By Shannon Rupp. When it comes to making a foray into social media, the first question novices should ask themselves is, “What do I want to achieve?” That’s the advice of British sociologist Mark Carrigan, who wrote the book Social Media for Academics. He writes that social media tools can enhance any academic career, provided you choose the right tool to serve your professional goals and don’t let it become a time-waster. More...
Transition Q & A: Jennifer Askey, YWCA project coordinator
By Jennifer Polk. My PhD program, like most in the humanities in the 1990s and early 2000s, was entirely focused on placing graduates in tenure-track positions. I learned about the job application process, interviewing, and positioning myself within the field of German studies. More...
Transition Q & A: Lino Coria, computer vision engineer
By Jennifer Polk. I wanted to become a professor in my native Mexico. I am very passionate about education, especially in a country such as Mexico. There is a lot of work to be done. More...
Transition Q & A: Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, social media manager
By Jennifer Polk. I was a little bit unusual, in that I knew even before I applied to PhD programs that I didn’t plan to end up on the tenure track. I wanted to be a historian and writer; I didn’t, however, want to spend my career in the classroom. More...
Support and community for graduate students and PhDs
By Jennifer Polk. I work for and largely by myself, and I love it. My graduate school experience was similar in important ways: I worked at home without much externally-imposed structure. It was challenging, and remains so. Even so, this is how I work best. More...
Ethical Considerations in the Practical Application of the Unisa Socio-Critical Model of Student Success
The prediction and classification of student performance has always been a central concern within higher education institutions. It is therefore natural for higher education institutions to harvest and analyse student data to inform decisions on education provision in resource constrained South African environments. One of the drivers for the use of learning and academic analytics is the pressures for greater accountability in the areas of improved learning outcomes and student success. More...
Assuring Quality in E-Learning Course Design: The Roadmap
Quality Assurance (QA) concepts and applications in Higher Education (HE) emerge from evolving meanings related to HE’s dynamic relationship with social, economic, cultural, and technological developments. The latter has been redefined by the growth spurred by the forms distance and online education acquired during the last decades. Creating a roadmap with clearly articulated meanings of quality and consistent key actions fills a need for the involved communities to reground the research, policy-making, and the related discourse. More...
Reading Online in Foreign Languages: A Study of Strategy Use
The present study, by virtue of exploring foreign language learners’ online reading experience, aimed to identify the reading strategies that learners would use when engaged in online reading activities in the target foreign languages. Thirty-two foreign language learners whose native language was English participated in the study. More...
Tele-proximity: Tele-community of Inquiry Model. Facial Cues for Social, Cognitive, and Teacher Presence in Distance Education
Distance education is expanding in all continents, and the use of video has dominated internet. Synchronous Video Communication (SVC) has not been an option thoroughly investigated and practitioners, who use and design synchronous learning scenarios, are in urgent need of guidance. Distant learners face many barriers, and as a result, they drop out more frequently than on-campus students. More...
Coordinated Implicitly? An Empirical Study on the Role of Social Media in Collaborative Learning
As social media is widely adopted in collaborative learning, which places teams in a virtual environment, it is critical for teams to identify and leverage the knowledge of their members. Yet little is known about how social media influences teams to coordinate their knowledge and collaborate effectively. In this research, we explore the roles of two kinds of social media activity – information processing and social connection in teamwork – by applying communication and transactive memory systems (TMSs) as the mechanisms of explicit and implicit coordination respectively. More...