The introduction of the HyFlex modality provides students with increased flexibility to choose how they participate in a course. This flexibility extends to guest speakers allowing for synchronous interaction with students to occur across long distances. The following article outlines how instructors can incorporate international guest speakers…

This study investigates the effectiveness of TED Talks in enhancing EFL university students' English-speaking skills for presentations. Despite the widespread use of TED Talks in language learning, limited research has examined their specific impact on overall presentation skills, including fluency, pronunciation, anxiety, and confidence in…

Three online courses at the authors' institution have successfully used an extensive guest lecturer format (N = 22-30) for almost 10 years. The course design facilitates networking within the relatively small but diverse and global field of aquatic animal health. In this study of students' learning experiences, students perceived the courses as…

Community Engaged Learning (CEL) is an increasingly popular and celebrated pedagogy in post-secondary education. Research indicates that CEL supports students' academic engagement, strengthens their professional skills, and provides them with an enhanced sense of civic responsibility. CEL is labour-intensive, though, and many instructors seek…

In this study, we explored the contribution of instructional strategies in nurturing critical thinking skills in Non-Formal Secondary Education (NFSE) in Tanzania. It was carried out in the Dar es Salaam Region. A qualitative approach with phenomenology design was employed and it involved 44 learners and 8 teachers making a total of 52…

Retention of students' attention in general chemistry courses stands as one of the main challenges that educators are facing in classes of any size and is especially prevalent with classes composed of mixed majors. Herein, we describe our experience with introducing short, 10 min student lectures ("flash talks") on popular chemistry…

English academic presentation (EAP) is an indispensable skill set of academic communication for university students. With the rapid development of desktop virtual reality (DVR), its application in language learning is worth exploring. The present study aimed to examine whether there is an improvement and difference in students' EAP by learning…

The way in which information is presented can influence students' judgments of learning (JOLs). Carpenter, Wilford, Kornell, and Mullaney (2013) found that students reported higher JOLs after viewing a fluent lecturer (good speaker) versus a disfluent lecturer, whereas actual learning performance was unaffected by lecturer fluency. The current…

Online learning has gained increasing attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers face social exigencies to design ways of knowledge dissemination in online instruction. We posit that understanding how knowledge can be represented in successful online academic genres can inform teachers on how they can design students' online learning…

Communication is a multimodal phenomenon. The cognitive mechanisms supporting it are still understudied. We explored a natural dataset of academic lectures to determine how communication modalities are used and coordinated during the presentation of complex information. Using automated and semi-automated techniques, we extracted and analyzed, from…

Students wishing to be entrepreneurs have a great need for role models to serve as inspiration and help them envision their future organization. Universities often use guest speakers for this purpose. The author introduces a methodology of using a library of audio tapes as a virtual guest speaker series, larger and more diversified than even the…

Public speaking is considered the most anxiety-provoking speaking activity for English as a foreign language (EFL) learner. While traditional lecture-based classrooms hinder EFL learners' constant practice and frequent interaction due to large class sizes and limited time, recent developments in technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI),…

This paper reports observations and reflections from a pedagogic intervention intended to enhance mathematics students' learning of course content in a course in multivariable calculus. The intervention design required students to structure, practice, and deliver an oral presentation that was a synthesis of the teacher's weekly lectures, for the…

Courses: Large-lecture; public speaking, business, professional, and technical communication; sales and marketing courses; courses with team-based projects. Objectives: To provide opportunities to develop public speaking skills, especially in large-lecture courses; to improve public speaking endurance; to improve students' abilities to give…

Combining traditional classroom instruction and online instruction, or hybrid/blended learning, has emerged as a popular option to mitigate rising enrollments and non-traditional student needs while maintaining the known advantages to the face-to-face learning format. We evaluated the effectiveness of a Fundamentals of Communication course (also…