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Within higher education, there was an abrupt shift from face-to-face to online lecturing with the introduction of social distancing measures in light of a global pandemic. The purpose of this study is to enrich the connection between students and instructors, the authors integrated elaborated interactive activities into large online lectures to enhance both students’ cognitive activities and social presence.

In this study, the goals are twofold. First, the authors introduce a classroom orchestration system and its features that support active learning across learning environments. Second, they investigate the differences and similarities between student behaviors during these activities in face-to-face and online settings.

The findings reveal individual differences in student behaviors between student cohorts, but no differences between learning environments, highlighting the versatility of the orchestration system across face-to-face and online environments.

This work presents the use of a classroom orchestration tool that is designed to easily support teaching and learning in online and face-to-face contexts and is particularly well suited for large classes.

Online lectures can be more than watching a teacher speaking on the computer display. Rich class-wide learning activities can be integrated into online lectures to support more cognitive engagement during the lecture.

While technical vocational education training (TVET) has been studied in-depth, the evolution and performance patterns of the subject remain unknown and limited. A bibliometric analysis was performed to examine the global scientific literature to assess the state of the art in TVET research over the past 23 years.

The Web of Science (WoS) database was searched to explore TVET-related research from 1999 to 2021, resulting in the identification of 7,512 articles. The VOSviewer software was used to investigate the network of collaboration between authors, institutions, countries and author keywords.

The results reveal that the subject categories of “education” and “educational research” are the most prolific contributors to TVET-related research, with 3,314 articles. Most of the previous studies in Phase I (1999–2006) focussed on human capital resources development in the TVET sector. Phase II (2007–2014) follows with the centralisation of TVET, focussing on technology transition in education. However, in Phase III (2015–2021), researchers appear to focus on vocational studies in higher education towards increasing the productivity of human resources via the implementation of technology transition.

The valuable findings of this study can facilitate better understanding among scholars on the trends of TVET research developments and on the direction of future research.

Investigating the social structure in online courses helps in designing for and facilitating student support and retention. Aims to provide data showing how course design and use of social software technologies provided social and collaborative learning opportunities for online students.

A study of computer‐mediated groups that utilized social media technologies and a web‐based collaborative model in an online program. Participants were put into groups and observed as they constructed knowledge using both online dialogue (synchronous and asynchronous) and social media technologies as tools to support their learning.

The integration of web‐based learning communities and collaborative group assignments into the course design has a positive influence on student retention in online courses.

The research was limited to the online student population at Pepperdine University, and did not include data or research from similar online programs at other universities. Future research should include data collected from students outside the USA to find out what role cultural mores, attitudes, and gender play.

Provides curriculum design strategies that foster community, utilize social/ participatory media, and support online student learning and retention through effective course design.

Current research on distance learning curriculum has focused on the instructor's perspective. It is felt that research from the student's perspective can also yield some valuable insights for online course design.

The purpose of this paper was to develop a framework of working-together relations and investigate ways to enhance working-together relations among people, organisations, communities and neighbourhoods using working-together applications. Today, people in communities, neighbourhoods and constituencies often work together in a coalition of public, private and non-profit institutions. The technology used today has enabled new forms of communications and collaboration. The rapid growth of mobile technologies and interactive, collaborative applications based on Web technologies has enabled the development of new approaches to derive and share organisational and local knowledge. Not all of these applications have succeeded; after a certain time, users tend to stop using online applications that do not assist them in developing collaborative practices with their team members.

To better understand the essential characteristics of a successful online application that effectively supports people to work together, the authors undertook an inductive analysis of related literature and existing social media application.

By combining and categorising the findings, it was possible to articulate the characteristics associated with four identified categories of working-together relations: networking, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. The study also identified essential activities that are performed in each working-together category and the factors that enable successful working-together relations: trust, risk and rewards.

Future studies will look into how applications could be further enhanced, so that, for example, an application that is currently classified as “coordination” could be improved and the required characteristics of “collaboration” could be met.

It is expected that the framework derived will assist in the design of successful online applications to support different categories of working-together relations.

The main contribution of this study is a new framework that can now be used to identify how effective an existing application can be in assisting the working-together relations.

Facing the dilemma between collaboration and privacy is a continual challenge for users. In this setting, the purpose of this paper is to discuss issues of a highly flexible role management integrated in a privacy‐enhanced collaborative environment (PECE).

The general framework was provided by former findings of several research projects, i.e. collaborative platform BluES and projects of privacy and identity management PRIME and PrimeLife. The role management concept bases on a literature survey and has been proofed by integration into the privacy‐enhanced environment BluES'n.

A three‐dimensional role management concept was developed describing users' rights, tasks, and positions. A discussion on how to fulfill privacy requirements yielded that a semi‐automated decision making regarding the use of roles with different identities is reasonable to support users' control of their privacy when interacting with others.

The concept of flexible role management complies with the requirements of PECEs. However, a fully automated approach of rule‐based information disclosure is not possible as such decisions depend on personal and situational aspects.

Using the example of a flexible role management concept, research described in this paper demonstrates that privacy and interaction concerns can be balanced and should be considered in application design processes.

Concepts of PECEs allow respecting privacy‐related attitudes and could improve the quality of service consumption.

The paper demonstrates contrasts between collaboration and privacy attitudes and presents solutions for the integration of role management to overcome this initially supposed contradiction.