Teacher educators face significant challenges in preparing candidates for the complexities of modern classrooms, particularly regarding inclusive pedagogy. Despite attempts to enhance multicultural diversity in teacher education, gaps remain in supporting students, combating bullying, and integrating inclusive curricula. This study explores the effects of an online simulation designed to equip teacher candidates to address these challenges in elementary settings. Grounded in situated (Lave Wenger, 1991) and simulation-based learning (Levin Frei-Landau, 2023), the simulation offers a safe environment for candidates to practice decision-making and reflect on their biases. Findings from qualitative data, including pre- and post-surveys of teacher candidates (TCs) and interviews with teacher educators (TEs), indicate a notable increase in TCs’ confidence and self-efficacy in inclusivity and multicultural engagement. TCs moved from understanding abstract concepts to actionable strategies, but noted potential backlash from parents. TEs, on the other hand, recognized the simulation’s effectiveness in fostering critical thinking and empathetic responses, but noted challenges in curriculum integration. The study emphasizes the potential of simulations as vital tools in bridging the gap between theory and practice in teacher preparation while identifying areas for further research.

The significance of social presence is pivotal for online students’ participation in online discussion boards. Yet, it remained ambiguous how students evolved their social presence in their network interaction development. This research delved into the extent to which social presence moderated trends over time in several facets of students' prominence within social learning analysis of online discussions. The social network analysis (SNA) employed revealed that students’ prominence, including betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and PageRank, showed no notable growth over the duration of a 7-week online course. Moreover, the consistent trend observed in betweenness, eigenvector, and PageRank, coupled with the declining trend in closeness, was consistent across participants, irrespective of their level of social presence. These findings underscored the high interactivity of the students over time, offering valuable guidance for online educators and instructors to effectively sustain students' social presence and interconnectivity in online discussion boards effectively and continuously.

The shift to online learning has highlighted significant gaps in how students’ emotional and social needs are supported (Bao, 2020). This paper explores innovative pedagogical feedback mechanisms designed to enhance emotional and social support in online settings. It introduces frameworks for delivering feedback that are both academically relevant and sensitive to students’ well-being. This paper advocates for more empathetic and socially aware practices in providing feedback, especially in online discussion boards. Key mechanisms include AI-driven tools, social network analytics, multimodal tools, and sentiment analysis. These tools aim to create a more inclusive and supportive online learning community, boosting student engagement, retention, and satisfaction.

Asynchronous online discussions are widely recognized as potent pedagogical practices for actively involving learners in the process of constructing knowledge and cultivating a thriving learning community. This study examined how the types of online discussion threads (i.e., student-based vs. topic-based) moderate diverse of social interconnection in discussions and how it changes over time. An upward trajectory in the diversification of interconnectivity was discerned. In spite of the shift from student-based to topic-based, students continue valuing the power of diversified interconnecting with their classmates. The significant drop, but transitory, from Week 3 to 4 can be explained by the switch to another discussion type. Both the student-based and topic-based threads were observed to facilitate comparable levels of diverse connectivity. However, they accentuated subtle attributes within the learning communities. Instead of deciding upon any asynchronous online discussion tools given by institution’s LMS, instructors should critically assess different discussion thread interfaces and integrate a relevant one to create and facilitate their ideal and effective, yet diverse learning community. Future research should explore diverse interconnectivity traits and extend the timeframe beyond three weeks to observe the enduring impacts on learning community development.

COVID-19 has emphasized the importance of holistic education with fostering stu- dents' multiple intelligences through effective social and emotional learning (SEL). Understanding students' SEL not only supports students' learning performance, it's also beneficial to inform teachers to provide more adequate social-communicative, metacognitive, and affective learning. This study examined: How does Data-Informed Learning Design (DILD) support online teaching on students' social and emotional learning? The study concluded that DILD is an effective design model to support teachers to probe students' socio-communicative, metacognitive, and affective learnings. The findings inform the educators to set high expectations for teaching and provide appropriate personal, social, data, and instructional support to enable teachers to regulate and support students to achieve ideal social and emotional learning.

This paper shares an innovative use of an online decision-based simulation to help preservice teachers examine contentious issues, such as challenged books in elementary and middle school classrooms. Challenged books, particularly those around gender diversity topics, can be contentious as well as emotionally laden. The online simulation that uses a combination of recorded actors, writing exercises, and various decision paths requires the preservice teachers to contend with multiple stakeholders and various priorities in a rich sociocultural context. The teacher educators share key strengths of this use that include using a mistake-friendly learning environment, replaying the simulation multiple times to connect decisions with consequences, and engaging in a complex, nuanced, and responsive learning context. This article provides an overview of the simulation and what was found to be useful when using simulations to address contentious topics.

Effective online interaction is beyond interacting with whomever. The quality of social interconnectivity matters. Social presence plays a vital role in building an effective online learning community. This study empirically examined: how online social presence will predict various aspects of students’ social interconnectivities (i.e., in-degree, out-degree, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, reciprocated vertex pair ratio, & PageRank) in the social network of discussion board within an online course? The predictive utility of social presence for all social network interconnectivity was supported, but reciprocated vertex pair ratio, so-called two-way interconnectivity was not. Social presence serves as a strong predictor for social interaction and interconnectivity. Learners with higher social presence are more likely to play distinguished roles of influencer, liaison, transmitter, social strategist, and prestigious figure of a community of learners. The findings would support online instructors to facilitate, guide, and support their students to navigate through the convoluted social interconnectivity effectively and continuously.

This study empirically investigated: How will various aspects of students’ prominence (i.e., betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities) in the social network interaction of online discussion change over time? And how will Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) skills moderate the trend over time on various aspects of students’ prominence in social network interaction? The results suggested that students’ closeness centrality increased over time regardless of students’ SRL skill levels. With the online discussion, students developed a stronger sense of diversified learning community and thus formed more competent communities of learners by sharing values and resources, actively and interactively, to sustain the learning community.

In this chapter, the researchers showcased the story of an international student to critically illustrate issues impacting international students in higher education within the U.S. and to offer ways forward to create more equitable and inclusive universities for these students. Such critical examination of these students' experiences is important because their enrollment in higher education has expanded considerably in the past decades. Support of these students may be a valuable investment in the future infrastructure of the U.S. and the world. However, they may experience a variety of challenges navigating university systems imbued with structures that have historically created and continue to perpetuate systemic marginalization of students based on ethnicity, racialized identity, and religious beliefs, among other social identities. Here, the autoethnography of an international Ph.D. student upon her arrival into the U.S. towards her graduation was collaboratively and critically examined and explored. Then, ways to deal with those issues at the college level were suggested.

Adaptive learning is an educational method that uses computer algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to customize learning materials and activities based on each user’s model. Adaptive learning has been used for more than 20 years. However, it is still unique, and no other system could bring more or even similar capabilities than the ones adaptive technology offers, including the application of AI, psychology, psychometrics, machine learning, and providing a personalized learning environment. However, there are not many studies on its practicality, usefulness, improving students’ learning skills, students’ perception, etc., due to the limited number of institutes investing in this new technology. This paper presents the results of administering the newly developed Adaptive Self-regulated Learning Questionnaire (ASRQ) in an adaptive learning course equipped with the ALEKS (Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces) system to study the amount of Self-regulated Learning Skills (SRL) score change, if any, of the students. The ASRQ was administered at the beginning and end of the semester as a pretest and posttest. Then, the quantitative Sample Paired t Test was run to measure the students’ SRL score change between the beginning and end of the semester. The results showed a significant decline in students’ SRL skills score while working with ALEKS. This paper also discusses the reasons for the considerable drop in SRL skills based on students’ perception and feedback collected through administering an open-ended survey at the end of the semester. The survey’s qualitative analysis showed various possible factors contributing to the decline of the SRL skills score, including lack of motivation, system complexity, hard penalty, lack of social presence, and lack of system practicality.

Many institutions have adopted an online accelerated learning model in which intensive online instructions are offered during the course of a normal semester to help students complete classes. Current research has focused on comparing different instructional lengths. Mixed findings have been reported. Accelerated instructions are not necessarily superior or inferior to traditional 16-week instructions. Research should focus on what is crucial and how to prepare students to succeed in accelerated online courses. This study examines whether self-regulated learning (SRL) skills may serve as predictors of positive accelerated learning experiences. It concludes that five SRL skills can predict success in online accelerated learning experiences and suggested educators should identify and prepare students with relevant SRL skills prior to attempting accelerated instructions to warrant a positive learning experience.

Adaptive Learning (AL), a new web-based online learning environment, requires self-regulated learners who act autonomously. However, to date, there appears to be no existing model to conceptualize different aspects of SRL skills in Adaptive Learning Environments (ALE). The purpose of this study was to design and empirically evaluate a theoretical model of Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) in ALE's and the related questionnaire as a measurement tool. The proposed theoretical model, namely, “Adaptive Self-Regulated Learning (ASR)”, was specified to incorporate the SRL skills into ALE's. Based on this model, the Adaptive Self-regulated Learning Questionnaire (ASRQ) was developed. The reliability and validity of the ASRQ were evaluated via the review of a content expert panel, the Cronbach's alpha coefficients, and confirmatory factor analysis. Overall, the results supported the theoretical framework and the new ASRQ in an ALE. In this article, the theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

This chapter describes an instructional method designed to integrate technologies fostering student engagement in a course content where educators reverse the roles traditionally held by teachers and learners. To provide context for this method, it details an example course designed for the pre-service teacher to develop technology integration in their future K-12 classes. This example provides a model of the theoretical rationale that supports practical applications of technology and the reversing constructivist role of the instructors enhancing learner engagement in technology-rich learning environments. In doing so, it introduces technologies fostering learner-centered technology engagement through introducing a “modified flipped spiraling curriculum” model. Furthermore, it demonstrates the performance indicators to evaluate the course and students' achievement of objectives. Finally, it tries to depict this model for instructors, instructional designers, pre-service teachers, and educational technologists to use it as a guide to design and implement similar courses.

Online learners' learning skills and behaviors are challenging for educators to foresee, particularly what skills may be related to certain social interaction behaviors. Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are critical to online learning. It is unclear how SRL skills may predict social network interaction. This study empirically investigated: How will SRL skills predict students' network roles (i.e., in-degree, out-degree, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, reciprocated vertex pair ratio, & PageRank) in the social network discussions of discussion board within online courses? The predictive utility of SRL skills for betweenness and closeness centralities was supported. Learners with greater SRL skills play more influential roles in online discussion network. Learners with higher SRL skills tend to connect to others based on flow and distance of the connections, rather than how prominent (eigenvector) and prestigious (PageRank) of their connections.

Personal Learning Environment is a promising pedagogical approach to integrate formal and informal learning in social media and support student self-regulated learning. The use of PLEs to support lifelong learning can be expanded to the formal, non-formal, or informal learning environments. This study empirically examined how PLE management predicted the use of PLE to support three types of lifelong learning (i.e., formal, non-formal, or informal learning). This study concluded that PLE management was predictive of each type of learning respectively. PLE is not only a technical platform but also a new digital learning literacy, conceptual space, pedagogical process, and social networks that enable and support learners to achieve their lifelong learning goals. While Open Educational Resources (OERs) are perceived as a solution for social justice in digital lifelong learning, PLE and Open Network Learning Environment are identified as the key pedagogy and instructional strategies to empower learners gaining network-learning literacy and becoming competent digital lifelong learners.