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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Phishing is a common social engineering attack aimed to steal personal information. Universities attract phishing attacks because: (1) they store employees and students sensitive data; (2) they save confidential documents; and (3) their infrastructures often lack security. In this paper, we showcase a phishing assessment at the University of…

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…

Teaching with empathy is an approach that values the emotional quality of both teacher and student experiences. To incorporate teacher empathy into our teaching practice, we must first recognize that distress is inevitable, and that building skills to deal with stressful situations is an important investment in our future mental health.…

To explore email request patterns in the institutional context of university settings, this study combines speech act research with conversation analysis methods to examine how native speakers of American English and native speakers of Chinese formulate email requests to faculty. 100 authentic email requests sent by Chinese and American students…

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…

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…

This experimental study tested whether a professor's form of address (FOA) and email signature influenced students' perceptions of the professor's credibility, approachability, and likability. Guided by communication accommodation theory, the study investigated the likelihood that students would reciprocate a professor's FOA in email…

More students than ever before are taking online classes, yet higher education is facing an online retention crisis; students are failing and dropping out of online classes at dramatically higher rates than face-to-face classes. Grounded in academic research, original surveys, and experimental studies, "Connecting in the Online…

The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students' email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. "International Journal of Applied Linguistics", 17(1),…

Emoticons have become a common phenomenon in email correspondence between students and professors. Even though the use of emoticons in formal writing is considered inappropriate and unprofessional, more and more students are using these nonverbal communication tools to add context or emphasis to their email messages to professors. This paper…