Instructional designers make numerous decisions daily to perform their job, for example, what authoring tool to use, what model or strategy to use, and what design process to use to develop learning solutions. Decision-making is important in the field of instructional design. The literature revealed many factors or variables instructional…

Working as a teacher educator today means working under an ever-present regulatory gaze. Accountability mechanisms, including state program approval processes, have been layered resulting in complexity. External assessments have failed to provide the data needed to support continuous improvement. There have been calls for combining external and…

This paper explores how the charter school sector evaluates the success of specialized education programs in order that the Nature School can learn from these best practices and develop its own framework. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with five evaluation experts and eight diverse charter school authorizers overseeing a significant…

This Delphi study explores the opinions of experts on their interactions with the adoption of digital products, services, and activities. Although there are a wide assortment of digital products and digital spaces that have the ability to make significant contributions to scholarship, still traditional monographs and textual publications dominate…

The program described in this paper is the essential first step in reviving and reinitiating the delivery of aviation maintenance technology instruction. The demand for aviation maintenance technicians (AMTs) is rapidly increasing and there is a need to provide as many as 679,000 AMTs over the next 20 years (Boeing, 2016). Given the high cost of…

Competency-based education (CBE) degree programs have grown significantly over the course of the past few years. Within the field of CBE, experts have differing views as to what elements are most critical to a high-quality CBE program. The purpose of this Q methodology study is to determine what models of CBE programs emerge from an investigation…

A quantitative study was conducted to get the perspectives of IT experts about risks in enterprise cloud computing. In businesses, these IT experts are often not in positions to prioritize business needs. The business experts commonly known as business managers mostly determine an organization's business needs. Even if an IT expert classified a…

To examine to what extent current general education pre-service teachers within a teacher preparation program at a private institution of higher education know and understand the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), expert focus groups were conducted. General education program syllabi were examined for UDL content and found to be…

A long standing problem in information technology security is how to help reduce the security footprint. Many specific proposals exist to address specific problems in information technology security. Most information technology solutions need to be repeatable throughout the course of an information systems lifecycle. The Chain-Link Fence Model is…

That organizations face threats to the security of their computer systems from external hackers is well documented. Intentional or unintentional behaviors by organizational insiders can severely compromise computer security as well. Less is known, however, about the nature of this threat from insiders. The purpose of this study was to bridge this…

The development of scientifically literate citizens begins in the elementary school. Yet elementary school teachers are ill prepared to teach science (Trygstad, Smith, Banilower, Nelson, & Horizon Research, Inc., 2013). The research base on teacher preparation finds that programs designed to prepare elementary teachers are inadequate in…

With the increase in frequency of the use of mixed methods, both in research publications and in externally funded grants there are increasing calls for a set of standards to assess the quality of mixed methods research. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to conduct a multi-phase analysis to create a preliminary rubric to evaluate mixed…

Providing information to the public is a widely recognized function of planning. Yet little attention has been paid to how expert information is characterized for citizens participating in a planning process. The text, maps and images used to tell the story in a planning process can help to bridge the divide between experts and citizens, or act to…

This dissertation examines two related questions. "How do mixed membership models work?" and "Can mixed membership be used to model how students use multiple strategies to solve problems?". Mixed membership models have been used in thousands of applications from text and image processing to genetic microarray analysis. Yet…

This dissertation presents a novel effort to develop ITS technologies that adapt by observing student behavior. In particular, we define an evolving expert knowledge base (EEKB) that structures a domain's information as a set of nodes and the relationships that exist between those nodes. The structure of this model is not the particularly novel…