This essay presents the reflections of four Education Doctorate (EdD) students on the pilot testing strategies used during an online research methods course. Rigorous questionnaire and interview development skills are challenging to acquire. Pilot testing is an under-researched stage of instrument design, yet it is crucial to ensure validity and…

Calculus courses often present a large number of difficulties to undergraduate students of scientific studies, especially in engineering degrees. These difficulties are sometimes related to teaching and assessment strategies. In this paper, a teaching innovation experience is presented within the framework of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.…

Goffman's dramaturgical approach is frequently used to introduce undergraduate students to the sociological understanding of human interaction. While a number of scholars have designed engaging student activities that highlight Goffman's approach, most of these activities tend to involve atypical embarrassing interactions or norm-breaking…

Online education continues to grow in popularity and is an attractive option for individuals of all ages, but particularly for adults who must balance work, family, and school responsibilities. Attrition rates in online courses are high for a variety of personal and institutional reasons. Some of the personal reasons attributed to retention in…

This paper describes the design of an industrial informatics course, following the project-based learning methodology, and reports the experience of four academic years (from 2012-13 to 2015-16). Industrial Informatics is a compulsory course taught in the third year of the B.Sc. degree in industrial electronics and automation engineering at the…

Vast amounts of daily news content are widely available and easily accessible, and they can be converted into materials for intermediate and advanced ESL classes. This article will describe the why and how for integrating news media sources into a multiskills ESL classroom. Through the news, students are immediately engaged with the material…

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has dramatically changed the way people learn a language. But how can we design an efficient language learning environment for a massive number of learners? Are there any good practices that showcase successful Massive Open Online Language Course (MOOLC) design strategies? According to recent…

It was planned to introduce online pre-laboratory session activities to a first-year undergraduate physics laboratory course to encourage a minimum level of student preparation for experiments outside the laboratory environment. A group of 16 and 17 year old laboratory work-experience students were tasked to define and design a pre-laboratory…

The main goal of this article is to develop a Management System for Merging Learning Objects (msMLO), which offers an approach that retrieves learning objects (LOs) based on students' learning styles and term-based queries, which produces a new outcome with a better score. The msMLO faces the task of retrieving LOs via two steps: The first step…

In this paper, the development of a web application for self-access English vocabulary courses at a national university in Japan will be reported upon. Whilst the basic concepts are inherited from an old Flash-based online vocabulary learning system that had been long used at the university, the new HTML5-based app comes with several new features…

The widespread use of mobile devices is leading towards their adoption in the learning process, even if some pedagogical challenges are still not fully addressed when integrating mobile-assisted activities into regular curricula activities. In this paper, we first define some guidelines to design a general, tailorable, and platform-independent…

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) represents the teachers' professional knowledge needed to integrate technology in education. Following a design-based approach this study describes the strategies for designing and assessing an in-service science teacher education course. Data was obtained through interviews, questionnaires, using…

Increasing regulation imposed on education systems at all levels engulfs teaching/learning time and impedes individual pursuits of interest to the learner. However, by restructuring the way educators approach the classroom, students can be provided an opportunity to explore further and become more successful. This success can be derived by…

Rarely do university departments of mathematics redesign their basic mathematics courses. Through developing an online version of our associate degree in engineering in collaboration with Open Universities Australia, we redesigned the first in a sequence of five engineering mathematics courses. The online cohort proved different to our…

Passive, lecture-based forms of instruction are often ineffective in helping students develop deep conceptual understanding of scientific concepts. Student-centered forms of instruction based in a constructivist framework, where students are guided toward actively constructing their understanding, have been met with greater success. However,…