The creation of an engaging online learning environment where students feel a sense of belonging is a challenge for all educators. With the rise of online courses, discussion forums are commonly used to connect students with course content, peers, and instructors. However, these discussions are often text-based in nature. The purpose of this quantitative study examined preservice teacher perceptions of Flipgrid in an introductory educational technology course. Statistically significant relationships between groups were found related to two of the three components of the Community of Inquiry framework. Specifically, the findings suggest those enrolled in a hybrid course perceived Flipgrid as a more effective platform to create cognitive and teaching presence than those online. Additionally, hybrid learners were significantly more likely to use Flipgrid in their own teaching practices. In this article, an analysis of findings will be discussed and provide suggestions for future research.

As schools endeavor to provide all students with access to computational thinking and computer science, the hackathon emerges as a competitive and high-energy event that uses authentic problems to motivate learners to engage in the domain of computing. This article presents the design case of a hackathon for teenagers as enacted over five iterations by faculty and staff at a Southeastern public university in the United States. Given a problem in the local community, participating teenagers collaborated in a mentor-supported environment to design, develop, and communicate software-based solutions. Using trustworthiness from naturalistic inquiry as a guiding approach to build the design case, our methods draw on multiple data sources, peer debriefing, member checks, and thick description. This design case contributes detailed descriptions and design rationales related to the youth hackathon’s evolving features. It provides all levels of designers with useful pedagogical and logistical resources to support efforts to enact hackathons in novel settings.

This yearlong study describes multiple stakeholders’ perspectives of 20 preservice English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, 43 elementary school students, 2 online mentors, and a teacher-researcher during a technology professional development practicum on a cloud. The case study provides qualitative and quantitative data from stakeholders concerning technology integration after participating in online project-based EFL instruction. The participating stakeholders encountered affordances and challenges that enhanced their online learning and teaching repertoires and offered nuanced evidence within this online professional development community. The findings call for continuing exploration of online practicums in preservice (language) teacher education and further research documenting complexities of multiple stakeholders’ technology professional development.

The Purdue Repository for Online Teaching and Learning (PoRTAL) was developed as an Open Educational Resource (OER) for graduate students and faculty in higher education settings to enhance their online teaching skills and strategies. The PoRTAL team used a design-based research approach (DBR; Wang & Hannafin, Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(4), 5–23, 2005). In this study context, we used Van Tiem et al.’s (2012) model to identify problems faced by instructors who struggled with or were new to online teaching from a Human Performance Technology (HPT) standpoint. To address the identified needs, we created resources for online teaching and embedded our research within practical activities to further study our design process. Our efforts resulted in an HPT-OER Model for Designing Digital Repositories. The purpose of this paper is to share the DBR process that we used to develop an OER repository within an HPT model.

Educational recommender systems offer benefits for workplace learning by tailoring the selection of learning activities to the individual’s learning goals. However, existing systems focus on the learner as the primary stakeholder of learning processes and do not consider the organization’s perspective. We conducted a systematic review to develop a categorization of workplace learning goals for multi-stakeholder recommender systems. Out of an initial set of 13,198 publications exported from databases, a final sample of 34 key publications was identified, according to predefined inclusion criteria. Content analysis and reflective exchange were deployed to synthesize workplace learning goals investigated in the key publications. We identified five categories of workplace learning goals that can be arranged along a dimension from intrinsic (goals set exclusively by the learner) to external (goals set exclusively by the organization). Our categorization provides a common language for multi-stakeholder recommender systems incorporating both the learner’s and the organization’s perspectives.

This article presents a collaborative maker project integrating the arts in a synchronous online environment. Based on the Thinkering, Making, Sharing, and Reflecting (TMSR) model, the four components of hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on, and social-on learning were integrated into an online collaborative maker project involving arts, music, and coding. The authors first describe the theoretical framework of the TMSR model and the design and implementation of the maker project, and then report on the experiences and reflections of the participating teachers, who were enrolled in an online graduate course. Survey results showed that the project fostered the teachers’ connectedness, positive emotions, and satisfaction toward the online learning environment. In addition, qualitative data from their reflective essays revealed that the teacher participants experienced all aspects of hands-on, social-on, hearts-on, and minds-on learning in the online environment both as learners and as teachers. Finally, the qualitative themes showed that the teachers acknowledged supportive maker project components that can be applied in their own teaching context. Implications of the findings for art-integrated maker projects in public school settings were also addressed.