Cooperative learning is associated with a variety of potential benefits to students, including better comprehension and retention, improved perceptions and attitudes, and increased openness to diversity. Yet, there is limited evidence or instruction on cooperative learning activities in asynchronous online classrooms, an increasingly common course…

This Writers' Forum piece addresses the importance and impact of community within the graduate experience through inception and evolution of a virtual writing group by six doctoral students attending geographically distant universities. By acknowledging relevant academic literature and sharing our experiences as best practices, we propose that…

This chapter describes the Integrated Online Team-Based Learning (IO-TBL) model, an online TBL course design which utilizes both asynchronous and synchronous modes of engagement to maximize the benefits of TBL in an online environment. Students' perceptions of the effective and ineffective aspects of the IO-TBL model are also reported.

Restrictions on in-person teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic severely challenged higher education practices worldwide. While didactic delivery of course content is easily achievable with virtual teaching technologies, promoting critical engagement with this material can be more difficult, particularly with classes of larger size and lower…

The spring of 2020 saw the spread of COVID-19 throughout the world, and in response many colleges and universities moved to emergency remote instruction. Herein is described how an introductory chemistry course that prioritizes active learning and collaboration was adapted for emergency remote learning. Instructors used both asynchronous and…

The realities of the 21st century have led professors and lecturers to renew their learning assessment practices so that they are more adapted to and contextualized in the current professional world. Despite advances in teaching and learning, assessment methods may still deviate from practice in authentic contexts. Although some instructors are…

Education is a perpetually evolving field, especially with the rapid advancement of technology and the upsurge of the globalization phenomenon (Crawford and Kirby 2008). Students need to become familiar with social interactions that they will eventually encounter in the future. However, in order for students to effectively participate in…

Perusall, a web-based collaborative reading platform characterised by its social annotation functionalities, was introduced in a postgraduate teacher-training language-awareness course in Hong Kong during the shift to online teaching and learning brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Tasks were designed on Perusall to engage the…

The Group Exercises is a distinctive collaborative group working activity completed by approximately 170 second-year undergraduate chemistry students each year in June. The activity comprises students working in randomly allocated teams of 4-6 members to complete a structured learning package to solve chemistry problems with industrial relevance…

There are differences in the benefits that are afforded by the two extremes of face-to-face and distance education. University campus courses are based on the assumption that the student community and interaction between learners and an expert teacher in the same physical location is essential to the learning process. In comparison, distance…

Given that our current educational context has required many educators to utilize online instruction in some capacity over the past year, the purpose of this paper is to describe how literacy specialists and teachers can use digital tools to remotely engage in data-based decision-making within a collaborative professional learning community.…

This essay expounds on the merits and demerits of two social studies instructional strategies (cooperative learning and discussions) through virtual means in the current COVID-19 global pandemic, and offers eight helpful guidelines in addressing the strategies for social studies instructors. The merits of virtual cooperative learning and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is sharing out basic guidelines and examples from an extended collaboration to move educators move online while avoiding synchronous meetings. "gPortfolios" are public (to the class) pages where students write responses to carefully constructed engagement routines. Students then discuss their work with…

Over the last two decades, the academy has experienced a renaissance of diversity in pedagogical techniques with the introduction of experiential learning, active learning, flipping the classroom, and, more recently, team-based learning (TBL). TBL adopts a two-stage process that incorporates individual learning with team collaboration. While…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, university professors are challenged to re-envision mathematics learning environments for virtual delivery. Those of us teaching in elementary teacher preparation programs are exploring different learning environments that not only promote meaningful learning but also foster positive attitudes about mathematics…