The university reward structure has traditionally placed greater value on individual research excellence for tenure and promotion, influencing faculty's allocation of time and definition of worthwhile labour. We find gender differences in Canadian natural sciences and engineering faculty's opinions of the traditional criteria for measuring…

By participating in asynchronous course discussion forums, students can work together to refine their ideas and construct knowledge collaboratively. Typically, some messages simply repeat or paraphrase course content, while others bring in new material, demonstrate reasoning, integrate concepts, and develop solutions. Through the messages they…

This paper addresses one of the major confusions in the study and practice of problem-based learning today, namely the use of the term "problem-based learning" to refer to both the small-group tutorial method pioneered by McMaster University and Maastricht University in medical education, and the problem-oriented project-work method…

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an "able" body to enact complex…

In this paper, we take a new look at the problem of analyzing course evaluations. We examine ten years of undergraduate course evaluations from a large Engineering faculty. To the best of our knowledge, our data set is an order of magnitude larger than those used by previous work on this topic, at over 250,000 student evaluations of over 5,000…

The call for the integration of ethical considerations in the teaching of science is now firmly on the agenda. Taking as illustrative a science lesson in a pre-service teacher class, the authors consider the roles of STSE (science, technology, society and environment) and the increasingly influential heavily funded STEM (science, technology,…

The article studies the differences in knowledge production between academic researchers. In this perspective, it attempts at first to answer the following question: what factors explain differences in knowledge production between Canadian researchers in natural sciences and engineering? After a presentation of some of the empirical evidence…

This paper describes the achievements of an innovative eight-year research program first introduced in Mizoguchi and Bourdeau (2000), which was aimed at building a theory-aware authoring system by using ontological engineering. To date, we have proposed OMNIBUS, an ontology that comprehensively covers different learning/instructional theories and…

Virtual Reality (VR) is primarily a visual technology. Elements such as haptics (touch feedback) and sound can augment an experience, but the visual cues are the prime driver of what an audience will experience from a VR presentation. At its inception in 2001 the Centre for Advanced Visualization (CFAV) at Niagara College of Arts and Technology…

Ten papers focus on applications in specific curriculum areas, modelling and simulation, and computer managed learning. Projects described include voice support for the visually handicapped, distance education, and industrial training, as well as teaching applied mathematics, several facets of engineering, zoology, and, with videodisc, observation…