Whether by choice or pushed online by Covid, higher education is increasingly happening in digital spaces with digital tools forming a critical part of learning and teaching contexts. While reviews suggest such tools positively influence student engagement, research tends to be generic and more is needed to understand how and why specific tools…

This study investigated how university students in Pacific Island contexts coped with the shift to remote learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers aimed to investigate the social capital of a group of Pasifika university students in Fiji, New Zealand and Solomon Islands universities during COVID-19 and how they coped with the…

The majority of Pasifika students at the University of Otago come from other parts of New Zealand and have to adapt to studying and living in an environment that does not have a strong Pacific culture. These changes potentially affect their education experience and academic performance. Students may form social networks through religious…

The impact of global mobility and technology innovations on urban linguistic diversity poses a key challenge to understand how and to what extent international students are immersed in the target language. Such diversity of languages and modes of communication has pointed to a fundamental transformation in the way that international students…

This paper reports on a study investigating the use of digital devices by language students at universities in New Zealand, Sweden and Germany. The study also examines the use of social media for learning a foreign language in an institutional context, using survey results from language students in the three countries. Based on an online survey…

The Force Concept Inventory was designed to poll the Newtonian conception of force. While there are many in-depth studies analyzing response data that look at the structure of the correct answers, we believe that the incorrect answers also carry revealing information about the students' worldview. The inventory was originally designed so that the…

Facebook is a frequently accessed social networking site with more than one billion active users worldwide. Although there are numerous studies on its impact on teenagers, none have investigated its impact on gifted and talented girls. This study's aim was to understand the social media experiences of talented female student leaders. A qualitative…

This reflective practice paper presents an excerpt of the outcome of a telecollaboration project between two tertiary institutions in New Zealand and Finland. Twenty-six intermediate students of German in the two countries used a Facebook-group to write about given topics which were part of their final assessment. The posts were a combination of…

In multilingual Malaysia, the place of English has been debated at various times since independence in 1957. An initiative to address concerns about levels of English language proficiency in the country through teaching Science and Mathematics in English was launched in the early 21st century. For some teachers, a trans-national component was…

This report provides a snapshot of information from the 2016 New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) national survey regarding the role and impact of digital technologies for learning in New Zealand primary and intermediate schools. We asked teachers and principals how students were using digital technology in the classroom, and how…

This paper investigates the use of "Facebook" for out-of-class, informal language learning. 190 New Zealand university language students (Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Spanish) completed an anonymous online questionnaire on (1) their perceptions of "Facebook" as a multilingual environment, (2) their online writing…

Global efforts to prepare young developing minds for solving current and future challenges of climate change have advocated interdisciplinary, issues-based instructional approaches in order to transform traditional models of science education as delivering conceptual facts (UNESCO, 2014). This study is an exploration of the online interactions in…

The Learning and Change Network Strategy (LCN) was developed to raise students' achievement by appreciating, extending and enriching their learning environments. Throughout New Zealand there are 53 voluntary, networked communities of practice. They involve the active participation of students, teachers, parents, school leaders and community…

The advent of web 2.0 has enabled new forms of collaboration centred upon user-generated content, however, mobile social media is enabling a new wave of social collaboration. Mobile devices have disrupted and reinvented traditional media markets and distribution: iTunes, Google Play and Amazon now dominate music industry distribution channels,…

The research reported here follows previous articles in this special issue which detail a national study involving a team of researchers across four higher education institutions in New Zealand. A key theme that emerged from a collection of questionnaire, interview and observational data was the central importance of teacher-student and…