Increasing costs and decreasing numbers of university Extension faculty have made it difficult to provide quality turfgrass short course education. In response, faculty from nine institutions collaborated to develop the Great Lakes School of Turfgrass Science. This 12-week online course provides students with unique learning experiences through a…

Addressing the gap between global open educational resource (OER) proliferation and the slow adoption of OER and open educational practices (OEP) in Australian higher education, this paper focuses on a capacity-building project targeting academics, academic support staff and educational developers. The conception, design, development, piloting and…

By participating in the 2-week mini-course, high school students will learn that (1) there is a difference between political terror and other criminal activity; (2) governments as well as nongovernmental groups engage in political terrorism; (3) political terrorism has been present throughout history; (4) political terrorism is a world wide…

Noting that recent descriptions of "political correctness" give multiculturalism a negative connotation, this paper explores the role of intercultural communication in a re-considered 1990s view of multicultural education and discusses the design of a conceivable short course that will serve as the foundation for increasing…

Although the notion of teaching literature in an intensive weekend format may present numerous problems to be solved by the instructor, it can be a format that results in considerable success. It is conducive to the schedules of many students who work during the week, and weekend literature courses have proven to be popular. Intensive weekend…

Based on a collaboration between an instructor and an undergraduate student for two different documentation projects, this paper discusses the difference between the language systems of writers and supervisors designing or choosing training materials and documentation and what the research says about the real needs for the documentation. The paper…

This is a comparative study of a school utilizing a mini-course science elective curriculum and one using a conventional textbook program in order to investigate the effectiveness of mini-course programs with respect to students' achievement and attitudes toward science. Two suburban junior high schools were selected, and different instructional…

Efforts to improve the quality of business communication often include developing tailor-made short courses that are offered "in-house" to corporation management personnel. These following guidelines, based on one corporate writing teacher's experiences, should help others to develop writing courses for businesses: obtain samples of the types of…

Guided design, an educational strategy based on the conviction that students are educated better by working through an ascending order of well-designed problems than by passively accumulating knowledge, employs small groups of students attacking open-ended problems. This paper describes guided design--its operation and advantages in the…

J.E.B. Stuart High School moved into the minicourse elective program five years ago from an anthology-survey oriented English curriculum. The students are grouped into two levels, one offering minicourses for eleventh and twelfth graders and the other offering minicourses for ninth and tenth grade students, with some courses open to all of the…

With nationwide acceptance of writing across the curriculum, educators are now realizing the next wave in curriculum reform: speaking and listening across the curriculum. There is a movement to introduce speech across the curriculum of secondary schools and higher education. To learn any subject or interest area, students will utilize the skills…

Noting that there have been few papers or workshops which focus on designing/supervising independent study projects or internship programs, this short course explores the potential variety of independent study projects available in interpersonal and small group communication, rhetoric and communication theory, and organizational communication. The…

Summer Tech '84 was the product of a joint venture of the College of Education of Ohio State University and the Columbus Ohio Public Schools to provide instruction on the use of microcomputers to citizens of the Columbus metropolitan area. For four weeks, 80 different 10-hour classes were offered in eight areas: introductory computer literacy,…

Like most two-year colleges, Chipola Junior College has had to respond quickly to the impact of the microcomputer revolution. A demanding clientele of students and community members, a faculty and staff unprepared for microcomputer technology, and limited equipment resources dictated the rules of change. After it was determined that computer…

A minicourse is any educational experience that involves a detailed and indepth study of a specific unit or subject, jointly planned by student and teacher, and for which less than a semester of time is used. Minicourses at Los Alamos High School, Los Alamos, New Mexico, are a part of their total packet of educational innovations, including open…