Participating in on-line social networks gives people the opportunity to collaborate with others regardless of geographic locale. However, social networks were initially developed with entertainment in mind, as opposed to collaboration and productivity. The research team developed a social network with collaboration and productivity in mind. After the social network (3Helix.org) was created, the researchers studied the groups, value, gender, trust, and innovations developed in the on-line community.

Celebrating 20 years of online learning, this session examines how the field of emerging media has strengthened online education. During an exploration of the past and present evolution of emerging technology, the session gives a salute to the TCC, Learning Times and the New Media Consortium before gazing into the future to propose how we may use mobile virtual reality in the classroom by 2020.

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model and framework, proposed by R. Garrison and T. Anderson, among others, is one of the most researched models of online education since the last decade. It states that on online educational collaborative constructivist experience is a product of three elements of the learning community: Social Presence, Cognitive Presence and Teaching Presence. One distinguishing trait of the model is the way it dissociates the actor and the function. It refers Teaching Presence and not Teacher Presence. That means that the teaching function may be exerted by other participants, becoming a distributed function not exclusive of the teacher in a formal online educational setting. This distribution may be intentionally framed in the teacher´s instructional design (for example by peer moderation activities) but may also emerge naturally from the cooperative and collaborative interactions between the students as they pursue their social learning in the virtual environment.

A forth element of the model (Learning Presence) that tried to account for the occurrence of interactions expressing learners’ self- and co-regulation processes has been recently proposed but was not accepted by all CoI researchers. In these regulating behaviors we have found evidence of what might be, not a forth element of the model but another component of Teaching Presence. In their original form, the CoI framework proposed Design and Organization, Facilitation of Discourse and Direct Instruction as categories of Teaching Presence. We propose that when the participants in the learning community regulate each other’s learning processes, mainly in group work activities, they exert (distributed) Teaching Presence in a way not previously addressed by the CoI framework. In this paper we will propose Regulation of Learning as a forth category of Teaching Presence, the rationale that supports the proposal, the indicators that compose the category and results of a study where this enhanced Teaching Presence construct was used to analyze the online interactions.

Online course offerings in higher education are on the rise in the US (Allen & Seaman, 2014). This study was conducted at a public regional college that offered 35% of its courses entirely online in Fall 2014 and projected offering more online courses in the future. The online faculty members primarily use the Sakai-based CMS. Yet how the online courses are taught is largely left to the individual faculty members.

Taking the community of inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) as a guide, this study describes how a newly hired instructor designed and delivered a Management Information Systems (MIS) course entirely online. In order to facilitate meaningful interactions between teacher and students, and students and students, four web platforms were integrated into the course: the Sakai-based CMS, the course website, Google+ community SNS, and Pearson’s MyITLab.

The MIS course is required for the undergraduate business major at the college. Sixty-two students started the course at the beginning of the semester, and fifty-seven successfully completed the course. Many students had not been familiar with Google+ and had never created a website before this class. Students’ feedback indicated that they felt using Google+ community and creating their own website clearly established their social presence – projecting oneself socially and emotionally as “real” people through the medium of communication used – in this online course. According to the CoI model, social presence is the critical component for an online course to be a success.

The use of Web 2.0 technologies in educational settings have been lauded for promoting student collaboration and motivation. In the writing classroom, it has been found to align with the basic tenets of composition writing including an emphasis on process, revision, and communal knowledge formation. At this time, however, little research has been undertaken on safety and privacy issues raised in these semi-public online spaces.

This study shares the experiences of three freshman composition classes at UH Manoa who used Google Drive as a homework hand-in and peer review tool. The study confirms the findings of digital literacy theorists that Web 2.0 technologies promote motivation but also finds that greater levels of motivation and achievement are correlated with some discomfort.

Data was gathered primarily through two qualitative research methods: a questionnaire and focus groups, conducted at UHM in the Fall of 2014.

The study adds to existing digital literacies and composition scholarship, which at this time has not fully explored the use of Google Drive or privacy issues in educational online spaces. The study suggests that further research could be conducted on strategies to create safe online classroom environments.