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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
Authors for this special issue presented their work, perspectives, and recommendations that look to move learning assessment at all levels "beyond multiple-choice."
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TYPE: OPINION
In this opinion piece, Susan Lyons explores the imperative to amplify diverse voices and perspectives in the field of educational measurement. She identifies two negative effects of the lack of cultural diversity in leadership positions within the field and ends by calling for a higher level of critical consciousness within the profession of educational measurement.
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TYPE: OPINION
In 2020-2021, elearning became essential at all levels of education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This editorial provides a year in review for eLearn Magazine. A common theme was the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic in online education and opportunities for overcoming these challenges.
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TYPE: OPINION
With so much formal learning now taking place online, eLearning educators have the opportunity to incorporate Wikipedia as a multifaceted pedagogical resource. I argue that doing so facilitates the cultivation of 21st century skills and empowers learners to participate in creating positive social change. The article concludes with various ways educators may incorporate Wikipedia into teaching practice, appropriate Wikipedia assignments for students.
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TYPE: OPINION
The possibilities for meaningful elearning experiences are endless, yet intentional work must be done to see that students are engaged and motivated. Through the fundamental elements of self-directed learning, students and teachers can forge new paths in education and create a bright future for teaching and learning online.
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TYPE: OPINION
In the wake of COVID-19, both K-12 and post-secondary institutions have had to transition from traditional learning in the classroom to teaching and learning through various online and or e-learning platforms. With such an abrupt transition, it's important for educators to explore the effectiveness of e-learning among their student populations. Moreover, this narrative discussion is facilitated by a program director who oversees an adult education English as a second language program located in Atlanta, Georgia. The director maintains the opinion that various modes of online learning are not the best learning method for all student populations and specifically adult English language learners.
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TYPE: OPINION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Distance education has exploded, in recent years, with more students taking online courses than ever before. However, despite the explosion in online course takers, the number of students who are not completing their online degree programs is also growing. Online students report feeling isolation, and a disconnect with their classmates and educational institution. Another phenomenon, social media, has also experienced explosive growth, including the largest in modern society, Facebook. The goal of my research study was to understand if there could be a connection between the use of social media, specifically Facebook and Facebook Messenger, and the isolation that distance students experience.
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TYPE: OPINION, HIGHER EDUCATION
In the past three years, eLearn Magazine has reached several milestones placing the publication at the intersection of elearning research and practice. This editorial provides an overview of these accomplishments and a plan for the next three years.
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TYPE: OPINION