Providing students with the professional, communication, and technical skills necessary to contribute to an ongoing software project is critical, yet often difficult in higher education. Involving student teams in real-world projects developed by professional software engineers for actual users is invaluable. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)…

Some colleges and universities are utilizing the inclusion of more active learning techniques in course content. Active learning involves students in thinking about what they are doing as they accomplish tasks or assignments in order to develop a deeper understanding of the topic or issue. In addition to a focus on enhancing student learning, the…

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) requires students to engage in more autonomous work. This autonomy is an outcome of the self-regulated learning process. Self-regulation involves a self-management skill set that can cope with any adverse contingency and requires both knowledge of the available abilities and personal control to put these…

Current international trends reveal that doctoral education is increasingly expected to satisfy workplace demands. In South Africa, "Work Integrated Learning" (WIL), introduced as part of the HEQF, is the principal initiative to facilitate greater relevance of higher education in the workplace. There has, however, been significant…

Most people agree that products are the culmination of what students have studied. For this article, "product" will refer to students' abilities to create outcomes and design artifacts. Those abilities are guided by four processes: inquiry-based learning, use of a research model, use of Web 2.0 tools, and appropriate assessments.…

Traditionally, teachers assess students' physics understanding through lab activities, responses to open-ended word problems, and tests. But there is another way to measure student understanding, one in which students apply their learning to the world around them. This article shows how to implement student portfolios, which allow students to…

When students collaboratively design and build artifacts that require relevant understanding and application of science, many aspects of scientific literacy are developed. Design-based inquiry (DBI) is one such pedagogy that can serve these desired goals of science education well. Focusing on a Projectile Science curriculum previously found to be…

Cooperative learning was applied in a graduate project management course to compare the effectiveness of asynchronous versus synchronous online team meetings. An experiment was constructed to allocate students to project teams while ensuring there was a balance of requisite skills, namely systems analysis and design along with HTML/Javascript…

Poetry, as a textual form for critical study and composition, continues to occupy a significant place in Australian senior secondary English syllabus documents and classrooms (cf. Carter, 2012). Indeed, within the senior secondary English syllabus in New South Wales (NSW), poetry remains one of the core mandatory types of texts for study by the…

This article describes an activity in which upon completion of this semester-long project, students should be able to: analyze and reflect upon their own communication behaviors in a group setting, and explain the importance of examining actual communication practices as opposed to retrospective self-report of communication practices. This project…

This paper highlights "Wave-Makers (1910--2010)", a collaborative timeline redesign project, which involves interactive and advanced web-based technology to connect and complement arts curricula at two higher education institutions, one located in China and another in the United States. Through in-depth research, video-conferencing,…

This article addresses the benefits and challenges involved with assigning small-scale research projects in one research methods class as means of introducing new(er) researchers to the work and rewards of empirical writing research. The following discussion does not claim to offer examples of cutting-edge methodological work. That is not our goal…

Could new types of pedagogy that involve more classroom projects and peer instruction encourage school districts to replace outdated furniture and redesign classrooms? Or could new classroom designs using modular furniture have an impact on how teachers engage their students? These are just a few of the questions that educators, instructional…

In 1986, Paul Friedman and Reva Jenkins-Friedman introduced "Fostering Academic Excellence through Honors Programs" by warning readers that "One might assume that the brightest college undergraduates feel well served during their years on campus and that procedures for educating them are common knowledge." The research on the importance of honors…

This research is about using two different instruction models, "theory course combined with sample introduction" and "theory course combined with case method teaching", to instruct elementary teachers on how to guide the science fair product in two courses (16 and 12 teachers in each class) and observe their guiding tactics after the instructed…