The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge challenge to education systems. This Viewpoint offers guidance to teachers, institutional heads, and officials on addressing the crisis. What preparations should institutions make in the short time available and how do they address students' needs by level and field of study? Reassuring students and parents is a…

Online education programs are on the rise and institutions of higher learning are utilizing Learning Management Systems (LMS) to facilitate online learning. The Community of Inquiry (CoI; Garrison et al., 1999) framework identifies three categories of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence to guide the development of online…

Courses: Introduction to Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Communication Theory, and Health Communication across face-to-face, hybrid, and online formats. Objectives: Students will demonstrate an understanding of interpersonal communication concepts and theories by (1) identifying artifacts that illustrate the unique features of…

This paper presents a role-play exercise and assignment that provides an active learning experience related to the system investigation phase of an SDLC. Whether using waterfall or agile approaches, the first SDLC step usually involves system investigation activities, including problem identification, feasibility study, cost-benefit analysis, and…

Increasingly, today's information systems (IS) programs are focused on making sure students are graduating with well-developed soft skills. One of these necessary soft skills is intercultural communication, which is the ability to communicate with people from different cultures. This teaching tip presents an assignment designed to increase the…

Social networking via texting, Facebook, Twitter, and similar media is enormously popular with students, though it often leads to communication challenges along gender lines. Research supports the fact that men and women have divergent expectations for social networking and use it differently. Students can benefit from classroom experiences that…

Most of today's college students live in a world in which they are connected "24/7" (i.e. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). Unlike their professors, students are true "digital natives." Young Americans spend more than seven and a half hours a day with some sort of electronic device, and because most of them are multitasking with those devices, "they…

Designed as a hybrid undergraduate class that includes online exercises and in-class discussion, Places in the Media helps students better understand the spatial politics of media that help structure our everyday lives. The article is meant as a do-it-yourself guide for instructors interested in building a course like Places in the Media. As such,…

"Invisible Girls" is an examination of twenty-four at-risk adolescent girls' writing practices in a Third Space setting located within a school but outside of the confines of a regular classroom. Through a description of the girls' writing over a three-and-a-half-year period in this setting, Mellinee Lesley details phenomena that both support and…

Weblogs (or blogs), as a form of communication on the Internet, have recently risen in prominence but may be poorly understood by both faculty and students. This article explains how blogs differ from other online communication tools and how political science faculty can make use of blogs in their classes. The focus is on using blogs as part of…

Composition teachers have generally embraced collaborative learning in the years since Kenneth Bruffee published his first article promoting its advantages in "College English" in 1972. But assigning collaboratively written papers in an introductory college writing course is still rare. This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a…

This article seeks to inspire humanities and social science faculty to explore ways of utilizing existing scholarly online communities to engage students in the process of academic inquiry. The author discusses her own experience using a discipline-specific listserv, shares successful assignments, examples of student postings and a grading rubric.…

Overburdened with athletics, play rehearsals, band practice, volunteer work, after-school jobs, friendships, and--if their parents are lucky--quality time with their families, it is hardly surprising that even the most dedicated students resent homework as an incursion on their time. Meanwhile, their teachers watch the growing stacks of unread…

As online research has become an increasingly standard activity for middle school and high school students, Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) has simultaneously emerged as the bane of many teachers who include research-focused assignments in their courses. An online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit its entries, Wikipedia has educators…

One of the greatest challenges of any K-12 teacher education program is providing pre-service teachers opportunities to work with students who are culturally and linguistically different from themselves. Despite best efforts of selecting texts and facilitating discussions, new teachers recently interviewed report that coursework just did not help…