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The ultimate objective of any learning platform is student engagement with the material, instructor, and classmates. Little is currently known about students’ concerns regarding privacy, confidentiality, and information safety and the potential impact these may have on engagement within an online learning environment. Existing literature and practice must be supplemented with awareness of the importance of student perceptions concerning privacy and confidentiality if online learning engagement is to be maximized. Our exploratory research shows that students do experience concerns, that these concerns can be impacted by the professional school status of the students in question, and that students take steps to create safety accordingly. As a result, student engagement within an online learning environment is different than its physical counterpart. Our findings and subsequent recommendations suggest more can be done to maximize the notion of learning safety and student online learning engagement.

This chapter illustrates the ways in which The Open University (OU), one of the leading distance learning universities in the world, uses a range of social media to engage members of the public in learning. The OU has been an early adopter of innovative technologies which enabled public engagement right from its inception, forty years ago, contributing to fulfilling its ethos of social justice. It is this aim to remove barriers and provide learning materials to a wide audience, including those who may be excluded from other learning institutions, which has been a major strategic driver of recent changes. Today the OU harnesses a range of social media to continue to develop this strategic policy. The OU's ecology of openness includes a presence on externally developed social media such as YouTube, iTunesU, Facebook and Twitter, which are used as platforms to transfer knowledge and expertise to interested members of the public and encourage academic debate. Alongside these, the OU has also developed its own cutting edge social media platforms, which also allow public engagement. Key OU platforms include OpenLearn, a website that gives free access to a vast range of OU course materials; and Cloudworks, a site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas, experiences and issues. This chapter explores the achievements of the OU in using social media to engage with public audiences, as well as highlights the challenges and issues encountered.

Emergency situations call for effective means of providing quality education. Higher education institutions are therefore required to use effective and efficient online approaches for teaching and learning which necessitate students, academic practitioners and institutions to engage and interact with each other successfully. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the importance of interaction and engagement in the use of blended learning online tools during emergency situations. The theoretical lens that informs the chapter is social constructivism which argues that learning is a social endeavour. The literature findings show that the effective engagement of students contributes to the overall quality of students’ produced experiences as well as pass rates. Furthermore, the importance of student–lecturer engagement and student–content engagement cannot be taken for granted. The right balance of synchronous and asynchronous online learning tools contributes to fruitful interaction and engagement. Online engagement seems to have many benefits as compared to conventional based engagement such as the ability of students to contribute to their teaching and learning. Despite these advantages, challenges associated with online learning such as balancing life commitments, confidence, students’ approach to learning, high investment costs in resources, motivation, competences of lecturers and students, interest of lecturers and students and efficacy of lecturers and students cannot be ignored. The authors therefore recommend that effective and efficient online learning requires the correct blend of online learning tools accompanied by the correct engagement strategies.

This book centers on several key areas of social engagement and social learning in higher education today, including social networking platforms and e-portfolios. In addition to these Web 2.0 technologies, rapid improvements in related communication technologies (e.g., broadband services, wireless, mobile phones, and tablets) have also provided the necessary infrastructure components by which educators implement innovative teaching and learning practices on a larger scale, in a more reliable manner, and in a more targeted fashion. These technologies are also transforming our views of what it means to learn in an increasingly globalized, interconnected, and pluralistic world. The authors have presented several perspectives on how to use social networking tools to better engage learners in more meaningful and authentic learning activities. Social networking sites like Facebook are not a panacea for effective learning, but they do provide instructors and students with a convenient platform for enhancing the teaching and learning process. Instructors also play an important part in modeling proper online behavior through their presence on the platform and their interaction with their students. However, these tools are only one piece of the learning puzzle. The ultimate goal is to enable students to become lifelong learners and to instill in them a high value for learning that matures over their lifetime. As such, these tools can be used to better engage students more deeply in authentic and personally meaningful learning experiences.

Contextualizing grammar in second language (L2) classrooms implies making grammar constructs relevant to the learners’ world; affording learners the opportunities to better comprehend and apply these concepts in their own milieus. This instructional design (ID) has been devised to contextualize grammar and to explore learner engagement of pre-service English teachers through Computer-Aided Learning (CAL) and Task-based Learning (TBL) in a technology-driven learning environment. CAL encompasses technology-aided discussions, multi-media presentations, online tests and exercises, and social media deployment. TBL, on the other hand, contextualizes grammar using technology and social network in planning, executing, and presenting four assigned tasks: picture essay, brochure design, dialogue composition, and comic strips illustration. Facebook is the e-portfolio of the class, archiving all group and individual output. The CAL-TBL tandem is propelled by group initiatives and class collaboration evident in group discussions and planning, microteaching, task presentations, peer reviews, and self-evaluations. These initiatives engage learners; empowering students to collaboratively take active part and responsibility for their own learning. The three-hour-class meets every week in a computer laboratory. The post-semester feedback and online poll course design review as well as the University Course Evaluation comments have shown that the ID, from the learners’ perspective, is effective in contextualizing grammar and in engaging learners.

This chapter synthesizes findings from the reviews of education using Web 2.0, social networking, mobile learning, and virtual worlds, in light of the earlier chapters on context, technology, pedagogy, content, and design. Benefits and issues associated technology-enhanced learning are generalized, with an important finding being the quite different ways that different technologies contribute to each. Twenty technology-enhanced learning design principles are derived from abstracting the Web 2.0, social networking, mobile learning, and virtual worlds literature. The benefits, issues, and technology-enhanced learning design principles are then related to one another by virtue of 13 clusters of concerns, namely pedagogy, access, communication, content representation, collaboration, motivation and engagement, vicarious learning and reflection, digital learning capabilities, assessment and feedback, student-centered learning, learning communities, protecting students, and teacher support. The analysis enables the general learning technology literature to be linked to concrete examples and evidential sources, so that educators and researchers can construct a deep and connected understanding of technology-enhanced learning design.

The higher education world around us is changing fast. Mobile learning (M-learning) and apps in education are new and exciting. However, this does not mean that the faculty is less relevant. On the contrary, the faculty are an ever-important factor that is needed to increase student engagement. Disengaged students are in fact more problematic than low achieving students. This is because of the disruption disengaged student bring in the classroom. Therefore, increasing student engagement is a key challenge in higher education today. Research suggests that active learning, value and expectations are important factors that determine student engagement. Some of these factors can be indirectly influenced by the faculty and course designers. Against this background, the objective of this chapter is to examine if dwindling student engagement in higher education can be addressed with CURPA, i.e. a CURriculum and course planning (CURP) App. CURPA is the result of our efforts at Utrecht University to help design courses and curricula by using cards to account for different activities, with the strategic aim being to stimulate student engagement in higher education. Our expert interviews resulted in a MoSCoW-prioritised list of requirements that can be implemented over time, structured in line with Becker's student engagement model.

Higher education has seen an unprecedented amount of change in recent decades, with technological advancements impacting on the very essence of teaching and learning. As there are an abundance of digital tools available to educators, it can be a challenge to select the most appropriate online platforms to incorporate into the classroom. This chapter discusses the topic of digital storyboarding by providing a case study of how the author adopted the online platform Storyboard That to enhance student engagement and co-creativity within a UK higher education institution. The chapter debates the benefits and challenges of technology-enhanced learning as part of a blended approach, and concludes with advice for educators wishing to adopt digital storyboarding within their own educational context.

Digital business models are often designed for rapid growth, and some relatively young companies have indeed achieved global scale. However, despite the visibility and importance of this phenomenon, analysis of scale and scalability remains underdeveloped in management literature. When it is addressed, analysis of this phenomenon is often over-influenced by arguments about economies of scale in production and distribution. To redress this omission, this paper draws on economic, organization, and technology management literature to provide a detailed examination of the sources of scaling in digital businesses. We propose three mechanisms by which digital business models attempt to gain scale: engaging both non-paying users and paying customers; organizing customer engagement to allow self-customization; and orchestrating networked value chains, such as platforms or multi-sided business models. Scaling conditions are discussed, and propositions developed and illustrated with examples of big data entrepreneurial firms.