The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of life, forcing educational institutions to pivot rapidly to emergency remote learning. Within higher education, learning designers stepped forward and shouldered much of the responsibility of supporting institutional change on an unprecedented scale to ensure continuity of student learning. Although…

Work and learning are essential facets of our existence, yet sociocultural barriers have historically limited access and opportunity for women in multiple contexts, including their professional pursuits. Such sociocultural barriers are particularly pronounced in technical domains and have relegated minoritized voices to the margins. As a result of…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer opportunities for professional development of environmental educators globally, yet we lack understanding of participants™ cognitive and social learning processes and of how instructors can enhance these processes. Based on the Community of Inquiry framework, we used a survey and coded participant…

To identify factors that can contribute toward supporting educator adoption of digital technologies beyond the emergency remote teaching response to COVID-19, we investigated how teachers' motivation and abilities related to the use of digital technologies for teaching changed since the onset of the pandemic. Two surveys and interviews were…

Although Twitter and other social media sites have grown in popularity with educators, we still do not know what is happening within this online space or how it supports teachers. The purpose of this case study of #Edchat, a group of educators who meet weekly on Twitter, was to investigate informal professional development through the lens of…

Effective communication is essential in every organization, including educational institutions. Often, members of the online community work in isolation. Collaboration across varying disciplines and departments can promote unique professional development activities and create a stronger connection to the entire online community. "Enriching…

For school librarians, being part of a "connected" community provides support for getting specific needs met, solving personally relevant and meaningful problems, and developing professional expertise. AASL provides many avenues for members of the profession to learn with and from one another. These include AASL and subgroup electronic…

As an educator for thirty-four years, the author describes several great changes she has seen in the field of education since she started in the 1970s. The author gives advice to educators just beginning their careers. Old and new ways of receiving professional development are explained along with the limitations and benefits of these options.…

This study sought to examine how educators are using Twitter to increase their professional learning opportunities beyond the boundaries of traditional professional development offers, and whether educators feel a greater sense of fulfillment receiving professional development through networking and community learning than they do through…

Social media are fundamentally changing core practices in various industries. Although surveys indicate that social media are impacting social scientists, we know little about how education scholars, specifically, use social media for their work or professional learning. This article explores how educational scholars incorporated the social media,…

Twitter has demonstrated potential to facilitate learning at the university level, and K-12 educators' use of the microblogging service Twitter to facilitate professional development appears to be on the rise. Research on microblogging as a part of teacher education is, however, limited. This paper investigates the use of Twitter by preservice…

Recent developments in the use of social media for learning have posed serious challenges for learners. The information overload that these online social tools create has changed the way learners learn and from whom they learn. An investigation of learners' goals, motivations and expected outcomes when using a personal learning network is…

This article presents the sociometric analysis of the interactions in a forum of a social network created for the professional development of Portuguese-speaking teachers. The main goal of the forum, which was titled Stricto Sensu, was to discuss the educational value of programmes that joined the distance learning model in Brazil. The empirical…

New technologies, such as social networks, wikis, blogs and other social tools, enable collaborative work and are important facilitators of the social learning process. Many companies are using these types of tools as substitutes for their intranets, especially software development companies. However, the content generated by these tools in many…

Teachers in isolated schools are often under-resourced and overwhelmed with additional pressures. Teaching in an isolated community can sometimes challenge teachers' skills and knowledge, particularly when additional pressures such as behavioural issues associated with students with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) like behaviours are present.…