This paper defines a model of the learning processes that occur during online courses and web conferences, focusing on synchronous communications, which involve the teacher and students interacting at the same time.

The substantial state-of-the-art section provides useful information that allows the reader to easily grasp the objectives and context of the paper. The authors apply a rather standard methodology that takes recordings of e-learning sessions and online seminars as input, and analyzes those recordings both quantitatively and qualitatively to derive a model. The methodology is described and applied in a consistent way.

The result of the study is a model that comprises a list of dimensions or categories--including types of interaction, process factors, issues of power, contextual influences, and types of learning--against which the learning experiment can be evaluated. The model is submitted to a set of practitioners for validation; according to the authors, the validation is successful. Overall, the paper is interesting and provides good suggestions for future work. It would be interesting, though, to get more insight on the analysis method.