Providing quality hands-on exercises in a GIS course is essential in enhancing problem-solving skills and student-led learning activities. However, the strategies and instructional methods of managing hands-on exercises, which have been used in traditional face-to-face classes, will require new interpretations in a virtual learning environment and…

Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy and Metaliteracy (IPILM) is a discourseoriented learning environment that engages students from diverse cultural backgrounds to participate in collaborative knowledge construction. The objective is to evolve a thematic approach to course design that includes elements of open pedagogy, information…

Purpose: This paper aims to present a practical guide for designing effective synchronous online teaching to support student engagement. Design/methodology/approach: This practical guide was developed by drawing insights from literature and our own practical experiences. Findings: This paper developed BEST principles (i.e., Building positive…

This design case describes the design of a multimodal learning environment that took place in the context of a funded study on the development of an online, multimodal, and tangible cross-border exchange program aimed at creating experiences that closely simulate face-to-face study abroad (SA) experiences in the post-pandemic context. Although…

Higher education (HE) faculty are increasingly teaching online. For many faculty, this represents a new instructional mode that comes with its own set of challenges but also with new instructional possibilities. One challenge is identifying innovative and effective active learning methods that academically engage online students. Along with other…

"Online learning"--learning that involves interactions that are mediated through using digital, typically internet-based, technology--is pervasive, multi-faceted, and evolving, creating opportunities and challenges for educational research in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this special issue, we advance an interdisciplinary agenda…

This research considers the synchronous creation of a faculty meta-ensemble emergent in the pivot to online music ensembles in 2021. The unit of study outline for Music Ensemble Performance mandates live ensembles in a Kolb-inspired experiential learning model, seemingly impossible to achieve in a pandemic. Eric Ries advocates for necessary change…

Many music educators are concerned about building healthy classroom communities as they prepare to transition to online or blended learning environments. Research involving distance education has indicated that several techniques in the design and delivery of online instruction can increase students' sense of community, commitment to the course,…

Classroom activity traditionally takes one of three forms, variously oriented toward the levels of individual students, small groups, or the whole class. CSCL systems, however, may enable novel ways to facilitate instruction within or sequence activity across these different levels. Drawing on theoretical accounts of learning at and across…

This paper situates a critical review of studies that we have conducted within the broader research literature to analyze the affordances of integrating modeling within disciplinarily-integrated games from computational thinking and science as practice perspectives. Across the studies, the analyses pursue two themes: (a) the role of agent-based…

Maastricht University (UM) has a distinct global perspective and a strong focus on innovation. UM offers an array of PhD courses to distance and campus based students who have access to elective, credit bearing modules and the language needs of these students are catered for by the Language Centre. Many PhD candidates choose to take an academic…

The usefulness of the online Skype system for qualitative data collection has been well documented, but its application in qualitative data analysis has been largely ignored. This article provides insight into the use of Skype in the context of interdisciplinary team research, with a focus on the analytical phase of a qualitative investigation.…

This article explores professional learning through online discussion events as sites of communities of learning. The rise of distributed work places and networked labour coincides with a privileging of individualised professional learning. Alongside this focus on the individual has been a growth in informal online learning communities and…

Students studying together inside their classrooms is widely advocated in the literature on teaching methodology. This paper provides a brief overview on the idea of students also studying together outside of class, either face-to-face or electronically. Such out of class student-student interaction offers many of the same benefits of in class…

This paper challenges traditional dichotomies that identify temporal and spatial restrains as relevant defining properties of learning environments. We present a critique of the current dominant computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) taxonomy. Although we believe that the taxonomy does provide useful information, we question whether the axis…