Volume 23 (2020): Edizione 1 (July 2020)

While technology-assisted learning has become commonplace in education, its applications are rarely examined along geopolitical and cultural perspectives that reveal certain shared and vastly distinct localized practices in evolving pedagogy and cultural dynamics. For developing countries such as Uzbekistan, collaborating virtually with a university in the U.S. may represent both a technological and socio-cultural challenge. Conducting a virtual international project, nonetheless, offers a unique chance to experience another culture in real time through its people, exposing reductionist perceptions of other cultures and humanizing that other through community-generated dialogue. Virtual intercultural exchanges advance intercultural communicative competency and constitute an effective format for high-impact learning practices that advance students’ understanding and appreciation of diversity, equity and inclusion in traditional and online classrooms. This surveys student evaluations of a pilot Virtual International Exchange (VIE) completed between U.S. and Uzbek students in 2018, and underpins a theoretical framework for the benefits of concurring cognitive dissonance for the benefit of open, equitable and inclusive pedagogical models.

Since the early 2000s, a plethora of web-based learning technologies has been developed, each proposing to improve the student experience. Yet, a study conducted by Martin et al. (2018) demonstrate sporadic new technology adoption in Higher Education (HE), despite wide-scale social interest and a wealth of academic publications. This paper aims to provide a framework to explore this problem from an institutional perspective, involving both educational planners and pedagogues. This framework, the Pedagogic Realignment with Organisational Priorities and Horizon Emergent Technologies Framework or PROPHET Framework, is a new three phase framework that combines two distinct research methodologies used by policy makers and pedagogues with a new dynamic multi-level diffusion of innovation (DMDI) model specifically designed to support dialogue between these stakeholders. Application of the PROPHET Framework will enable stakeholders to arrive at a common understanding about the efficacy of such new technologies and collaborative exploration of technology through these different lenses will lead to increased confidence in its value and relevance. It is hypothesised that undertaking this process will increase the adoption rate of Horizon Emergent Technologies, resulting in operational policy amendments and evidence of impact in the learning environment.

Creating a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) based on analysis from research requires the adaptation of MOOC pedagogies. For example, course designers need to follow certain design principles and adapt learning content to the pedagogies and constraints of a MOOC platform. That said, this paper outlines five different learning design principles that create active learning in a MOOC. These emerged when adapting knowledge from a research case study. To exemplify the adaptation, this paper examines how research from a sociological, qualitative classroom study about a teacher who used digital technologies in foreign-language training at a Norwegian high school was adapted for a MOOC that ran on FutureLearn.

While research has established the importance of questions as a key strategy used to facilitate student interaction in online discussions, there is a need to explore how the structure of questions influence students’ interactions. Using learning analytics, we explored the relationship between student-student interaction and the structure of initial questions with and without the Practical Inquiry Model (PIM). Degree centrality was used as the method to analyse the number of responses each student sent (out-degree centrality) and the number of responses each student received (in-degree centrality). Findings showed that the number of responses each student sent and received was higher in the discussions initiated by the PIM-question prompts. In addition, analysis revealed a positive relationship between students’ interaction and the discussions structured with PIM and non-PIM questions. Finally, there was a significant difference in out-degree centrality but no significant difference in in-degree centrality between discussions structured with the PIM and non-PIM questions. We conclude that initial questions can be structured using PIM as a guiding framework to facilitate student-student interaction in online discussions.

With the current issue of student retention and attrition as a major aspect of online education, this interpretivist qualitative case study sought to determine whether online facilitators and online student-to-student relationships affect online graduate students’ ability to complete their modules and achieve student learning objectives and outcomes (LOO). This study encompassed CoI (Community of Inquiry) and surveyed 54 participants who indicated that the three interdependent presences that form part of CoI (cognitive, social, and teaching) were instrumental in helping them to complete their modules and to achieve student learning objectives and outcomes (LOO). Students’ feedback on online facilitators exemplified their cognitive presence in the form of statements linked to triggering events and exploring of ideas. However, there were few statements connected to integration and none linked to resolution. Overall, most of the data collected connected to subsets of teaching and social presences rather than cognitive presence. Additionally, students’ feedback on their peers suggests that social presence that fosters group cohesion is the most critical factor to assist in completion of the modules and achieving student LOO. Open communication was also indicated and, to a lesser degree, personal/affective subsets of social presence were evident. The findings of this study suggest that more research is needed on the components of the three presences and their relationship to students’ ability to complete the module and achieve student LOO.

This article profiles a MOOC on International Franchise Law offered by UNSW Sydney in 2016. The IFL MOOC is an example of an open access legal education course that was successfully integrated in real time into an on-campus curriculum for students majoring in business law. Opportunities, and future challenges that emerged for legal education are addressed.