Volume 20 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

There is emerging evidence that suggests emotions as a discrete factor in academic online contexts that significantly contribute to student engagement and higher order learning (Cleveland-Innes & Campbell, 2012; You, 2012, You & Kang, 2014; Zembylas, 2008; Liaw, 2008). Pekrun (2000) and Pekrun, Goetz, Frenzel, Barchfeld, and Perry (2011) developed the control-value theory of achievement emotion that not only showed that emotions represent a discrete category in student engagement, but that there are certain factors such as perceived academic control and self-regulation that function as antecedents of students’ emotional reactions that affect online learning. The aim of the present paper is to review the emerging research evidence of the impact of emotions on students’ engagement in order to understand the distinct role that emotions may play in online learning. The review also proposes strategies and activities that teachers can use in order to enhance students’ positive engagement in online learning. The findings suggest that emotions are significant factors in students’ engagement in online learning while cognitive and behavioural factors function as antecedents of emotions in online contexts. The inclusion of emotional, cognitive and behavioural strategies in online teaching can enhance students’ engagement and learning experience in the online classroom.

Environmental Management (EM) is taught in many Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Most this provision is studied full-time on campuses by younger adults preparing themselves for subsequent employment, but not necessarily as environmental managers, and this experience can be very different from the complexities of real-life situations. This formal academic teaching or initial professional development in EM is supported and enhanced by training and continuing professional development from the major EM Institutes in the UK orientated to a set of technical and transferable skills or competencies expected of professional practitioners. In both cases there can be a tendency to focus on the more tractable, technical aspects of EM which are important, but may prove insufficient for EM in practice. What is also necessary, although often excluded, is an appreciation of, and capacity to deal with, the messiness and unpredictability of real world EM situations involving many different actors and stakeholders with multiple perspectives and operating to various agendas. Building on the work of Reeves, Herrington, and Oliver (2002), we argue that EM modules need to include the opportunity to work towards the practice of authentic activities with group collaboration as a key pursuit. This paper reports on a qualitative study of our experiences with a selected sample taken from two on-line undergraduate EM modules for second and third year students (referred to respectively as Modules A and B) at the Open University, UK where online collaboration was a key component. Our tentative findings indicate that on-line collaboration is difficult to ensure as a uniform experience and that lack of uniformity reduces its value as an authentic experience. Whilst it can provide useful additional skills for EM practitioners the experience is uneven in the student body and often requires more time and support to engage with than originally planned.

This paper investigates the potential of digital technologies for strengthening the participation and inclusion of learners with developmental and attention deficits (focus learners) into the mainstream classroom. The paper describes the authors’ approach to the challenge of researching the extent, to which digital technologies may support the learning process of focus learners - in particular in those aspects of the learning process that deal with the construction of learning products and the communication and dissemination of knowledge to peers, teachers or others. On the basis of the actual analysis and a succeeding discussion, the paper concludes that in order to create ownership, pedagogic strategies and interventions with digital technologies (whether viewed from the perspective of teaching or the perspective of learning) should incorporate opportunities for developing digital multimodal reifications. These, in turn, then stimulate learner reflection and awareness. Finally, the authors of the paper emphasize importance of opportunities for reflection, tools and structures for construction and dissemination of learners’ knowledge (to demonstrate “I am able to” and “I know”).

Open online courses are becoming more prevalent at local level and for and professional development objectives. Proper instructional design combined with use of online tools can promote learner interaction in online environments. Using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, this study aimed at examining learners’ interaction and their perceptions of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence in an open online course offered for professional development in three Swedish universities. The course was free and open to all, attracting participants from all over the world. In order to understand the online interactions of the course, three presences of CoI were matched to three types of interaction (Moore, 1989). Data were collected through a slightly revised version of the CoI instrument and open-ended questions were added. Survey results showed that participants had high perceptions of the three presences in the course. Results also yielded significant relationships between teaching presence and cognitive presence, as well as social presence and cognitive presence. The findings suggest that deploying a set of online tools combined with appropriate pedagogical approaches in designing open online courses could foster learner interaction especially learner-content interaction and cognitive presence.

High dropout rates are still a problem with online training. It is strongly suggested that learner characteristics influence the decision to persist in an online course or to drop out. The study explored the differences in domain-specific prior knowledge, motivation, computer attitude, computer anxiety, and learning skills between dropouts and active learners who enrolled in a vocational online training about media pedagogy for teachers. The data were collected from 575 trainee teachers from which three groups were formed: (a) students who only registered (n = 72) and (b) students who started learning but failed to complete any of the course modules (n = 124) and (c) active students who completed at least one module (n = 379). A dropout rate of 34.1% was observed. In general, only small effects were found. Students dropping out were older, had less prior knowledge, and lower skills in arranging an adequate learning environment.

The present study aims to empirically examine the relation between learner autonomy and specific aspects of the learning process, such as student-student interaction and tutor-student interaction, in a distance learning environment in Greece. An empirical study was conducted at the Hellenic Open University (HOU) using data gathered via a four-section questionnaire, completed by 100 postgraduate students. The correlation analysis yielded a positive correlation between learner autonomy and both student-student and tutor-student interaction. In particular, the results revealed the existence of a positive correlation between all three subscales of autonomy, namely sensibility to others, ability to manage new situations and self-awareness, and student-student interaction. A significant positive correlation was also observed between selfawareness and tutor-student interaction. Moreover, the results suggested that there are no statistically significant differences of the above parameters in relation to demographic features, such as gender, age and the number of Counselling Group Sessions (CGS) in which students had participated. Yet, results suggested that there is an effect of the number of course modules attended by students on the levels of student-student interaction.

Many users of online open education resources (OERs) are learners seeking insights into problems encountered as they pursue their everyday interests and activities. As well as benefitting from intrinsic motivation, such authentic learning activity provides context that helps the learner absorb and integrate the meaning of the knowledge. The purpose of this study was to explore barriers that prevent some online learners from using OERs in this way. Participants had experienced difficulties using music theory OERs to pursue personal music-making goals. Provided with online tutoring through an action research methodology, they appeared to benefit particularly from five aspects of active guidance: additional motivation, connections between generalized knowledge and personal experience, relevant learning activities, focus of attention, and goal-oriented feedback. In an environment rich in open content, providing these supports, in activities oriented towards learners’ goals, may be a particularly valuable use of teaching time.

The affordance of social interaction has been a part of open online repositories of teaching and learning resources for nearly two decades. Repositories are built not only to collect and disseminate materials, but enable users to collaborate and review, comment on and rate the content they access. However, research indicates that (a) most users do not participate in this type of generative use, and (b) the possibility of social interaction does not necessarily signal active participation in social interaction. In recent years the positive effects of gamification and social networking elements on user engagement have come to the fore in educational settings. From this stance, a quantitative study was conducted to assess users’ acceptance of the existing game mechanics of a large national repository of educational resources, their attitudes towards the inclusion of extra features, and teachers’ motivation to share openly. Our results indicate that teachers do not see open repositories as social networks, but as libraries of resources, and are likely to share if rewarded by intrinsic rather than extrinsic factors.

This study explored the impact of transactional distance dialogic interactions on student satisfaction in an international blended learning master’s degree program. The program examined was collaboratively delivered by three European universities to a cohort of students residing on several different continents. Students reported experiencing transactional distance for learnerlearner and learner-teacher dialogic interaction elements and dissatisfaction in the online components of the program but reported a sense of community and satisfaction for the inperson elements of the program. Transactional distance for the dimension of learner-content dialogic interaction was highest for elements of the program that were impacted by its multiinstitutional nature, but students reported general satisfaction for the program overall. This study has practical implications for distance educators, administrators, instructional designers, and policy makers concerned with student satisfaction in blended courses and programs, and it contributes to the literature on student satisfaction and multi-institutional programs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate in which ways technologies may be used to increase inclusion and a feeling of flow and self-efficacy in learning processes when it comes to learners with developmental and attention deficits (focus learners) in a mainstream classroom. The paper is one piece of outcome of a wider study on ICT facilitated inclusion, and this current piece of research addresses the challenges of enhancing focus learners’ comprehension when working with the curriculum. Several technologies have been tried out in a real school context and seven types of interventions are identified as valuable for focus learners’ capability in learning processes. The paper discusses the findings and concludes that conscious use of technology-based interventions makes it possible to provide learning challenges balanced to the learners’ individual skills. But a broader understanding and acceptance by all stakeholders of the specific challenges of this group of learners in mainstream educational systems seems needed to fulfil the potential.

Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this exploratory study examines the preservice teachers’ adoption of mobile technologies through the factors of current use, instructional use and future use in their teaching practices. Participants were 466 pre-service computer teachers enrolled at a public university in Turkey. A questionnaire developed by the researchers was used to collect data. Results indicated that the current use and instructional use factors had a strong positive correlation and also there was a similar correlation with the factor of future use and current use. Relationships between current, instructional, and future use of mobile technologies explained within the context of perceived usefulness, ease of use, and behavioural intention constructs of the TAM.

Lurkers, who are also known as silent learners, observers, browsers, read-only participants, vicarious learners, free-riders, witness learners, or legitimate peripheral participants (our preferred term), tend to be hard to track in a course because of their near invisibility. We decided to address this issue and to examine the perceptions that lurkers have of their behaviour by looking at one specific online learning course: CLMOOC. In order to do this, we used a mixed methods approach and collected our data via social network analysis, online questionnaires, and observations, including definitions from the lurkers of what they thought lurking was. We then analysed the data by using social network and content analyses and interpreted the research findings using the concept Community of Practice, with the Pareto Principle used to delimit types of learner. Our research findings revealed that lurking is a complex behaviour, or set of behaviours, and there isn’t one sole reason why lurkers act the ways that they do in their respective communities. We concluded that for a more participatory community the more active, experienced or visible community members could develop strategies to encourage lurkers to become more active and to make the journey from the periphery to the core of the community.