By the school year 2022-2023, all teachers in Hawaii will be required to provide instruction in Computer Science for all K-12 students. Despite this new mandate, limited guidance has been provided from the state’s Department of Education as to what Computer Science instruction should look like in the classroom. To help address this need, the present project designed and evaluated an online professional development module for upper-elementary teachers. The topic of the module was Computer Science, and it was designed for educators in a rural school district. The goal of the project was to (1) increase teachers’ knowledge of computer science, Computing Systems, and Networks and the Internet, and (2) increase teachers’ knowledge of upper-elementary standards for Computing Systems and Networks and the Internet standards. Seventeen participants (n = 17) completed the asynchronous module along with a pretest, embedded assessment, and a posttest. These instruments were used to assess the module's ability to increase teachers’ content knowledge. All of the participants demonstrated increased performance between the pretest and posttest with an average increase of 28 points. The professional development module was effective in increasing teachers’ knowledge about important computer science topics and standards. Attendees can expect to learn about an effective strategy for increasing teachers’ computer science knowledge with the hopes that it can be generalized for broader application within professional development courses for educators.

Food safety knowledge is crucial to careers within the restaurant and foodservice industry. High school Career and Technical Education (CTE) elective courses help students explore their career interests and prepare for future employment. Food safety is an important topic relevant to the industry that students can use in their personal lives and future careers. The researcher utilized various visual design and multimedia learning principles to develop an online food safety module on Google Sites (https://sites.google.com/hawaii.edu/culinary1-foodsafety/home) targeted toward high school students.

The researcher conducted a usability study to evaluate the format, ease-of-use, and content included in the online food safety module. The usability study evaluated how easy or difficult it was for participants to navigate through the website and how participants perceived the organization and usefulness of the content included. The researcher collected data from a total of 15 participants via a virtual usability test, including a think-aloud of the website, completion of four task-based scenarios, and an online survey. Data collected during the study and results from the online survey indicated that participants found the website straightforward and easy to navigate. The final product can be incorporated into various CTE classes and used as an up-to-date, easily accessible resource.

Learning portfolios have been a staple in the education community for years. Traditionally, these portfolios were a collection of a learner’s best work and examples of achievement. Over the years, these learning artifacts have leaped into the digital world, becoming known as electronic portfolios or ePortfolios. With this evolution, ePortfolios have become an amazing learning and teaching tool in online education.

In this presentation, participants will learn how ePortfolios can be used for:

• course and program assessments,
• simulation and gaming type learning opportunities,
• creating living resumes,
• learning repositories and trainings,
• collection of learning,
• and so much more!

This presentation aims to challenge participants to think outside of the common definition of ePortfolios and discover the endless learning opportunities they truly offer.

2020 brought many challenges and uncertainty to the distance learning environment. Despite over twenty years of online teaching, this presenter was confronted with further essential questions in their pedagogical role. What creates community online? What have I shared that learners found the most meaning in or connection with? What is most practical in a VUCA (violative, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environment for online students in their career development?  And how to help provide resources at a distance in online learning for adult students to cope and flourish?
According to McCarthy (2016) ELT defines learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.  Since students in counseling must understand themselves in route to helping others experiential learning is a natural fit in online counseling courses. This presentation will provide participants with insights on how teaching online in 2020 furthered instructor and student transformation with opportunities for growth. Participants will embark on the following journey of inquiry: 1) an exploration of the phenomenon that are challenging everyone in the complex COVID-19 environment (in particular, effecting learning and teaching);2) experiential strategies at a distance used with online adults counseling students connecting to meaning in their life/work (career development); and 3) prompts universal to any discipline that can connect distance students to an online community.

Computer Programming education is becoming an area of study for elementary school students. While the demand for computer science education exists, there are numerous hurdles in its implementation on a large scale. For teachers, programming lessons can be a daunting task. Not only do they have to learn a brand-new set of skills, but they also have to present those skills to students that are digital natives. As for students, without proper guidance and pedagogy, existing learning tools may be beyond their comprehension which can discourage interest in computer science. Other barriers to accessibility in programming education include school resources, gender bias, and familial resources. Coding skills are becoming more relevant with each year and such barriers to accessibility need to be addressed.

This project is designed to bypass these obstacles by providing a curriculum that teachers can follow and lead their classes through. Alternatively, students can choose to complete the lessons with minimal hardware and benefit. Through this project, students can pursue a curriculum that is designed to teach the basics of programming in self-contained sections as well as encourage experimentation and exploration. The overall objective of this tutorial is to arm students with a basic understanding of computer programming concepts and therefore provide them with an understanding of how the digital landscape operates in a digital, constructivist approach.

Pragmatically appropriate interaction means that speakers contextualize an upcoming talk, provide necessary information, and maintain the continuity of talk. Thus, in order to be pragmatically appropriate in conversation, second language (L2) learners need to learn various interactional strategies and grammatical resources. This study focuses on interactional resources (e.g., ways to organize turns, between-turn pauses, discourse markers, ways to engage in conversation) that characterize pragmatically appropriate interaction in L2.  English as a second language (ESL) Learners need to learn concrete and detailed conversational features so that they can shape their talk in a context-specific and pragmatically appropriate manner. However, maintaining the continuity of talk and using context-appropriate language is challenging as conversation is a result of speakers’ shared efforts. To this end, this study aimed to provide a concrete description of interactional features that characterize varying levels of interactive pragmatic performance. Using data of transcribed 102 English ESL learners’ role-play performances, this study explicates a relationship between fine-grained conversational features and L2 learners’ speaking proficiency measured by real-life role-play tasks. Based on the findings, I discuss ways in which technology and media can help ESL learners to become interactionally fluent and appropriate.

This paper provides evidence that an autonomous discussion forum facilitator (AD Bot) framework using natural language processing and fuzzy logic can enhance student engagement in online discussion forums. This includes student to student and student to instructor engagement as well as increasing knowledge attainment of subject matters discussed, where students receive timely feedback to their discussion post and exposure to relevant supplemental content.

An original in-person design thinking hackathon was moved to online due to the pandemic. As a result, participants from over 10 universities across Europe, Asia, and the USA attended. There were more participants than in previous years, many were located in different time zones, and with the event moved to a new online environment, careful designs were put in place to foster community building, collaboration, and creativity. The event focused on solving the current- and post-pandemic challenges through interdisciplinary and international teams, with the aspiration to bring a positive impact on global communities in innovative ways. Over the three-day event period, interdisciplinary and international teams of mentors, facilitators, and judges were also assembled to help participants think and see from multiple perspectives.

While participant surveys indicated overwhelmingly positive feedback, a few design considerations were pivotal in the running of the event. Warm-up activities before the start of the event helped break the initial ice. Frequent breaks with small community-building activities helped sustain the momentum. Commonly used low-tech tools such as google docs, mural, and zoom bridged between synchronous and asynchronous activities. In the presentation, we will also share the impressive gallery of works participants created.

The digital gender divide and acquisition of digital literacy for women are demanding global attention in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2019). The digital gender divide is the gap between women and men in both the opportunity to access ICT and the ability to use it (West et al., 2019). Since September 2020, I have collected data remotely at a digital skills school for women in Germany to understand the perceptions and experience of women either learning or teaching digital skills of the digital gender divide. However, just as my engagement with this school is remote and online, so is the experience of students learning digital skills there (Anonymous, personal communication, October 2020). This online learning has caused the school to grapple with ethical dilemmas. For example, is it ethical to encourage vulnerable women to study online when they have little understanding of cybersecurity? Is their right to access education during the Covid-19 pandemic more important than concerns about their online safety? I intend to share my preliminary research findings, including some lingering concerns about cybersecurity in the context of the alleged “digital transformation” in education (Fraser, 2020). Attendees of this discussion will learn about online learning delivered to students with low digital skills and the ethical concerns this raises, supporting their awareness and future practice in online learning.

With online/virtual learning platforms at the forefront of higher education, faculty need to focus on how to connect with their students virtually.  One strategy that should be considered is the use of videos.  Research has proven that when faculty make and share videos, students can feel more connected (McMurtrie, 2020). Specifically, the use of welcome videos created by faculty and posted in an online forum can help establish rapport and a sense of community.

Therefore, the goal of this presentation is to discuss and elicit participant interaction based on the following questions:

1. What platforms can faculty welcome videos be created on?
2. What specific elements should be included in a faculty welcome video?
3. How can faculty promote connection with students based on the use of welcome videos?

As part of a discussion around these questions, the authors will share relevant research and personal experience based on their use of welcome videos in the online classroom.  As full-time faculty teaching at one of the largest distance education universities in the United States, the authors have researched this topic as part of a project on creating a sense of community in the online classroom.