First-generation (FG) college students (i.e., those for whom neither parent/guardian obtained a bachelor's degree) experience more barriers in college, compared with continuing-generation students. These barriers are compounded by subtle messages from instructors that convey the idea that natural talent is necessary for success in scientific…

The purpose of this paper is to provide a low-cost, effective way to teach emotional intelligence (EI) skills for email communications by utilizing Dale Carnegie's 30 Human Relations Principles. Our teaching approach is based on an actual multiple-party negotiation that included an executive from a Fortune 500 Company. Utilizing negotiation…

Institutions of higher education are no strangers to crisis situations. From world wars to campus violence, colleges and universities across the United States have been both directly and indirectly affected by these crisis situations. However, in the early part of 2020, higher education was faced with a situation that transcended anything colleges…

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is associated with university student academic success outcomes, however students often need support to develop these skills. Technology-mediated feedback is one strategy that may aid educators in supporting students' SRL development. This study aims to explore whether a technology-mediated feedback strategy targeting…

Out-of-class communication between teachers and students is essential throughout university engineering courses for in-depth explanations of the concepts covered in class. This study evaluates this aspect throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, a survey that addressed this issue was administered to students at the beginning (March 2020) and at the…

Mastery-based assignments typically provide students with multiple opportunities to improve their performance, but getting students to take advantage of these opportunities is difficult. We report on the implementation of a two-part series of nudges designed to improve students' engagement with and performance on mastery-based assignments in…

CalFresh benefits can help college students make ends meet while attending college, but not all eligible students apply. One contributing factor may be that students are not aware they are eligible. Therefore, outreach efforts informing them of their eligibility could help increase take-up rates. To test this, we designed and conducted two…

Can a "nudge" toward engaging, fun, and useful material improve student attitudes toward statistics? We report on the results of a randomized study to assess the effect of a "nudge" delivered via a weekly E-mail digest on the attitudes of students enrolled in a large introductory statistics course taught in both flipped and…

Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are increasing in popularity, they have been subject to criticism due to the high dropout rate. This study examined the impact of an instructor's personalized email intervention on the rate of completion of a nine week course, which included seven weekly quizzes, and the rate of completion of the final…

CalFresh benefits can help college students make ends meet while attending college, but not all eligible students apply. One contributing factor may be that students are not aware they are eligible. Therefore, outreach efforts informing them of their eligibility could help increase take-up rates. To test this, we designed and conducted two…

COVID-19 has caused great changes in education. Routines, practices, and especially the technologies used in teaching have differentiated at all levels of education. The purpose of this study is to determine the technologies used by faculty members for instructional purposes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and their perspectives on the use…

Communication and learning across cultures is always a challenge during the development of educational internationalization. Higher education institutions worldwide are progressively under pressure to support and embrace multicultural student bodies and intercultural exchange. In recent years, some overseas universities have conducted…

Use of university students' educational data for learning analytics has spurred a debate about whether and how to provide students with agency regarding data collection and use. A concern is that students opting out of learning analytics may skew predictive models, in particular if certain student populations disproportionately opt out and biases…

Background: The teachers in one sub-district in the North West province lacked technological knowledge and skills thus did not adopt a blended learning approach in their daily teaching. A partnership between the University of South Africa (Unisa) and schools in the district was forged to train teachers to acquire technological knowledge and…

Instructors and students communicate via email in both online-only and traditional college coursework. Few institutions have guidelines regarding instructor-to-student or student-to-instructor response norms. This article discusses findings from a study investigating undergraduate student instructor email response expectations and perceived…