The statistics used in education research are based on central trends such as the mean or standard deviation, discarding outliers. This paper adopts another viewpoint that has emerged in statistics, called extreme value theory (EVT). EVT claims that the bulk of normal distribution is comprised mainly of uninteresting variations while the most…

In 2015, 35 million learners participated online in 4,200 MOOCs organized by over 500 universities. Learning designers orchestrate MOOC content to engage learners at scale and retain interest by carefully mixing videos, lectures, readings, quizzes, and discussions. Universally, far fewer people actually participate in MOOCs than originally sign up…

This article examines what that immersion in virtual worlds has looked like for Jason (a pseudonym), a 21-year-old person diagnosed on the autism spectrum who has participated in virtual games since he was 12. Over the four years we have followed Jason, what has been noticeable is not only the increasing communication skills he has demonstrated,…

With the burgeoning casualisation of the higher education workforce, the precarious nature of casual teaching has become increasingly well documented. Universities are recognising that enhancing quality learning and teaching must include attention to the provision of services, support, and professional development for teachers employed on a…

Social networks have drastically changed communication between people, constituting a means of everyday use by which information is created and shared in a simple, instantaneous way with the rest of the world. Although social networks were not initially created for academic purposes, they are gradually being used as a means of communication…

The growing proliferation of digital media over the past few decades has engendered both significant promise and significant concerns regarding children's development. Digital media have changed the ways young people learn, interact with others, and develop essential cognitive and social-emotional skills. This paper provides school psychologists…

Research has identified the need for additional teaching strategies to address issues within intercultural computer-supported collaborative learning (iCSCL) environments. While some strategies have been proposed to support teacher effectiveness and student participation, to date no research has traced issues back to students' underlying, intrinsic…

This dissertation has two components: social media fundraising and e-commerce. The first component of social media fundraising discusses social media users' charitable content generation in essay 1 and charitable giving in essay 2. In essay 1, we examine how reciprocity of followees affects social influence on users' charitable content generation.…

A number of states and organizations have begun to add cross-content technology elements to their educational standards, providing teachers opportunities to use social media communication (SMC) technology in teaching and learning. Specifically, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the PA Core Standards, which are adapted from the national Common…

The original goal of this project was to build a peer e-mentoring program for parents and measure the effect of the program on persistence. In spite of strong mentor participation, two terms of focused recruiting did not attract mentees. This sparked the question of why those who had successfully navigated the higher education system thought a…

This dissertation examines conversations and attitudes about mental health in Twitter discourse. The research uses big data collection, machine learning classification, and social network analysis to answer the following questions (1) what mental health topics do people discuss on Twitter? (2) Have patterns of conversation changed over time? Have…

One of the demonstrators during the 2011 Egyptian revolution tweeted "We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world," thus acknowledging and establishing the fundamental role of social media in the political unrest and revolution against the regime in Egypt. Information Systems (IS) have…

Launched in June 2016, the Smithsonian Learning Lab (SLL) provides access to the digital resources from across the Smithsonian's 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the National Zoo, to be used as real-world learning experiences. It is designed to aid students in building lasting knowledge and critical skills that take learners from simply…

This paper contributes to current sociolinguistic research on the rapidly-changing landscape of digitally mediated communication (Androutsopoulos and Staehr 2018) by presenting mediagrams, a new method for research on transnational mediated interaction. Based on an ethnographic study of mediated multilingual communication in four families with…

Among the language skills, writing has been considered as the most difficult skill not only for native speakers, but for foreign language learners as well in the sense that one cannot achieve fluency and accuracy unless they become successful language users in terms of listening, speaking, and reading. This action research studied the effect of…