The onset of the 2020 pandemic caused traditional in-person library instruction to expeditiously move to virtual environments. In an effort to maintain the personalized human touch and interactions that occur between librarians, students, and faculty, the constructs of teaching presence were embedded into online informational literacy sessions at…

This article describes how there are specific tools and techniques used by teachers in synchronous-live-virtual classroom environments. Those items were investigated in this article. Data was collected from semi-structured, one-on-one interviews conducted with a purposeful sample of twelve identified "highly-qualified" teachers at a…

As traditional classroom settings are transitioning to online environments, teachers now face the challenge of using this medium to promote effective learning strategies, especially when teaching older age groups. Because adult learners bring a different set of understandings and skills to education than younger students, such as more job and life…

Given the growth of cyber charter schools in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, more research is needed in this new wave of school reform. In fact, little research currently addresses the perceptions that district leaders have in regard to cyber charter schools and that is what this study proposed to address. District leaders interviewed included…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

Pennsylvania's first cyber charter school opened in 1998, enrolling 44 full-time students. From this modest beginning, Pennsylvania's cyber charter sector has grown to 16 schools enrolling 35,000 students from all but one school district in the Commonwealth. Pennsylvania has one of the nation's most extensive cyber charter sectors, and six…

Surely "massive open online course" (MOOC) has one of the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) or the droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word "snafu" (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up). The author is not a complete neophyte to online…

Online learning has steadily become a more integral strategy for schools and districts in their efforts to offer students greater access to the courses they need. Where in the past, much of the online learning activity happened at the state level or regional level, more and more schools are exercising greater control over their online and digital…

The purpose of this study was to share the author's experience of using the virtual classroom when teaching online mathematics course. Various softwares including MyMathLab and Wimba are introduced and the teaching methods and tips are provided and analyzed. Results show that the use of the virtual classroom enhance the communication in the online…

With hundreds of K-12 schools routinely offering online courses, the idea of a full-time virtual school is no longer as outlandish as it once may have seemed. Thanks to giant improvements in technology and the quality of their academic instruction, most virtual schools now hold a trump card they had not possessed: credibility. "There were…

The popularity and rise in online courses have somewhat taken the author by surprise. Starting as a college instructor three years ago, the author has witnessed the tremendous interest in online programming. In fact, it is the fastest growing enrollment at the kindergarten-12th grade and higher educational levels. At the university level,…

The number of courses offered online grows every year, resulting in an increasing number of higher education faculty entering a virtual classroom for the first time. It has been well documented that faculty need training and assistance to make the transition from teaching in a traditional face-to-face classroom to teaching online. Faculty…

This article describes the affordances of social media and networks for online Elementary German courses that have been taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2010. These online courses were created to provide students the opportunity to take Elementary German as part of the language requirement for Penn credit during the summer months…

The latest installment of the Fordham Institute's "Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning" series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online-schooling experts to estimate today's average…

The purpose of this issues brief was to obtain a better understanding of how online programs are dealing with students who have been identified as at-risk. The first section, "Strategies for Working with At-Risk Student Populations in Online Environments," documents a sampling of K-12 online programs currently working with at-risk…