Professionals and communication partners report experiencing challenges with regard to developing the knowledge and skills needed to support individuals with complex communication needs who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). These challenges can be exacerbated in rural and remote areas where access to resources and training may…

Innovative, pedagogically informed instructional design is instrumental in increasing student engagement and improving learning outcomes in online learning environments. Interactive learning resources provide students with the opportunity to engage with content in a more personalised manner. H5P (HTML 5 Package) is a collaborative platform that…

In Thailand, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is being promoted to support science student teachers by conducting projects to extend their learning skills and to turn them into innovators. This study aimed to develop a professional development programme (PDP) based on biomimicry to improve STEM project creation for…

In recent years, online learning has become ubiquitous in tertiary and higher education institutions; yet many teachers are not sure how to design more blended approaches to enhance the learning process. This qualitative interdisciplinary research took place in two iterations of a first-semester undergraduate course in the Bachelor of Teaching…

Experiential learning is a pedagogical technique that places students in direct contact with the material being studied. Students progress through four stages in a continuous cycle of learning. Because it is conceptualized as a continuous cycle, we question whether student comprehension varies according to where in the learning cycle they begin.…

Effective educational interventions require sufficient learner engagement, which can be difficult to achieve if the learner is inadequately motivated. Games have been shown to possess powerful motivators that fuel a person's desire to engage in unattractive activities, such as learning theoretical material. However, to design an educational game…

In this article, third generation cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2011) will be the means for analyzing tensions and contradictions between formal and informal learning within a MOOC design. This article builds on previous work (Bradshaw et al., 2017) wherein CHAT was used to establish formal and informal learning as…

Education is characterized by at least the following features: (1) it offers learning environments that help students to achieve preset goals; (2) it induces learners to engage in relevant learning tasks; and (3) it offers support while learners execute learning tasks. Offering learning environments builds on the assumption that learners will…

Followership is more than just a topic to be tacked on to the body of a leadership program; it fundamentally alters the way students engage with leadership theory and practice. In this chapter, the authors draw on 15 years of experience supporting, modifying, and delivering followership training within leadership programs to provide the unique…

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Understanding by Design instructional design framework can be applied to design high-quality single-session information literacy instruction. The author describes the Understanding by Design process in detail, noting modifications for single instructional session design with examples from the…

Underutilized in higher education, soft systems thinking can mitigate common challenges in implementing instructional design and technology initiatives. A valuable approach is soft systems methodology (SSM), which captures multiple stakeholder perspectives in rich pictures and activity models to support structured conversations about how to…

This study used the Delphi technique with 31 seasoned leadership educators who, over the course of two rounds, were tasked to categorize the level of complexity of 60 leadership competencies. What resulted was a five-tier taxonomy based on the level of complexity of each of the 60 competencies assessed. The taxonomy also includes four categorical…

This commentary extends and amplifies aspects of the Cantor, Osher, Berg, Steyer and Rose (2018) discussion about what we know about the nature of learning and its implications for how we educate students across the span from early childhood through advanced levels of formal education. The paper's overall goal is to offer some guidance and…

Learning Analytics become the key for Personalised Learning and Teaching thanks to the storage, categorisation and smart retrieval of Big Data. Thousands of user data can be tracked online via Learning Management Systems, instant messaging channels, social networks and other ways of communication. Always with the explicit authorisation from the…

For many years, scholars have investigated instructional design expertise and described the difficulty defining it. A lack of a clear definition, inclusive of primary components, poses a measurement problem for those seeking to evaluate the development of expertise. An overarching aim of this study is to gather evidence to support a definition of…