Utilizing Interactive Technologies to Engage, Integrate, Involve, and Increase Community amongst College Students

Author(s):  
Pamela M. Golubski

Retention in higher education is a forefront goal for most administration, staff, and faculty members. For this goal to be achieved, college professionals must go above and beyond to ensure students are engaged socially, successfully integrated into the campus community, and actively involved during college. When these interactions occur, students are more likely to experience a sense of belonging, as, evident from developmental research theories, an institution could experience an increase in overall retention rates. However, to achieve engagement, integration, involvement, and feelings of belonging, it requires staff and faculty members to offer and encourage continuous interactions with students, both inside and outside the classroom. While these interactions in the past usually happened through face-to-face methods, today, the Web 2.0 and virtual technological tools have extended opportunities for college professionals to interact more often with students. Two such virtual technologies are Google Wave and Wimba Collaboration Suite (Voice, Pronto, and Classroom).

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rogelio Zapata-Garibay ◽  
Jesús Eduardo González-Fagoaga ◽  
Clara Judith González-Fagoaga ◽  
José Rafael Cauich-García ◽  
Ismael Plascencia-López

Higher education teaching practices experience in Mexico changed from face-to-face teaching to the emergency remote teaching derived from the health contingency by COVID-19. The change from face-to-face to an online modality in the Mexican education system represented a great challenge for teachers of all educational levels. In Mexico, the federal government declared on Tuesday March 24, 2020, Phase 2 of the plan to address the country’s Covid 19 pandemic. Governments in at least ten states decided to suspend their activities and services as of March 17, including the education system. On April 13, the Mexican education system began activities in the online modality exclusively; however, derived from the country’s technical adequacy and digital connectivity conditions, a large proportion of the educational campuses, academic programs, and the teaching staff were not prepared for this situation. This cross-sectional study was carried out to analyze the faculty members experiences about the change from face-to-face to an online modality in the health emergency context due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We designed a study to gather information on practice in the new online learning scenario. For this purpose, we collected data on the previous experience in the conduct of online courses, the technological tools used, the barriers faced while driving online courses, the current conditions of use of educational and technological tools, the vision for the future, and some indicators of physical and mental health.In a sample of 341 faculty members, those working in public institutions were on less favorable terms than their peers attached to private universities. In contrast, lecturers recorded better conditions for dealing with modality change than full-time teachers. Likewise, lecturers more often mentioned having their infrastructure to teach courses from their homes than full-time teachers, which indeed responds to less access to the universities facilities in which they teach. Another important aspect to highlight is the increased proportion of teachers in public institutions and lecturers who have other jobs, so their workload can be more intense than those of their peers.


This chapter explores how activism is positioned within the world and within higher education. Societal expectations of college students are discussed and include the idea that student's mirror the larger world around them. This leads to students' use of technology as a form of activism, and ultimately, how students balance their own independent thinking and their relationships with faculty members. A second perspective presented is how activism looks to college administrators and policy makers, noting that technology-based activism may draw upon a larger collection of students, but may actually result in less disturbance and impact on campus. The chapter concludes with projections as to what activism will look like in the future.


Author(s):  
Maria Meletiou-Mavrotheris ◽  
Katerina Mavrou ◽  
Piedade Vaz-Rebelo ◽  
Silvio Santos ◽  
Pekka Tenhonen ◽  
...  

This chapter presents the results of a study on faculty perceptions and practices regarding the use of videos and other technological tools in higher education. The research was developed within the scope of the EU project RELOBIE: Reusable Learning Objects in Education (2014-1-FI01-KA200-000831). Through a cross-national, in-depth survey of faculty members in four partner countries, the study has gathered some useful insights into instructors' perceptions, motivations, and experiences regarding the use of digital videos and other technologies for personal, professional, and instructional purposes. The study has also shed some light into both facilitating and inhibiting factors to the adoption and effective use of videos and other technologies in the higher education classroom.


Author(s):  
Gráinne Conole ◽  
Patrick McAndrew

The web 2.0 practices of user participation and experimentation have created models for social networking that influence the way people communicate and interact online. This chapter describes an initiative, OLnet, that is creating a technical environment based on web 2.0 principles to support the sharing of experiences around the design and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in order to facilitate closer links between researchers and users. The aim is to combine online functionality, face-to-face events and research activities so that research outputs can inform users and users can help steer future areas for research work. This chapter sets out the challenges and background that have motivated OLnet before looking at two of the tools that form part of the initial OLnet technical infrastructure; a tool for visualising OER designs – CompendiumLD, and a social networking tool for exchange of ideas – Cloudworks.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Nahed Abdelrahman ◽  
Beverly J. Irby

Hybrid learning has been utilized as a transitional learning method to make advantage of both face-to-face and online learning platforms. In this article, the authors explored how faculty members perceive using simultaneously multiple platforms in higher education such as face-to-face, online, and hybrid platforms in teaching. In this study, the authors examined how faculty members defined hybrid learning. They also explored how the participants perceive both hybrid and online learning as vehicles for higher education advancement as well as strategies to attract more students to higher education. The purpose of this research was to develop an analytical overview of one of the learning approaches such as hybrid and its impact on higher education. The authors have interviewed ten faculty members in order to achieve this objective. The results illustrated that faculty members do not have one single definition of hybrid learning but rather they have multiple definitions. Faculty members also demonstrated that they support online learning because it achieves more accessibility to higher education, yet, they believe the face-to-face learning achieve more quality of education.


Author(s):  
Teresa Torres-Coronas ◽  
M. Arántzazu Vidal-Blasco

In the present landscape of technological change there is increasing awareness of the need to support the acquisition of digital competences. In this paper, the authors address how digital competences can be developed through formal learning. The authors examine and demonstrate the design of a web 2.0 learning experience implemented at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, which developed both digital competences and management knowledge. The authors argue that higher education academics should continue to expand their awareness of web 2.0 applications and the role they can play in optimizing learning and knowledge creation among students, the digital workers of the future.


Author(s):  
María Soledad Ibarra-Sáiz ◽  
Gregorio Rodríguez-Gómez

The increasing use of technological tools to support the process of participation in assessment is explained, firstly, by the current tendencies in assessment and learning in Higher Education which encourage the active participation of students as a means to improve their learning; secondly, by the universal presence of technology that makes it impossible to conceive of any educational process that does not contemplate its use and that is leading to ever more courses that are either virtual or require minimal attendance; and, finally, an environment in which there are ever greater numbers of students per class. This chapter presents the results of using the web-based EvalCOMIX® programme in the context of a number of Higher Education training courses. Data has been collected through questionnaires and interviews applied to students, lecturers and academic coordinators. The results illustrate the ease of implementation of EvalCOMIX®, its usefulness in creating and sharing assessment instruments and the opportunity it provides to facilitate student participation in assessment.


2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peta Sharrock ◽  
Helen Lockyer

AbstractLiterature relating to Indigenous Australian students in higher education highlights the need for improving the retention rates of Indigenous students in Australian universities. A cause for concern has been the increasing numbers of Indigenous Australian people experiencing lower progress and completion rates in comparison to non-Indigenous students. The literature suggests that flexible course delivery is a strategy for improving retention rates and participation. This research extends knowledge relating to the effectiveness of providing courses in flexible delivery mode as a retention strategy in Indigenous higher education. It investigates the “reverse block visit” component of a flexi-mode course delivered by the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. Initial findings suggest that this community based support strategy may be impacting positively on risk factors contributing to students withdrawing from their studies. Further research is required to explore the validity of this initial data and how the “reverse block visit” from Centre staff may be working to help students to decide to continue studying.


Author(s):  
Engin Karadag ◽  
Ahmet Su ◽  
Hatice Ergin-Kocaturk

AbstractCOVID-19 pandemic triggered distance education in higher education. Decisions such as isolation, social distancing and quarantine made by countries unexpectedly and suddenly forced face-to-face education to change to distance education within days. All academics around the world had to move online overnight. All the educational and academic activities in higher education (courses, exams, meetings, etc.) had to be conducted online in a few days. Based on these changes, this study aimed to analyze the relationships among student, faculty (adaptations of faculty members to distance education) and institutional (distance learning capacities of the universities) variables that affected satisfaction of the students related to distance education in higher education institutions in Turkey during COVID-19 pandemic using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The study group included 14,962 students and 3631 academics from 30 universities. The results showed that universities with higher distance education capacities got higher satisfaction scores. HLM analysis showed that 43% of the variation in satisfaction scores resulted from universities. The second HLM analysis showed that 44% of the overall satisfaction score variance of the students could be explained by the factors of university features (Level 2: distance education capacity and acceptance and use of distance education systems of faculty members). Thus, it was determined that 44% of the university factor calculated as 43% in Model 1 (which is calculated within students’ general satisfaction scores) resulted from the distance education capacity and the acceptance and use of distance education systems of faculty members. The findings of this study provide insights to improve distance education by stakeholders of higher education institutions.


Author(s):  
Nahed Abdelrahman ◽  
Beverly J. Irby

Hybrid learning has been utilized as a transitional learning method to make advantage of both face-to-face and online learning platforms. In this article, the authors explored how faculty members perceive using simultaneously multiple platforms in higher education such as face-to-face, online, and hybrid platforms in teaching. In this study, the authors examined how faculty members defined hybrid learning. They also explored how the participants perceive both hybrid and online learning as vehicles for higher education advancement as well as strategies to attract more students to higher education. The purpose of this research was to develop an analytical overview of one of the learning approaches such as hybrid and its impact on higher education. The authors have interviewed ten faculty members in order to achieve this objective. The results illustrated that faculty members do not have one single definition of hybrid learning but rather they have multiple definitions. Faculty members also demonstrated that they support online learning because it achieves more accessibility to higher education, yet, they believe the face-to-face learning achieve more quality of education.


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