This article reports on a trace-based assessment of approaches to learning used by middle school aged children who interacted with NASA Mars Mission science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) games in , an online game environment with 8 million registered young learners. The learning objectives of two games included awareness and knowledge of NASA missions, developing knowledge and skills of measurement and scaling, applying measurement for planetary comparisons in the solar system. Trace data from 1361 interactions were analysed with nonparametric multidimensional scaling methods, which permitted visual examination and statistical validation, and provided an example and proof of concept for the multidimensional scaling approach to analysis of time-based behavioural data from a game or simulation. Differences in approach to learning were found illustrating the potential value of the methodology to curriculum and game-based learning designers as well as other creators of online STEM content for pre-college youth. The theoretical framework of the method and analysis makes use of the Epistemic Network Analysis toolkit as a post hoc data exploration platform, and the discussion centres on issues of semantic interpretation of interaction end-states and the application of evidence centred design in post hoc analysis.

How do people reason with data to make sense of the world? What implications might everyday practices hold for data literacy education? We leverage the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on these questions. COVID-19 has engendered a complex, multimodal ecology of information resources, with which people engage in high-stakes sensemaking and decision-making. We take a relational approach to data literacy, examining how people navigate and interpret data through interactions with tools and other people. Using think-aloud protocols, a diverse group of people described their COVID-19 information-seeking practices while working with COVID-19 information resources they use routinely. Although participants differed in their disciplinary background and proficiency with data, they each consulted data frequently and used it to make sense of life in the pandemic. Three modes of interacting with data were examined: scanning, looking closer and puzzling through. In each of these modes, we examined the balance of agency between people and their tools; how participants experienced and managed emotions as part of exploring data; and how issues of trust mediated their sensemaking. Our findings provide implications for cultivating more agentic publics, using a relational lens to inform data literacy education.

The world-wide pivot to remote learning due to the exogenous shocks of COVID-19 across educational institutions has presented unique challenges and opportunities. This study documents the lived experiences of instructors and students and recommends emerging pathways for teaching and learning strategies post-pandemic. Seventy-one instructors and 122 students completed online surveys containing closed and open-ended questions. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted, including frequencies, chi-square tests, Welch Two-Samples -tests, and thematic analyses. The results demonstrated that with effective online tools, remote learning could replicate key components of content delivery, activities, assessments, and virtual proctored exams. However, instructors and students did not want in-person learning to disappear and recommended flexibility by combining learning opportunities in in-person, online, and asynchronous course deliveries according to personal preferences. The paper concludes with future directions and how the findings influenced our planning for Fall 2021 delivery. The video abstract for this article is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F48KBg_d8AE.

The annual instructional virtual team Project X brings together professors and students from across the globe to engage in client projects. The 2020 project was challenged by the global disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper draws on a quantitative dataset from a post-project survey among 500 participating students and a qualitative narrative inquiry of personal experiences of the faculty members. The findings reveal how innovative use of a variety of collaboration and communication technologies helped students and their professors in building emotional connection and compassion to support each other in the midst of the crisis, and to accomplish the project despite connectivity disruptions. The results suggest that the role of an instructor changed to a coach and mentor, and technology was used to create a greater sense of inclusion and co-presence in student-faculty interactions. Ultimately, the paper highlights the role of technology to help the participants navigate sudden crisis affecting a global online instructional team project. The adaptive instructional teaching strategies and technologies depicted in this study offer transformative potential for future developments in higher education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher education institutions to implement online learning activities based on virtual platforms, allowing little time to prepare and train faculty members to familiarize students with digital technologies. While previous studies have looked at how students engaged with digital technologies in their learning activities, the characteristics of the student engagement in online learning remain underexplored. Therefore, a systematic review of the literature on student engagement in online learning in higher education is much needed. This article synthesizes the findings on student engagement in Latin American higher education institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. After reviewing the studies on online learning activities, this review examines student engagement from behavioural, cognitive and affective dimensions and identifies the main characteristics of student engagement from these tripartite dimensions. The implications of the findings for online learning in Latin American higher education are as follows: (a) to transform higher education, (b) to provide adequate professional training, (c) to improve Internet connectivity, (d) to ensure quality online learning in higher education and (e) to provide emotional support. These findings will provide valuable guidance for teachers, educational authorities and policy makers and help them make informed decisions to use effective strategies to support online learning in higher education institutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant challenge to higher education and forced academic institutions across the globe to abruptly shift to remote teaching. Because of the emergent transition, higher education institutions continuously face difficulties in creating satisfactory online learning experiences that adhere to the new norms. This study investigates the transition to online learning during Covid-19 to identify factors that influenced students' satisfaction with the online learning environment. Adopting a mixed-method design, we find that students' experience with online learning can be negatively affected by information overload, and perceived technical skill requirements, and describe qualitative evidence that suggest a lack of social interactions, class format, and ambiguous communication also affected perceived learning. This study suggests that to digitalize higher education successfully, institutions need to redesign students' learning experience systematically and re-evaluate traditional pedagogical approaches in the online context.

This paper aimed to provide a holistic view of research that investigated online learning in higher education around the globe during COVID-19 utilizing a bibliometric analysis. The researchers used co-citation analysis and text mining afforded by VOSviewer to document and analyze research patterns and topics reported in peer-reviewed documents published between January 2020 and August 2021. Findings of this study indicated that scholars from 103 countries or regions from the Global North and Global South investigated a wide array of topics, such as use of various technologies and strategies, redesigned curriculum, student perceptions and psychological impacts of the pandemic-imposed online learning. Many researchers applied technology acceptance theories and structural equation modeling to investigate factors associated with adoption and impacts of the pandemic-imposed online learning. Of the large quantity of research, medical education and chemical education were the most investigated disciplines. Inquiry-based learning, discovery learning, hands-on learning and collaborative learning emerged as instructional approaches frequently discussed or utilized across the target studies. This paper discussed (a) ongoing and emerging challenges to online higher education, (b) placing innovative pedagogies at the forefront of online learning, and (c) rapid, but imbalanced distribution of evolving literature based on the findings.

For the last 28 years, one of the leading international science education organisations has regularly provided a week-long summer school experience for doctoral students. In summer 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented international travel and close-contact interactions between scholars. This required the transformation and relocation of learning interactions between mentors and doctoral students online through a virtual week-long summer school. All doctoral participants, from across the five continents, were invited to reflectively comment on their educative experience after the online event. This paper consequently presents the perspectives of these science education PhD students who engaged with the transformed virtual summer school to consider how the range of varied online interactions maintained the learning opportunities for them and enabled their introduction to an established research community. The study indicates how the digital activities facilitated and maintained high-quality learning exchanges through a varied array of intellectual activities involving both experienced and novice scholars. The findings demonstrate how successful academic outcomes can be achieved remotely while minimising international travel and significantly reducing financial outlay. This was achieved through creatively structuring a week-long virtual experience and combining a series of synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities for different groupings of participants within the international summer school community.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education across the world as campuses closed to restrict the spread of the virus. UK universities swiftly migrated to online delivery. The experiences of students and staff during this transition can inform our return to campus and our ability to deal with future disruption. This study draws on Moore's theory of transactional distance to understand factors influencing student study skills engagement and participation in online learning during this period. We surveyed students ( = 178) in a computing school at a UK university. A partial least squares (PLS) analysis was used to explore the influence of transactional distance (between students/teachers and between students/students), access to e-learning capital, and perceived usefulness on two measures: study skills engagement and participation in online collaborative activity. Results show that transactional distance influences participation, and e-learning capital influences study skills engagement. Our findings suggest that if universities continue with aspects of online learning for previously on-campus students they should provide access to infrastructure and training on utilising the online ecosystem to avoid disadvantaging students. Further investment in students' e-learning capital, such as signposting and adapting existing resources, is also necessary to support this key influence in study skills engagement.

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked an urgency for many educators to integrate digital information and communication technologies in their educational practices. We explored how faculty members tackled the task of adapting their assessment practices during the pandemic to identify what is required to sustain and favour future quality development and implementation of e-assessment in higher education. Employing a qualitative descriptive approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with thirty-one individuals six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified four major themes in participants' discourse about the integration of e-assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic: (a) the considerations they had for the potential consequences on students and how they considered this while deciding how to move forward, (b) the preoccupations for the potential for cheating, (c) the importance of pedagogical alignment, and (d) the affordances available to them. While the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fact that higher education institutions were not prepared for a pivot to- or greater integration of- e-assessment, it also provided the tipping-point to do so. In other words, it offered an unprecedented opportunity to critically appraise and change assessment practices, this opportunity was also a very challenging balancing act of considering the social consequences of assessment, and the alignment within set affordances.

Educators have indicated the need to foster students' ability to solve problems by acquiring up-to-date knowledge as well as promoting their competences for making decisions from diverse perspectives based on the acquired knowledge. Traditional courses mainly use lecture-based instruction without providing sufficient opportunities for students to practice and interact with the teacher; therefore, it is difficult to deliver such up-to-date knowledge via traditional instruction, not to mention fostering students' critical thinking. In this study, the Mobile technology-supported Decision, Reflection and Exercise (MDRE) model is proposed to address this problem. Moreover, a learning system is developed based on the proposed approach. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted in a university with a two-group pretest posttest design to assess participants' learning achievement, critical thinking and learning satisfaction. The participants were two classes of undergraduate students. One class with 37 students was the experimental group learning with the MDRE learning approach, whereas the other class with 37 students was the control group learning with the conventional technology-based learning approach. Analysis of covariance was performed to evaluate the effect of the intervention on the target outcomes. It was found that the experimental group showed better learning achievement, critical thinking and learning satisfaction than the control group. This implies that the MDRE approach has good potential in helping learners think from diverse perspectives and promoting their learning performance and engagement, which is important in higher education aimed at fostering students' competence of acquiring up-to-date knowledge for solving problems.

Online learning is currently adopted by educational institutions worldwide to provide students with ongoing education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though online learning research has been advancing in uncovering student experiences in various settings (i.e., tertiary, adult, and professional education), very little progress has been achieved in understanding the experience of the K-12 student population, especially when narrowed down to different school-year segments (i.e., primary and secondary school students). This study explores how students at different stages of their K-12 education reacted to the mandatory full-time online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, we conducted a province-wide survey study in which the online learning experience of 1,170,769 Chinese students was collected from the Guangdong Province of China. We performed cross-tabulation and Chi-square analysis to compare students' online learning conditions, experiences, and expectations. Results from this survey study provide evidence that students' online learning experiences are significantly different across school years. Foremost, policy implications were made to advise government authorises and schools on improving the delivery of online learning, and potential directions were identified for future research into K-12 online learning.

This paper addresses the research problem of how to reach, engage and support parents in home-educating young children during the first national COVID-19 lockdown in England (March-June 2020), which was addressed through using technology. An internet-mediated research (IMR) approach is used to investigate the effectiveness of using technology and translational research as strategies for disseminating a rapidly produced digital guide, for promoting play-based learning at home, to parents. Lockdown with the closure of early years provision led to parents finding themselves isolated at home with young children. Early years educators were managing a unique set of circumstances where communication with families, including those 'harder-to-reach' was contextually problematic. Qualitative data using IMR captured online interactions by unobtrusive and obtrusive methods; unsolicited emails and social media comments and questionnaire responses. Conventional content analysis identified emerging themes of access, availability, reliability and readability. Analysis showed a combination of factors impacted on the speed and scale of sharing and downloading the digital guide. First, being digitally ready as platforms were already used by early years educators and Local Authorities. Second, the professional drive of Local Authorities and early years educators to support families during the crisis and third, the availability of an easily accessible online resource seen as valuable in improving play-based learning at home.

To support young children's learning during the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, preschool educators in Hong Kong were required to teach with digital technologies. In this study, 1035 educators from 169 preschools reported their views and practices in an online survey, which we examined via and . More than half of the respondents (53%) expected future online teaching to continue, and only 11% of educators believed that parents would reject this form of delivery. Administrators and teaching assistants were more likely than teachers to expect online preschool teaching to continue in the future. In addition, respondents with existing online platform experience, who taught the upper levels of preschool, or incorporated specific teaching practices (eg, after the online lesson, they assessed children and assigned homework tasks), were more likely than others to expect online teaching in the future. Many of these respondents also reported (a) difficulty with engaging their children when online and (b) inadequate support from parents for learning activities, which reduced the respondents' perceived likelihood of future online teaching. Administrators and teaching assistants were more likely than teachers to believe that parents would accept online teaching in the future. Respondents who felt they had inadequate training to teach online, children in families with inadequate technical skills and parents who believed that online lessons harmed children's well-being, were less likely than others to believe that parents would accept online teaching in the future. These educators believed that online learning communities could connect parents and schools and foster interaction that could help align with educator's support for children's learning needs.

Social media use has spiked around the world during the COVID-19 global pandemic as people reach out for news, information, social connections, and support in their daily lives. Past work on professional learning networks (PLNs) has shown that teachers also use social media to find supports for their teaching and ongoing professional development. This paper offers quantitative analysis of over a half million Twitter #Edchat tweets as well as qualitative content analysis of teachers' question tweets ( = 1054) and teacher interviews ( = 4). These data and analyses provide evidence of the kinds of supports that teachers in the United States and Canada sought on social media during the rapid transition to emergency remote teaching in Spring 2020 and how these supports informed teaching practices. These results provide insights into PLN theory and teachers' social media use during times of disruption and crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a wide range of challenges for school leaders that they now (rapidly) have to address. Consequently, they also turn to informal learning networks, in order to share and collect information and reach out to their communities. In this context, the current study investigates the underlying networks structures among school leaders, what type of information is being shared, and what differences can be identified when comparing a nation-wide and a localized sample. We collected data from a US nation-wide sample of 15 relevant Twitter conversations, as well as Tweets from an US urban mid-sized public school district. Using a mixed-methods approach, we discovered several key structural dimensions and a host of highly influential actors. Moreover, we found semantic evidence for users sharing information on topics such as status reports. Finally, we discovered that the urban sample did not overly use the nation-wide, very specific approach of including COVID-19 related hashtags. Instead, they used more localized terminologies. These findings are valuable for policy makers, as they map the underlying communication patterns and provide valuable insights into who is moving what types of resources as part of the emerging governance approach on social media.

The COVID-19 pandemic situation has pushed many higher education institutions into a fast-paced, and mostly unstructured, emergency remote education process. In such an unprecedented context, it is important to understand how technology is mediating the educational process and how teachers and students are experiencing the change brought by the pandemic. This research aims to understand how the learning was mediated by technology during the early stages of the pandemic and how students and teachers experienced this sudden change. Data were collected following a qualitative research design. Thirty in-depth and semi-structured interviews (20 students and 10 teachers) were obtained and analysed following a thematic analysis approach. Results provide evidence on the adoption of remote education technologies due to the pandemic with impacts on the education process, ICT platforms usage and personal adaptation. The emergency remote education context led to mixed outcomes regarding the education process. Simultaneously, ICT platforms usage was mostly a positive experience and personal adaptation was mostly a negative experience. These results bring new insights for higher education organizations on actions they could take, such as curating the learning experience with standard, institutional-wide platforms, appropriate training for students and teachers, and suitable remote evaluation practices.

This paper reports a study on teaching and learning strategies during the COVID-19 lockdown period (CLP) that were used by the secondary government school teachers and students in Eastern India. These teaching and learning strategies were analysed in relation to their engagement with an initiative called Integrated approach to Technology in Education (ITE). ITE engagement in the pre-CLP involved using project-based learning (PBL) with technology and continuous, practise-based professional development for teachers focusing on integrating constructivist use of technology in their curriculum and pedagogy. A survey and interviews of teachers revealed that teachers with higher ITE engagement in the pre-CLP were more likely to use PBL with technology during the CLP. Students' interviews indicated that this PBL involved deep research and technical skills that were also practised during the CLP using distance technologies. Thus, the study demonstrated adaptation of ITE innovation into a distance mode; the introduction of WebQuests during the CLP improved the likelihood of teachers engaging in project-based teaching and PBL during the CLP. Policymakers, practitioners and researchers are recommended to adopt and continue to study the sustainability of ITE approach in new contexts such as the CLP.

We report on the lived experiences of faculty members during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the broader experiences of faculty members as individuals living multifaceted lives whose homes became their offices, their students scattered geographically and their home lives upended. Using a phenomenological approach for data collection and analysis, we conducted 20 in-depth interviews with faculty holding varied academic appointments at universities across Canada. Experiences during the early months of the pandemic were described as being overwhelming and exhausting, and participants described as being stuck in a cycle of never-ending repetitiveness, sadness and loss, or managing life, teaching and other professional responsibilities with little sense of direction. In keeping with phenomenological methods, this research paints a visceral picture of faculty experiences, seeking to contextualize teaching and learning during this time. Its unique contribution lies in portraying emergency remote teaching as an overlapping and tumultuous world of personal, professional and day-to-day responsibilities.

Recent advances in communication technologies enable potential provision of remote education for patients using computer-generated environments known as virtual worlds. Previous research has revealed highly variable levels of patient receptiveness to using information technologies for healthcare-related purposes. This preliminary study involved implementing a questionnaire investigating attitudes and access to computer technologies of respiratory outpatients, in order to assess potential for use of virtual worlds to facilitate health-related education for this sample. Ninety-four patients with a chronic respiratory condition completed surveys, which were distributed at a Chest Clinic. In accordance with our prediction, younger participants were more likely to be able to use, and have access to a computer and some patients were keen to explore use virtual worlds for healthcare-related purposes: Of those with access to computer facilities, 14.50% expressed a willingness to attend a virtual world focus group. Results indicate future virtual world health education facilities should be designed to cater for younger patients, because this group are most likely to accept and use such facilities. Within the study sample, this is likely to comprise of people diagnosed with asthma. Future work could investigate the potential of creating a virtual world asthma education facility.