Engagement during Pandemic Teaching: Report of The Eaai-21 Panel on Teaching Online and Blended AI Courses

Three panelists, Ashok Goel, Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi and Mehran Sahami explain some of the tools and techniques they used to keep their students engaged during virtual instruction. The techniques include the desire to take one’s passion for the learning materials to the virtual classroom, to ensure teacher presence, provide for cognitive engagement with the subject and facilitate social interactions. Finally, we learn about tools used to manage a large online course so as to move the many active learning exercises to the virtual classroom.

Token Economy for Sustainable Education in the Future: A Scoping Review

This research aims to examine the use of a token economy for education sustainability. It presents a recent review and evaluation of the token economy used among young learners and learners with special needs for behavior management and learning engagement in teaching. Online articles from Google Scholar, ERIC, and UKMLibrary were used. The terms used for reviewing the articles were token economy, token systems, positive reinforcement, and rewards. The scoping review protocol was used for this study. A total of 60 relevant articles published from 2000 to 2020 were filtered and grouped into three major themes for review: behavior management, learning engagement, and types of tokens. Findings suggested that although previous research had examined the impact of a token economy on behavior management and learning engagement, there was limited research on the correlation between teaching methods and social fairness. Teachers as the main participants in assessing the effectiveness of a token economy, were also lacking. Additionally, the use of social and physical reinforcers was found to assist in obtaining the desired behaviors and learning engagement from participants, thereby enabling them to sustain learners’ interest in future lessons.

Egyptian Educators’ Online Teaching Challenges and Coping Strategies during COVID-19

The present descriptive study investigated the challenges experienced and the coping strategies used by Egyptian university educators from different institution types while teaching online during the pandemic. The cross-sectional study drew participants (N = 222) from three different academic institution types, private universities, public universities, and adult education institutions, who responded to a survey that examined the technical, professional, administrative, social, and psychological challenges teachers encountered as well as their coping strategies. Data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results indicated that the challenges and coping strategies reported by teachers varied according to the teaching context and the requirements of each academic institution. The most reported challenges experienced were exhaustion, internet problems, technical issues, and anxiety. Despite the challenges, participants reported a few positive effects, including feeling more productive, being motivated to learn something new, feeling appreciated by the students and administration, and feeling confident using online teaching tools. Results also revealed that the participants used social and professional strategies to cope with the circumstances accompanying the sudden shift to online teaching. The results indicated how challenges faced by educators from different institution types may diminish with more training on, and experience with, online teaching, forming communities of practice as well as other coping strategies they developed. Such findings should be helpful to educators, institutions, and policymakers in different academic institutions all over the world and in various teaching contexts.

Love and Duty: Translating Films and Teaching Online Through a Pandemic

The Chinese Film Classics project, launched in 2020, is an online research and teaching initiative aimed at making early Chinese films and cinema history more accessible to the general public. Led by Christopher Rea at the University of British Columbia, the project is centered on the website http://chinesefilmclassics.org and the companion YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies. These two platforms together host new English translations of over two dozen Republican-era Chinese films, over two hundred film clips organized into thematic playlists, and a free online course of video lectures on Chinese film classics. This essay tells the story of how the Chinese Film Classics project grew from being a book project into a multiplatform translation, teaching, and publication project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online teaching and social media publication involved multiple global storytellers: filmmakers, educators, translators, students, and the broader Internet public. How might moving things online change, or improve, the practice of cultural history? Rea highlights in particular the practical considerations facing the translator and gives examples of how, in a social media context, some of the stories are told not by creators and audiences but by data analytics.

Finding a Silver Lining in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented shift towards educational technology around the world. Teachers began exploring digital tools, which contributed to their professional development. This ethnographic research studied a teacher online Facebook community in Georgia from a participant-observer perspective to understand its social interactions and discussions, using both qualitative insights collected through observation, and quantitative data using various digital tools. The chapter attempts to find a silver lining in the middle of the pandemic: it argues that the adaptation to educational technology during the pandemic gave teachers new opportunities to explore teaching online. Peer-led teaching and learning, sharing experiences, and best practices appeared to be productive. This chapter contributes to understanding the Georgian context during the early waves of the pandemic, and can serve as a unit of comparison with similar online communities elsewhere.

Art Integration in EFL

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has evidenced the need EFL education has of better and innovative practices in its classrooms; in response to these challenges, art integration in the EFL classroom comes as an alternative to improve not only linguistic development, but to promote critical thinking, social and cultural awareness, and enhance empathy in students. However, this tool cannot reach its full potential without reflecting its use and the purposes it can serve in daily practices, most especially during an emergency educational period such as the one the world is currently going through. This chapter portrays the experience of 35 pre-service teachers registered in an elective class called Artistic Expressions in the Language Classroom and how the implementation of art-related activities, their follow-up, socialization and discussion in class, and their reflections in the assigned papers led them to acknowledge the pedagogical value art can constitute in their educational communities, particularly when teaching online.

Framework to Navigate the Virtual Classroom Space

This chapter addresses the need to develop sustainable and contextual teaching-learning processes with the paradigm shift in pedagogy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Descriptive factors associated with preference for mode of learning was determined through a survey among 169 teachers and 388 students from engineering, humanities, and science backgrounds in South India. Thereafter, a qualitative study was carried out on selected survey respondents. The main research questions raised were: What are the expectations of teachers while teaching online? What are the expectations of students while learning online? What are the outcomes of online teaching-learning (teachers' and students' perspectives)? How can online teaching-learning be improved? Qualitative inquiry, through questionnaires and interview, was carried out among 15 teachers and 17 students. Thematic analysis was carried out. The findings gave rise to the formulation of a framework to navigate the virtual classroom space.

From In-Person to Online Teaching

Restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic forced many teachers across the United States to teach their students remotely using online teaching strategies. Analyzing teachers' perceptions and expectations of online teaching before and during the pandemic help stakeholders understand how to better handle the challenges of online learning. The literature review examines the traditional differences between teaching online and in-person courses, challenges faced when teaching online courses, and teacher perceptions of online learning. The survey method was used to collect data on the experiences of online teaching before and during the pandemic from ninth through twelfth grade teachers in a North Texas school district. The study results show that factors such as a teacher age or years of experience had less influence determining if they were prepared for online teaching. Rather, factors like a teacher school campus, prior experience, and access to support structures correlated more to teachers having a high level of preparedness for online teaching.

Burnout Prevention Through Professional Development

Surging enrollment, high levels of student contact, and the professional isolation that can result from teaching remotely combine to increase the risk of burnout for faculty teaching online. Additional risk factors stem from higher education's turn toward a customer service model, its current emphasis on efficiency with the addition of performance metrics, and resulting feelings of loss of agency, efficacy, and belonging. However, the principles of self-determination theory—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—provide a foundation for creating a sustainable, engaging work environment for faculty that also benefits students and the university as a whole. This chapter draws from interdisciplinary research and the insights and experiences of faculty to detail the causes of and solutions for burnout, emphasizing the role institutions play in mitigating the risk factors. Finally, this chapter includes a playbook of concrete practices that departments and institutions can draw from to create opportunities for employees to collaborate, reflect, and flourish.

A Review on Transition from Face-to-Face to Online Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Online-learning has become a necessary feature in all educational establishments such as schools, colleges and universities. The educations sector in India is deeply affected by this. To fight back the disruption and damage, educational institutes across the country embraced the digital mode of education as a solution to fill the void left by classroom teaching. Online education is conducted in two ways. The first is through the use of recorded classes, which, when opened out to public, are referred to as Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs). The second one is via live online classes conducted as webinars, or zoom sessions. This review has identified five important strategies that could be incorporated into a best practice framework for online education.1) As e-learning becomes the "new normal", the authorities have been taking steps to make digitisation of education accessible and affordable for all. 2) Training in educational technologies and their effective use should be available to faculty and students who need it.3)The Indian education system has to transit to online learning without creating a digital divide, the Centre and state governments must raise the spending on education.