Schools are technology rich. Teachers routinely now use digital tools for reporting, communications within school and with parents, for maintaining class records, for preparing materials and so on. Some schools use online teaching programs or electronic textbooks. With NAPLAN moving to become fully online (see Chapter 19) there is a need for both teachers and students across the primary years to be confident and creative users of digital technology. Each chapter in this book has included examples and strategies for integrating digital tools into the teaching of mathematics across a range of mathematical content areas.

Inspired by the human brain, neural network (NN) models have emerged as the dominant branch of machine learning, with the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model being the most popular. Non-linear optimization and the presence of local minima during optimization led to interests in other NN architectures that only require linear least squares optimization, e.g. extreme learning machines (ELM) and radial basis functions (RBF). Such models readily adapt to online learning, where a model can be updated inexpensively as new data arrive continually. Applications of NN to predict conditional distributions (by the conditional density network and the mixture density network) and to perform quantile regression are also covered.

The chapter defines the meaning of online silence, explains how it occurs in virtual classroom settings and unpacks the phenomenon as learning engagement or the lack of it in cognitive, social, emotional, and technological dimensions. Online silence is an unsettled, under-theorised construct without a universal definition but varies according to context and educators’ various levels of patience when waiting for learner response. The author argues that online silence represents both a barrier to and a condition for learning efficacy. Drawn extensively from the research discourse on the occurrence and absence of learner participation, the discussion outlines how silence pervades the digital educational environment. The discussion first defines the meaning of online silence and examines how online instruction provokes silence. Secondly, the dynamic of silence is unpacked concerning both learning engagement and learning disengagement in cognitive, social, emotional, and technological dimensions. Thirdly, it is argued that online silence exhibits two opposing impacts by being both a barrier to and a condition for learning efficacy. The chapter embraces online silence in language learning and in subject-content education considering that learners need to develop not only language proficiency but also knowledge and skills for real-world communication.

One essential activity that organisations must review as they capitalise on digital technologies' potential is their existing business processes. Put simply, they must examine 'how things are done around here' and, in doing so, identify if there is any way of improving these activities. In this chapter, I seek to offer an account of delivering a module on 'Innovation, Creativity and Critical Thinking' to final year students of a BA Honours Degree in Insurance Practice. This programme, which commenced in 2016,is Ireland's first apprenticeship towards awarding a level 8 honours degree. The three-year, work-based training programme combines digital academic learning with on-the-job learning, allowing students to acquire various skills. This chapter will demonstrate how students can practically apply techniques learnt in their online class to industry, bridging the theory-practice gap by adopting a learning-by-doing approach to business process re-engineering (BPR).

this research explores the effectiveness of one UK university’s online networking operations from the student perspective. Existing research on online learning has largely overlooked students’ social development. However, developing a desired level of social connections is considered critical for boosting their emotional well-being. Adopting case study, this research used semi-structured interviews to collect data. The findings suggest that this group of year one students did not meet as many new people as they wished, and were also unable to turn acquaintances into close friends (breadth and depth), even though they were looking forward to making new friends. It appears that a lack of face-to-face, and also online networking opportunities seems to be the main causes. This study ends with recommendations for UK universities, and potentially higher education institutions in other countries using remote teaching as the main teaching approach.

Quality assurance and enhancement exercises are important in higher education. Curriculum assurance and enhancement exercise, relied in the past primarily on raw assessment data and self-reported, which lacked follow-up mechanisms gauging its effectiveness. This paper reports on an impact study of a curriculum review exercise using both digitalised data and self-reported data. Both the original review and its impact study were conducted on an English Programme in a Hong Kong university taken by around 6,000 students each year. Both adopted a learning analytics approach with digitalised behavioural and assessment data. Results of the impact study, which is the focus of this paper, demonstrate the strength of using learning analytics, including its capability of inter-course and intra-course investigations. Learning analytics can also empirically confirm and/or refute concerns reported by teachers and students. The use of digitalised data for learning analytics offers opportunities to implement and follow-up on quality assurance measures.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant changes to student experiences. A sudden switch to an online learning mode may serve as a natural experiment for the educational system. In this chapter, we test four "promises" of online education, which were widely discussed before the pandemic. Based on survey data of 5,464 undergraduate students from eight Russian universities, we compare the expectations to the reality of online learning. As the results show, the massive forced transition to online learning gave students more time to sleep, but they are not less tired than in traditional educational formats. Students find it difficult to ask questions, focus their attention when an instructor delivers material and find a comfortable place for studying. Consequently, the majority of students estimate their learning as ineffective. Relying on these results, we formulate lessons learned from this natural experiment.

This chapter examines the origins and the future role of digitally induced shared learning and, in this context, of micro-credentials as a currency towards earning a degree qualification, possibly in combination with the flexibility where to seek the qualification. We argue that the general trend towards the deinstitutionalization of tertiary education, to be understood as the unbundling and re-bundling of educational services, will help to make digitally based micro-credentials fungible by taking advantage of the so far reluctantly utilized degrees of freedom for accreditation and assessment more liberally. The COVID pandemic is encouraging a merger of the world of theoretically face-to-face programmes, now delivered virtually, and the world of MOOCs and micro-credentials. It will ultimately change the underlying economics of shared learning and will thereby help to make it a core feature of a much more accessible higher education.