The COVID-19 pandemic that forced the closure of campuses in the spring of 2020 accelerated the diffusion of distance education in Universities worldwide. The need to shift to distance education without time to prepare or train teachers or students led to what has been called a crisis learning situation in what was far from a seamless transition. This article surveyed 200 students at a large university in the United States at the end of the spring semester in 2020 about their online learner readiness including access to technological infrastructure (computers and highspeed Internet access), computer self-efficacy, computer anxiety, and how that influenced positive and negative learning experiences and feelings about distance education and learning. A four-stage Structural Equation Model shows a detailed picture of the distance education process and suggests intervention points to improve its outcomes. Results suggest that access to technological infrastructure are necessary but not sufficient for successful distance education experiences and point to the critical importance of computer self-efficacy and anxiety in predicting positive (or negative) learning experiences, which lead to increased feelings of learning and the likelihood that students will choose distance education in the future.

In this paper, we describe research exploring the effect of behavioral and visual realism of avatars on users' social copresence in emotionally engaged conversations conducted via a simulated mobile video telephone. We offer an elaborated definition of Social Copresence to better measure users' engagement with conversational partners in social interactions that do not involve specific tasks or concrete outcomes. We investigate ways to secure mobile telephone users' anonymity while preserving their most important nonverbal affective behaviors. Experimental results with 180 participants using different combinations of static and dynamic, high and low iconic (both video and graphically animated) avatars show increased Social Copresence with dynamic high-iconic (similar to the human communicator) avatars incorporating correct facial expressions, even when these are presented on the small screen of mobile telephones in such a way that individual identities are masked. The results point to an economical combination of behavioral and iconic realism of avatars that produces maximum emotional engagement in anonymous social interactions using mobile video telephones.

Computer users' negative reactions to printed computer documentation are attributed to the linear nature of the print medium, coupled with the varied information needs of different classes of users. A document system, called LAST (level of abstraction structured text), that meets the requirements of nonlinear traversal and automatic adjustment to users' requirements for type of information and level of detail is described. This system is a series of internally consistent text frames, organized by level of abstraction. It is shown that LAST system users made significantly fewer errors on task performance measures such as number of typing mistakes, correctly set margins and tabs, and correctly formatted text body. LAST users' subjective acceptance ratings of the documentation system were found to be higher than those given to the printed documentation.>