COVID-19 greatly increased the online delivery of higher education. But one limitation of online learning is that students often struggle to stay engaged while watching online lectures. We examined whether including an instructor's face in lecture videos (instructor visibility) enhances student engagement or learning. In two preregistered…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted community colleges and created a new context in which they were forced to operate. Faculty, especially those who normally taught in-person, were required to transition quickly to fully online classrooms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted at the start of the pandemic with 17 students pursuing degree…

The empirical evidence concerning the question whether an instructor should be presented on online lecture slides is equivocal and two lines of theoretical reasoning exist. On the one hand, the instructor may distract from the content, thereby hampering learning; on the other hand, the instructor may function as a social cue that triggers a more…

Cognitive load is a critical internal state associated with learners' learning process and significantly influences learning outcomes. With the worldwide popularity of video-based learning (VBL), tracking real-time cognitive load variations becomes more and more important for the timely provision of adaptive learning support during the learning…

Purpose: This paper aims first to describe the most prevalent teachers' and students' behaviors in synchronous online classes in emergency remote teaching; second, to discern behavior profiles and third, to investigate what features explain the observed behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: An adapted COPUS observation protocol was employed to…