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The main aim of this study is to gauge international offshore students’ perceptions of virtual office hours (VOH) to consult with their offshore unit coordinators in Australia.

This paper employs a quantitative and qualitative approach where data was sourced from three offshore campuses over a 12‐month period using a survey instrument. SPSS v20 was used to perform basic descriptive analysis, cross tabulations and chi‐square statistics.

The study revealed that 81 per cent of respondents indicated a willingness to use VOH. A number of perceived benefits of VOH were also identified, including support my learning, instant feedback, feeling valued and convenience.

Participants may have inaccurate perceptions which can manifest in misguided data being presented. The willingness by the majority of undergraduate offshore students to use computer‐mediated communication to conduct VOH provides a platform to explore new ways to promote out‐of‐classroom communication. Students may become more engaged in the teaching and learning process and ultimately provide a more enriched and quality experience.

This study addresses a distinctive gap in the existing literature relating to gauging international offshore students’ perceptions of VOH. Furthermore, the study adds richness to a relatively new trend amongst educators in exploring students’ perceptions of VOH.

This paper aims to examine the emerging field of reference in virtual worlds and attempts to determine its place among existing reference services. The virtual world of Second Life is the focus for these virtual world services. Advantages of virtual world reference are highlighted and drawbacks are discussed.

The paper examines two existing virtual world reference projects in an attempt to determine both the feasibility of virtual world reference and the level of need for such a service.

Both virtual world reference projects were successful and appear to indicate there is a need for reference within Second Life.

Virtual worlds and reference within these realms are at the very early stages. There is room for detailed analysis of issues raised within the paper.

The paper outlines the steps of creating a collaborative and institutional virtual world reference service, including training and implications.

This paper examines the emerging field of research and practice in virtual worlds and will be of significant interest to reference librarians.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which patrons use chat widgets for individual consultations with subject librarians.

Subject librarians with an embedded chat widget on their research guides were contacted and asked to fill out an 11‐question survey on the use of the widgets by students or faculty for consultation purposes.

Overall, patrons used chat widgets infrequently to consult with their subject librarians. Only 28 per cent of librarians reported weekly or daily consultations through the widget. However, certain factors increased the use of this communication tool. These included advertising the service and longer connection times to the chat widget. Consultations were also more frequent according to librarian age group and subject responsibility.

Statistical analyses were precluded due to insufficient number of responses when tabulating cross‐comparisons between survey questions. Only trends, rather than clear conclusions, could be established.

To date, there have not been any studies describing the use of instant messaging or chat widgets by individual librarians, despite the fact that many subject librarians have inserted chat widgets on their subject guides to provide individualized assistance to patrons who seek subject‐specific consultations.

The growing body of research on student engagement in online writing courses suggests that learning management system (LMS) technology does not by itself create an interactive learning situation nor does it automatically engage students in meaningful interactions with their peers and the instructor. Traditional top-down engagement strategies such as a discussion forum, we argue, have not worked to increase student-to-student engagement in the online environment, confirming our contention that students’ notions of engagement and quality are different from instructors’. Engagement should be re-envisioned as a student-centered effort, wherein educators take on the responsibility of implementing strategies that promote student-to-student engagement. This chapter, then, reconceptualizes approaches to student engagement in online writing-intensive classes. It examines how virtual learning environments challenge traditional notions of student engagement, offers some innovative learner–instructor engagement strategies that can be marshaled to improve student learning, and addresses the challenges and successes of this undertaking, in an effort to establish a meaningful and sustainable student-centered online writing classroom.

The pandemic-induced global shift to remote learning calls for rethinking the foundations of design for higher education. This watershed moment in global health and human interaction has accelerated changes in higher education that were long emergent and amplified specific deficiencies and strengths in pedagogical models, causing institutions to reevaluate current structures and operations of learning and campus life as they question their vision and purpose. Since physical space has largely been taken out of the equation of university life, it is evident that fresh design research related to this new normal is required.

This qualitative research study speculates on new possibilities for the future of campus, based upon insights and inferences gained from one-on-one interviews with faculty and students in multiple countries about their personal experiences with the sudden shift to the virtual classroom. The longer the mode of physical distancing stretched through Spring 2020, these phone and web-enabled dialogues – first with faculty (teachers) and then with students (learners) – lead to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how the notion of the campus for higher education was itself morphing in ways expected and unexpected.

At the heart of this study lies the question – Has COVID-19 killed the campus? This study suggests that it has not. However, campuses are now on a path of uneven evolution, and risk shedding the good with the extraneous without eyes-wide-open rethinking and responsive planning. This two-part qualitative analysis details the experiments and strategies followed by educators and students as the pandemic changed their ways of teaching and learning. It then speculates out-of-the-norm possibilities which campuses could explore as they navigate the uncertainty of future terms and address paradigm shifts questioning what defines a post-secondary education.

This paper draws inferences from discussions limited to the first 100 days of the pandemic. This on-the-ground aspect as the pandemic continues is its strength and its limitation. As Fall 2020 progresses across global campuses, new ideas and perspectives are already reinforcing or upending some of this paper's speculations. This researcher is already engaged in new, currently-ongoing research, following up with interviewees from Spring 2020, as well as bringing in new voices to delve deeper into the possibilities discussed in this paper. This follow-up research is shaping new thinking which is not reflected in this paper.

Design practitioners have long-shaped campuses on the belief that the built “environment is the third teacher” and that architecture fosters learning and shapes collective experience. Educators recognize that a multiplicity of formal and informal interactions occur frequently and naturally across campus, supporting cognitive and social development, collegiality and well-being. Even today's digital-native-students perceive the inherent value of real interpersonal engagement for meaningful experiences. This research study offers new planning and design perspectives as institutional responses to the pandemic continue to evolve, to discover how design can support what lies at the core of the campus experience.

The VTBound program was implemented at Virginia Tech to ensure international student enrollment despite travel and visa restrictions during the pandemic. The program was a partnership across academic affairs, student affairs, and admissions. Eighty-two first-year undergraduate international students from 19 countries participated in a full-time remote curriculum directed to their intended major (mostly engineering). Instruction was primarily asynchronous with synchronous office hours and recitations attentive to global time differences. Support mechanisms to maximize student success included dedicated academic advising and a customized first-year experience (FYE) course with peer mentors. The academic performance of and adherence to academic integrity standards by these students exceeded that of domestic and international first-year students on campus. Many VTBound students became engaged in co- and extracurricular programming while studying remotely. The greatest challenge was limited access to visa appointments and global travel restrictions necessitating a second remote semester for most VTBound students. Overall, the VTBound program demonstrates the value of a customized first-year transition program for international students and the potential to engage students for a successful semester of remote learning from their home Countries.

What contributes to US professional doctoral student success in the online space is the subject of this chapter. The online doctoral student occupies two underserved categories of higher education students: doctoral students and online students, both of which have historically low graduation rates (Bawa, 2016; Stone, 2017). A number of US online doctoral programs have significantly higher graduation rates than normal, demonstrating that it is possible to create highly successful online doctoral programs. In this chapter, we apply the R. E. Clark and Estes (2008) conceptual framework of human performance to understanding the factors contributing to doctoral student success in online programs. We look at three stakeholder groups, faculty, staff, and students, and review the factors and solutions that could allow each group to contribute to doctoral student success. This review of the literature is informed by examples drawn from two online professional doctoral programs for which the authors either designed and taught courses, and chaired dissertations, or were enrolled in as a student.

This chapter discusses two instructional designs that sought to leverage the multiuser virtual environment Second Life to support learning and instruction with both undergraduate and graduate students at two different universities. We examine each of these curricular developments in depth and provide findings from research conducted with each. Using data collected from students and faculty, we describe 11 research-based virtual world design principles that emerged from each experience that include such suggestions as Create opportunities for sustaining virtual community beyond a task and Expect your learners to go off-task. These principles may be used by readers to guide future designs that use virtual worlds to support learning.

The syllabus serves as a plan that can be utilized for discussing course (re)design. The Online Community of Inquiry Syllabus Rubric© (OCOISR) was developed for collaborators to review online course plans for continuous improvement. It assesses the potential to engender cognitive presence (CP), social presence (SP), teaching presence (TP), and learner support (LS) in online college courses based on interactive treatments. In one case study, two raters with advanced degrees in instructional design and online teaching experience reviewed 31 online syllabi across disciplines to determine their potential for producing an online community of inquiry. They achieved a good degree of consistency among measurements, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) = 0.821, p < 0.001, and 95% CI [0.40, 0.932]. Raters found above-average CP, moderate SP, and basic TP. These results mirrored that of the previous case study at a different institution. Other findings included basic educational technology use in both cases. The lead author, serving as the college’s instructional designer, provided course-specific recommendations to instructors based on their syllabi review for action research. This chapter describes the use of the OCOISR© to maximize student–student, student–teacher, and student–content planned engagement for improved online learning experiences.

Changes in the accounting profession predictably impact higher education, including the sudden, unexpected shift from working in an office to working remotely. The Covid-19 global pandemic forced our accounting department to pivot all courses to a remote teaching and learning environment, which represented a very turbulent environment for our faculty and students. Since we had no clarity regarding the extent or duration of this change, we decided to collect our experiences that semester to share the practices that we tried that worked well and to also capture the practices that did not work as well as anticipated. As a result, we were able to leverage our dynamic capabilities to work on continuous improvement in the areas of engagement and innovation to have a positive impact on our teaching and student learning.