Sustainable and innovative programs to support students in their transition to university and improve student progress rates and retention are in high demand and short supply. An institution-wide model was established for an online Embedded Tutor Program. The program supports commencing undergraduate students and is sustainable post-pandemic.…

The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge…

Purpose: Online resources can be helpful for students and can augment the content presented in learning environments. A team consisting of four biologists, a graduate student, instructional designer and media developers collaborated on the design, development and evaluation of first-year biology online tutorials in a Canadian University. The…

For chemistry, where learners are required to integrate experimental observations with theoretical knowledge, laboratory work appears to be a viable instructional strategy. However, research has shown that chemistry laboratory instruction often fails to live up to its potential. The scheduling practice in higher education (HE) separating theory…

My research uses interaction analysis to investigate two STEM education spaces and discuss how instructors can and should notice and address unproductive group dynamics, particularly in the service of creating more humane learning environments. The primary goal of this work is to investigate how inequities emerge and continue as interactions in…

Leveraging the campus learning management system and rapid e-learning development software such as Articulate Storyline allows educators to develop and deploy interactive tutorials for performance assessment of students' knowledge. This quick hit chronicles the development, deployment, and assessment of a suite of tutorials for information…

The article discusses the development of online tutorials to support the Academic Librarians' information literacy instruction during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. The content and development of the activities are presented in relation to information literacy (IL) standards. At the University of Northampton, the first-year students…

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted higher education online, drawing attention to synchronous learning and instruction on digital communication platforms. Learner-centered teaching practices in the tertiary level, such as mathematical discussions, have been shown to benefit student learning. The interactions involved in online synchronous mathematical…

This paper describes a comprehensive review of academic integrity across course-level learning outcomes for all courses at one institution. The authors developed a taxonomy based on The International Center for Academic Integrity's (ICAI) fundamental values of academic integrity to audit course-level learning outcomes for evidence of academic…

This article is a follow-up to an earlier paper on the mathematics support learning tutorial programme (SLT), an intervention programme at The University of Queensland that targets students considered to be at risk of failing Calculus and Linear Algebra I, the first tertiary level mathematics subject at The University of Queensland. The first…

Online tutorials are a way many librarians connect with students. The main benefit is the ability to reach more students than traditional face-to-face instruction sessions. In 2016, the Life & Health Sciences Librarian received instruction session requests for a freshman biology lab to teach students how to search for articles and use proper…

This article delivers an evaluation of a pedagogical intervention implemented within a first-year undergraduate university module. The intervention, termed the student-led tutorial (SLT), is based on the concept of the tutorless tutorial and presents a platform for student learning which was designed to increase active learning prior to their…

Engineering tertiary courses that reflect professional activity mandate the successful application of theorems and concepts in order to solve technical problems. This graduate skill is typically assessed during student problem-solving activities. Furthermore, both collaborative learning and the interactive study method known as self-explanation…

Twenty-seven first-year nursing students, divided across six focus groups formed on the basis of their past chemistry experience, were interviewed about their chemistry experience as a component of a Health Science unit. Information related to learning and academic performance was able to be established from student conversations resulting in…

For over four years, students enrolled in remedial writing classes who attended eight writing center tutorials directly linked to their assignments had an average pass rate of 95.6 percent, whereas students who did not attend any writing center tutorials had an average pass rate of 39.4 percent. These correlations are just that--correlations that…