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Background: Online learning and teaching were globally popularized due to the impact of COVID-19. The pandemic has made both synchronous and asynchronous online learning inevitable in regions privileged with the technological affordance. Aims: This study was designed to examine and compare the effectiveness of both learning modes through the Community of Inquiry framework. Materials & Methods: Comparative analyses on a sample of N = 170 undergraduate students who took both synchronous and asynchronous online courses in Spring 2021. Results: The paired-sample T-tests results indicated a significant difference in social presence, cognitive presence and self-evaluated performance. Discussion & Conclusion: Teaching presence significantly influenced social presence and cognitive presence in both learning modes. However, under synchronous learning mode, social presence significantly impacted self-evaluation, grades and school identification. While social presence only influenced school identification under asynchronous learning mode. Theoretical and practical implications were also included.

Message diffusion is associated with 'going viral' that many communicators strive for in spreading their words. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) provides a framework for the current study to understand the effects of emotions generated from a message on persuasion – how high- and low-effort processes of comprehending information influence people's decision in spreading societal issue-related Facebook posts. The researcher conducted a survey experiment to explore the effects of emotional response to societal issues on message diffusion. The findings suggest individuals' diffusion decisions depend on issue controversy considering their imagined audience. Emotions trigger both cognitive and heuristic processing of information. The results reveal that message elaboration mediates the effects of both positive and negative emotion arousal on diffusing moderate-controversial issues to the more symmetrical audience. Positive and negative emotions were only directly associated with diffusion high-controversial issues to the symmetrical audience via Facebook. Theoretical contributions to ELM and practical implication of strategic communications were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]