Digital technology is used to improve the quality of life for the growing number of older adults in the United States, but it also exacerbated the digital divide between generations and regions. Digital literacy programs effectively designed for older adults have a potential to mitigate this issue; however, sustaining an effectively designed program can be a challenge due to practical constraints. This case study-mixed methods study examined effectiveness and challenges of implementing a digital literacy program that is designed with six instructional strategies known to be effective for older adults. Data sources included surveys and interviews from learners, instructors, including teaching assistants, and an administrator involved in the project throughout three implementation cycles at a regional library. Overall, participants reported enhanced confidence in using digital literacy domains and satisfaction towards the program. Various implementation challenges identified are aligned to the instructional strategies used. The study emphasizes the importance of developing and sustaining an inclusive and flexible digital education for seniors aimed to reduce the digital divide and promote their engagement in an increasingly digital society.

The purpose of this study was to examine how team process factors relate to students’ self-efficacy, attitude, and learning satisfaction in flipped learning. Since lone-wolf students tend to have little patience for the group work process and exhibit a lack of organizational commitment, this study also explores how students’ preferences for collaborative work or individual work affect their self-efficacy, attitude, and learning satisfaction in a flipped classroom. The participants were thirty-four undergraduate students enrolled in a consumer behavior course offered by a school of business at a university in Seoul, South Korea. Data were collected through surveys that measured team process, lone-wolf tendencies, self-efficacy, and attitude during the course. The results show the factor of team trust had a significant negative correlation with the lone-wolf measure but a positive correlation with responsibility, communication, cognitive and social competency, and self-efficacy. Moreover, communication and responsibility were positive predictors of self-efficacy and attitude. These results imply the usefulness of identifying critical variables of individual difference, such as lone-wolf tendencies, that could lead to both dysfunctional team process and low outcomes. Based on the results, this study provides implications for structuring and managing team projects in a higher education setting.

Teachers’ ability to design meaningful uses of technology for all learners in any classrooms has a potential to narrow digital gaps among K-12 students. However, we know little about whether teachers are prepared to consider these issues when making technology integration decisions. This study explored preservice teachers’ knowledge use and their considerations about teaching practices related to digital inequality while reasoning about technology integration decisions. We analyzed interviews with and documents of a group of preservice teachers ( N = 14) who completed a technology integration task in a technology integration course. Findings showed that although they used multiple domains of teacher knowledge throughout their reasoning processes, they paid limited attention to sociocultural aspects of teaching that demonstrated the ability to care about digital inequality issues. Implications are discussed in terms of ways to better prepare preservice teachers to deal with digital inequalities.

To investigate how prompts shape preservice teachers’ reflections, we examined, in this exploratory case study, the written reflections responding to three types of prompts (standard-based, concept-based, and task-based) of 21 preservice teachers in an online technology integration class. We analyzed these reflections at the sentence level (total 1,503 comments), both quantitatively and qualitatively, using a framework comprising descriptive, rationalistic, and anticipatory dimensions to understand the compositions of reflections generated from each type of prompt and the kinds of teacher abilities demonstrated in each dimension. We found quantitative patterns between prompt types and the reflections generated and emergent themes in each dimension of reflection relating to teacher abilities. We conclude by discussing three prompt design features that appeared to have played an important role in shaping the reflections and suggesting implications and future research directions.

As a way to support teachers’ professional development activities and build communities of practice for teachers, education researchers and practitioners have put considerable effort into building an online learning community for K–12 teachers to create a venue to facilitate teachers’ joint knowledge construction. However, a substantial number of such online communities have failed due to lack of participation of members. Therefore, it is critical to understand how to design a sustainable community that fulfills members’ needs and elicits active participation of members. In this literature review, we adopted a sociological framework to investigate how to create a sustainable online community. This framework suggests that the sustainability of a community comes from individual members’ three types of commitments: instrumental, affective, and moral commitments. Such commitments are results of members’ cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative processes and lead to membership retainment, cohesive relationships, and socially regulated participation. Using this framework, we conducted a systematic literature review on online teacher community articles published from 1990 to 2018. Our findings provide insights on factors associated with teacher members’ instrumental, affective, and moral commitment to an online community. Based on these findings, we further provide design suggestions to build a sustainable community for teachers.