Background: Research shows that how formative assessments are operationalized plays a crucial role in shaping their engagement with formative assessments, thereby impacting their effectiveness in predicting academic achievement. Mandatory assessments can ensure consistent student participation, leading to better tracking of learning progress.…

The ability to collaborate online is an essential skill that allows learners to bring together diverse perspectives to deepen understanding regardless of physical location. As online learning and hybrid workplaces have become more prevalent since the COVID-19 global pandemic, the critical nature of this skill has become particularly relevant for…

This paper discusses the role of mediation as it arose in developing and teaching two online American Sign Language (ASL) courses for parents of deaf children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaf children and their families who are still acquiring ASL have ongoing learning needs that are most often not met in mainstream educational systems, and…

Teachers of students with disabilities require a vast set of knowledge and skills for effective practice. While preparation programs provide a broad array of content and experiences through course work and guided practice, the wide scope of knowledge and skills required for beginning teachers, in conjunction with increased accessibility to online…

This paper builds on student-instructor partnerships by describing how an instructor, students, program coordinator, and members of a research team were involved in the co-design of an open educational resource in a graduate program in education. A four-part open learning design framework was used to guide the course design: (a) clarifying the…

How are we preparing teachers to design and foster learning through making where disciplinary knowledge and skills are applied and developed? One approach that addresses this question can be found from the International Maker Educational Network (IMEN); an online professional learning community built upon shared interests in educational making.…

Purpose: This article revisits three classic findings from Dan Lortie's 1975 book "Schoolteacher," in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and its possible aftermaths. These findings are that teachers and others base their ideas about teaching on the long apprenticeship of observation as students; they derive their satisfaction from…

This paper offers insight from an informal cross-cultural mentoring experience of course development in higher education framed by the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning project. The Open Education for a Better World is a tuition-free international online mentoring program established to unlock the…

Quality teaching includes reflective practice, dialogue, and curiosity and depends on personal, institutional, and community assets and constraints, as well as on the individual's definitions of the roles of education in society. Based on an environmental scan and action research with instructors in an online distance Bachelor of Science, Nursing…

As universities continue to grow their undergraduate programs, graduate students are increasingly called upon to teach first and second year classes, often without feeling adequately prepared for the task. These teaching opportunities, however, can provide novice instructors with a chance to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning…

From a design perspective, the intentionality of students to engage in surface or deep learning is often experienced through prescribed activities and learning tasks. Educators understand that meaningful learning can be furthered through the structural and organizational design of the online environment that motivates the student towards task…

Sustained discourse is critical to the learning potential of online courses. And, while research has surfaced many factors that mediate interaction, it further suggests that sustained interaction remains elusive. In this paper, I propose that student facilitation may have an impact on the quality of facilitators' interactions following a week of…

The study buddy is a learning strategy employed in a graduate distance course to promote informal peer reviewing of assignments before submission. This strategy promotes student-student interaction and helps break the social isolation of distance learning. Given the concern by Arum and Roksa (2011) that student-student interaction may be…

In the 2011 Winter semester, the University of Guelph engaged in a pedagogical experiment: an online first-year seminar. This article is a conversation about the learning journey that surrounds this seminar, as experienced by three participants: Jacqueline Murray (JM), Professor of History and Director of the FirstYear Seminar Program (FYS);…

The purpose of this research was to analyze the experience of post-secondary first time online students combining time spent in the classroom-workshop with online course access, and their interactions with instructors. In the following discussion, and following the Cleveland et al. [1] model, a comparison between the categories "student's…