Online course instruction remains one of the fastest growing sectors in the higher education industry but has been historically stigmatized with poor quality and low standards. Early distance education programs were heavily teacher-centric in design and were used as a means to disseminate information to students at a distance. However,…

Many Higher Education institutions outsource online course development to an online program management (OPM) provider because of a lack of budget, staff, and technology. Current research indicates that OPM providers often do not have instructional design (ID) services tailored to a specific university. This research uses a case study to analyze a…

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was one of four participating institutions in the Association of American Colleges and Universities' (AAC&U) Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning for Curricular Coherence Project, funded by the Teagle Foundation. The goal of the project was to examine and improve curriculum coherence in undergraduate…

This article re-operationalizes the term "impact" to evaluate success in the USAF Leader Development Course for Squadron Command (LDC). Literature is used to define impact in a three-part way: area of impact (what topics were most effective in instruction), level of impact (how topics will be applied in the future), and depth of impact…

The purpose of this research was to investigate whether a mid-sized public university could create a more coherent and efficient undergraduate curriculum over a short period of time with minimal resources. We pursued this question using an action research design. Using a curriculum model, we developed that focused on foundational, breadth, and…

Employers value soft skills and often report a "skills gap," resulting in calls on higher education to teach these skills more widely. However, few studies have examined faculty perspectives on soft skills. The researchers conducted a nationwide survey of faculty in the fields of business, education, engineering, library science,…

The positive effects of diversity coursework on college students are uncontested and the majority of institutions now require some form of diversity content. However, not all students engage in this content in the same way, and heterosexual White male students may show ardent resistance to diversity courses and the faculty teaching them. Faculty…

Online courses are ubiquitous, but the research findings on student learning outcomes and opinions of these courses are mixed. Therefore, this research comprehensively investigated online courses at UHCL by analyzing them from the perspective of both user groups, students who consume the courses and faculty who deliver the courses. For this study,…

Digital literacy is increasingly central to the experience of learning and teaching in higher education. This paper details the design, implementation, and results of a student-staff partnership project that utilized a mixed method research strategy to "map" the digital curriculum within a sociology program, measure the digital capacity…

The process toward academic literacy aims at developing academic reading and writing together with higher academic competences of increasing relevance for undergraduate students as future teachers and researchers. Such a process is even more complex in ELT vocational courses where non-English speaking trainees study English as a system while they…

To address the recent calls for integration between liberal arts education and the business curriculum, we designed the team-taught interdisciplinary course, How to Cell: Marketing Meets Microbiology. The course blended multiple introductory courses, focused on environmental issues involving microbiology, and addressed how they were being…

Teaching and learning of many undergraduate science courses often remains confined within the boundaries of classrooms rendering learning of these subjects irrelevant and detached from students' lived experiences. Community-based experiential learning (CBEL) is one way to address this issue. This paper reports the development and implementation of…

This paper presents a case study of a Competency-Based Education Introduction to Psychology course conducted in a small, private, traditional university in the western United States. Two competency-graded sections were offered, one online and one in the classroom. Eleven undergraduate students completed the online section, and 24 students…

This case study contributes to the higher education curriculum development literature by showing how a faculty-led short-term study abroad experience can become the catalyst for student research and offer students an international perspective. The authors analyze students' reflections and provide data collected over the years of taking…

The purpose of this study was to develop a model to help engineering faculty overcome the challenges they face when asked to design and implement interdisciplinary curricula. Researchers at a U.S. University worked with an Interdisciplinary Consultant Team and prepared a steering document with Guiding Principles and Essential Elements for the…