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Online courses are a key means for universities to scale up their educational offerings to wider audiences. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, many such courses that were initially designed to be given in-person, were pushed online. Instructors and their respective institutions, however, had limited knowledge of processes, practices, and tools to design high-quality learning experiences. This paper collects faculty and student experiences from a Nordic university and outlines key challenges for designing high-quality live online learning sessions. It demonstrates that, given the fundamentally different contexts for learning in digital settings, teachers need to rethink their understanding of what is possible, and engage with creative tools and pedagogical practices that support enhanced learning experiences online.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology has provided a new technological platform for 'mirror worlds', where layers of information, meaning, and functions are integrated with a digital twin of the real world. To explore mirror worlds, we designed and developed +Andscape, an interactive AR sandbox. In this conceptual and empirical case study, we observed children's (5-6-year-old, N = 16) collaborative play and storytelling with +Andscape. The qualitative content analysis from observational video-based data allows us to infer how children's play with the AR sandbox engaged their questioning and reflections of both the real world events and the computational mirror worlds. The use of the tool triggered children's imagination and opened for them a story world for exploration of current media events in a unique way. We conclude that when introducing mirror worlds, the focus should be on creative play, participation and storytelling through which the children can construct their own story worlds.

Over the past decades, preschoolers emerged as frequent and experienced users of new digital media. As this trend continues, it is important for game designers to address the gratifications of this new gaming audience. Unfortunately, existing theoretical frameworks on meaningful gameplay for preschoolers are rare, outdated, or they lack a comprehensive validation. In this paper, we present a User Experience (UX) Laddering study to unveil the gameplay preferences of preschoolers, relying on five-year olds (n=25) as active research participants. The results of this study provide a set of meaningful and useful guidelines for future game designers, directed at this young target group. Copyright 2013 ACM. ispartof: pages:147-156 ispartof: Proceedings of The Interaction Design and Children pages:147-156 ispartof: Interaction Design and Children date:24 Jun - 27 Jun 2013 status: published