While massive open online courses (MOOCs) promise to democratise access to education, the literature reveals a nuanced understanding of engagement in these settings, especially in resource-constrained environments. Blended MOOCs combine MOOCs and physical classroom settings of contents and instructions. This study extends this discourse by…

This study aimed to capture collective faculty experiences of adapting to teaching entirely or partially online during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The literature suggests that emergency remote teaching (ERT) was only a temporary stopgap for higher education institutions and faculty to move instruction online early in the pandemic…

This multiple-article dissertation explores institutional support for student academic engagement through the lens of the Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework. A literature synthesis explores the current research on teaching assistant (TA) support in online and blended environments in higher education, with a special emphasis on…

Traditionally, education has been largely delivered in an in-person format; however, an increasing number of courses are being delivered entirely online or with a blend of online and in-person components. These formats differ along various dimensions, such as the quantity and quality of interpersonal interactions and connections, which will likely…

This mixed methods study compared the Community of Inquiry (CoI) presences and student performance between two course sections in a course -- HyFlex vs. online asynchronous. The CoI presences show participants' perception of three important elements -- teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence in a computer-mediated course…

The "community of inquiry" framework examines the interplay between four kinds of presence (teaching, cognitive, social, and learner) to promote effective learning in online education. This paper investigates the impact of "instructor participation" ("IP"), a key component of "teaching presence," on student…

This descriptive study examines the experiences of virtually-trained new members in a hybrid distributed community of practice (CoP) focused on undergraduate genomics education. We utilized a sequential explanatory mixed methods research design consisting of an engagement survey for all community members (n=124), followed by interviews with new…

This paper explores the literature around online and blended learning. The impetus came from a cohort of 60 students being led through their dissertation by an e-learning evangelist. Initially the pedagogy closely followed Salmon's Five Stage Model, Wenger's Community of Practice, and traditional Social Constructivism pedagogies. In hindsight, it…

As part of a large exercise physiology laboratory (lab) reform project, we used blended learning to support graduate teaching assistants and lab technicians in developing their pedagogical knowledge and create an entry point to reflective conversations about teaching and learning. Because self-paced asynchronous online modules can enable…

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more K-12 teachers in the United States were teaching online than ever before, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities (US Department of Education, 2011), and since March 2020, nearly every teacher has become, at least for a little while, a virtual teacher. The purpose of this study was to…

Purpose: While blended learning has been proved to be successful in learning outcomes, the landscape of blended learning has changed under coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Hence, the present study aims to explore first-year university students' perceptions of wholly blended learning during the pandemic, through the three constructs in the…

The purpose of this PLC-informed qualitative interview case study was to explore middle school teacher methods for cultivating student autonomy and the rationale behind their instructional choices. Here, student autonomy was defined as learners taking ownership of their academic performance and scholastic responsibilities (Holec, 1981). The…

Global events have changed the fundamental way teachers teach and students learn in the 21st century. Teacher preparation programs have necessarily offered their programs through varied modalities. One specific framework for teaching in different modalities is the community of inquiry framework (CoI). In this study, we utilized CoI to study…

This article discusses issues that emerged from conducting professional development activities for educators during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, as post-academic educational trainers, the authors worked closely with more than 200 professional educators who participated in an international diploma program to develop their professional skills and…

Anatomists are well placed to tackle the transition from face-to-face to blended learning approaches as a result of the rapidly forced changes brought about by COVID-19. The subject is extremely visual and has, therefore, previously been a target for the development of technology-enhanced learning initiatives over the last ten years. Today's…