Despite being an educational approach that has existed for more than five decades, project-based learning (PBL) has remained a conceptual fog, with limited applications beyond the medical and health sciences. This paper detailed the scarcity of the academic literature on PBL, specifically in relation to PBL and film productions and/or competitions. Using the Dracula Digital 2022 competition as the chosen context, this paper aimed to fill two gaps: (1) adding to the academic literature on PBL’s applications beyond those most frequently found in the medical and health sciences, the learning of foreign languages, or business and management learning; and (2) proposing that film production and competition are novel approaches to PBL. In an attempt to fill these research gaps, this study employed the 10 dimensions of PBL to identify the PBL components present in the Dracula Digital competition. The results showed that all 10 dimensions of PBL were found in the Dracula Digital competition, proving that film production and competition can indeed be considered an educational approach that satisfies PBL’s core components. This study calls for the consideration of a myriad of creative activities which should be added to curriculums to not only engage students in their learning but also reap the coveted benefits offered by the PBL approach.

Following Hyland's model of metadiscourse, evidential is defined as an expression that references information from other texts. Evidence in traditional academic writing may include peer-reviewed articles, published books and personal communication with field experts. With a sharp increase in the use of online teaching and learning environments by education providers, such as Google Classroom and Canvas, and a vast range of sources of evidence available in non-traditional forms, are types of evidence in students’ academic writing changing and, if yes, how? In this study, we analysed the use of evidentials in course discussion forums by students at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, revealing the types of evidence included in the writing. Our findings show that students’ academic writing in online teaching environments expands what is traditionally considered academic evidence to some extent, but more targeted teaching intervention may be needed to broaden the range and quality of evidentials used by students.

This paper will be focusing on discussions on how to use small-scale, higher-institution-based film festivals (including film competitions) as a vehicle to motivate students who are majoring in media and screen production to improve their production quality for both module assignments and competition-targeted special projects. Moreover, this paper will argue that, by inviting industry representatives to be involved in judging and commenting on student works, such small-scale film festivals organised by higher education institutions over time may grow into a platform that not only recognises and supports budding directors, screenwriters, actors, and actresses in Brunei but also acts as a playing field in which novice filmmakers can connect with experts, exchange ideas, acquire valuable skills, and enable further collaboration in the future. Based on first-hand data collection, an analysis, and semi-structured interviews of the multiple parties involved, our discussions cover how to launch the production process for screen-practice-based education, how to organise module assignments to fit the themes of specific film festivals/competitions, and how to overcome the challenges facing students working in a multicultural production team, etc. Two higher-institution-based film festivals, i.e., PRISM UBD Short Film Festival organised by Universiti Brunei Darussalam and the Dracula Digital competition, a mobile-phone filmmaking competition run by Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania, are used as analytical case studies.

Research conducted on Instagram, and other social networking sites (SNSs), has primarily been focused on individual use and representation. The focus of this paper, however, is corporate use of Instagram. With over 25 million business profiles on this social media platform, it is time to shift some attention to the corporate use of Instagram. Corporations, including the private and public sectors, have grown reliant on social media as means of maintaining public relations – a platform where there is an attempt to represent the institution, promote corporate social responsibility activities and communicate with stakeholders. Uta Russmann and Jakob Svensson (2016) proposed a content analysis framework to study political parties on Instagram. However, it was found that the proposed framework was insufficient and should be revised for corporate use. The proposed revision of this content analysis framework is the focus of this paper to give rise to corporate strategy framework for Instagram.

This study investigates metadiscourse use in online academic discussion forums with the use of Ӓdel’s reflexive model. Metadiscourse markers are linguistic features in spoken and written texts that refer to the author/speaker, the reader/listener, and the evolving text. Reflexive metadiscourse, the focus of the current thesis, is a specific type of metadiscourse where the linguistic features are all discourse internal. This means that the author/speaker, the reader/listener, and the reference text must all be part of the evolving text. The reflexive model offers a set of criteria for the selection of metadiscursive markers that prove to be useful in a study such as this.In the reflexive metadiscourse model, metadiscourse instances satisfy the delimiting strategies set in Ӓdel (2006). In the current study, reference to these reflexive metadiscourse instances are termed simply as “metadiscourse”. If the process of identifying potential metadiscourse is still ongoing, then the instances are termed “potential metadiscourse”. Finally, the term reflexive will be used when an instance is found to be non-metadiscursive, according to the framework of this thesis, subsequently labelled as “non-reflexive metadiscourse”. This is to account for the fact that in other models, such as Hyland’s interpersonal metadiscourse model, some non-reflexive metadiscourse instances are still metadiscursive. For example, evidentials include instances when a speaker is sharing his/her experience in an ongoing text. In the reflexive model, however, such evidentials would not be metadiscursive as the experience occurs outside of the ongoing text and in the writer’s real world.The study involved collecting interactions in online discussion forums from four modules at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and the resultant corpus has over 150,000 words. The reflexive model was adapted for use with this discourse based on a close reading of one module during the pilot study. To analyse the corpus, AntConc was used to electronically search for metadiscourse markers from the pilot study, and from Ӓdel (2006) and Molino (2018) to generate concordance lines. Then these lines were manually read to filter out non-metadiscursive instances. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 undergraduates and postgraduates on their use of online discussion forums for their learning to provide an insider’s perspective on the use of metadiscourse online and to check the categorisations that resulted from the analysis. Some of the categorisations were revised based on the information from the interviews. Finally, quantitative methods were employed for the identification of patterns in metadiscourse use in online discussion forums, specifically their role in constructing relationships among peers and in constructing the self-identity of writers.The results suggest that there were new metadiscourse forms found in this genre of online interactions and some revision to the key concepts in reflexive metadiscourse is perhaps timely and necessary. The results may be influenced by the affordances of online platforms such as change in the intended audience (Hafner, 2018) and the ability to reference other texts intertextually via the use of hyperlinks (Xia, 2020). These affordances have contributed to the changes in the way that writers construct their texts for their readers. In addition, in the current study, the interactions seem also to be influenced by the relationship writers have with their readers outside of the discussion forum (i.e., their relationships in their face-to-face classes and their social relationships outside of the academic settings).Overall, this thesis provides insight into the writing process in crafting main responses and comment posts in online discussion forums using data from both the Discussion corpus and information obtained from the semi-structured interviews. This thesis thus provides valuable methodological, theoretical, and conceptual implications, laying out a foundation for future studies on reflexive metadiscourse in online academic discussion forums, and potentially other discourses in various under-explored settings.