Electronic communication, most notably email, is ubiquitous in higher education and remains the dominant, most commonly used communication method in the workplace. Unfortunately, student emails are often abrupt, lack salutations and signatures, and can even be riddled with errors that make it difficult to understand their intended message. This…

Machine learning (ML) techniques have been successfully applied to a wide array of applications. This dissertation aims to take application data handling into account when developing ML-based solutions for real-world problems through a holistic framework. To demonstrate the generality of our framework, we consider two real-world applications: spam…

This dissertation addresses the problem of practice of the high rate of employees in financial organizations clicking on phishing links, positioning their companies at risk of a data incident or breach. The financial sector was the most breached industry in 2022 (Schwartz, 2022) and was impacted the most by malicious phishing emails (Trellix…

Nurturing, responsive relationships between teachers and young children and between children and their peers are critically important predictors of lifelong positive outcomes (Jones et al., 2015; DeLay et al., 2016; Hanish et al., 2016). By prioritizing strategies that promote and sustain these types of relationships with and between children,…

This dissertation research is a case study centered on graduate student responses to eight (8) risk and crisis emails sent from two (2) University of Minnesota leaders delivered between February 2020 and August 2021. The study joins conversations about technical communication, risk, and crisis communication, as well as advancing work on digital…

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…

Institutions of higher education grapple with low retention rates, including community colleges, which have even lower rates. Historically, retention barriers include financial reasons, transportation issues, or lack of motivation. However, investigating the institution's role is also important. Institutional barriers come in the form of…

Although there have been numerous technological advancements in the last several years, there continues to be a real threat as it pertains to social engineering, especially phishing, spear-phishing, and Business Email Compromise (BEC). While the technologies to protect corporate employees and network borders have gotten better, there are still…

The purpose of learning analytics is to improve and optimize learning using student data (Siemens, 2013). An early alert warning is learning analytics designed to promote student success (Baneres et al., 2019; Foung, 2019; Lawson et al., 2016; Villano et al., 2018). An early alert has an intervention component that includes, at minimum, an email…

Technology has been brought into the educational milieu changing the way teachers and parents communicate. It allows teachers and parents to communicate conveniently while also facilitating the sharing of a variety of media (i.e., photos or video). Photos paint a visual picture of learning in the classroom, allowing families a glimpse into their…

Language is a tool for communication. People use it when they converse with each other. One way to comprehend what is being said is based on understating the intended meanings of the conversation, or what is called the underlined meanings (pragmatics). Pragmatic studies how different meanings are conveyed, depending on the utterances provided. A…

A high number of cyber breaches in organizations occur as a result of email phishing attempts. Research has shown that cyber education has a positive impact in user awareness of attack methods resulting in the reduction of compromises from email phishing attempts. However, in some instances, cyber education does not have a positive impact on the…

As the digital world evolves, so does the risk of cyberattacks. Despite technology playing a vital role in nullifying these threats, the human factor is still regarded as one of the greatest weaknesses. End-user behavior is a major cause of information security breaches. This quantitative empirical study used a single-group, pre-post-test,…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Low levels of academic success for primary grade students attending rural schools located in the southern region of the United States may be related to student resilience. Researchers have found that educators can support the development of students' resilience, which can result in improved academic success, but little is known about how teachers…