method in graduate psychology training, shifted abruptly to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to increase understanding of psychology graduate students' perception of online group supervision during COVID-19 by focusing on the group process and the students' professional identity formation.…

Asynchronous online discussions are broadly used to support social learning. This paper reports on an undergraduate class's online discussion activities over one semester. Applying social network analysis, this study revealed a participation gap among students reflected by their varied levels of network prestige. The low-prestige group initiated…

Discussion forums are the primary and most widely used venue for social learning and communication in MOOC context. There has been an interest in the last few years to study the interactions and participation behavior in this environment. This systematic review studied eighty-four papers published between 2013-2017 to provide a state of the art,…

The study of interactions regarding on-line environments for education is an area of research that has being developing during the last years in order to know the type of interactions that take place in discussion forums. Interactions analysis is important in order to know and to understand knowledge construction process in a virtual space.…