Educators constantly wrestle with the question of how to engage students in an environment in which students are increasingly distracted. This issue has become more relevant as instructors have been forced to pivot to the use of a variety of online learning modalities to administer instruction. While the synchronous online class session allows for…

Collaborative learning can be a worthwhile and valuable part of a student's online course experience, and interpersonal exchanges among members of an online course community often rely on greater intentionality within the design of the learning experience. We present a synergistic framework for strategic design of collaborative learning in the…

The shift of evidence-based, active and inquiry-based pedagogy to online modalities has typically been done with a synchronous model, using video conferencing technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration amongst students. Such an approach can be infeasible for some students and create inequitable situations within a class. This paper…

Teacher-student group conferences (TSGCs) blend the benefits of one-to-one teacher-student writing conferences with those of peer response. TSGCs socialize student writers into discussions of academic writing, giving them an expert model (the teacher) and an opportunity to practice providing feedback to several peers. This article describes how…

Learning metabolic pathways is vital for understanding biochemical processes and all of their implications for life. Their learning in the virtual environment is complex and generative learning strategies, such as the construction of online conceptual maps, can help in this process. This article presents a proposal for the collaborative…

Taking the challenges presented by shifting to online instruction mid-semester due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, I tried to utilize prompts on discussion boards as test questions. The prompts for these questions were to create a triple integral satisfying certain conditions, and when a person posted their integral, no one else could use the…

Internet users' comments in online spaces have attracted researchers' attention in recent years. Although this data is typically publicly available, its use requires careful consideration so as to not cause harm to the users, while complying with the terms and conditions (Ts & Cs) of the online spaces. However, the Ts & Cs and researchers'…

Technology can help expand communities of practice in music education and promote a democratic schooling process vital to culturally sustaining pedagogy. Through careful and effective implementation, technology helps connect students to relevant musical communities and supports educators in achieving student-centered thinking and practices. The…

Many instructors question the move to online teaching and learning and it is often met with resistance as they fear that on-line learning will be more structurally didactic. In particular, one of the major concerns is that the value of face-to-face discussions will be lost. This is a core concern for courses that require the development of…

What does it take to make online discussions work? Educator Michael B. Sherry offers three strategies for addressing the challenges of online conversations and engaging students in going deeper in their digital discussions.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Albright College changed its classroom courses to an online format starting at the middle of the semester. This communication describes the transformation of the remaining semester for the lecture of the general chemistry course for majors. Video, ungraded and graded quizzing activities, and discussion…

Courses: Undergraduate courses in interpersonal communication, nonverbal communication, relational communication, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and intercultural communication, as well as basic communication courses. Objectives: The purpose of this activity is twofold: (1) to demonstrate how nonverbal communication shapes content and…

When learning is virtual and students' webcams are turned off, interaction between students and teachers compared to an in-person classroom can fall short. The reasons some students keep their webcams off are numerous and compelling from an equity lens perspective (Yu 2020a): The history of policing in the United States points to an increased use…

In this case, we focus on two innovations in the design of competitive discussions for a high stakes learning context. The designer created the intervention to provide learners first-hand discussion experiences despite large class sizes. It was a business communication course, and the large class sizes and group dynamics previously had inhibited…

"To learn about X, observe what happens to the system when X is removed." What happens to the higher education student experience when, during a pandemic, so many of the avenues for building a sense of belonging are radically and fundamentally disrupted? How should we respond as individuals, a collective and a sector, to redress this?…