This design case presents a detailed analysis of a project that created nine openly-licensed books and over 250 openly-licensed videos in a four year time-span, bringing together a team of more than 60 K-12 educators, 20 authors, and five editors. The case outlines the project’s design, implementation, and contributions to practice-based scholarship strategies. It provides insights into the complexities of co-authoring open educational resources with practitioners and proposes strategies for fostering sustainable partnerships through practice-based scholarship using the Collaborative Resource and Alliance Framework for Teaching and Educational Development framework. Ultimately, it advocates for a more inclusive vision of instructional design—one that values the expertise of those on the front lines of education and leverages their insights to create meaningful, practice-driven resources.

In this study, we developed and collect initial evidence of the validity of scores from an instrument to identify parents' perceptions of their ability to support their students' engagement in online learning. The instrument can also diagnose what level and type of help they need. This study randomly split 660 participating parents from seven K-12 Indiana online schools into two subgroups. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) for one group to form constructs regarding the number of factors represented by the items. We then conducted a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for the second group data to assess the factors generated from the EFA results. The results indicated good fit for a three-factor model representing three constructs: (a) parent perceptions of their learner's independent engagement, (b) parents' confidence to support student engagement, (c) school provided support to parents. Items demonstrated strong reliability within each factor.

As demand for online courses continues to rise in higher education, many institutions struggle to develop, promote, and sustain high-quality online programs, in part due to limited capacity. In response, Online Program Managers (OPMs)?private companies that collaborate with colleges and universities to create and provide online offerings?have become increasingly prominent over the past 15 years. These partnerships allow institutions to scale online courses and programs without having to contribute significant upfront investments. However, there remains a general lack of awareness about what OPMs are, the scope of their services, and the trade-offs involved. This article aims to shed light on the advantages and potential drawbacks of OPM partnerships. Because OPMs can be crucial to the success of online initiatives, placing constraints on their collaboration with higher education could impede efforts to expand access and enhance the quality of online learning.

So much depends on online course participants’ ability to communicate in ways so that others can perceive their personalities and know that they are real people. However, the line between the real and the artificial has been blurred with the rise of generative AI and guidance is needed for integrating generative AI into online learning without harming the sense of presence and community that students rely on. Building on previous research conducted by us and others for more than a decade on asynchronous video communication, we argue that establishing social presence using asynchronous video is especially important when teaching and learning with generative AI. In this article, we discuss generative AI’s potential impact on online instructors and students’ social presence. We then share a framework for strategically combining AI-generated text and instructor- and student-created video communication to strengthen social presence in online learning environments.

Independent engagement can be challenging for K-12 online students. Parents' physical presence makes them an important source of engagement support. Previous research on parental support in online courses is limited and focused on asynchronous learning within a single program. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, online enrollments have grown and instructional modalities have evolved. To better understand parental support post-Covid, we interviewed 21 parents across eight online programs with asynchronous, synchronous, and bichronous course offerings. Parents identified their affective, behavioral, cognitive, and other support roles. Implications for parental roles in addressing the academic engagement gap are provided to both researchers and practitioners.

This research seeks to understand parental support for online students. Using a survey, this study examined perceptions from 567 parents from eight online K-12 programs in a Midwestern state regarding their support for students' online affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. Guided by the Academic Communities of Engagement Framework, our analysis identified eight main challenges parents faced when supporting their online student: (a) focus; (b) keeping on pace; (c) lack of motivation; (d) lack of organization, learning materials, live sessions, and support from online schools; (e) lack of feedback, support, and communication from teachers; (f) parents in need of additional skills in supporting students' online engagement; (g) schedule issues at home and (h) parents' unawareness of students' online learning. Practical recommendations to help parents are shared at the end of the study.

While generative AI such as ChatGPT has important drawbacks, it can potentially unlock new types of learning and support – specially for English learners and students with disabilities – by facilitating teachers’ Universal Design for Learning (UDL) efforts. As generative AI is quickly becoming an integral part of our lives (e.g., being incorporated into existing tools such as Google products), teachers will need to decide how they can use and benefit from this new technology. Our analysis of data collected during a summer teacher institute found that in Summer 2023 the majority of teachers had never used generative AI and were evenly split on whether it was a “friend” or “foe” in their teaching efforts. Overall, 43

AbstractStudents at the primary and secondary levels are increasingly enrolling in online courses either to supplement or completely replace their in-person courses. While there are benefits to learning online, they come at a cost, and students are less likely to pass their online courses compared to their in-person courses. In this chapter, we share two frameworks. We share the 4Es framework that highlights how online courses should be designed to enable, extend, engage, and elevate student learning. However, a well-designed course is not enough, and most students will require support from others to be successful. For this reason, we also share the Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework that highlights the supports that can increase a student’s affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. The ACE framework identifies actors within the student’s personal community and course community who can provide students with the support that they require.

Despite increased interest in K–12 online education, student engagement deficits and the resulting student attrition remain widespread issues. The Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework theorizes that two groups support online student engagement: the personal community of support and the course community of support. However, more evidence is needed to understand how members of these communities, especially parents, support students in various contexts. Using insights gleaned from 14 semi-structured interviews of parents with students enrolled in online secondary school, this study adds support to the roles identified in the ACE framework by presenting real examples of parents supporting their online students’ affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. Findings also confirm patterns found in previous research that are not explained using the ACE framework, such as parental advocacy, communication with teachers, and self-teaching. We discuss how a systems approach to conceptualizing the ACE communities allows the framework to more accurately capture parents' perceived experiences within the personal community of support. We also discuss implications for both practitioners and members of students’ support structures.

Field experiences are essential to teacher preparation; however, teacher preparation programs have largely overlooked the need for online field experiences. To provide programs with insights into designing such experiences, we conducted a systematic review synthesizing the characteristics, benefits, and challenges of field experiences implemented in P-12 online settings. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyze 25 studies published from 2007 to 2022. Most studies were published during or after the COVID-19 pandemic. Over half of the studies described experiences that were implemented in the U.S., lasted nine to 16 weeks, and required teacher candidates to reflect, teach, evaluate, and/or observe. The review concludes with implications for preparing teacher candidates for continued higher levels of online teaching.

In light of the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders of higher education institutions around the world have been contemplating ways to help their universities engage in a digital transformation that must have student engagement and learning as the foremost considerations. This study reports on the work conducted at a university in Colombia that created an evaluation instrument based on the Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework (Borup et al., 2020) to examine how well the institution was supporting the affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) dimensions of engagement in its online and blended learning course offerings. This survey, the ACE in Higher Education (ACE-HE), measures indicators of the ABC engagement dimensions as well as indicators of institutional support for those elements. The survey was completed by 1,295 university students representing a broad demographic profile. Structural equation modeling found good fit for both the model of ABC engagement dimensions and the model of institutional support for ABC engagement dimensions. Institutional support for affective engagement showed strong relationships to affective, behavioral, and cognitive indicators of engagement, while institutional support for behavioral and cognitive engagement did not have the same outcome. This research provides access to both English and Spanish versions of the ACE-HE instrument. It also highlights ideas for institutions that want to improve their support for student ABC engagement dimensions in online and blended environments. Finally, several implications for making updates to the ACE framework are shared.

The Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework was originally created to identify the critical factors that limit or facilitate students’ ability to engage in online and blended learning environments (Borup et al., 2020). Specifically, the ACE framework builds on previous educational psychology research that has three interconnected dimensions of engagement: affective, behavioral, and cognitive (the ABC dimensions of engagement). Within a blended or online learning environment, students can independently engage in learning activities without the support of others. However, much of the existing research has assumed the in-person learning environment and has not considered the affordances and constraints of online and blended environments that can facilitate or inhibit a learner’s ability to engage in learning activities. For instance, the nature of asynchronous online courses can leave learners feeling isolated and require that they exercise more self-regulation abilities compared to their in-person counterparts. These challenges are reflected in online learning’s relatively high attrition rates (Freidhoff, 2021). When online learners’ ability to independently engage affectively, behaviorally, and/or cognitively is insufficient, they require support from others to be successful. The ACE framework defines the ABC dimensions of engagement and explains how environments, communities, and learner characteristics can limit or facilitate academic engagement.

This research used three scales to explore ethnicity and other variables' effects on university students' self-assessed academic help-seeking. The scores from each respective scale were regressed onto academic and demographic variables. In two of the three regression models, Age was the only significant factor, older students self-assessing as less avoidant and more persuaded of the benefits of help-seeking. However, investigating an interaction in one model revealed that older Pacific Islanders followed an opposite pattern, self-assessing as more avoidant of help-seeking with increased age, and significantly more avoidant than same-age peers of other ethnicities. Pacific Islanders also self-assessed significantly higher in instrumental help-seeking. In summary, except for Pacific Islanders, ethnic background had surprisingly little effect on academic help-seeking, a finding which may be attributable to the highly multicultural research setting. These findings suggest that younger students and older Pacific Islanders may benefit from focused efforts to facilitate their receiving academic help.

Existing research on facilitators in K-12 schools has focused on supplemental online programs where on-site personnel work with online students in a local brick-and-mortar school. While some insightful research exists focused on online facilitators at full-time cyber schools, additional research is needed to examine facilitators using synchronous support. The purpose of this study was to determine whether and how the role of a facilitator in a full-time cyber school could help to address students’ cognitive, behavioral, and affective engagement needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted qualitative interviews with two administrators and four advocates during Spring 2020, using the Academic Communities of Engagement Framework as a lens to understand the advocates’ role. Findings confirmed the need for a facilitator role to support online student engagement. This type of research will provide insights to full-time cyber schools and will be insightful to those seeking to engage students during emergency remote learning.