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…

The objective of achieving a sense of "authenticity" in an educational context is one that might have immediate appeal, though how this is defined, let alone achieved, remains contested. The concept of "authentic discussion" has traditionally been used in the context of classroom English teaching in schools, but this paper…

This paper describes a research project that investigated the process of redesigning a fully-online unit, in order to enhance undergraduate Education students' engagement in their learning. This redesign was guided by the development of an Engagement Framework, which presents five elements of engagement that are distinct yet interrelated. The…

Online discussion forums are often the only interaction or communication a student in an online learning environment will have with the course instructor and fellow students. Discussion forums are intended to elicit a range of thinking skills from the students, from purely social interaction to metacognition in order to achieve deep learning.…

There is a dearth of research into teaching strategies and learning approaches for units involving sensitive topics that can provoke an emotional response in students. In a business ethics unit, attempts to strike a balance between conceptual knowledge and theory and skills training can be challenging because the unit can involve personal,…

In this study, we develop a theoretical model to investigate the association between social network properties, "content richness" (CR) in academic learning discourse, and performance. CR is the extent to which one contributes content that is meaningful, insightful and constructive to aid learning and by social network properties we…

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…

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…

This paper reports on research investigating student experiences of learning through face-to-face and online discussions in a political science course in a large Australian university. Using methodologies from relational research into university student learning, the study investigates associations between key aspects of student learning focusing…

It is argued that online discussion is a useful tool for creating opportunities for learning in teacher education. In a project designed to improve the practicum in rural areas, researchers placed pre-service teachers (PSTs) in two different moderated online discussion forums: an unstructured personal blog space and a structured threaded…

The increasing number of external students enrolling at Charles Darwin University has led to the university investing in new technologies to provide better support for students studying online. Many students, however, come from non-traditional backgrounds and lack some of the skills and confidence to participate successfully in an e-learning…

Evaluation of "e-Learning", or arguably "e-Delivery", is difficult. One reason is that comparisons are often made between different courses delivered using various delivery modes, making such comparisons hard to justify. The Business School at a university in the United Kingdom reportedly delivers the same postgraduate course…

This paper reports on an investigation into learning through discussions by undergraduate social work students. Second-year students studying psychology for social work experienced discussions began with face-to-face tutorials, and then continued for some time after online. This study used closed-ended questionnaires to investigate what students…