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Assumptions are made around the digital literacy and digital capabilities of students in higher education. It is important that these assumptions are dismissed, digital literacy becomes a true consideration in curriculum design, and students are supported in their development rather than expected to develop the digital skills they need. Supporting students in their development of digital literacy through curriculum integration not only allows them to succeed in education, but also work toward obtaining the skills they need for their future career and joining a workforce in a digital society.
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TYPE: OPINION, HIGHER EDUCATION
Drawing on his recent book, Autonomy-Supportive Teaching in Higher Education: A Practical Guide for College Professors (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Whitehead describes how to apply the evidence-based principles of autonomy-support into asynchronous online courses. These include, among others, being patient with students as they adapt to the learning system, designing surveys where students choose course topics, and creating opportunities for students to interact with one another.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Harnessing the power of instructional technology, educators can drastically enhance the learning experience by infusing their curriculum with digital tools specifically chosen to align with their teaching objectives. The article highlights 15 such technologies--Canva, Genially, Waklet, Quizizz, Flip, Flipsnack, PowToon, Anchor, Bitmoji, Loom, Padlet, Google Jamboard, Moovly, Edpuzzle, and Clarisketch--each providing unique opportunities for creating engaging content, fostering interaction, and enabling collaboration in the digital classroom.
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TYPE: OPINION, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, HIGHER EDUCATION
The clerkship phase in medical school is pivotal for clinical training. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption and implementation of educational technology in medical education became inevitable, leading most medical schools to shift toward distance learning. While technologies cannot entirely replace hands-on clinical teaching, faculty members have devised effective ways to utilize technology, such as virtual patients, virtual reality, first-person video streaming, simulators, gamification, and mobile apps. This article provides a summary of the technologies employed, the challenges associated with them, and the advantages and instructional outcomes resulting from their use.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, HIGHER EDUCATION
Providing opportunities for students to lead and shape class, alongside an instructor, takes into account the unique cultures, needs, and experiences of each student. A co-leading model was used during a blended Instructional Technology course and findings revealed that this model was engaging and gave students an opportunity to share their own experience. Student reflections also indicated some challenges, such as group collaboration and technical issues.
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TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Online education's success hinges greatly on the implementation of a robust social presence, akin to a perfect "no skip" music album, fostering an interactive and connected learning community. These 12 strategies--being authentic, recognizing students as individuals, ensuring availability, fostering higher-order thinking, intending social presence, creating community cohesion, acknowledging the reciprocity of social presence, strategically implementing technology, leveraging curiosity through gamification, promoting immediacy and intimacy, focusing on affective association, and understanding chronemics--offer a comprehensive guide for educators to improve online engagement, thereby improving the student's learning experience and reducing feelings of isolation.
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TYPE: OPINION, HIGHER EDUCATION
To enhance student engagement and learning in the online classroom, instructional videos need to be thoughtfully created, curated, and integrated. Key considerations include making the videos learner-centered and relevant, ensuring easy access, keeping video length short, focusing on clarity over perfection, providing alternative means of accessing the information, fostering student interaction, and personalizing videos to enhance the sense of class participation and connection.
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TYPE: OPINION, DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Building vibrant, online professional learning communities (PLCs) is crucial to combat the isolation experienced by online faculty and facilitate their professional growth, with strategies such as prioritizing relationship building, empowering all faculty with a voice, recognizing their achievements, ensuring relevant and targeted content, teaching best pedagogical practices, and accommodating faculty needs. By nurturing a supportive and collaborative online environment, institutions can help faculty overcome remote teaching challenges, connect them to valuable resources, and enhance their professional and personal fulfillment in their roles as online educators.
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TYPE: OPINION, HIGHER EDUCATION
To maximize online student learning, instructors should prioritize their time towards instructional strategies that students deem most impactful, such as providing individualized, one-to-one feedback; adopting a holistic feedback approach; engaging in asynchronous discussion forums; curating relevant content resources; and presenting instructional content in efficient, versatile formats. As research reveals, learners value instructor feedback and engagement in online discussions above all else, thereby guiding where educators should focus their limited instructional time.
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TYPE: OPINION, HIGHER EDUCATION
One might say that Watermark's Vice President of Product is on a mission of continuous improvement. Or rather, his passion is helping institutions implement and experience the benefits of the continuous improvement cycle. With philosophies based on human-centered approaches to design, it's clear that Brian Robinson understands the theoretical foundations of and practical approaches to this critical work in institutional evaluation and effectiveness. This interview takes readers on a journey through the underlying components and future of continuous improvement through the eyes of a leading educational technology executive.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW, HIGHER EDUCATION
A common challenge for instructional designers and administrators of online programs is ensuring that projects are completed within the development timeframe and course content meets high standards for quality. This article describes a training course that was developed to meet those challenges. The course prepares subject matter experts (SMEs) to work with a design team made up of instructional designers and instructional technologists so that SMEs can plan their course content using a backward design framework. SMEs participate in a fully asynchronous online course with other SMEs where they can collaborate and brainstorm ideas. Having SMEs take an online course that resembles the online course they will later be designing allows them to gain insight from a learner perspective, which can help them design a learner-centered course.
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TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Gamification has been dismissed by some as a passing fad and buzzword in education; however, if approached as part of mindful course design, gamification can enhance student learning and engagement. This article introduces a gamified redesign of a technology-based graduate course using Yu-Kai Chou?s ?actionable gamification.? Chou?s Octalysis Framework defines eight-core drives that describe the psychological motivators found in common gaming mechanics. Adding elements of ?white hat gamification? to the course?which focused on building a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, and meaning making?created an environment that allowed students to overcome their anxieties related to technologies, build digital literacies, and overcome the fear of failure in the classroom.
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TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
In response to the advent of AI technologies like ChatGPT in academia, educators should not merely react with plagiarism policies but proactively integrate such tools to enhance learning. By cultivating AI literacy, integrating AI into assignments for interactive learning, and leveraging it for idea generation, we can prepare students for a digitally advanced future, promoting critical thinking and digital literacy while ensuring thoughtful use of technology to support student growth.
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TYPE: OPINION, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, HIGHER EDUCATION
This study aims to comparatively analyze students and professors' perceptions regarding the development of competencies through the online format of a bachelor's degree program in hospitality management during three semesters of stay-at-home learning. The goal is to understand whether the tools and teaching resources used by faculty adequately met the objectives of the bachelor program, which has as one of its main objectives the development of competencies. Using the two variables from the TAM Model (i.e., perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) and the types of technological resources that students and professors used, we found both groups saw the accessibility and ease of use of technological tools as simple and believe that they are useful or very useful for learning.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION, INTERNATIONAL ONLINE EDUCATION
Learner agency, premised on making education meaningful and relevant, involves fostering two critical aspects in online classrooms: voice and choice. By providing students with a say in the teaching-learning dynamics (such as setting course policies or assignment deadlines) and offering them decision-making capacity in mastering course content (like choosing individual learning paths or formats to demonstrate understanding) educators can create a personalized learning experience that enhances student motivation, engagement, and investment.
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TYPE: OPINION, HIGHER EDUCATION
Gamification, the application of game elements in non-game contexts, is being embraced in higher education, particularly in online classrooms, to foster engagement, participation, and satisfaction. As a quick and effective way to gamify, digital badges serve as virtual rewards for accomplishing specific tasks or goals, stimulating student motivation, promoting community, encouraging critical thinking, developing skills, and bolstering incremental learning, thus making learning tangible and shareable, and driving competition.
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TYPE: OPINION, DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Teaching online learners with social skill, mental health, and communication disabilities requires post-secondary instructors to become more than content experts. The purpose of this article is to provide recommendations for postsecondary instructors for building inclusive communities, focusing on accessible course design, and increasing specialized professional knowledge that serves all learners, saves planning time, and diminishes frustration from excessive individualization of instruction.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Josie Ahlquist's book "Digital Leadership in Higher Education" provides stakeholders in higher education with strategies to establish authentic personal connections using social media.
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REVIEW: LITERATURE,
TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Asynchronous learning has taken on new significance in the era of COVID-19 social distancing. The learning curve for students and faculty members to adapt to the new distance learning environment has been a dynamic experience. In this article we review some of our experiences with asynchronous curriculum in the pre-clerkship curriculum at the Uniformed Services University. We review student and faculty perceptions of virtual, asynchronous curriculum as well as tangible solutions for implementing asynchronous curriculum and pitfalls to be aware of.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Panopto is a screen and lecture capture tool that can create in-video quizzes. By following guidelines, creating quizzes in Panopto can effectively keep students watching and help the lecture content stick in learners' memories.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
In 2020, as the entire world, including the U.S., experienced the rapid restraints and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, innovative teaching and assessment methods had to be utilized to achieve pre-pandemic goals and objectives of graduate education. This article describes how faculty implemented virtual oral exams as an assessment methodology to evaluate students' cumulative knowledge of essential women's health content. Course faculty administered a 25-minute virtual oral examination to students enrolled in a second-year advanced women's health course. All enrolled students (25 in 2020 and 19 in 2021) completed the virtual oral examination. The method was successfully implemented for two consecutive years, demonstrating the potential feasibility, applicability, and sustainability of implementing oral examinations utilizing the evaluation method in graduate education.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Organized asynchronous discussions are a common feature in online, formal higher-education courses. Discussions can take place learner to learner or instructor to learner and are situated in small group projects, processing content in message boards, and games. Within these learning settings, conflict can emerge. Conflict may foster deeper learning about ideas, or it may be destructive and create a negative learning environment. The purpose of this article is to identify conflict challenges present within asynchronous online discussions and to present evidence-based strategies to mitigate conflict within these higher education instructional settings. Conflict challenges may involve navigating effective online collaboration, participating in small group discussion, and developing discernment for health conflict.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
We missed in-person learning due to the pandemic. Three years later some form of virtual learning is here to stay, so how can we replicate that in-person feel?
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Quick response (QR) codes allow for quick and easy accessibility of just-in-time training (JiTT) for a variety of online materials. They are becoming more widely utilized to share educational materials, with potential vast applications for health professions education. In this article, we describe the development of a novel video-based equipment skills training curriculum incorporating QR codes and discuss the broader implications for educators.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, HIGHER EDUCATION
Conferences offer a venue to share ideas, present and hear about current research, and network. Medical conferences include an added dimension of being a form of continuing medical education. The COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to conduct traditional in-person conferences, and, out of necessity, everyone had to transition to a virtual platform. Organizing a conference requires a tremendous amount of planning, preparation, and persistence to ensure the intended vision is met. But there is insufficient evidence and guidance on conducting effective conferences. This paper will discuss my experience planning and conducting a virtual medical conference.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Many medical residency programs have attempted to equip their trainees with tools to combat burnout using wellness curricula. One often-overlooked aspect of burnout is the support person's lack of understanding about the stress residents face as well as what is required of them. We describe a program, known as the Family Anesthesia Experience, with a focus on the conversion of the in-person event to a virtual format and comparing learning experience in the two formats. The goals of this program are to improve residents' support persons' understanding of anesthesiology residency and combat physician burnout via a social-relatedness approach. This program was conducted in-person in 2019 and converted to a virtual format in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION, NONFORMAL/INFORMAL LEARNING
Developing pediatric resident trainees' proficiency in managing and troubleshooting tracheostomy issues is critical for the intensive care of children with medical complexity. Tracheostomy management, involving a set of complex technical and non-technical skills, are traditionally taught in simulation centers. The COVID pandemic, however, has posed a challenge to our in-person coaching, prompting us to explore the innovative use of VoiceThread to teach these skills using a blended approach. In this paper, we report the evolution from VoiceThread-based completely asynchronous coaching towards blended coaching, and we discuss the optimization of blended coaching into Just-in-Time Coaching. We demonstrate that the development of instructional approach was based on our critical analysis of different modes of teaching, reflection on lessons learned and best practices from implementation, and review of relevant literature.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, HIGHER EDUCATION
Blended learning in pain education is an effective teaching method to help learners grasp complex didactic and clinical topics. In this report, four educational strategies are examined that were successfully utilized to teach a postgraduate dental orofacial pain course. These strategies included using virtual presentations, hands-on training, virtual interactive case-based learning, and student created multimedia and peer-to-peer feedback.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, dentists, etc.) use cutting-edge technologies in patient care. They interact with technologies daily. However, the use of technology for education has not been widely adopted by healthcare professions educators. This special issue explores how educators in different healthcare professions have adapted their teaching to the online environment. The articles in this special issue showcase the use of educational technologies in a broad health professions landscape: dental education, nursing education, medical school, and medical residency programs.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Because of high economic volatility, ongoing competition intensification, and the recent COVID-19 global pandemic influence, more and more education institutions are looking for efficient ways to serve their adult learner population. This article introduces a peer-mentoring framework of practice to help education institutions develop healthy cross-institutional leadership collaborations. This framework builds on three pillars: Developing a shared vision, respecting diversity and differences, and streamlining communications. An adult distance education consortium located in the U.S. is discussed as an example to illustrate how this three-pillar peer-mentoring framework of practice can be used to help make cross-institutional leader collaboration a success.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, MANAGEMENT
To improve the quality of online teaching, institutions typically provide structured professional development in the form of institutional teaching or learning center programming. This programming typically focuses on teaching and learning quality, transitions to online teaching, pedagogies, and new technologies. This article reports on the use of outsourced professional development along with faculty responses to the program. Use of an outsourced program was attractive to faculty who wanted to have another institution's name on their vita. Seventeen faculty completed the professional development program and eight shared their reflections on this inquiry.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Flipped classroom is an active learning method that encourages students to access study material prior to class time. Ensuring the flipping process took place, understanding how it occurred, and verifying whether it produced positive results has been a challenge for lecturers. In this article, we analyze a flipped classroom scenario through process mining techniques. Process mining was applied to an event log provided by a learning management system that supported a particular undergraduate course offering. The outcomes provide evidence for the flip of the classroom, adding precision and reliability to lecturer analyses.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
In recent years, substantial progress has been made in the application of technology for learning environments to support interaction and learning. However, current digital assessments still need to be modified to measure student learning in more engaging and effective ways. Conversation-based assessment (CBA) advances the conventional digital assessments by creating a conversational environment between test-takers and agents where each test-taker receives feedback for their correct responses and hints or follow-up questions for their incorrect responses through a natural conversation. This work provides a summary of CBAs by discussing their advantages and differences from conventional digital assessments.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Learning modalities and technology offer dozens of ideas on how to teach online, but still, two things often seem to be missing in the online classroom: class interaction and efficient grading and feedback. In this article, the author describes in detail two kinds of weekly recording activities that greatly add to student engagement and learning in asynchronous courses. Students can be a rather passive audience, but they become much more active in group-conversation video recordings in which the instructor is not present but does provide feedback upon review of the recording.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Concept maps (CM) are a learning tool that has emerged into an efficient e-learning and e-assessment knowledge tool. The aim of this research is to propose and share the most important aspects, practices, and achievements of using, with science teachers and a master student, a combination of a metacognitive tool-advanced concept mapping (ACM) to assess mental models with immediate real-time feedback assessment tool. The use of the logic branching feature of multiple-choice Google Forms (MCGF) may enable teachers to customize surveys and to assess within many students' high order thinking skills, with the convenience and efficiency of an automatic grading system.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
As with most aspects of life, assessment practices have been challenged by the events of 2020. The combination of the consequences of COVID-19 restrictions and the increased awareness and reckoning with systemic racism requires the field to take a hard look at our assessment systems. The main function of assessment is to gather evidence by which one makes inferences about what people know and can do. Over the past decade, our digital capabilities have increased exponentially and offer the potential to approach assessment differently. We now have digital learning environments that capture the actions of students as they engage in learning activities.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
In an online, general education course, for a course grade, students were to submit video posts to an introductory course activity. Student responses (by text) were also required for that activity. Initial posts and responses were cataloged by race and gender across multiple sections of the course through multiple semesters and years. Statistical tests were performed to analyze mean numbers of responses and determined that evidence supported that different numbers of responses occurred depending on the race or gender of the original poster, but not both the race and the gender.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
Blended learning offers adult learners unique opportunities for instructional continuity given work and personal commitments. However, learners participating in blended learning may experience a sense of isolation and/or problems with technology. To address the challenges of a blended program, an expanded orientation, called "onboarding," was designed to ensure learners feel connected to their program and clearly understand the programmatic requirements. Onboarding spans six months and includes a series of activities to provide learners with technological, interaction, and self-directed learning skills needed to succeed in a blended program. Results from the evaluation survey reveal that learners feel most engaged with the program through one-to-one interactions with their academic advisors and interactions with peers in an online discussion board.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
How might the online learning experience, and the support required for success, differ for men and women? New survey research captures insights from 505 participants, including 295 women, who graduated from online programs between 2015 and 2020. This article provides an overview of the characteristics of online students, highlighting the challenges female students face and considerations for supporting their success. Differences in demographic characteristics across gender were found in the areas of degree level and academic major, income, age, and ethnic diversity. More men chose computer and information sciences majors, while more women were in healthcare and education. Female students were also younger and at lower income levels than their male counterparts when they were enrolled in their online programs.
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TYPE: HIGHER EDUCATION
During the COVID-19 pandemic, most, if not all, courses were shifted to online learning formats. In this article, we share our experiences related to teaching and learning in a completely online, condensed (seven-week) graduate-level course during the fall 2020 semester. More specifically, we discuss the important role of emotional literacy as a mechanism for framing online course design, adaptation, and evaluation. We explore emotional literacy in terms of its necessity in teaching and learning in online contexts during a pandemic, beyond the scope of other obviously important non-traditional literacies, such as technological and informational literacies.
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TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Students in online classes may have difficulty or believe they cannot develop a rapport with fellow students. There is significant research that indicates that this rapport greatly increases the student?s success in a class. Students can easily build rapport in an in-person classroom and often the instructor is not involved. However, in the online classroom, the problem becomes how do students build this rapport when they only see each other in a virtual space in the classroom to help increase their learning and course success.
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TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
