In the afterword to our collection of essays, Chris Clark urges us to resist labeling a technology as inherently good or bad for teaching and learning. Rather, we should identify learning goals and teaching strategies before deciding whether a technology can help. Even the most powerful technology can’t turn terrible teaching into excellent learning.

The Provost E-Learning Initiative at the University of Florida aimed to implement evidence-based best practices to develop high-quality online courses for undergraduates. This essay outlines the goals of the initiative and how they were accomplished in the development of the Engineering Economy course at UF.

Providing feedback to students about their in-class presentations can be a juggling act, and students may not be able to connect instructor comments with specific moments in their talks. In this essay, Drs. Curto and Laudato describe a technique for providing feedback via rich media capture. Much like comments in the margins of a written assignment, feedback is received at the appropriate time point in the presentation.

Professor Rosenthal began a quest to increase classroom engagement when she noted that laptops were drawing students’ attention away from discussions of English literature. This essay describes a series of strategies she has tried — including laptop restrictions, PowerPoint visuals, grading methods, blogging, and wikis — in a continuing effort to update her teaching.

Professor Angst incorporated iPads into his Project Management course in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the devices, observe their impact on IT support, and move towards an entirely digital course. Students used the tablets annotating readings, taking notes in the field, looking up information during class, and other tasks. Dr. Angst used the ATUAT model to evaluate acceptance of the technology.

In his essay, Professor Pérez-Quiñones describes how he uses Web 2.0 applications with his computer science students who are learning to develop such applications. In particular, the students and the professor found the use of Twitter to be very helpful during the course.

Professor Rossi had groups of students use a wiki to develop and share original word problems based on images. He found that students learned concepts better when they applied them to original problems of their own design.

Professor Lehman created virtual crime scenes in Second Life for his Introduction to Forensic Science course. In future courses he plans to expand the physical evidence students collect, such as including fingerprints.

In their online course, Theory and Practice in Teaching Multicultural Literature, the authors used different tools to encourage discussion and reflection. The focus was encouraging student interaction to critically engage students in the material.

In this essay, the authors share their strategies for collaborating with writing and research experts on campus to model a scholarly community within an upper-level literature class. The <emma> learning management system was used to facilitate communication and peer review.