Kapi‘olani Community College's two-time national award-winning Teaching Online Preparation Program (TOPP) prepares faculty to teach online, both technically and pedagogically. The program serves a cohort of approximately fifteen faculty each semester, but when the pandemic saw classes going online en masse, that proved insufficient. A total redesign scaled the professional development to serve not only faculty at the College, but anyone and everyone (including counselors, librarians, adjuncts, teaching assistants, etc.) who wished to participate across a 10-campus University of Hawai‘i system. The result, TOPP To Go!, fostered a rich community of practice that bridged campuses, disciplines, and staff and faculty rolls in an unprecedented manner. Participants from seven community colleges and three, four-year campuses connected to share questions, challenges, insights, strategies, and resources. The program has undergone four iterations, with a total participation of 550+ and has fundamentally changed our approach to professional development. In this session, we’ll share our data, resources, and takeaways from this transformative experience, including strategies to foster engagement in a large-scale, online community of practice and differentiating for diverse professional development needs.

Our presentation will focus on the 3-Tier GICE approach for student success and empowerment, which is designed to provide instructors with a strategy for guiding, inspiring, challenging and empowering their students. Too many students fall away during the first term of their online college experience. Many struggles they face can be conquered with instructor help. A successful first term experience can give way to a completed educational goal. As instructors, we play major roles in that success for many of our students!  Our presentation will focus on the 3-Tier GICE approach for student success and empowerment, which is designed to provide instructors with a strategy for guiding, inspiring, challenging and empowering their students.

In Fall 2020, St. Martin's University offered their first Virtual Reality class. Designing and teaching the class in a virtual world was a great experience despite the many challenges presented to education in 2020. This session highlights the strategies and a few lessons learned for future classes.

Due to the  Covid19 pandemic instructional faculty had to transition their instructions and redesign their curriculum to deliver course objectives and promote effective student learning in the digital environment in the middle of the semester. The lack of digital readiness of institutions led to a disruption in instruction and learning as the move to digital environments became a requirement. Successful transition of learning and curriculum from traditional to digital environments rely on faculty’s competencies that would enable them to adapt to the change (Al-Awidi, H., & Aldhafeeri, F, 2017).  These competencies include skills and knowledge in the use of digital tools in all curriculum domains and making students’ learning extend beyond the classroom (Bonanno, 2011).

The challenges in delivering effective Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) increase in a virtual classroom. Isolation is a barrier to distance learning (Thompson, 2017). Social-Emotional Learning needs will be higher than ever, and the education community, in its efforts to keep students physically safe, must not ignore or minimize their mental health (DeWitt, 2020). The goal of this study is to examine the importance of digital readiness of faculty in delivering SEL in a virtual environment. The paper will seek to understand if digital readiness plays a role in an effective SEL delivery that leads to enhanced academic engagement.

Student engagement and peer interactions are vital to student success in any course. Discussions are one of the many ways we can create community and encourage students to interact with the class in an online setting. For math courses, it can be a challenging task to find meaningful and interesting topics that encourage rich conversations. This session will share a few ideas on how to foster such discussions in an online math class.

Instructor generated videos have been a part of online college courses for quite some time. Years ago, creating videos was a novelty that some instructors embraced to differentiate and add value to their courses. Currently, instructor generated videos are strongly encouraged if not required and research shows students have a favorable opinion of instructor generated videos (Draus et al., 2014). However, some instructors are hesitant primarily due to not being comfortable creating their own videos (Valenti et al., 2019). Perhaps the best way for instructors to become more comfortable creating videos is to begin with a class welcome video. “A self-introductory video can maximize connections with distance students by presenting an authentic self and sharing enthusiasm for content, thereby setting a welcoming tone for the semester” (Singh and Robbins, 2020). Welcome videos also contribute to learning effectiveness as part of the Community of Framework Model’s Social Presence component. “Social presence, as a component of the Community of Framework Model, facilitates an open communication between the instructor and student and provides a risk-free expression of student learning” (Banerjee et al., 2020). This presentation will offer recommendations for creating a welcome video that establishes social presence. Included in the interactive presentation will be tools, an example welcome video, and the exploration of a free video creation website to get instructors started.

Civic engagement is a lifelong process. The United States federal government offers a plethora of resources freely available to libraries and the public, providing excellent information to promote civic engagement. Starting with children and teens, Ben's Guide to the U.S. Government website supports civic learning for a well-rounded K-12 curriculum, and youth.gov includes resources for volunteerism, national service and service-learning.

For adults, information on voting and elections such as finding election office websites, elections processes, and voter registration are found on various government pages. There are resources for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and other web resources such as the official government website. Lastly, nationalservice.gov covers Americorps, information about serving your community, and rounds out our discussion with Senior Corps, which is described as a network of national service programs for Americans 55 years and older. It consists of three primary programs, which take different approaches to improving lives and fostering civic engagement.

In the year 2020, usage of the internet has become something that millions have learned to adapt to and rely on quite heavily.  Living in an emerging technological society has really made things easier as far as broadband access, tablets, social media networks, and open-source technological tools. The way information is shared and used has come to provide a new meaning in terms of collaboration. Yet, what id s digital literacy?  It is defined as finding, creating, or sharing, evolving technology, information exchange and digital content.  Information can be shared and communicated through various modes such as Zoom meetings, webinars, virtual world environments (such as Second Life or Sims, podcasts and or LMS platforms.  Using digital literacy helps keep information efficient and emerging. Using Digital Literacy for learning and gaming is what is an innovative educational technology mode. Learning while playing has been implemented into elementary school, high school, and higher educational levels.   Implementing learning game design elements to engage students and increase their attention is ideal. Information that is up to date and available can help keep it valid and useful. Digital literacy is important to not only gaming, social media,  but also to higher education.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented change and rapid adaptation within the education sector. Like many other countries, schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have had to respond with very little time or preparation.

Many private schools in Dubai opted to offer a ‘blended learning’ approach for their students which would give them the choice of attending their lessons physically in class or online. The majority of schools are offering these lessons synchronously with teachers delivering the same content to both in-class and online learners at the same time.

Blended learning is a contested term in education that can refer to multiple different variations of face-to-face and online learning. Depending on the type and frequency of these, blended learning has fallen under many other terms.

At this moment, schools are at a pivotal point where the decisions they make in how they create their ‘new normal’ of blended learning will have massive impacts on their financial stability, teacher retention and well-being as well as performance in the competitive annual school inspections. In this paper, we present two contrasting progressions, both utopian and dystopian futures for Dubai private schools.

The purpose of this presentation is to describe the factors that are important in virtual collegial collaboration. In academia, collegial collaboration between colleagues is common and often mandated. In today’s world, especially with recent changes in academia driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, more faculty are working in different geographic locations from their colleagues. This distributed workforce must engage via home or other satellite locations (Poulsen & Ipsen, 2017) utilizing various technologies that support professional learning communities.  Can we work collaboratively in a purely distance relationship? Successful group collaboration is driven by high expectations, shared goals, professionalism, and peer accountability. Such collaboration may be viewed as involving a nonlinear theory of change, with multiple factors influencing processes and outcomes. Factors impacting success include academic considerations (professional goals, disciplinary expertise), nonacademic issues (personal preferences, financial factors), and the development of a culture of trust and collective leadership. Practical strategies to implement such virtual collaboration are discussed, from the perspective of virtual teamwork in project planning and implementation, mentoring within a department, collective leadership, and the experiences of a purely virtual academic team.