Colleges implement success courses to improve student outcomes. Since expanding its curriculum to include nine success courses, Illinois Eastern Community Colleges (IECC)--a multi-college community college district in rural, southeastern Illinois--has not determined the efficacy of these courses on student success. The purpose of this study was to…

The purpose of this study was to examine tenured faculty members' perceptions of factors that motivate their participation in the development and delivery of Virtual Learning (VL) programs, as well as to determine tenured faculty members' perceptions of factors that tend to extrinsically and intrinsically motivate their participation in the…

Over the last decade, secondary schools around the United States have rapidly adopted ethnic studies courses. For instance, California's governor mandated ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement in 2021 (Magcalas, 2023). According to scholars, ethnic studies courses offer educational experiences that disrupt the erasure and…

The purpose of this study is to assess the knowledge and skills that are needed within Louisiana postsecondary institutions to obtain four- and five-star jobs in computer and information technology. The study will examine computer science and information systems curricula at select colleges in the state and compare course offerings with skills…

In this dissertation, I used practitioner research to examine the process of revising a civics course to better emphasize justice. This dissertation relies on the central idea that civics education can be transformed by redefining "good" citizenship and adopting an action-oriented approach to civic education and civic life. This study…

The purpose of this teacher-practitioner research study was to examine how elementary teacher candidates engaged in sensemaking about the learning process within the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and to further examine how they engaged in sensemaking about NGSS teaching and curriculum development. Interviews and course artifacts from 14…

To meet an increasingly complex set of global challenges, undergraduate programs need innovative, well aligned curricula that prepare students to effectively address those challenges. This is especially true in programs such as sustainable food systems education (SFSE) where students learn to think systemically, critically, and reflectively, and…

This phenomenological study explored how faculty who create online courses perceive quality assurance standards and available resources in line with the Quality Matters rubric at a mid-sized university in Southeast Texas. The participants in this study consisted of 12 university faculty members who have created online courses and passed the…

Online learning provides students greater access to higher education opportunities when regular, on-campus options are not viable. However, for administrators and educators, online learning can be difficult to assess and ensure quality, which leads institutions to use quality assurance frameworks such as the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program…

The focus of this qualitative descriptive study was on what undergraduate faculty at 4-year Christian universities or colleges in California have experienced and what recommendations they have pertaining to the use of scripted syllabi in teaching online courses. Ted Aoki's theory on curriculum implementation as a situational praxis was used as the…

This research involved investigating descriptions of experiences of undergraduate nursing faculty when incorporating mental health topics into their instruction. Nursing curricula are changing from traditional curricula to evidence-based curricula. With this change, undergraduate nursing faculty who have not previously taught mental health topics…

The problem addressed in this qualitative grounded theory study was that there are different curricula designs for online biology courses resulting in students having significant challenges. The purpose of this qualitative grounded theory study was to use the theories of Mezirow (1990) and Tomlinson (1996) as the theoretical framework to explore…

Globally, the demand for people prepared to enter Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers is increasing. To help fill this demand, many formal and informal STEM educational interventions have been implemented in the K-12 domain. However, due to the lack of a clearly defined framework for documenting the nature and scope of the…

A generic qualitative research design was used with the primary purpose of hearing experiences of counselor educators concerning their views of online course development while integrating 2016 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) Standards to acquire themes for the research study. The study targeted a…

This dissertation follows a three-article format. The unifying theme for all three articles are the ways in which instructors face the challenges of facilitating access to course knowledge for undergraduate students enrolled in online introductory statistics courses. Each of the three articles are interrelated by the unifying theme but contributes…