Hundreds of thousands of K-12 children in the United States are enrolled in online K-12 virtual schools that consistently report poor academic outcomes. There is a need to assess how well instructors in a synchronous online environment present new material to learners in a way that best aligns with how the brain manages and integrates new…

The aim of this study is to present a model proposal on determining the student participation rate in synchronous courses given in Learning Management Systems (LMS). Especially in situations where equal opportunities cannot be provided or opportunities are limited, distance education provides benefits for learning anytime and anywhere (ubiquitous…

Online teaching has been in use for a while, but not many people cared to embrace it as a method of teaching until the COVID-19 pandemic literally forced them into giving it a consideration. The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutting down of schools across the country and several parts of the world. Consequently, many state…

Student engagement in the online learning environment is critical for academic success. One increasingly popular means through which to facilitate this engagement is the use of web-conferencing software. While there are a variety of potential applications, this paper will evaluate the use of one such web-conferencing tool to support synchronous…

The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge challenge to the world. It has interrupted many aspects of lives, especially education settings. Emergency remote education was put into practice to ensure the continuity of education while learners are physically out of universities, schools and institutes. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the…

Online learners face a different set of obstacles than their classroom-based counterparts as they seek to develop clinical skills solely through interaction with the content of an independent learning curriculum. While ground campus learners benefit from classroom content such as lectures or roleplay activities with their peers to rehearse…

The National University of Science Technology is an English-language institution in the Middle East offering degrees in Medicine, Pharmacy, and Engineering. We present the results of our studies of the evolving student learning experience during the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) lockdown restrictions. There was a discernible preference for…

Online courses are growing in higher education, resulting from an increased access to information and communication technologies. While such courses allow time and/or space flexibility for both students and instructors, they also promote active learning and require more autonomy from the students. In this paper, we present the main design features…

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives, including instruction in the higher education system. In this sudden and stressful change, faculty had to explore different opportunities and technologies to continue to deliver quality instruction to their students. Instructional design has always been an important topic for education…

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, China implemented the largest online education practice in human history. In the process, different teaching models coexist. Through a quasi-natural experiment, a total of 1,024 samples from Guiyang No.8 Middle School and another comparable school with the same conditions and students were enrolled for…

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, China implemented the largest online education practice in human history. In the process, different teaching models coexist. Through a quasi-natural experiment, a total of 1,024 samples from Guiyang No.8 Middle School and another comparable school with the same conditions and students were enrolled for…

This article describes an equity-focused professional learning community that used the EQUIP observation protocol to provide data analytics to instructors. The learning community met during Spring 2020, and due to the global coronavirus pandemic, it moved online midsemester. This article describes patterns of student participation and how they…

Participation in synchronous online learning is an increasing need for students' learning outcomes. Teachers generally cannot be sure about the fact that students who are seen in the participation lists are really following the online tasks. Recent studies have shown that gamification can be an effective way to support learners' participation in…

In face-to-face conversations, speaker transitions (or hand-offs) are typically seamless. In computer-mediated communication settings, speaker hand-offs can be a bit more challenging. This paper presents the results of a study of audio communication problems that occur in an online synchronous course, and how, and by whom, those problems are…

Most online courses are offered as "asynchronous" courses and have no real-time contact with students. The Synchronous online alternative provides normal scheduled class time and allows students to login to a virtual online classroom with the instructor. We provide an overview of two different platforms for hosting synchronous classes…