Innovations in undergraduate education have increased the prevalence of active learning courses, online education, and student engagement in the high-impact practice of undergraduate research, however it is unknown whether students with disabilities are able to engage in these innovative learning environments to the same extent that they are able…

The concept of precision medicine aims to provide additional context to patient data for healthcare providers. Precision medicine overlays three additional layers of patient data on top of standard patient information: environmental exposure, personal lifestyle and behavior patterns, and information gleaned from their genome. While precision…

Online education has been increasing at an astounding rate, and advocates contend this trend will transform schooling as we know it. The current research has been centered on the student outcomes in online education. However, this myopic focus on outcomes underestimates the broader systemic factors that may be driving the implementation and…

As K-12 online offerings gain in popularity, districts search for cost effective ways to implement online courses. Most districts opt to use current staff members to both develop and teach the online offerings. Merrill (The future of instructional design: The proper study of instructional design, 2007) explains that individuals with no formal…

Online students at some California community colleges are experiencing lower success rates than their peers in face-to-face versions of the same courses. Insight into the forces shaping student success in online courses is needed to address such disparities. The purpose of this study was to explore, in-depth, the lived experiences of faculty…

This dissertation was an in-depth investigation of successful online teaching in the context of higher education. It is presented in nontraditional dissertation format as approved by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Iowa State University. This dissertation includes three publishable journal articles that would represent Chapter 2, 3…

Enormous demands for online degrees in higher education have increased the pressure on universities to launch web courses and degrees quickly and, at times, without properly attending to the quality of these ventures. There is scarce research that defines which quality indicators are used to assess cyberlearning environments, how different…