A key problem in facilitating a successful online course is the highly time -consuming nature of the administrative and pedagogical tasks involved. It is also difficult to achieve a community of learners online, since the lecturer has to overcome the natural reticence of students to post in shared class spaces. In computing courses an additional factor is the tendency of some students to work t...

Benefits of Social Software in teaching and learning are a research subject of great interest, especially in higher education. Even though the opportunities to encourage students’ participation are promising, there is a neglected area we intend to illuminate: heteronomy. Compulsion and external control are used to foster participation. In our study we examined 16 international evaluation and re...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how different levels of participation, tutorship styles, and metacognitive reflection in an online course can influence the group’s knowledge building. 131 undergraduate students in Psychology and 59 students in the Educational Sciences and Primary Education Sciences participated in the study. Results show that a central level of participation is associat...

FitzPatrick KA, Finn KE, Campisi J. Effect of personal response systems on student perception and academic performance in courses in a health sciences curriculum. Adv Physiol Educ 35: 280–289, 2011; doi:10.1152/advan.00036.2011.—To increase student engagement, active participation, and performance, personal response systems (clickers) were incorporated into six lecture-based sections of four re...

This study addresses the longitudinal associations between youths' out-of-school activities, expectancies-values, and high school course enrollment in the domains of math and science. Data were collected on 227 youth who reported on their activity participation in 5th grade, expectancies-values in 6th and 10th grade, and courses taken throughout high school. Math and science course grades at 5t...

Online discussion forums have been shown to contribute to the trust and cohesion of groups, and their use has been associated with greater overall engagement in online courses. We devised two experimental interventions to encourage learners to participate in forums. A collectivist (“your participation benefits everyone”), individualist (“you benefit from participating”), or neutral (“there is a...

Methods for characterizing asynchronous text-based discussions have received significant attention in the literature. In this study, we examine student and instructor posts made in seventeen undergraduate mathematics courses over the duration of a fifteen-week semester (n=6964 posts). We apply our previously developed multifactor discussion board metric to compare differences in student partici...

Purpose. To understand what faculty members can do to improve students' learning, we explored (1) program and course characteristics important to students, (2) choices within courses students feel are important, and (3) students' perceptions of learning online. Background. Web delivery alters interactions among students and faculty, thereby changing the learning environment. Methods. Master of ...