Purpose: Mentoring supports children, adolescents and young adults on their career paths and presents an important extracurricular educational format. The COVID-19 pandemic created a strong impetus for the deployment of virtual mentoring programs (VMPs), in which mentors and mentees communicate completely or predominantly through information and…

Purpose: The rapid emergency remote teaching has moved informal learning programs online including makerspaces, which has created an opportunity for harnessing the benefits of virtual makerspaces. This study reports on findings from three club designers and facilitators' reflections on a fully virtual maker club offered in the summer of 2023. This…

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many instructors to rapidly shift to online/distance teaching. With a narrow preparation window, many instructors are at a loss of strategies that are both effective in responding to the crisis and compatible with their professional practices. One urgent need in classrooms at all levels is to support…

Purpose: Emergency transitions from face-to-face learning environments to digitally mediated learning require robust support networks, particularly in the form of communities of practice. Digitally enhanced communities of practice (DECoP) can be created and sustained when research-based design principles are used. The purpose of this paper is to…

Purpose: Open online courses have expanded opportunities for people to learn remotely. However, few online experiences offer participants ways to create projects and actively engage with course materials while developing meaningful personal connections with one another. The purpose of this paper is to share strategies implemented in a large online…