Learning engagement and career-relevant skills are both important elements in learning. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research related to learning engagement in massive open online courses (MOOCs) from MOOC instructors' point of view. Research is also needed on MOOC instructors' strategies to provide career-relevant content to the learners. In…

Technology-driven interactions are becoming commonplace, particularly as online classes, telecommuting, and virtual meetings across distances and time zones have all increased in popularity. Platforms such as Google Meet, Skype, Webex, and Zoom use synchronous audio-visual communication supported by text-based chat, emoticon responses, and other…

Despite the wealth of inquiry focused on the first-year seminar (FYS), little research has examined the pedagogical components of such courses. There is also a lack of research that assesses the extent to which FYS influence students' intrapersonal, interpersonal, and epistemological development. The goal of this study was to qualitatively explore…

A common use of technology in higher education is the provision of online course materials, invoking an investigation of the ways in which students engage with online course content, and how their participation changes over time. This is particularly necessary in the context of high absenteeism from lectures, where online access may be the only…

In modern and well-structured universities, ethics centers are playing a key role in hosting, organizing, and managing activities to enrich and guide students' ethical thinking and analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the goals, activities, and administration of ethics centers, as well as their role in promoting ethical thinking…

Classroom response systems, or clickers, have become pedagogical staples of the undergraduate science curriculum at many universities. In this study, the effectiveness of clickers in promoting problem-solving skills in a genetics class was investigated. Students were presented with problems requiring application of concepts covered in lecture and…

We have investigated the impact of using multimedia learning modules (MLM) on the learning of students enrolled in introductory physics courses at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. One hundred fifty-nine students were randomly registered in two sections of an introductory mechanics course, one of which featured the MLMs. Both…

To address the need for greater flexibility in access to higher education, an online graduate course in physiology using case studies was developed and offered in summer 2012. Topics in both animal and human physiology were organized as modules that contained a case study with questions, a prerecorded online lecture, and three research journal…

Teaching competence is an important skill for graduate students to acquire and is often considered a precursor to an academic career. In this study, we evaluated the effects of a multi-day teaching workshop on graduate teaching philosophies by surveying 200 graduate students, 79 of whom had taken the workshops and 121 who had not. We found no…

This article reports on the learning conversations between a mathematician and a mathematics educator as they worked together to change the delivery model of a third year discrete mathematics course from a traditional lecture mode to team-based learning (TBL). This change prompted the mathematician to create team tasks which increasingly focused…

In the online environment, students and instructors are virtually, but not physically, present in the same environment. In the online environment, technology mediates learning: it mediates communications and information transfer between the student and the instructor, between the student and the content, and among the students. Critics fear that…

Inability to use knowledge is one of the major problems that university graduates face. Some instructional designers recommend situated learning for the solution. The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of situated learning on students' school motivation and achievement. The two main hypotheses are: 1- Situated learning increases…

For the net-generation students learning in a Web 2.0 world, research is often equated with Googling and approached with a mindset accustomed to cut-and-paste practices. Recognizing educators' concern over such students' learning dispositions on the one hand, and the educational affordances of blogging on the other, this study examines the use of…

Team-based learning (TBL) is an instructional strategy that combines independent out-of-class preparation for in-class discussion in small groups. This approach has been successfully adopted by a number of medical educators. This strategy allowed us to eliminate anatomy lectures and incorporate small-group active learning. Although our strategy is…

Well-designed university buildings and physical environments have a documented positive impact on student participation, engagement, and feelings of support and belonging. These factors are known to improve learning; however, it is hard to document the direct impact architecture has on student learning outcomes. Information on how specific design…