Teachers' and students' perceptions of a sense of community in blended education.

Universities have renewed interest in blended learning in preparation for post-COVID education. However, unsatisfactory social interactions hinder the quality of blended learning, despite its potential for flexible and personalized learning. In this situation, a sense of community would provide essential academic and social benefits. To develop a sense of community among students, we need to further understand students' and teachers' perceptions concerning this subject by exploring their experiences in blended learning. Therefore, we investigated this for three blended courses using a qualitative case study approach. We conducted: (1) classroom observation; (2) document analysis of course content, assignments, and assessments; and (3) individual interviews with teachers (n = 3) and group interviews with students (n = 18). The results showed the main factors that appeared to contribute to sense of community: group learning activities within courses, non-academic and extracurricular activities across courses, and the campus as a physical place integrating academic and social life after COVID. Further, we identified two obstacles: students valued group learning but struggled to manage group dynamics, and despite teachers' efforts to encourage learning autonomy, students viewed teachers as the ultimate authority in the learning process, which strained the student-teacher relationship. Additionally, this study revealed the limitations that digital tools have for promoting sense of community, as students questioned whether these tools have added value for supporting intricate and in-depth conversations. Finally, based on these findings, we provided practical recommendations for the future development of sense of community in blended learning.

Teaching presence in students' WhatsApp groups: Affordances for language learning

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic and disruption of campus-based education, the use of mobile social networking applications to supplement formal education has attracted a great deal of attention. Teachers do have opportunities to join students' online groups to share, clarify, and exchange housekeeping information and course-related content with them. Teachers can, in particular, provide English as a foreign language (EFL) students with more sources of linguistic input, interaction, and feedback. Research investigating this potential, however, is still scarce in such contexts. The current study explores the likely affordances of teaching presence in students' WhatsApp groups for designing, facilitating, and guiding cognitive and social processes conducive to their language learning. A mixed-method design was employed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data and information from English-major undergraduates (N = 111) and faculty teachers (N = 8) who joined the same WhatsApp groups for one academic semester at a major university in Oman. Descriptive and thematic analyses of data from a survey with both closed-ended and open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews indicate that the shared WhatsApp groups functioned as small close-knit communities where students were able to constantly access teachers for their assistance, feedback, and clarification of content. Despite these merits, however, the participating faculty believed that the presence of teachers in WhatsApp groups might have consequences for students' tolerance of ambiguity, scaffolding, and autonomous language learning. The paper concludes by discussing several pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

Examinations of the relationships between self-efficacy, self-regulation, teaching, cognitive presences, and learning engagement during COVID-19.

This study investigated the relationships between self-efficacy, self-regulation, and teaching presence, cognitive presence, and learning engagement during the pandemic. A total of 1435 undergraduate students in Korea completed an online survey on their learning experiences during COVID-19. The findings indicate that self-efficacy had a positive relationship with teaching presence and cognitive presence as well as self-regulation. No direct relationship between self-efficacy on learning engagement was found; however, the relationship between self-efficacy and learning engagement was fully mediated by self-regulation, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. Self-regulation had a positive relationship with both cognitive presence and learning engagement. Teaching presence had a positive impact on cognitive presence, but not on learning engagement. However, cognitive presence fully mediated the relationship between teaching presence and learning engagement. In effect, this study lends support to the significance of the role of cognitive presence in online learning.

The role of feedback in building teaching presence and student self-regulation in online learning

In this research we studied usable strategies to promote student engagement and learning in the online classroom specifically connected to the development of teaching presence and student self-regulation. A design-based research approach (Barab & Squire, 2004) with multiple methods of data collection were used in the study's design, which was informed by the Garrison et al.'s Community of Inquiry framework and Zimmerman's cycle of self-regulatory phases. Qualitative sources of data included coursework and semi-structured interviews with three student participants, accompanied by text-based planning and debrief notes, and a semi-structured interview with one instructor. The study context was an online course connected to a Bachelor of Education program at a university in Ontario, Canada. Findings indicate students experienced teaching presence directly in the timely, strengths-based and personal feedback they received. Regular feedback helped students know their work was being seen and that they were "on the right track”. Strengths-based and personal feedback aided student motivation and self-regulation, which emerged as important for ongoing engagement and learning online. Recommendations that emerged from this study are of interest internationally to designers of online learning courses, online instructors and researchers in online learning. © 2023

Challenges and Issues of Teaching and Learning during the Pandemic (COVID-19)

This study is conducted to investigate the effectiveness and readiness of teaching and learning among students during the pandemic (COVID-19) towards the online learning among hospitality and tourism students. A quantitative method was employed and students from the Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management Penang Campus were chosen as the target sample. The sample size for this study was 430 and a total of 360 questionnaires were successfully collected with the return rate of 83.72%. Descriptive analysis was used to interpret the demographic data, Pearson Correlation analysis was employed to examine the correlation among variables, and multiple regression analysis was used to measure the overall relationship between independent and dependent variables. From these analyses, the three (3) variables (social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence) were found to have positive relationships with a student's learning experience. Overall, this study is important to fellow academicians, academic researchers, and practitioners in improving their methods of teaching and learning, assisting the students, and strengthening their teaching techniques in online learning.

Teacher role of learners in a mobile learning environment: practice in higher education

Purpose: Available research on mobile learning all stand on the viewpoint of teachers. However, as mobile learning is learner-centric, learners' roles must be understood clearly from the learners' viewpoint, particularly considering its self-directed learning feature. It is well-known learners for self-directed learning must bear some teachers' core responsibilities. The knowledge gap on this important issue inspires the present work which tries to answer two questions: which "teacher roles” can learners play and how will learners play their "teacher roles” in a mobile learning context. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives. Design/methodology/approach: A novel research approach integrating an action research model and a teaching presence scale analysis is proposed to answer the questions. The mobile learning courses conducted by the present authors for engineering undergraduate students, during the COVID-19 pandemic, provided the experimental data for this study. Findings: The experimental results reveal that the learners could play a number of "teacher roles” actively for mobile learning. Some of this research studies are consistent with available studies but a discrepancy is also observed. Discussion is conducted for such discrepancy. Originality/value: The findings will contribute to improve the pedagogy of mobile learning theoretically and practically. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

How Teaching Presence Facilitate Rural Teachers' Learning Engagement in MOOC for Teacher Education: The Mediating Effect of Learning Motivation

Under the dual influence of the rapid development of education informatization and the severe impact of COVID-19, online training has become a normal way of professional learning for teachers. Teaching presence and learning engagement, as important factors affecting learning effect, have received extensive attention from educational researchers and practitioners. Based on a teacher education MOOC, this study conducted a questionnaire survey on 169 rural teachers who participated in this MOOC, and explored the relationship and mechanism of teaching presence, learning motivation and learning engagement perceived by rural teachers. This study found that there was a significant positive correlation between teaching presence, learning motivation, and learning engagement, and learning motivation played a partial mediating role in teaching presence and learning engagement. In the following MOOCs for teacher education, MOOC designers should enhance the sense of teaching presence from three aspects: learning design, learning organization, and learning intervention, and stimulate the learning motivation of rural teachers, so as to achieve the occurrence of deep online learning for rural teachers. © 2022 ACM.

Ecological aspects of online learning in higher education: a qualitative multi-level exploration in a developing country.

Using 22 undergraduate business students' online learning experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown in Pakistan (as the pandemic was the only time these students were enrolled as online students in Pakistan), this study demonstrates that online learning is a multi-level phenomenon and a practice situated within the environment. Despite online learning being a heavily researched area, research has under-examined the interaction of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework with the context. By adopting an ecological perspective, and by examining the interaction of micro, meso, and macro levels, this qualitative research provides useful insights into the interaction of the individual (micro-level) captured through the CoI framework, with the broader environment in which learners are located (meso and macro levels). It contributes to research on online learning broadly, and the CoI framework specifically, by revealing that each element of the CoI framework (micro-level), is influenced by macro (developing country), as well as meso (institutional policies and institutional preparedness) levels. It also spotlights the negotiated relationship between the individual and the systemic forces. The findings of this study are particularly relevant given that online education has the potential to become a norm in higher education in developing countries.

Online Vs. In-Campus, Comparative Analysis of Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, Student Engagement and Satisfaction: A way forward for Post COVID-19 Era

The education sector was severely impacted due to the pandemic;thus, educational institutions had to shift toward an online learning system. This adaptation in the educational system posits a challenging question: which mode of learning would be best to engage and satisfy the students in the post-COVID-19 era? Therefore, drawing on the self-identity theory, this study explores the differential impact of intrinsic motivational factors (interest/enjoyment, competence, autonomy, and belongingness) on digital engagement and online class satisfaction versus on-campus psychological engagement and physical class satisfaction. Surveying 496 students from six Indonesian universities shows that digital technologies make the learning process interesting and joyful for students compared to on-campus classroom learning, thus resulting in more digitally engaged and satisfied students. Simultaneously, competence is found to be positively impacting online and on-campus students' engagement and satisfaction at an equal level. Moreover, autonomy and belongingness show more students' engagement and satisfaction within the campuses than in an online learning mode. These findings suggest that the post-COVID-19 era can take advantage of both these methods to incorporate a hybrid mix of blended learning to achieve the best learning outcomes in terms of engagement and students' satisfaction. Implications for higher education institutions and directions for future research are suggested. © The Authors.

The Impact of Multimodal Communication on Learners' Experience in a Synchronous Online Environment: A Mixed-Methods Study

During the COVID-19 pandemic, from early 2020 onwards, the adoption of synchronous online learning increased rapidly. It offers students a unique learning experience, utilizing communication modes from both in-person and asynchronous online classes. This mixed-methods study examined the impact of modes of communication (visual, bodily behaviors, spoken language, and written language) found in synchronous online contexts on students' learning experiences from the perspective of social presence and teaching presence, as well as their satisfaction with synchronous online learning experience. An online survey was distributed first to collect quantitative data. The survey results indicated that four different modes influenced students' communication to a different extent, with written and spoken language being the most effective modes of online communication. These modes were also significantly positively correlated with social presence, teaching presence, and student satisfaction;however, only spoken language was a significant predictor of student satisfaction. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine students' perceptions of how multimodality affects social presence, teaching presence, and satisfaction with online learning. This led to five major themes and highlighted how multiple modes of communication supports social presence, thereby helping teachers scaffold students. In addition, the online learning context impacts type of instruction, and the reduced distance between teachers and students improves teaching presence;however, the students felt a lack of affective belonging in their online classes. This study also provided implications for course instructors and designers to help them effectively adopt different modes in synchronous online environments and promote social and teaching presence. © 2022, The Online Learning Consortium. All rights reserved.

Preliminary Study on e-Collaboration Readiness and Community of Inquiry Presences in a Higher Educational Institution

The current nature of large class size in Higher Educational Institutions (HEI), the recent COVID-19 pandemics, and more importantly, because lecturer-student’s relationships mostly terminate right after the class session have made educators faced many new challenges. Based on these, educators have found it imperative to change the pedagogical and didactical approaches to teaching by integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the classroom. e-Collaboration is one of the pedagogical approaches that enable two or more people to work together using technology to help achieve a goal. This study has introduced students to e-collaboration platforms via Learning Management System (LMS) and Piazza. The present research focuses on finding out the experience and readiness of the e-collaboration in a HEI. Both qualitative and quantitative approach were employed in the study. Results indicated that majority of participants in the study have positive attitude towards e-collaboration, their attitude results are significantly varied with their gender, and there are positive correlations among the Community of Inquiry (CoI) constructs at r = 0.75, n = 75, p = 0. In addition, majority of participants would like to use e-collaboration in future at M = 3.95. Thus, both male and female have positive attitudes towards e-collaboration at M3.82 SD = 0.74. The research brings to light the usefulness and the possibilities of e-collaboration for effective teaching and learning in HEI. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Proposed Framework for the Growth of Online Learning Communities

The abrupt shift to full online learning due to COVID-19, displaced students and teachers, created multiple barriers in teaching and learning, and caused some instructors not being able to build and maintain an online learning community. This situation resulted in students' detachment from their instructor and peers causing lack of motivation and increase of failure chances. First the paper explores the challenges and opportunities of building and online learning community highlighting the needs, and reviewes some past frameworks in the field. Second, a framework proposed identifies four factors that help the growth of online learning communities. Those factors are;teacher presence, social presence, cognitive presence and students' emotional engagement. Further the framework specifies type of actions and activities that teachers/instructors should be adopting throughout the course. The paper adds to the growing knowledge on Coronavirus effects on the educational sector and highlights the need for the efficeint use of technology in education.

Teaching presence predicts cognitive presence in blended learning during COVID-19: The chain mediating role of social presence and sense of community.

With the continuous lockdown and staying home strategies of COVID-19, both instructors and learners have met with the presence challenges in language learning. To address the complex and dynamic relationships of different presences in blended learning during COVID-19, based on the Community of Inquiry framework, 215 Chinese English learners were obtained as samples for an empirical test. SPSS 23 and PROCESS for SPSS were utilized to examine the hypotheses. Results indicate that teaching presence (TP) has a significant direct positive impact on social presence (SP), sense of community (SoC), and cognitive presence (CP). SP has a significant positive impact on CP and partially mediates the relationship between TP and CP. SoC is also found to impact CP and partially mediates the relationship between TP and CP. The findings also validate the chain mediating role of SP and SoC between TP and CP. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Supporting Online Language Teaching: The Use of Zoom and Facebook (Zoom-booking)

Integrating social media into classroom language teaching has been argued to be beneficial for both students and teachers. However, little is known about using two social media platforms in one online language class session, especially to support the teaching and learning process during the COVID19 transition to online teaching. This case study explores the use of Zoom and Facebook (henceforth referred to as Zoom-booking) as English language teaching support platforms during the COVID19 online teaching of a general English course by one English as a foreign language teacher (EFL) at a university in Thailand. We adopted the concept of teaching presence and netnography as a perspective. Findings from the online classroom observation, online traces (written text or posts, videos, PowerPoint slides, and images), and interviews revealed that our teacher-participant perceived Zoom-booking the online language classroom as personal and institutional. This suggests that while Zoom-booking supports teaching presence for synchronous and asynchronous teaching modalities, it also highlights the need for teachers to respond to their language learners' needs. We discuss the implications, and we offer recommendations for future studies. © 2022 Editorial Board TESL - EJ. All rights reserved.

Online Learning for High Quality Education: Perspective of Indonesian Educators

Entering post-pandemic era, some countries consider combining online learning with onsite learning. Given that educators play an important role in the success of such combination, it is important to summarise their perspective about online learning and consider that in designing such combination. This quantitative study summarises perspective of 210 educators about that matter in Indonesia. In general, educators see benefits of online learning except in promoting educators' teaching presence, supporting vulnerable students, and maintaining student integrity. These issues should be addressed first before combining online learning with onsite learning. © 2022 IEEE.

Effectiveness of community of inquiry based online course: Cognitive, social and teaching presence

This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine students’ community of inquiry perceptions through online learning activities designed based on the community of inquiry model. The participants of the study consisted of 81 freshmen enrolled in two different departments of a Turkish state university. The process for the experimental procedure was carried out as part of the Information Technologies course. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the research process was carried out with synchronous distance education. While the control group received instruction through direct instruction and question/answer technique, the experimental group received instruction based on the community of inquiry model. For data collection, a demographic information form and the community of inquiry scale were administered. According to the results, students in the experimental group had significantly higher scores in terms of cognitive and teaching presence compared with the students in the control group. On the other hand, no significant difference was observed between the groups in terms of their social presence scores. Overall, the students in the experimental group had higher community of inquiry score than the students in the control group.

The Sustainability of a Community of Inquiry in Online Course Satisfaction in Virtual Learning Environments in Higher Education

Teaching and learning online is quite challenging. Both require an additional capacity and effort to withstand ongoing engagement in a virtual learning environment. Nonetheless, there have been cases of dissatisfaction with virtual learning environments due to the lack of engagement and poor interaction between the instructor, students, and content, which may affect how students learn online. This study presents a cross-sectional survey that was designed to re-examine the theoretical model of the Community of Inquiry (CoI), and to examine the structure of course satisfaction using SmartPLS 3.3.8 for multivariate statistical analysis. The CoI and the course satisfaction instruments were adapted in this study. The reflections of the CoI are then assumed to form type II second-order constructs to determine their effect on student satisfaction with the course. The findings revealed that teaching, social, and cognitive presence in the CoI have a significant influence on students’ satisfaction with the courses that they are enrolled in. These results provide a direction for further research on the CoI in online learning by extending a framework that incorporates online learners as one of the essential stakeholders in education. Therefore, the results presented here are only applicable to certain courses, and it would be meaningful to investigate academic achievement and motivation, and to compare them between specific courses or subjects to find out which courses have lower or higher levels of presence.

Building bridges to advance the community of inquiry framework for online learning

The COVID-19 pandemic forced institutions of higher education around the world to quickly transition to forms of distance education, including synchronous and asynchronous online learning. Often lacking conceptual, empirical, and practical understanding of online pedagogy, many institutions have met this endeavor with mixed success. It seems inevitable that online learning will continue to play a key role in all sectors of education and, accordingly, that online pedagogy deserves a more mainstream focus. To help build a joint understanding of foundational knowledge between the online learning, educational technology, and educational psychology communities, in this article, we summarize the most frequently cited conceptual model that shapes research and practice in the field of higher education online learning: the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. We describe the original CoI model and its foundational components (i.e., cognitive, social, and teaching presence) and highlight opportunities for improvement of the model by incorporating the educational psychology and learning sciences research base to inform: (1) conceptualizations of the social dimensions of collaborative learning and (2) understanding of learner contributions to online collaborative education including self-, co-, and shared regulation of learning. We propose that a new, more comprehensive conceptualization of the regulation of collaborative online learning be integrated into the existing CoI framework and that a new "presence" be referenced going forward-"Learning Presence." Through this work, we strive to develop a more nuanced, generative, and informed vision of the future of online learning informed by relevant contemporary conceptualizations in educational psychology.

Perspectives of high school teachers toward online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

The urgent need to transition rapidly to exclusively online learning environments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic presented challenges in the K-12 education system. This study sought to address the problem of the lack of exploration into the effectiveness of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This quantitative study explored the effectiveness of online learning based on teachers' perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing high school teachers' experiences with two different online learning programs, "remote" and "virtual" at a public K-12 school district in southern California, based on the existence of the three forms of presence of the CoI framework: cognitive, social, and teaching. For the purposes of this study, remote learning took place through teacher-developed online courses and virtual learning took place through vendor-developed online courses. Data were collected using the CoI survey instrument. A final sample of 96 responded to the survey (n = 72 in the remote and n = 24 in the virtual). Independent samples t-tests were performed to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in teachers' perceptions regarding the existence of the three forms of presence between the remote and virtual learning programs. Teachers in the remote reported a statistically significant higher level of agreement regarding the existence of the teaching presence and cognitive presence, and a slightly higher but not a statistically significant level of agreement regarding the existence of the social presence, than those in the virtual. These results indicate that teachers providing instruction in the remote are more likely to perceive a stronger sense of community of inquiry than teachers providing instruction in the virtual. It can be determined that when teachers design their own content, include engaging learning materials, and facilitate live interactions within their courses, they perceive higher levels of cognitive, social, and teaching presence than teachers using a pre-designed learning content developed by other educators. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Self-Regulation, Teaching Presence, and Social Presence: Predictors of Students’ Learning Engagement and Persistence in Blended Synchronous Learning

Blended synchronous learning (BSL) is becoming increasingly widely implemented in many higher education institutions due to its accessibility and flexibility. However, little research has been conducted to explore students’ engagement and persistence and their possible predictors in such a learning mode. The purpose of this study was to investigate how to facilitate students’ engagement and persistence in BSL. In detail, this study used structural equation modeling to explore the relationships among specific predictors (self-regulation, teaching presence, and social presence), learning engagement, and learning persistence in BSL. We recruited 319 students who were enrolled in BSL at a Chinese university. The online survey was administered to gather data on the variables of this study. The results demonstrated that self-regulation, teaching presence, and social presence were positively associated with learning engagement. Self-regulation and learning engagement were positively associated with learning persistence. Moreover, learning engagement mediated the relationships between self-regulation, teaching presence, social presence, and learning persistence. This study suggests that self-regulation, teaching presence, and social presence are significant predictors for student learning engagement and persistence in BSL.