The COVID-19 pandemic has affected deep reflection in higher education classrooms: how do we attract and retain students to (temporary but nevertheless increasing) online learning experiences, how do we keep them at our universities and colleges, and how do we give students a learning experience from which they will remember meaningful…

As educators around the world are exploring new approaches to keep students involved in remote learning during the pandemic, we investigated the utility of memes in promoting engagement in the online environment. Medical students enrolled in a human physiology course at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Sohar, Oman were provided with an…

In this article, the author shares his fear that students will become accustomed to an educational experience that lacks joy and fun as a result of the changes made to education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his teaching colleagues have noticed that when students are learning virtually, they act much more as receivers of knowledge than…

Effective teachers engage their students in multiple ways, and engagement reduces disruptive student behaviors. However, teachers consistently report struggling with classroom management, and their struggle has been linked to teacher turnover. Currently, there is a small but growing body of literature on the use of comedy techniques in the…

The COVID-19 pandemic upended higher education in March 2020 and has continued into 2022. Within days of the international lockdowns, an emergency conversion from face-to-face (F2F) to remote learning occurred. Educators scrambled to convert their in-class teaching into some version of online teaching. The transformations ignited a surge in…

How can comedy be used as an effective tool and truly help innovate the learning experience? This paper outlines how aspects of comedy have been creatively integrated into primary and secondary academic curricula such as English Language Arts, social studies, drama, as well as in areas of mental health and wellness. The essay demonstrates, for…

This paper will analyze the function of final particle "yo", and factors that may affect the use of "yo" in order to avoid FTAs if there is any. The data used in this paper is a transcription of a 10-minute unscripted excerpt from a Japanese comedy variety show called "Shabekuri 007". The excerpt was first aired on…

Generation Z (Gen Z) represents something of a quintessence for the broken promises that now seem to make up the promise of higher education. But if despair indicates the dark side of generational malaise around things like civic engagement, community, and student learning, the dark humor that has emerged out of these generations points to modes…

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the education sector soon faced the unprecedented challenge of moving courses online within no time. The rapid implementation of emergency remote teaching (ERT) led to students and teachers alike being thrown into an emotional terra incognita. This paper sets out to explore if foreign language (LX) grit,…