The evolving landscape of higher education demands integrating advanced technologies to foster engaging and inclusive learning environments. This paper examines the practical integration of Stellarium, a virtual planetarium software, and ChatGPT, an AI conversational agent, in an asynchronous online undergraduate astronomy course. Stellarium…

Many undergraduate and graduate courses have been recently converted to fully remote offerings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even within the remote structure, courses vary in their frequency of synchronous and asynchronous meetings. Fostering collaboration through students' idea-sharing and supporting their learning is especially challenging in…

Lectures and seminars increasingly strive for continuous interactions between learners and the instructor. I study whether the communication program Slack contributes to these goals by analyzing daily activity statistics in methodological and project-based postgraduate courses at an Irish university. Both semester-long courses were taught online…

This study reports on a participatory design approach including the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of a mobile app-based personal response system (PRS). The first cycle formulated initial design principles through context and needs analysis; the second utilized the collaboration with instructors and experts embodying specific…

This article starts with a detailed literature review of recent studies that focused on using learning analytics software or learning management system data to determine the nature of any relationships between online student activity and their academic outcomes within university-level business courses. The article then describes how data was…

At Franklin University, we are in the process of creating a master's degree in Instructional Design and Performance Technology. In one of the program courses, Enhancing Learning with Technology, we wanted students to experience applying principles of e-learning while using an industry standard e-learning application. However, we have learned by…

Faculty who offer university-level technical courses through e-Learning environments must surmount several difficult challenges. Traditionally, learning in technical courses takes place through real-time interactions between instructor and students in the course of solving actual problems--a form of activity that is not possible in asynchronous…

Exploring the Solar System in the elementary school curriculum has traditionally involved activities, such as building scale models, to help students visualize the vastness of space and the relative size of the planets and their orbits. Today, numerous websites provide a wealth of information about the sun and the planets, combining text, photos,…

Online learning space design becomes a significant issue with the proliferation of online learning in higher education. Never before has the instructor been given such a privilege in building and molding the learning space to fulfill his/her instructional aspirations. However, enormous challenges are present to the instructor in taking advantage…

This article discusses the challenges faced when integrating new technologies into the classroom. Viewing the experiences of teaching a first year learning community through the lens of the principles of the Reflective Teaching Portfolio, the author looks to answer the question: "How should Technology relate to our Teaching Philosophy?"…

Merrill proposes First Principles of Instruction, including a problem- or task-centered strategy for designing instruction. However, when the tasks or problems are ill-defined or complex, task-centered instruction can be difficult to design. We describe an online task-centered training at a land-grant university designed to train employees to use…

Given the challenges facing higher education in the fast-changing educational and social environment, what can be learned from an instructor who has braved the rapidly changing stream of technologies and has subsequently developed a personal and productive approach to using emerging technologies to teach better and farther? What aspects of…