Esports Fandom and the Collegiate Student-Athlete Experience

eSports audiences have gratifications that must be met. Online gaming provides access to gamers to create community and gain virtual reality skills within the online world. Through information seeking and virtual gratifications, gamers have a need to establish relationships and learn new skills in their game of choice. The event of competitive gaming has become so popular that it is not uncommon for college students to create an organization on campus around eSports. eSports has been studied in the disciplines of audiences, college athletics, and online learning communities; however, few have examined the importance of eSports spectatorship and the student-athlete experience. Using the extension of Hall's Encoding and Decoding model of Active Audience Theory, this research will identify the effects of audiences and spectatorship within the collegiate eSports fandom experience.

Analyzing learners' behavior and discourse within large online communities: a Social Learning Analytics Dashboard

Online Learning Communities (OLC) are nowadays one of the most important producers of Big Data in education. However, the investigation of such environments is underrepresented in educational research. There is a lack of methods and tools that characterize the massive learning associated with the student participation in large OLC. This paper presents a Social Learning Analytics Dashboard (SLAD) to analyze temporal trend models that outline the evolution of learners behavior over time. Such models suggest that ongoing collaboration and positive emotion have a fundamental role for knowledge creation and sharing in large scale social learning. These findings can be used to take actions in order to enhance and regulate social interaction within large OLC.

Anonymity, Systems Characteristics and Feedback Provision in Online Learning Communities

The growing ubiquity of the Internet has attracted various studies on the various issues concerning online communities for education. These studies assume that systems characteristics do not play any major role in the behaviours exhibited in such online spaces. Consequently, they focus on group impetus and personality traits of members. Further, the role of anonymity in feedback provision in online communities for education is inconclusive. The purpose of this paper, is to develop and test a model that explains learners’ feedback provision in online learning communities. The model includes anonymity and relevant system characteristics such as system quality and information quality. Survey data analysed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling reveal two main findings. First, the higher the assurance of anonymity for learners on online learning, the better their system credibility and quality. Second, system characteristics such as aesthetics and perceived system quality predict feedback provision. The implications to research and practice are discussed.

Willingness and Evaluation Model of College Students’ Online Learning Behavior Based on Distributed Cognition

Guided by distributed cognition theory, we analyze the influential elements of content, tools, and contextual interactions in the online learning process through research and case studies to explore the characteristics and evaluation of college students’ willingness to engage in online learning behavior under distributed cognition and provide guidance for the experience design of online education platforms. Based on distributed cognition, this paper designs a convolutional neural network model based on InceptionNet, which uses a global average pooling layer instead of a fully connected layer to reduce the number of parameters, and InceptionNet increases the depth and width of the network by branching to improve the performance of the network and avoid overfitting. Distributed cognitive theory emphasizes the distributed nature of cognition, and the intrinsic variables that influence the willingness to participate in online learning communities from a systemic viewpoint are mainly attitudes, subjective norms, expected emotions, competence, sense of relatedness, desire, and perceived behavioral control. In addition, perceived behavioral control has a direct positive effect on the willingness to participate in online learning communities.

Reimagine Elementary and Secondary Learning During the Pandemic: Tsinghua University

New technologies inspire the reforms in education. A global pandemic that kept people including students and teachers in their homes only accelerated the progress of adopting new ways for students to learn and for teachers to teach. This chapter presents two programs carried out by Tsinghua University and Tsinghua University High School to provide adequate learning experience for students even when they cannot attend school physically. The merits of the two programs are not only reflected in the new content students learned, but also emphasized by the fact that students from distant areas and diverse backgrounds can form online learning communities that continue to exist after the pandemic. Finally, how teachers inspired undergraduates to act as peer learners for younger students is also inspected and discussed here.

A Proposed Framework for the Growth of Online Learning Communities

The abrupt shift to full online learning due to COVID-19, displaced students and teachers, created multiple barriers in teaching and learning, and caused some instructors not being able to build and maintain an online learning community. This situation resulted in students’ detachment from their instructor and peers causing lack of motivation and increase of failure chances. First the paper explores the challenges and opportunities of building and online learning community highlighting the needs, and reviewes some past frameworks in the field. Second, a framework is proposed that identifies four factors that help the growth of online learning communities. Those facots are; teacher presence, social presence, cognitive presence and students’ emotional engagement. Further the framework specifies type of actions and activities that teachers/instructors should be adopting throughout the course. The paper adds to the growing knowledge on Coronavirus effects on the educational sector and highlights the need for the efficeint use of technology in education.