Abstract:

Online education enables removing time and geographic constraints in educational environments, and introduces new paradigms of communication in e-learning. In addition to positive trends of online teaching such as accessibility, and reaching a wide audience, there are also negative ones related to the lack of verbal and nonverbal communication which have still not been researched in-depth. Due to the absence of verbal and nonverbal signs of communication such as gestures, body language, and facial expressions in e-learning, communication practices need to be carefully adopted. Research shows that students of online courses often drop out and score lower results if they are not actively involved in student to student communication, as well as if there is the lack of participation and presence of the lecturer in an online environment. The aim of this paper was to examine how the creation of an online social community in the form of small groups and collaborative tasks as well as technology-mediated communication between students and lecturers affects the participants of online classes. At the cognitive level, the contribution of this research was achieved through a sample that includes high school students, university students and doctoral students in order to examine communication practices and their effectiveness in online teaching and learning at various educational levels. Furthermore, at the methodological level, quantitative analysis of data through statistical processing was applied. The results show that methodological planning of teaching practices and interpersonal communication can significantly contribute to the success of online teaching and learning. Moreover, at a practical level the framework of effective communication practices for successful e- learning within digital curriculum has been established.

Keywords:

Communication practices, online teaching, e-learning, digital curriculum.