Use of social media in higher education is growing and one of the newer trends within higher education is what is known as online pinboards. Pinterest and educlipper are two examples of the many sites available that allow educators to incorporate pinboard-style, social photo sharing into their curriculum as well as enable administrators to further expand the colleges’ online community. A few colleges in the United States have their own Pinterest pages, including Drake University, Marquette University, Duke University, Seattle University, and the University of Hawai‘i.

The creation of electronic instructional materials has suggested that learning is no longer restricted to the confines of a traditional classroom. In the Flipped Classroom Model instruction occurs at home while class time is used to work on applying the material with the assistance of the instructor. While forms of this model have been used for decades, new technologies have made this method of instruction increasingly popular.

This presentation will describe and discuss how the use of concept or visual maps can support student learning in teaching online courses. Using data collected from online discussions, the author will describe how students perceive visual mapping as an instructional activity. It will discuss the challenges of integrating this tool into the curriculum of an online course.

The aim of this study was to explore whether there is a gender difference in the beneficial effects of Nintendo Wii Fit Plus, which is a series of sports video games used to support Physical Education students’ balance performance. Participants were twenty-six (n=26) undergraduate students, between the ages from 20-22 years old. Thirteen (50%) of the participants were male and thirteen were female (50%). The balance ability assessment was performed with the Biodex stability system. Participants voluntarily completed 24-minute Wii Fit plus sports video games 2 times per week for a total of 8 weeks.

It is important to use best practices in online discussions because threaded discussions are becoming increasingly common in online courses. The session will present best practices in using online discussions from related literature, from the presenter’s personal experience in teaching 100 online courses since 2000, and from actual student feedback in those courses. The results include how and when students participate in online discussions and what students think about online discussions.

The inspiration for conducting case study research aligns with successfully tutoring adult learners to become problem solvers and critical thinkers, ready for technology challenges of the professional business world. Knowing how to think about and solve problems is a skill needed by technology professions. The research followed on the paper presented by Lauridsen at TCC in 2012. Problem-based learning (PBL) is an ideal protocol for facing the challenge.

V-Tenn is a virtual sim that provides a variety of information accompanied by virtual simulations for tennis beginners to learn about the basic game of tennis. V-Tenn stands for ‘virtual tennis’, combining the virtual world elements of Second Life (SL) and instructional design. By offering an immersive learning environment, the participant will learn about tennis in various sections of the simulation.

To learn a foreign language implies to learn about its culture. There is a very close interrelation between them because language is not only an important aspect of culture, but also a means to access to its cultural expressions.

Even during a period of decreases in budgets and increases in costs, institutions must still maintain the goal of educating students. While the online classroom enables us to reach larger groups of students and employ the most effective instructors without the hindrance of remote geographic locations we must still acknowledge a population that contains various learning modalities. In this digital age, we continue to search for effective methods to reach all of our students.

Research indicates that academics and students have differing perceptions of what happens in university classrooms, particularly in regard to higher order thinking, in particular, critical thinking. Higher education is challenged with encouraging students to pursue higher-order thinking and often fall short according to industry standards. The current research was directed at responses from full-time and adjunct faculty teaching either face-to-face or online mainly in the disciplines of criminal justice and political science to assess their views and application of teaching critical skills.