The rapid rise of online learning creates an imperative for teaching strategies that support student success. Research consistently shows that students’ self-regulatory skills are suboptimal (DiFrancesca, 2016). Online students in particular often lack skills to effectively self-regulate their academic behavior such as time management (Broadbent, 2015).

Fortunately, students’ self-regulating behaviors may change through intervention (Cazan 2013). Interventions address intention-action gaps, such as when learners set goals without achieving them (Yeomans & Reich, 2017) or when they procrastinate (van Eerde, 2018). One strategy for addressing intention-action gaps is the use of nudges (Thaler, 2009), which help individuals make decisions in their own best interest without coercion (Hargreaves, 2011). Nudges, such as reminders, feedback, and warnings have been shown to promote behavior change (Weinmann, 2016) and improve student outcomes (Damgaard, 2018).

This presentation will share findings from a survey of 455 undergraduate students in an asynchronous online course. The survey gauged student perceptions of personalized, informational nudges delivered in the form of “progress check-ins.” Check-ins were sent by instructors via email throughout the semester and provided students with current course progress and suggestions for actions to improve their grades.

Implications will be discussed and a discussion period will encourage attendees to share their relevant experiences.

First a brief summary of the existing literature that deals with humour theory, authentic digital learning and humour in education, leading us to a present-day consideration of how those concepts align with using humour as a pedagogical tool in digital learning.

A facilitated discussion with participants addressing the following:

• How do they think about humour in education generally?
• How has moving to online teaching reshaped the ways in which they use humour?
• Does humour fit into our participants' perception of their own professional identity?

Have they successfully or unsuccessfully used humour in online learning platforms and if so how?

Going forward, how can we create a resource for using humour in education which reaches a wide and appreciative audience of educators?

Attempting to model the practices and ideas, the tone will be informal and light-hearted. We also want to emphasise to participants that this is not about “doing online stand-up comedy” and telling jokes or reducing education to “edutainment”. Rather, diverse uses of humour such as “call-back” and memes can increase student engagement and also help connect those involved in the educational process as humans mediating communications through technology.

The objective is that participants will leave the session with an understanding of the importance of online presence and authenticity in an online learning environment and how various uses of humour can be a key component of that.

New, often extreme, behaviors are appearing among students and colleagues during COVID-19. Usually technology-enhanced, the activities demonstrate at once a rage for novel escape from restraints imposed by the pandemic and twenty-first-century citizens’ ability to find technologies that can and will satisfy a need to act and interact. Cellphone self-evaluations, language apps such as Duolingo, YouTube how-to videos, Garmin and Fitbit tools, and Peloton interactive devices constitute some now-common gear used at home and outdoors, often to the extreme.

Research proves that more people are exercising during the pandemic, but they are doing so in personal, technology-enhanced ways, compensating for Coronavirus quashing of normal pursuits. Illness or injury, the overtraining syndrome, are risks. Running several marathons in a pandemic year, playing tennis 4 hours daily, swimming miles in cold pools or the ocean, building new houses or making drones—remote learners do it all.

This presentation comprises an invitation to discuss participants' own experiences with pandemic-provoked practices among colleagues and students enveloped by technology.

Building a sense of belonging online is an arduous process for college students. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated this process, limiting how people connect with one another with social distancing and restrictions with social gatherings. Inspired by the events of the pandemic and seeing an opportunity to explore social and group online connections, the objective of our session is to discuss ways in which online social spaces can enhance students’ sense of belonging. Through the effective use of social online spaces universities are able to promote discussion, dialogue, participation, motivation and socialization among higher education students. We will discuss the current literature on the impact of both formal and informal online social spaces upon students’ sense of belonging and community building, how this ultimately contributes to student persistence, and provide best practices for universities seeking to leverage informal online spaces in this capacity.

How does a person gain instructional design experience? With a seemingly rampant increase in the need for instructional designers across all industries and fields, perhaps largely influenced by the pandemic, those interested in venturing into the field can face challenges with how to enter it. In this session, we share a project-based initiative designed to introduce emerging professionals with instructional design experience. Scholarship on professional development illustrates the value of developmental opportunities for increased retention, confidence, community development, and succession planning. But, what does this look like for individuals interested in exploring new fields and potentially new careers? Literature illustrates the value of investing in professional development for employees or potential employees through workshops, internships, or community-networking events, and more. At this session, we provide lessons learned from a virtual development initiative based on virtual facilitation, community of practice, and project-based learning. We also share several unexpected elements produced as a result of the initiative that might be considered for future endeavors.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the library intranet is being leveraged to serve librarians over a four-state system as a multi-functional dashboard. This presentation will discuss how the intranet, built on the LibGuides platform, provides access to reference tools used in library technical services processes such as in-house guides for cataloging eBooks and weeding of older print titles. The presentation will also discuss how the intranet is used to facilitate communication with both peers and student employees through connection to meeting software, and to monitor the progress that student employees make on assigned remote projects. The presentation will also discuss how the intranet connects librarians with various collection development tools to aid in library collection building. Finally, the presentation will discuss how the intranet serves as a professional development tool for librarians across the four-state system by providing access to selected collections of eBooks, full-text journals and professional webinar recordings.

It is no secret how hyper-mediatized our societies are. Nowadays, information simply flows in a constant river of data, making it easy to dehumanize it, to disconnect it from the human being behind it. Experiences and memories have just become numbers and, with luck, an ephemeral reflection of happiness, a “like”. Even though we are more exposed to other humans than what we have ever been, we are less capable to understand others and to put ourselves in their perspectives. This phenomenon is caused not by the massification of information, but rather by our own incapacity to process that information. Fortunately, it can be reversed by being conscious about how we consume and expose ourselves to data.

In late 2020 and early 2021, a collaboration between the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) in Caracas (Venezuela) and the University at Albany (SUNY) in Albany (U.S.A) took place. The students from Caracas had the opportunity to work closely with their peers in Albany to compare their cultures, having by one of the results, a comparison of popular culture through the then arising TikTok. In the process, we learned how faces are hidden behind the content we unconsciously consume, and how social media can be used not only to massify information, but to give spotlight to our human experience. Topics such as activism in movements like Black Lives Matter and the perception of freedom were specially aborded, putting into contrast the different perspectives between human groups.

This quantitative descriptive survey study conducted in 2021, during the continuation of the COVID pandemic, is a follow-up to the authors’ 2020 interviews with online adjunct faculty to identify their specific greatest sources of stress. Areas of stress were rated by faculty as extremely, moderately, somewhat, or not at all stressful. Results will be reported for administrative variables (e.g., being able to obtain desired teaching load, class size, external deadlines for grading, live class session requirements, lack of administrative support with student-related concerns, administrators’ perceptions of online faculty as disposable and replaceable) and student-related variables (e.g., student-related readiness to learn online, students’ technology skills, quality of student completion of course deliverables, communication with instructor). Special focus will be placed on recommendations for improvement of these stressful working conditions for online faculty in a post-COVID-19 world.

This session delves into lessons learned from designing and implementing a gamified online course based on quest-based learning (QBL) design. QBL is a choice-driven instructional approach that integrates game elements in a gamified learning environment (Snelson, 2021). Benefits of the QBL approach include supporting learner interest through activity choice, the potential for strengthening motivation and engagement, and increased flexibility and differentiation of the learning pathway. Challenges for designing and implementing gamified QBL online courses include the added workload teachers may face when designing activity choices, the technological limitations of traditional online learning management systems, how to integrate game elements in a meaningful way, and unpredictable student responses to gamified approaches.

Participants in this session will gain (1) insights from an online educator's experience designing and teaching a gamified online course (2) practical strategies for design, development, and implementation of gamified online courses.

Does online learning using 360° Immersive Reality (IR) actually improve learning outcomes for students as compared to current on-site learning modalities? You decide! The goal of this EdTech Tools demo is to showcase the strategic teaching and learning capabilities of 360° IR technology in an online career and technical higher education classroom. Presenters invite the audience to evaluate a specific use case illustrating how 360° IR was used to create a virtual space for adult learners designed to meet specific teaching and learning goals.

During the presentation, presenters introduce the audience to specific features of 360° IR by illustrating their use to create a process technology instructional ‘playground’. Focus will be on how learning experiences were designed to meet the specific instructional goals of differentiating instruction for students with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, managing cognitive load, and teaching students to ‘think like an expert’ while they familiarized themselves with a novel technical environment.

The technological capabilities allowed for the design and development of a learning environment able to support unlimited student interaction, easily incorporate scaffolded support, automatically level instruction to meet the unique needs of each student, provide immediate feedback, and provide expert modeling while saving students in a rural environment the time and expense of onsite learning.