Environmental change is ideally taught through field observations; however, leaving the classroom is often unrealistic due to financial and logistical constraints. The Internet offers several feasible alternatives using webcams that instructors can use to illustrate a variety of geographic examples and exercises for students. This article explores…

In the current Higher Education climate, there is a pressing need to integrate research and teaching in the student learning experience. In order to create synergy between research and teaching activities, to the benefit of students and instructors, we provided students with the opportunity to participate in a high profile collaboration between…

In an increasingly networked and technologically mediated world, people need to continuously update their knowledge and skill base, so as to be able to self-direct their intentional learning projects. In addition to teaching domain-specific knowledge and skills, the role of higher education should be reorganizing current teaching and studying…

In the past year, there was an overall decrease in dropouts at all grade levels in Maryland, with the largest decrease occurring among students in grade 12. Not surprisingly, principals across the state discovered that alternative assessment strategies that were designed to help students from special populations actually worked for all students.…

Undergraduate psychometrics classes often use computer-intensive active learning projects. However, little research has examined active learning or computer-intensive projects in psychometrics courses. We describe two computer-intensive collaborative learning projects used to teach the design and evaluation of psychological tests. Course…

This paper reports an adaptation of a classroom-based, traditionally taught module to both facilitate field-based knowledge acquisition and contribute towards research. The module enabled students, through a combination of new research and co-learning, to achieve the original classroom-based learning outcomes. Students engaged enthusiastically…

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and…

While this paper set out to discover what activities and/or interaction channels might be expected to lead to more highly engaged students, what it found was a bit different. After first creating a scale to measure online student engagement, and then surveying 186 students from six campuses in the Midwest, the results indicate that there is no…

The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), located in Aurora Illinois, is a public, three-year residential high school for students who are academically talented in mathematics and/or science. The mission statement of IMSA is to "ignite and nurture creative, ethical, scientific minds that advance the human condition." This…

Project-based learning (PBL) is a highly effective means of motivating students to learn independently. However, training or encouraging teachers to practice PBL in their classrooms is challenging, especially if the educational system does not accommodate creative teaching practices. In particular, in a test-driven educational system, time…

Background: In order to design appropriate environments for performance and learning of movement skills, physical educators need a sound theoretical model of the learner and of processes of learning. In physical education, this type of modelling informs the organisation of learning environments and effective and efficient use of practice time. An…

This paper describes two case studies where problem-based learning (PBL) has been introduced to undergraduate civil engineering students in University College Dublin. PBL has recently been put in place in the penultimate and final year transport engineering classes in the civil engineering degree in University College Dublin. In this case study,…

This article defines wholistic education and provides a model currently used in a college-level, academic setting. The various dimensions of the model are described along with the manner by which each is measured. An important contribution of this paper is the introduction of nonlinear methods which provide appropriate means for analyzing and…

Teaching high school students about the digestive system can be a challenge for a teacher when s/he wants to overcome rote learning of facts without a deeper understanding of the physiological processes inside the alimentary tract. A series of model experiments illustrating the journey of a sandwich was introduced into teaching high school…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a Personal Learning Plan method used in undergraduate early childhood education courses as a specific case of learner-centered, inquiry-based instruction. A rationale for this approach to instruction, the instructional context in which the specific method was developed and used, the method framework (i.e.,…