Online course tools such as WebCT or Manaba+R are popularly used in university classes and enhance learners' understanding of their course contents. In addition, teachers try to utilize these online course tools for their students such as giving their students online discussions, providing students with additional materials and so forth. However,…

Describes the nature of online chats in terms of how graduate students structured their conversations in online group discussions, and how they participated and conversed in and across concurrent conversations. Characteristics of the computer medium contributed to the conversational structures and the kinds of structures affected interactivity and…

An Internet user talks about her experiences as a result of a graduate-level class, "Telecommunications in the Classroom," at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Discussion focuses on the Internet community and the various kinds of talk on the Internet, including bulletin boards, real time, creative, political, expert, international,…

Describes an investigation into the social dynamics of a technology-mediated preservice teacher environment (an Internet discussion group) and the extent to which community-building occurred. Discourse analysis examined how the technology-mediated discourse community reflected five main categories characterizing the ethos of classroom communities.…

Given the explosive growth of online communications, new forms of discourse are an intriguing topic of study. This research focused on ten online discussions hosted by "The Chronicle of Higher Education," using content and discourse analysis of the postings to answer several questions. What is the "conversational scaffolding" used by posters in…

Discussion and writing are very powerful ways to support learning. This article describes the use of a free, synchronous online forum to expand student-teacher discussions beyond the time/place constraints of the physical physiology classroom. The main participants were medical students enrolled in physiology class at the University of Zagreb…

The authors describe the design of and student reaction to a counseling and spirituality course offered to full-time resident counselor education students at the University of Virginia, a secular university. The course was offered as a blended Internet-based and seminar course. The Internet components were the result of student feedback from…

The "Vicarious Learner" project at Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Edinburgh is looking broadly at issues concerning the role of dialogue in learning. This paper looks at the more general question of how the value of dialogue in learning depends on the structure of the environment in which it takes place. In…

The mission of the NetPro European project is to develop project-based learning through the Internet. The NetPro project is creating tools and services to facilitate communication and collaboration between distant students, and to manage access and control of project deliverables. NetPro project teams form cross-institutional learning communities.…

Online collaborative documents can be used effectively for conducting collaborative research and for learning collaboratively via the Internet. Collaborative documents are dedicated online workspaces that allow individuals or groups to use the Internet to share their work with others, edit it, and finalize it. This paper identifies Basic Support…

Describes the development of a distance education graduate course at Arizona State University; the course is text-based, supported by the Internet and computer conferencing. Discusses course planning and design factors, implementation strategies, technical considerations, students' evaluations, and instructor perspectives. (AEF)

Conceptual learning of 13 graduate students was studied during a six-week course using the Internet for collaborative learning of online articles. Five groups were formed with each creating a knowledge map during the first and fifth week of the course. Multidimensional scaling analysis was used to study change in each group's mapping over time to…

Examines the use of "type 2 discussion," in which the teacher creates an online conversation with the class. Suggests that, by adding type 2 discussions to a face-to-face developmental education class, faculty help students build their own knowledge base. Adds that the online component gives all students equal access to this knowledge…

This paper discusses the processes and outcomes of translating a traditionally-taught business writing course into the online format, using bulletin board software. The paper covers creating, teaching, and managing the online business writing course at Golden Gate University (San Francisco, California). Pedagogical objectives are to emulate group…

Language laboratories, developed in the 1970s under the influence of the Audiolingual Method, were superseded several decades later by computer-assisted language learning (CALL) work stations (Gündüz, 2005). The World Wide Web was developed shortly thereafter. From this introduction and the well-documented and staggering growth of the Internet and…