Dear Colleagues,

The coronavirus pandemic has required all organizations to examine how they will function in the years to come. Private corporations are dealing with major issues, such as remote work, changing markets and customers in the era of Amazon.com, and costs. The same is true in higher education, as institutions of learning migrate to online technology to support instruction, academic services, and administrative efficiency.  Even before the onset of the pandemic in 2020, higher education had been evolving to a more online environment, with some predicting significant upheaval, while others suggested a more deliberately careful approach to technology.

Drew Faust, former President of Harvard University, in a message to the World Economic Forum, in 2015, described the following three major forces that will shape the future of higher education:

• The influence of technology;
• The changing shape of knowledge;
• The attempt to define the value of education.

In reference to technological change, she gave the following statement:

“So much of what humanity has achieved has been sparked and sustained by the research and teaching that take place every day at colleges and universities, sites of curiosity and creativity that nurture some of the finest aspirations of individuals and, in turn, improve their lives—and their livelihoods. As the landscape continues to change, we must be careful to protect the ideals at the heart of higher education, ideals that serve us all well as we work together to improve the world.”

On the other hand, Joseph Aoun,  President of Northeastern University and author of Robot Proof, Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, acknowledged colleges and universities as among the fullest expressions of human culture ever evolved and perhaps the most effective institutions for intellectual advancement ever developed and went on to caution that if they fail to respond creatively and deliberately to the technological challenges that they face, “they will wither into irrelevance”.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. The Editors seek to provide a forum for academic leaders and researchers around the globe to consider whether online technology can serve as a vehicle of hope for higher education to improve instruction, to make college more affordable, to mitigate the increasing costs, and to ensure  marginalized populations can access education.

• Manuscript deadline: 1 October 2023
• Abstracts deadline: 28 February 2023

Prof. Dr. Anthony G. Picciano
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• online technology
• enhanced education
• adaptive learning
• higher education in an online environment
• higher education in the age of artificial intelligence
• online instruction and academic services

1 Title: Student Evaluation of Instruction in the Online Environment: The Straight-Line Effect.

Abstract: This article will summarize an analysis of 1.5 million student responses to their end of course evaluation ratings for the years 2017-2021 at the University of Central Florida (UCF) pre and during the pandemic. This reflects a long-standing tradition in higher education for capturing the student evaluative voice that has become increasingly influential in the digital age. Over several decades, the course and instructor rating process has been scrutinized evoking controversy, ambivalence, and criticism. Simultaneously however, those ratings receive support as the most effective manner by which to assess instructional quality. Early work in this area focused exclusively on the face-to-face instruction because at the time that was the only course modality. However, beginning in the early 1990s things changed with the advent of online learning that quickly morphed into course arrangements such as: reduced seat time blended learning, reduced time active learning, limited assistance, video streamed with classroom attendance options, video streamed, synchronous live video, fully online, fully face-to-face, and other configurations. These developments reflected the growing influence of the internet, social media, the pandemic, and a generation of students that demanded universities become much more responsive to their lifestyles. In the digital age, contemporary learners have unfettered access to information formally sequestered in university halls. No longer must students come to campus but rather the campuses come to them. This is the seismic shift that impacted the student evaluation of instruction process – its administration, analyses, use by instructors, students, and university administrators. These developments triggered this study that answers the question about how the digital generation student responds to their educational experience in an age where they evaluate, mostly virtually, every course no matter the modality. This study reflects a big data approach for end of course evaluation. The current instrument in play at UCF consists of nine Likert items that index the areas: organizing, explaining, communicating, respect and concern, interest, environment, feedback, achievement, and overall effectiveness. These elements comprised the evaluative rubric based on the commonsense notion that excellent instructors in students’ judgement would be highly rated on most or all of them. Interestingly, this approach leads to a kind of circular reasoning where should an instructor excel on these elements, they must be an excellent teacher. This may or not be the case, however, because of the micro-macro problem where the interactions of the individual items on the rating scale create the emergent effect found in complex systems making prediction difficult. Excellent instructors may not score well on each item and instructors that score well may not be excellent teachers. The original intent of the research was to replicate the Dr. Fox study conducted by Wang, Dziuban, Cook and Moskal that developed, using data mining techniques, a set of robust decision rules to predict what course characteristics determine whether students rate their courses as “excellent.” However, during the processes of cleaning the data an unanticipated outcome was encountered – the straight-line effect. Sixty-six percent (n=1,008,774) of the students selected the same scale value for all items on the form (All 1s, 2s, 3s 4s, or 5s) essentially bypassing or ignoring any thoughtful responses. This zero-variance pattern appears in other studies but not nearly of the magnitude encountered here and those investigators failed to consider classifications such as course modality and other characteristics of the teaching learning environment and how they might impact the process. Therefore, this work clarifies those considerations examining the “effects” of, in addition to modality, course level, class size, term, department, college and the time pre and during the pandemic. The results of the study show that irrespective of any segmentation design, the straight-line behavior remains constant. Put another way, no matter how one deconstructs the data, students consistently bypass the evaluation process. This finding caused concern across the campus where these data remain high stakes for decisions on promotion, tenure, salary increases, teaching and research awards, sabbaticals, internal grants, released time and other aspects of faculty life. With respect to corroboration of these findings, when presented at the 2022 meeting of the Educause Learning Initiative, representatives from universities across the country confirmed their strong suspicions that straight lining was happening on their campuses as well. However, they had never seen the data as we presented them. This is an important consideration for the future of higher education, faculty excellence, and how we reconsider incorporating the student voice into the learning process considering the assumption that excellent instructor ratings predict effective learning outcomes. The conclusion of the article describes how UCF is responding to these findings – a process that is ongoing.

2 Title：A Study of Online versus Face-to-Face Course Dropout: Why are students leaving?

Abstract: Despite more focused attention in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic, online attrition remains both a concern and a mystery; gaps in our knowledge exist as to why students do not complete online courses. This study uses a sample of 780 students who dropped out of matched fully online vs. face-to-face course sections at a large university system in the Northeast prior to the pandemic. Students were asked about their specific reasons for dropout, and results indicate that there were distinct differences in the patterns of reasons given by online and face-to-face students: although the perceived quality of the instructor was deemed important to student persistence in both mediums, it seemed to be of greater importance face-to-face than online. Further, issues related to time were found to be more prominent reasons for dropping for online learners than face-to-face learners. Findings from this study shed new light on how reasons for course attrition may differ online versus face-to-face.

3 Title: Addressing WICKED Problems through Virtual Exchanges in Higher Education: A Scoping Review
Abstract: International virtual exchanges are here to stay. The coronavirus pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19) necessitated global virtual interactions to solve wicked problems. As O’Dowd 2021 notes, within industry during the pandemic the use of online technologies expanded at a never before seen rate to form global partnerships. Yet, at the same time, institutions of higher education lessened traditional international offerings, refocusing on how to reimagine “campus” education with “just in time online education.” Still others leveraged international partnerships to fully embrace international virtual exchange. Adopting virtual learning technologies to support global educational exchange in this way develops the knowledge and skills required in a post-pandemic world. To continue to shape knowledge that supports international collaboration toward addressing wicked problems, higher education must learn to leverage global virtual exchange while addressing issues of access, equity and cost. This scoping review queries literature published since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to explore methods, models and outcomes of virtual global exchange in higher education.

4 Title: Developing a Next-Generation Model for Massive Digital Learning

Abstract: Reports of remote learning’s death post-pandemic are greatly exaggerated, since the world is now irreversibly hybrid—and will stay that way because many people and organizations value the new opportunities this presents. From now on, when students leave the shelter of classrooms to interact with the world beyond schooling, they must have skills for adept hybrid performance both face-to-face and across distance. Colleges, universities, and countries that force all teaching and learning to be face-to-face are dooming their graduates to reduced agency in every other aspect of life. A decade ago, massively open online courses (MOOCs) were heralded as the solution to universal, global access to higher education. While they failed to reach this vision, primarily because of presentational/assimilative instruction (a PDF of the residential classroom), MOOCs provided the foundational models and infrastructure for emergency remote learning in the pandemic. As discussed in recent reports from Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, new approaches to digital learning were developed during the pandemic that are now improving campus-based learning. Insights from these approaches now offer the opportunity for student engagement at scale, taking advantage of strengths of online instruction such as collapsing time, bridging space, personalizing via rich datastreams, using AI-based instructional assistants and learning partners, delivering content and experience across universities, and sustaining online learning communities after formal instruction ends. Combined, these advances can enable next-generation massive digital learning, a means to achieve the aspirational vision of universal, global access to higher education. A coalition of higher education institutions could quickly realize this vision, an essential step in enabling all learners to survive and thrive in our increasingly turbulent, disruptive global economy and civilization.

5 Title: Addressing the language and study challenges of undergraduates in online EMI higher education

Abstract: English-medium instruction (EMI) is taking hold within higher education in non-Anglophone settings, but research is lacking into the challenges students encounter when engaging in their EMI studies online. In this exploratory quantitative study, we investigate the language and study challenges undergraduates experienced in their university studies when face-to-face classes were suspended due to COVID-19. 113 first and second-year students completed a questionnaire in which they rated their perceived challenges in the areas of writing, speaking, reading, listening, and study skills. The results show that reading and study skills (especially motivating oneself) were particularly challenging, as well as vocabulary range. Students who had less experience of EMI in their secondary school education reported more challenges. We offer guidance for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners to help students overcome these challenges and suggest university language centres provide more targeted small-group training for harder-to-reach students. If online technology continues to be used as a more flexible means of subject delivery, EAP needs to be more closely grounded in the language and study needs of students in these digital settings.

6  Title: Social Media and Artificial Intelligence: Critical Conversations and Where do we go from here?

Abstract: Prior to and during the pandemic, social media such as Twitter and Facebook served as powerful online platforms for communities of all types and spaces for engagement and learning. The authors of this article have explored using social media with a focus on Twitter for engagement and student-centered design in online courses. They recently identified that opportunities for different types of engagement with learning activities using Twitter included, 1) sharing of learning artifacts, 2) creative pedagogical practice, 3) the concept of fun, and 4) fostering collaboration and teamwork. As with all technology, social media is also riddled with complex issues and unfortunately is increasingly considered unsafe. Students have often been hesitant in their use of social media, especially for coursework and unfortunately, this hesitation has only worsened. Considering this and recent developments, social media has become a questionable tool for use in education yet remains integral to the lives of many both personally and professionally. And with the recent addition and popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGTP, Lensi, and Canvas Write, these tools cannot be avoided by the educational communities. Is there hope for social media and AI tools during these uncertain times? With this article, the authors will engage in a review of the current literature and a qualitative collaborative autoethnographic research approach (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2016) to take a step back and engage in critical conversations about 1) what we have learned with purposeful use of social media, 2) the concerning status of social media (and AI) tools for engagement and learning, and 3) with an emphasis on “hope,” where do we go from here?

7 Title: Data Analytics and Adaptive Learning: The impact of digital tools in upper level and graduate courses

Abstract: How do students perform, and what is their level of engagement, in courses that utilize adaptive learning at upper levels of higher education?  Analytic data on specific courses can provide real-time indicators of student success. This study will examine the effectiveness of adaptive learning beyond lower level gateway courses, by focusing on upper level undergraduate and graduate level business courses.

CTU has been able to harness adaptive learning content and data analytics for hundreds of sections of online courses at a time for thousands of students per quarter. Approximately 600 CTU faculty have engaged with adaptive technology in the classroom. Currently, CTU has over 150 courses utilizing adaptive learning technology. Adaptive learning provides a method for determining the level of knowledge that students demonstrate in a course so that content can be personalized. Dashboards included in adaptive learning tools provide instructors and academic leaders’ visibility and insight into the level of progress of students taking a particular course. Leveraging this data, faculty have adapted instructional strategies and curriculum to improve student outcomes.

Data analytics surrounding student success factors, such as student engagement, timeliness of assignment submission, and assignment grades, as well as student progression (persistence to next term), in upper level and graduate business courses utilizing, and not utilizing, adaptive learning will be compared, with an eye on intervening where success factors are not being met. The study will also review CTU Messenger data providing real-time insights extracted from instant messages during the course. Additionally, faculty and students will be interviewed to provide their perceptions of student success, and engagement, in courses that utilize, and do not utilize, adaptive learning. 

This paper will include an analysis of several sections of upper level business and graduate courses over time including student progression and faculty instructional strategies based upon data within the courses. Additionally, real-time instant messenger feedback, providing student perspectives during the course progression will be included. The implications of this data, including considerations for adaptive learning content beyond gateway courses will be included as well as strategies, informed by data analytics leading to improved student outcomes.

8 Title: The Future of Higher Education in a World of AI
Abstract:  This paper is to examine the future of higher education in a world of AI, including the opportunities, challenges, and implications that may arise. The consensus view among economists is that AI is a general purpose technology, similar to the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. As a GPT, AI will be the main driver of innovation in most sectors of the economy, including education. AI has the  potential to transform the entire educational system, from teaching and learning to assessment and credentialing. First, the paper examines the potential benefits of AI in higher education, including the use of adaptive learning systems, changes in pedagogy and  curricula, as well as the potential for new models of education, suchas micro-credentialing and lifelong learning. Second, the paper investigates the impact of AI on the role of educators and  administrators, including the potential for job displacement and job redefinition. Third, the paper discusses the challenges, including the ethical implications of AI, such as data privacy and algorithmic bias. Ultimately, this paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the future of higher education in a world of AI and provides insights for educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders on how to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape. 

9 Title: Connecting Prescriptive Analytics with Student Success: Evaluating Institutional Promise and Planning
Abstract: Data-driven educational decisions enabled by online technologies hold promise for improving student performance across the full range of student dis/ability, even when efforts to design for student learning requirements (such as through Universal Design for Learning) fall short and students struggle to learn course material. In this action research study, 40 institutional stakeholders evaluate the potential of prescriptive analytics to project predicted potential student outcomes in different simulated worlds, comparing hypothetical future learning scenarios in order to make recommendations to students about tutoring in the present and to faculty about beneficial course redesign points. Analysis focuses on necessary resources, processes, and values alignment for a feasible institutionalization of such prescriptive analytics. In the post-pandemic higher education landscape mixing online and on-campus learning under increasingly constrained resources, it makes sense to explore the potential competitive advantage from leveraging such use of data from online technologies toward greater student success.

10. Title: Digital Transformation in Higher Education: International Cases of University Efforts to Evaluate and Improve Blended and Online Teaching

Abstract: The global pandemic of 2019 to the present brought heightened awareness to institutions of higher education of the need to engage in a digital transformation that includes pedagogy, counseling, advising, administration and all major functions of the institution. This article will explore three case studies of universities in Colombia, Brazil, and Mongolia that focus on pedagogical transformation. Each case study will analyze the following: (1) what is driving the local need to engage in digital transformation, (2) what the major challenges and barriers are to achieving a transformation, and (3) what efforts are happening to help each university to move along the path towards adoption and change. The results of these analyses will be beneficial to other colleges and universities in the international sphere that are attempting to transform to the evolving digital universe.

11. Title： TikTok Breaks Higher Education?:  A Typology of Academic TikTok Content Creators

Abstract: Faculty at institutions of higher education, across disciplines are using the social media app TikTok. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a restructuring of how academics distribute their expertise in publishing and teaching and how they connect with their students and peers.  This article presents an initial typography of TikTok content created by academics regarding higher education to initially explore how and why academics are using TikTok as a means of distributing their knowledge, insights, and advocacy. Four categories of content emerge from our initial analysis 1) entire courses taught on TikTok; 2) support and help regarding academia; 3) academic humor; and 4) field specific content. Demographic analysis of academic TikTok creators reveals diversity of academic fields, types of institutions, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and years of experience. This typology opens consideration of tensions riddling TikTok.  These include the apparent contradiction of academics distributing expertise and knowledge for free via TikTok (a form of breaking higher education status quo) while simultaneously realizing that the algorithm essentially commodifies both creators and users.  Rather than resolve such tensions, this article uses the typology of academic TikTok content creators to facilitate a consideration of the power and equity issues involved in the higher education marketplace and social media’s use in it.

12. Title：Online learning and social-emotional support with focus on digital mindfulness: An integrative review and online learning design recommendations

Abstract: As the world transitions increasingly into online learning, there are many challenges that need to be addressed. In particular, given the reduced physical presence, online learning can negatively affect sense of belonging, social interactions, and social-emotional regulation, all of which, in turn, can adversely affect learning experience and outcome.  Thus, it is important to understand whether and how social-emotional support can be implemented in online learning. In this proposed paper, we will provide an integrative review of research into social-emotional support in online learning. First, the unique social-emotional challenges of online learning are highlighted. Second, relevant papers from the past 10 years including during the COVID-19 period will be searched and integrated to provide an overview of what is known. In particular, we will focus on digital mindfulness support and interventions that are increasingly popular. Finally, we will propose some recommendations for online learning designers as they consider incorporating social-emotional support into online learning.