The twenty-eight item Sense of Online Community Scale was completed by 293 online students at a midsized southeastern United States university to ascertain community importance and activities associated with its formation and maintenance on the program and institutional level. A large majority of these students believed that a sense of community…

The current study aimed to understand the trend in the community of inquiry that many researchers have been working on for over 20 years. Within the scope of this aim, 102 studies were reviewed with regards to some variables: most preferred keywords and words in abstract, year of publication, authors, journals, geographical distribution, academic…

Offering online courses can be seen as a way of enhancing the three essential "presences" (teaching, cognitive, and social) of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. Creating and enhancing cognitive, teaching, and social presences require an innovation for teachers during planning, implementing, and evaluating their online courses. As…

As the online higher-education market continues along its trajectory of steady growth, it becomes increasingly competitive. Since quality sets online programs apart in the current competitive market, it is a priority for higher-education institutions. Consequently, presidents/chancellors and provosts at many U.S. higher education institutions have…

The purpose of this study is to identify and characterize the state of social construction of learning in virtual communities within online learning environments and to identify the advances and research challenges of social learning. The method was a systematic mapping to analyze the evidence published on the topic in 2015-2020. We automatically…

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework describes three essential presences (i.e., teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence) and how these presences interact in providing an educational experience in online and blended learning environments. This meta-analysis examined 19 empirical studies on the CoI Presences (teaching…

In this study, we work towards a strategy to measure and enhance the quality of interactions in discussion forums at scale. We present a machine learning (ML) model which identifies the phase of cognitive presence exhibited by a student's post and suggest future applications of such a model to help online students develop higher-order thinking. We…

This paper reports on research that extends knowledge about higher education students' perceptions of online engagement. In particular, the study aimed to identify what students thought engagement was and how they experienced it. Understanding students' views about online engagement will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the topic and…

The purpose of this case study was to examine how a professional graduate program in higher education administration developed seminar-style courses in a blended format. Blended courses involved two extended in-person weekend sessions with synchronous online sessions, and other asynchronous coursework in between. This study explored the importance…

A sense of belonging (SoB) is a valued concept in campus-based learning, being firmly linked with improved student attainment, increased learner satisfaction, and reduced attrition rates. Some researchers, echoing the work of Maslow (1962), even assert that learners cannot fulfill the goals of higher education without acquiring SoB. This study…

The purpose of this research study is to shift the focus on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) research by changing the narrative surrounding MOOC effectiveness from issues of course completion and certification to the impact of these courses on participants' actual practices. The "Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning" or HumanMOOC was…

After presenting a brief overview of the key elements that underpin Etienne Wenger's communities of practice (CoP) theoretical framework, one of the most widely cited and influential conceptions of social learning, this paper reviews extant empirical work grounded in this framework to investigate online/blended learning in higher education and in…

Blended learning, which combines online and face-to-face pedagogy, is a fast-growing mode of instruction as universities strive for equitable and alternative pathways to course enrollment, retention, and educational attainment. However, challenges to successfully implementing blended instruction are that "social presence," or students'…