The goal of this single-phase and convergent mixed methods study was to compare the differences in the effectiveness of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) presences of a community college blended block instructional model with the in-person counterpart. Data were gathered from the Community of Inquiry Survey, Blackboard LMS reports, and course…

Instructors seeking to add active learning elements to their courses encounter an "evaluation challenge" when trying to assign grades to discussion-based activities that do not produce a final product. By creating a way to incorporate evaluation into hard-to-observe activities, the protocol presented here can help instructors make active…

Recent years have witnessed the spread of purpose-built active learning classrooms throughout the higher education sector. While these innovative learning spaces are well-suited for a variety of active learning strategies, their lack of a single focal point means they are inconvenient spaces for lecturing. While educational developers often…

Active learning has experienced a recent resurgence with the advent of specialized active learning classrooms. While the fundamental theory behind active learning is anything but new, a relatively recent finding is that active learning pedagogies thrive in suitable active learning classrooms. To date, studies of active learning have focused on…

Oral history as a field of research, teaching, archival collection, community building or engagement, truth and reconciliation, and creative practice, emerged with the diffusion of the tape recorder in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of enormous social and political upheaval. As a result, oral history was quickly taken up by feminists,…

This statistical study of 272 dancers, ages 18-96, using Kolb Learning Styles Inventory 4.0, identifies dominant learning cycles, learning styles, and learning style flexibility of the dance participants, and subgroups of notation users, and then compares these results to existing results from other disciplines. The research reveals the depth and…

Many academic institutions are investing thousands of dollars in technology-based classrooms to market themselves as modern and adapt to the new generation of students for whom technology forms part of their everyday lives. This technology is also believed to provide the added benefit of better knowledge acquisition, improved critical thinking and…

Open educational resources (OER), including open textbooks, are free, adaptable learning resources. The integration of these materials in place of commercial textbooks allows for considerable financial savings for students and creates opportunities for more active and engaged learning. The growing interest in the use of OER at a Western Canadian…

Flipped classrooms are gaining popularity, especially in psychology statistics courses. However, not all courses lend themselves to a fully flipped design, and some instructors might not want to commit to flipping every class. We tested the effectiveness of flipping just one component (a module on junk science) of a large methods course. We…

The present paper discusses ways of incorporating two digital tools, Desire2Learn (D2L) and Google Docs, in language teaching and learning. Data were collected from four French language modules offered at the University of Calgary. Through the analysis of the tutor's observations and module evaluations, this paper explores the effectiveness of…

Scholarly literature is replete with suggestions for fostering creativity in both teachers and students; however, few articles exist where practitioners appraise these methods and generate theories of their own. After a semester of team teaching using a creative project-based learning (PBL) approach, we reviewed, through a mutual interview…

Having experienced preliminary success in designing two active learning classrooms, Lethbridge College developed an additional eight active learning classrooms as part of a three-year initiative spanning 2014-2017. Year one of the initiative entailed purchasing new audio-visual equipment and classroom furniture followed by installation. This…

Active learning activities are becoming more prominent in the university setting, specifically in North America. However, in some departments, large class sizes make application and engagement with these types of activities particularly challenging. In response to this challenge, departments may look to supplemental programming for students, which…

Active Learning Classrooms are new learning spaces that allow collaborative learning activities to take place easily over the traditional classroom. However, some features of these rooms could be viewed as "distracting" to students' learning such as the multiple interactive screens. The purpose of this paper is to begin the conversation…

We compared seven unrelated data-sets to evaluate a major education improvement initiative. Perceptions of students in 54 course sections were surveyed regarding the helpfulness of 39 specific teaching or learning strategies, and relative workloads and enthusiasm were compared to their other courses. Classes were observed using an established…