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Motivated by the likely scenario that AI tutors will soon become indistinguishable from human educators, this article discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that will arise from this shift and calls for reflection on how the role of human educators could evolve in light of emerging technologies.
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TYPE: OPINION
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
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into various sectors has raised significant ethical concerns, particularly in academic writing. This article examines the impact of generative AI (GAI) tools, such as ChatGPT, on the academic writing process. While these tools offer the potential to enhance efficiency and creativity, they also present challenges related to authorship, plagiarism, and academic integrity. The article explores key concerns, including privacy, validity, and bias, associated with GAI tools. It further provides guidelines for the ethical use of AI in academic manuscripts, emphasizing the importance of transparency and the careful documentation of AI contributions.
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TYPE: OPINION
Within higher education, digital learners are confronted with antiquated classifications of digital natives and immigrants, first introduced by Marc Prensky (2001), which make assumptions about their proficiency in digital literacy. This article provides a code of ethics and practical guidelines for critically examining the assumptions presented. The author has coined the term "e-ethical-learning" to refer to a set of ethical principles and practical guidelines, which is a portmanteau of "ethical education" and "e-learning."
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TYPE: OPINION
eLearning, while seemingly democratizing education, carries colonial biases in curriculum, language, and technology. Decolonization requires recognizing these constraints, disrupting the status quo, and embracing alternatives. Strategies include decentering Western voices, co-creating learning experiences, challenging linguistic hegemony, bridging the digital divide, and leveraging technology for decolonization. This ongoing process fosters inclusive and equitable education by acknowledging the colonial legacy and actively dismantling it.
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TYPE: OPINION
Course syllabi are often long, text-heavy documents that learners find difficult to engage with. This paper proposes a syllabus abstract--a one-page infographic-style syllabus that summarizes key course elements and includes interactive elements such as audio and video explanations. This approach aims to make syllabi more visually appealing and accessible for learners.
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TYPE: OPINION
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
In an era of rapid digitization of higher education, innovative online assignments that engage students, foster critical thinking, and mitigate academic dishonesty are paramount. Unique, experiential, and collaborative tasks such as digital storytelling, virtual field trips, interactive infographics, and more can bridge the interpersonal gap in virtual classrooms, inspire active participation, and bolster students' motivation, thus countering challenges such as student disengagement and plagiarism.
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TYPE: OPINION
The value of assignment feedback in enhancing student learning is significant, not just in rectifying conceptual misunderstandings but also in engaging and motivating students and strengthening their belief in their academic capabilities. This article outlines 13 strategies to provide effective, efficient, and engaging feedback, including the use of feedforward guidance, one-to-many feedback, peer-to-peer feedback, multimedia feedback, feedback banks, automation, formative classroom assessment techniques, rubrics, assignment exemplars, generative AI, proactive notifications, automated mastery learning opportunities, and student self-feedback, all of which holistically empower students towards academic success, meaningful instructor-student interaction, and a richer online learning experience.
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TYPE: OPINION
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
Online learning can greatly benefit learners with disabilities, provided that inclusive teaching practices and effective support systems are implemented. This article highlights 11 best practices for supporting these learners, including fostering relationships, identifying individual needs, using proactive teaching strategies, ensuring course alignment, providing emotional safety, implementing differentiation strategies, monitoring engagement, encouraging a growth mindset, establishing preferred communication modes, soliciting feedback, and adjusting teaching methods based on that feedback.
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TYPE: OPINION
Online education, while alleviating geographic constraints, amplifies the challenge of transactional distance, exacerbating students' sense of isolation during the learning process. This article suggests 10 strategies for enhancing instructional presence in a digital learning environment, including creating one-on-one spaces, establishing a reasonable response timeline, leading the class as a collective, using a consistent "voice," showing your face, being genuine, communicating expectations, sharing personal experiences, keeping course resources updated, and regularly checking-in; these strategies aim to mitigate the absence of physical proximity, fostering a more engaging and collaborative virtual classroom experience.
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TYPE: OPINION
Creating a meaningful and engaging online learning environment requires the deliberate fostering of social relationships, tapping into the inherent social nature of learning. Nine key strategies include sharing professional experience and expertise, demonstrating empathy and compassion, maintaining a visible online presence, integrating personalized videos, offering warm welcomes and farewells, providing one-on-one support, establishing rapport, and incorporating synchronous components to facilitate real-time interaction, all aimed at humanizing the online learning experience and effectively supporting learner engagement.
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TYPE: OPINION
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
Teaching in an online environment demands efficient time management and a focus on activities that maximize student learning and engagement. To this end, seven key strategies are suggested: reflect on and prioritize your instructional time, create a teaching calendar to manage tasks, integrate tools for streamlined communication, leverage analytics to focus attention, automate repetitive tasks, utilize video technology for efficient instruction and feedback, and foster collaboration among learners and colleagues.
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TYPE: OPINION
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
In a standardized curriculum, it is essential to design courses that maximize the unique qualities of each instructor while maintaining curricular consistency. By adopting a collaborative approach to course development, integrating technology intentionally, creating opportunities for instructor personalization, and supporting instructional growth, educators can ensure the benefits of unique instructor differences are utilized, resulting in an enriched online learning environment.
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TYPE: OPINION
In an era of rapid technological advancements and explosion in eLearning, it is with great enthusiasm that I start my term as the new Editor-in-Chief of eLearn Magazine. I am honored to lead the magazine through these exciting times.
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TYPE: OPINION
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 editorial provides an annual review of eLearn Magazine including a high number of published articles, the addition of new topic series, increased partnerships, and an effective editorial board strategic plan.
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TYPE: OPINION
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
Although concerns around academic integrity and plagiarism have been raised, ChatGPT can be used constructively as a learning tool. Several examples are included to guide educators on how to integrate ChatGPT in their teaching, such as answering questions, designing interactive lessons, starting discussions, and providing personalized learning experiences. However, it's imperative for educators to post guidelines for proper and improper use of ChatGPT, as well as teach students to use AI tools effectively and ethically. Embracing AI tools like ChatGPT could provide students with a dynamic and responsive learning experience.
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TYPE: OPINION
Stakeholders in digital assessments have requirements and expectations that technology implementations do not always meet. This is the "Assessment Excellence Gap." This article explains why digital assessment is important and focuses on two particular aspects with a call to action to make assessments more inclusive and to write questions that go beyond recall when creating assessments.
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TYPE: OPINION
Higher education is faced with a shifting milieu that actively embraces online education. This environment requires robust faculty support. Enter the faculty concierge model of faculty support, which extends the instructional designer-focused concierge model of online support proposed by McCurry and Mullinx through a faculty-centered lens. The faculty concierge model aims to provide high-touch, individualized faculty support. Faculty concierges respect the experiences and expertise of the faculty members they work with; they start with small changes and focus on offering simple and accessible support.
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TYPE: OPINION
With so much technology-enabled innovation in assessment, one area has often had too little attention--the exam development phase, often called the "hardest job in publishing." Writing exams is so challenging and so important, not just for the validity of tests but also for the ability of exam providers to innovate their services and operate efficiently. With genuinely enterprise scale solutions finally becoming available in this area, the authors offer a checklist guide for assessment providers to review their authoring processes.
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TYPE: OPINION
Mass production of test items involves numerous steps and takes time. Technology can play a key role in supplementing human resources whether gathering and storing source materials, communicating with subject matter experts, or synchronizing and coordinating activities during a complex or fast-paced development cycle. Our work in automated item generation (AIG) using natural language processing is one example of this process unfolding in practice. Over the past few years, there has been a surge in developments in the fields of natural language understanding and generation (NLU/NLG) regarding applications of language models developed via machine learning techniques that have yet to be applied to the area of AIG.
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TYPE: OPINION, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
The primary focus in developing and providing equitable assessment should be the student who will engage with the assessment. Students' diverse experiences and individual needs are key to centering them in their assessment. New practices and greater emphasis are needed to provide an assessment environment that enhances student agency. Performance assessment, current innovative and emerging technologies, and considerations for marginalized students and students with disabilities, all grounded in research-based practices can promote equity in assessment. Some of these approaches already exist in some schools, which can serve as an illustrative example of what can be accomplished.
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TYPE: OPINION
This is the first in a series of articles covering advancements in eAssessment. The series will feature educators, developers, and researchers from around the world who are innovating how learning is assessed while meeting the challenges of efficiency, scalability, usability, and accessibility.
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TYPE: OPINION
The highlight of this past year was new community initiatives. In this annual review of the magazine, the Editor in Chief details her accomplishments and goals.
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TYPE: OPINION
