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This paper aims to explore the experiences of a high school senior, a doctoral student, a university professor and an online academic coach with a rapid, unplanned shift to online learning in the USA during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the challenges and distinct skills they identify as essential for success in a 100% virtual learning environment.

Through scholarly personal narratives (SPNs), the researchers shared details and authentic knowledge regarding their experiences and perceptions of successful teaching and learning in a 100% online learning environment.

The main goal was to identify necessary skills for success in a 100% virtual learning environment resulting from an unplanned shift. The findings show a need for learner and teacher self-directedness in developing a variety of nontraditional, critical literacies.

In light of the imposed and unplanned educational shifts in teaching and learning, this study has strong practical implications for human resource development offered through an analysis of multiple perspectives. This research may lead to a better understanding of how, in a period of rapid, unexpected shifts, individuals need to use self-directedness to leverage personal and professional development opportunities to adapt and succeed in the new environment. Additionally, the authors use an innovative critical theoretical framework to outline the skills the participants report as useful for success in an online classroom during a period of rapid, unexpected shifting.

The purpose of this study is to examine how academic coaches, through academic student support, impact graduate student performance in a time-intensive online learning program for pursuing a master’s degree in leadership and human resource development in a research-intensive public university in the Southern USA.

The participants in this study were 435 graduate students enrolled in their online master’s degree program. Framed by the theory of transactional distance and by adopting a pre-experimental design and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique, the student performance in three courses was compared (principles of adult education, research methods and performance analysis) with academic coaches.

The findings indicate that the average score of students was higher when students received more feedback and comments from an academic coach than less feedback and comments in the performance analysis course. Students who had an academic coach in the adult education class performed better than those who did not have a coach. However, there was not a significant difference in academic performance based on the number of academic coaches (one versus three) in the research methods course.

This preliminary work may lead to a better understanding of how academic coaches can best support adult learners in their pursuits of online postsecondary education. This study would suggest implications for online instructors and institutions to enhance student success and retention in online learning activities by using academic coaching.

This paper aims to present the experiences, beliefs and perceptions of international faculty at a Research 1 institution in the Southern US regarding the perceived differences between their and their students’ and colleagues’ cultures and first languages.

Face-to-face interviews were conducted with four international faculty from Europe and Asia who held appointments at a Research 1 institution in the Southern US. The interviews focused on the participants’ communication experiences with students and colleagues from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The findings have implications for academic and professional development and support as they show that understanding cultural aspects of language and communication can be challenging for individuals who may not be aware of possible cultural differences.

This study is unique because it presents stories of faculty from different backgrounds, who were born on different continents and who learned English at different ages but are all working in a linguistically homogeneous context. Also, the originality of the study comes from examining the intercultural communication between the participating faculty and their students, as well as their colleagues.

What is the historical, normative and institutional setting that helps leading Latin American and Eurasian countries to implement a post-hegemonic agenda and contribute to the multipolarization of global politics? Post-hegemony describes a situation in which the unipolar organization of the world political economy is challenged by a plurality of alternative projects, without however being entirely replaced by another system. Emblematic of post-hegemonic initiatives is the rise of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa countries who have taken the lead in creating alternative institutions that constrain US global hegemony, while however failing to spearhead a coherent, uniform and confrontational opposition movement. Regarding post-hegemonic regionalism, Latin American regionalism – as represented by Bolivarian Alliance for Our America (ALBA) – is characterized by a social justice-driven agenda that refutes US neoliberal hegemony, whereas the peculiarity of Eurasian regionalism – as represented by Shanghai Cooperation Organization – lies in its security-oriented focus that confronts US interventionism and international terrorism. An underlying commonality of both Latin American and Eurasian experiences is that they constitute a multi-front struggle centered on four main areas: culture, economy, financial cooperation, and regional defense. They both hinge on a strong normative framework and firm commitment in the regionalization of an endogenous culture, educational cooperation, and defense system. They all accord primary importance to social, financial, and infrastructural development. Overall, these experiences suffer from unresolved tensions between national sovereignty and supranationalism alongside the predominance of charismatic leaders inhibiting institutionalization. The limitations and contradictions of post-hegemonic transformations also include Latin America’s inability to resolve the question of extractivism, Eurasia’s neglect of the question of democratic participation, and both regionalism’s failure to offer a coherent alternative model of economic development to US hegemonism.

This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science and positions it in the disciplinary universe.

After motivating the objective, a definition of the core and an explanation of its key aspects are provided. The definition is related to other definitions of information science before controversial discourse aspects are briefly addressed: discipline vs. field, science vs. humanities, library vs. information science and application vs. theory. Interdisciplinarity as an often-assumed foundation of information science is challenged.

Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions. Research and professional practice encompass the infrastructures – institutions and technology –and phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time as its core contribution to the scholarly landscape. Information science collaborates with other disciplines to work on complex information problems that need multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to address them.

The paper argues that new information problems may change the core of the field, but throughout its existence, the discipline has remained quite stable in its central focus, yet proved to be highly adaptive to the tremendous changes in the forms, practices, institutions and technologies around and for manifested information.

Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), like other universities, are faced with challenges related to faculty diversity. The literature related to faculty at HSIs is scant and so this paper aims to address this gap by problematizing faculty diversity at these institutions.

By means of a document analysis, the authors have scoured the data on faculty demographics at these institutions and the findings of the study are threefold.

First, a lack of accessible and transparent data exists. Second, there is a lack of available demographic information and third, this creates a dismal narrative regarding faculty diversity at HSIs.

Further critical research is warranted as a means to uncover data on faculty diversity at HSIs.

This study supports the need for a critical consciousness lens to problematize faculty diversity at HSIs.

Woller, Dunford, and Woodworth (1999) and Morduch (2000) were among the first to discuss the existence of a “schism” in the study of microfinance. Although the exact dimensions of this divide are stated differently by various authors, the existence of alternative schools of thought is widely accepted (Brett, 2006; Bhatt & Tang, 2001; Mitlin, 2002; Robinson, 2001; Rhyne, 1998).

The Latin American region experienced an electoral shift to the political left during the 2000s but this leftist shift did not radically alter the political economy of the region. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach to theorizing about the state, this paper focuses on the perspective that the structure of the state is both an outcome of prior social struggles and a structuring mechanism for the social actors that attempt to enact political and economic reforms.

After demonstrating what this has historically meant for the types of state that have existed in Latin America during the past century by reviewing some of the literature on the corporatist and bureaucratic-authoritarian states and clientelism, this paper argues that the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s constituted a new type of state – the Latin American neoliberal state. This analysis is then focused on the literature that seeks to describe the new lefts in the region, while continuing to focus on the role of the neoliberal state in structuring these new lefts’ terrain of struggle.

Understanding the new lefts in Latin America and the types of reforms that they are capable of making requires that we better understand this new type of state. Due to the structural limitations imposed by the neoliberal state, the lefts are not able to radically alter the region’s political economy.