Back-and-forth conversations with others are vital for children's development in the early years. While children's conversation partners have traditionally been their parents, teachers, and peers, recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to the introduction of machines that understand human speech and generate natural responses, and…

Higher education institutions are increasingly offering online courses, forcing a growing number of faculty members, who are accustomed to the traditional face-to-face method of teaching, to adapt to the rigors of the new technology. Although students demonstrate more positive attitudes and superior academic performance when engaging in highly…

Inclusive preschool classrooms have become increasingly common in recent decades, affording opportunities for children with and without disabilities opportunities to interact and develop positive relationships. Children with disabilities may be unintentionally excluded from these interactions due to communication differences. This paper discusses…

COVID-19 has had a major impact on collectivist cultures and their means of social interaction and maintaining contact with those in their wider community. This has particularly been the case for Pacific peoples living in diaspora, with COVID-19 preventing travel home and social distancing and forced lockdowns restricting the ability to gather.…

Digital Ethnicity is a model developed to provide an organized method to define human interaction with digital communication technologies and the result of these interactions on cultural development. The ultimate goal for the development of Digital Ethnicity as a concept is to describe those aspects of digital ethnicity that influence society.…

Purpose: Against the background of empirical research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), the purpose of this paper is to advocate implementing collaborative learning activities into online distance education courses to engage learners in interactive knowledge construction. This study uses empirical evidence to illustrate how…

The online environment poses a number of challenges, including creating opportunities for students to interact and get to know each other. I propose adding online discussions that can allow students to explore the real-world implications of biochemistry to provide course context, build the classroom community, diversify student assessment, and…

Distance education requires an instructional design approach that can lead to educational transformation. This is characterised by advanced flexibility, learner autonomy and extensive use of digital technologies to enhance learning outcomes. The main feature of such methodology is the physical distance between teaching staff, peers and educational…

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) presents an approach of learning to permit an online and a distant learning for internet users. These systems are confronted with several problems among which the most important: the lack of participants' interactivity in the platform and the dropout of the participants. Those challenges need to be resolved to…

In 2020, the rapid onset of a pandemic related to the disease known as COVID-19 resulted in a widespread lockdown of societies across the globe. Universities rapidly closed campuses, forcing the transition to emergency remote teaching within just a few weeks. The distinct difference between Australian universities and those in the Northern…

The coronavirus outbreak will likely highlight both strengths and weaknesses of the pre-corona educational system. Researchers have a responsibility to examine the experiences educators have had during the pandemic; however, there are no education-specific frameworks for researchers to use to examine teachers interacting with digital colleagues…

Social interaction is crucial for understanding individual and collective processes in knowledge communities. We describe how technology has changed the way people interact in large communities. Building on this description, we propose a framework that distinguishes four types of joint interactions in online knowledge communities: Attendance,…

As with the responses to the COVID-19 crisis, technology has a critical role to play in enhancing the resiliency of education systems. The urgency of developing responses highlighted the limitations and consequences of a technological solution that is not complemented with supportive policy and investments in capacity for all the actors:…

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…

There still appears to be a gap between what online learning promises and what it can deliver in terms of student learning. Developments in online pedagogies and professional learning appear to lag behind the developments in technology and the promised benefits of technological transformation may not be realised. In this paper, we bring together…