People learn and remember more efficiently and effectively through the use of text and visuals than through text alone. Infographics are one way of presenting complex and dense informational content in a way that supports cognitive processing, learning, and future recognition and recollection. But the power of infographics is that they are a way of delivering the maximum amount of content in the least amount of space while still being precise and clear; because they are visual presentations as opposed to oral or text presentations, they can quickly tell a story, show relationships, and reveal structure. The following paper reports on an exploration of top 20 'liked' infographics on a popular infographic sharing website to better understand what makes an effective infographic in order to better prepare graduate students as consumers and designers of infographics. The paper concludes with recommendations and strategies on how educators might leverage the power of infographics in their classrooms.

The theory of social presence is perhaps the most popular construct used to describe and understand how people socially interact in online learning environments. However, despite its intuitive appeal, researchers and practitioners alike often define and conceptualize this popular construct differently. In fact, it is often hard to distinguish between whether someone is talking about social interaction, immediacy, intimacy, emotion, and/or connectedness when they talk about social presence. Therefore, this chapter outlines the evolution of the construct of social presence in an effort to understand better its relationship to online learning.

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Research on social presence and online learning continues to grow. But to date, researchers continue to define and conceptualize social presence very differently. For instance, at a basic level, some conceptualize social presence as one of three presences within a Community of Inquiry, while others do not. Given this problem, we analyzed how researchers in highly cited social presence research defined social presence in an effort to better understand how they are defining social presence and how this might be changing over time. In this article, we report the results of our inquiry and conclude with implications for future research and practice.

Asynchronous video-based discussions have affordances that can address some of the constraints of asynchronous text-based discussions. However, little research has been conducted on the use of asynchronous video-based discussions in online courses. As a result, the purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate students’ perceptions of using Flipgrid for asynchronous video-based discussions in fully online courses. We used a cross-sectional survey design to survey 79 students who used Flipgrid in a fully online course. Students overall reported that they liked using Flipgrid, it was easy to use, and that it helped improve social presence. In this paper, we will report the results of our inquiry and implications for research and practice.