The purpose of this study was to better understand student learning in asynchronous computer-conference discourse (ASD) for non-native speakers of English in India through the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework. The study looked at ASD from an online course taught in the fall of 2015 to 25 students in a seminary in South India. All but one of the students were non-native speakers of English. The class consisted of 22 men and 3 women. Eight students spoke languages from the Dravidian family of languages (Malayalam, Tamil, Telegu and Kannada). Eight students were from the Northeastern states of Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura, where most languages are from the Sino-Tibetan family. Three students were native speakers of Indo-Aryan languages (Odiya and Assamese). Five students were from Myanmar representing several Sino-Tibetan languages. The COI is a framework used to understand learning in ASD, often used in online learning. To study the ASD of this group, critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used with the COI to capture the unique socio-cultural and linguistic conditions of this group. The study revealed that non-native speakers of English often reach the Exploration phase of learning but rarely show evidence of reaching the Resolution phase. This phenomenon was also …

This study incorporated a community based assessment with a focus on community based tourism in Kalache and Hulgol, India. Kalache and Hulgol are two agrarian based communities located in the environmentally significant region of the Western Ghats. Each of these communities has considered community based tourism as a means to reduce urban youth outmigration, to diversify economic resources, and to encourage the empowerment of women. The primary goals of this study were to understand the community issues and objectives, to determine the level of support for tourism development, to determine participant attitudes toward tourism, and to determine the obstacles to tourism development. The findings of this project address the complexity of operating in the tourism industry, the impacts of tourism, and the use of community based tourism models in support of sustainable tourism.