The principle of traditional education has transformed fundamentally within the last few years. The growth of new computer and communication technologies has provided learners with access to a variety of quality online education. Many educational institutions have shifted partially or completely to distance learning and online lectures as their…

As the world is evolving, higher education is too. This includes online service-learning which in the past has been predominantly delivered in formats off-line or hybrid. This article describes some best practices to make the online service-learning experience beneficial for all who are involved and accessible to more students, including students…

Universities around the globe have begun implementing outcome-based learning (OBE). The curriculum will be revised, evaluated, and the outcomes of the assessments will be reported as part of this OBE implementation. Due to the importance of the evaluation method, several lecturers are searching for innovative approaches for assessing the…

This article emphasizes the need for adult educators to adapt to the constantly evolving digital landscape. Traditional methods of professional development (PD) no longer suffice, so PD courses should strive to foster a lifelong learning mindset and encourage a culture of experimentation. The article outlines three strategies for creating an…

The phyphox app has demonstrated itself to be useful and impressive for physics teaching. The app is free to download and has so many features that it seems it may be particularly helpful in this time of distance learning. Phyphox (pronounced to sound like "physics") works for Android and Apple phones, and there are many experiments…

This team of authors collaborated to transform a middle school-focused informal STEM learning experience to a virtual platform that engaged students in authentic STEM learning experiences while simultaneously promoting discourse.

The majority of chemical experiments conducted during educational programs are carried out in laboratories because they require instructors with special skills, in addition to large, expensive instruments. Recently, there has been an increasing demand for chemical experiments that can be carried out anywhere. Herein, we propose a novel type of…

The blog and distance learning: the former can enhance, enlighten, and elevate the educational experience for the student and the teaching experience for the instructor. And blogs are especially suited for the asynchronous environment where nearly everything is written and remains throughout the course, so students can continually refer to the…

Labor-based grading: for many instructors in the world of distance learning this is a new concept, yet it is one that is rapidly growing in acceptance and popularity. First introduced in 1993 by English professor Peter Elbow, the premise of labor-based grading is that instructors weigh assignments based on how much labor--how much…

The protein folding reaction is one of the most important chemical reactions in the human body. Yet, despite its importance, it is sometimes omitted from undergraduate courses due to the challenging nature of some of the underlying concepts. To help make key concepts of the protein folding reaction accessible to our undergraduate students, we…

Online learning is not going away; in fact, it is growing exponentially. While some students and educators may have been forced into the online instructional realm under less-than-ideal circumstances due to COVID-19, the authors agree with Schwartzman (2020), who noted there is a benefit from this experience--shifting perspectives from a…

Special educators must be prepared to meet the diverse needs of their students, yet they have few opportunities to collaborate with others in similar roles or receive targeted professional development. Therefore, practices that intentionally sustain special educators are needed. Such experiences have existed in the professional development world…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education systems around the world, resulting in an unprecedented emergency with school closures affecting 1.6 billion learners (Azevedo et al., 2021). This brought to light the need for resilient education systems that can provide education during emergencies and school closures (UNICEF, 2021). The challenge of…

Despite its mainstreaming into the broader educational ecology, open and distance education (ODE) still leaves much to be desired in terms of both practice and research. Inspired and informed by the author's 35 years of experience as an ODE practitioner, researcher, reviewer, and editor, this article concentrates on 10 critical issues of ODE…

When teaching practice changes due to unwelcome forces, like COVID-19, there still could be pedagogical innovations worth keeping in post-pandemic toolboxes. This leads to the questions: What teaching practices from the pandemic do we want to keep or modify? What lessons learned from the pandemic should we consider keeping when moving forward?…