All students studying Computer Science (CS) deserve to have their basic psychological need for belonging satisfied. In this dissertation, I present two studies of belonging among CS students at the University of Washington-Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. In the first study, my collaborators implemented a resubmission…

Visual bookmarking app Pinterest, known for its aspirational and consumptive qualities of users' "pinning" work, has recently made concerted forays into the online advertising and marketing space. At the same time, its visual and collaborative qualities offer unique potential for application in pedagogy. This paper describes a…

Objective: How do learning communities influence academic performance in Introductory Psychology? Method: The present research examines the relationship between participation in first-year students learning communities and academic performance across a variety of course requirements (midterms, finals, papers, and class participation) in…

The author assesses the evolution of classroom community through an examination of three subsequent semesters of a large undergraduate education course at a regional, comprehensive university. The evolution and modification of course format and assignments across three semesters are treated as interventions to foster interactions among students…

The author successfully implemented the "House" system in a university social studies methods class and reports on the positive results that ensued. Students reported a sense of unity, camaraderie, identity, and closeness that was missing in many of their other classes. The House assignments and competitions are described, as well as…

Several of the key measures in this year's Student Academic Experience Survey have moved in a positive direction, but these movements have tended to be relatively small. Value-for-money perceptions have improved, but not statistically significantly, while there has been no change in the proportion who would choose the same course and institution…

Creating collaborative working and learning experiences has long been at the forefront of computer-assisted language learning research. It is in this context that, in recent years, the integration of social networking sites and Web 2.0 in learning settings has surged, generating new opportunities to establish and explore virtual communities of…

After two demanding years for everybody in higher education, and particularly for students, it is encouraging to see that in most parts of the UK, undergraduates are beginning to see better value-for-money, and fewer students are reporting poor or very poor value from their academic experience. With much more frequent 'face-to-face' teaching,…

Digital technology is reshaping the way higher education subjects are taught, including design. Various design disciplines use studio teaching as a pedagogy to educate students for professions in art and design. Studio teaching bases a high premium on face-to-face interactions which guide learning through dialogue and feedback on individual work.…

This paper discusses the intentions and outcomes of a service-learning course in LIS. Interviews with students who had recently completed the course provided insight into how the course had changed their perspective on their community. The interviews sought students' perspectives on their own empathetic development, sense of community, and…

Many of the headline findings reflected in this year's Student Academic Experience Survey (SAES) 2021 will be disappointing to the sector, though perhaps not entirely unexpected. The 2021 SAES was offered to over 47,000 undergraduate students in the United Kingdom (UK) and took place between 2 February 2021 and 22 March 2021, with all four parts…

During the Winter and Spring 2014 semesters students registered in the online offering of Human Kinetics and Recreation 1000 (N = 589) were asked to participate in two Twitter events encompassing two of the course's assessment activities. In each Twitter event, students were required to post, at minimum, one original tweet and respond to another…

Coaching female athletes is as rewarding as it is challenging. These athletes are usually more coachable, intelligent, and mature than males at similar ages. However, they are different in many ways from their male counterparts. For example, Drobnick (2012) and Merchant (2012) have emphasized women's communication styles as seeking feelings more…

More and more educational institutions have been moving towards delivering courses and programs at a distance. Although asynchronous online courses overcome the constraints of time, students feel isolated due to the lack of real-time communications. One possible solution to overcome this isolation been suggested that learner's online behavior and…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…