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Time takes on a different character when online teachers take advantage of the possibilities for interactions occurring over different scales of time. Online teachers' pedagogical link-making can help students see links between ideas across individual postings so that meaning making becomes cumulative and progressive. This article reports on a qualitative case study of a fully online postgraduate course in Educational Research Methods within a New Zealand tertiary institution where the intention was to develop a learning community. The study was framed within a lecturer-researcher collaborative approach to facilitate online lecturer development. Data collected from the online postings between lecturers and students, and among students and lecturer and student interviews, revealed how postings that point towards previous group ideas, current developing ideas and forward-focused ideas at pivotal points in the course supported student reflection, collaboration, and provided for socio-emotional support albeit in different ways and means. The authors argue that there is value in explicitly considering the mediating role of time when learning is understood as multidimensional and cumulative and provide implications for further research and practice.

Networked learning environments that embed the essence of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework utilise pedagogies that encourage dialogic practices. This can be of significance for classroom teaching across all curriculum areas. In science education, networked environments are thought to support student investigations of scientific problems, including the collection and processing of data, and construction of explanations and conclusions. Student engagement that involves thinking about and questioning key scientific processes and ideas is argued to address the challenges of making school science more relevant. In this article, examples from two studies are presented where New Zealand teachers employed networked technologies, including Moodle (a learning management system) and Wallwisher (an online notice board). These examples illustrate how face-to-face classroom teaching practices can be complemented with online learning practices. The CoI framework was used to examine how the social, cognitive and teaching dimensions of online student communities were similar and yet distinct to the face-to-face communities they belonged to. Findings showed that the CoI framework helped to unpack how networked environments created hybrid spaces where classroom interaction possibilities were extended, and new layers of knowledge construction added in support of students' growing authority and accountability for their learning.