Diverse perspectives are required to address the technological problems facing our world. Although women perform as well as their male counterparts in math and science prior to entering college, the numbers of women students entering and completing engineering programmes are far below their representation in the workforce. This paper reports on a…

Engaging in an online course has traditionally been perceived to be a lonely experience, with students busy viewing video lectures, working on problem sets and interacting intermittently with others using asynchronous technologies. More recently, over the past 6-7 years, online courses have become recognized as viable delivery vehicles for online…

The academic support system that is available online for distance students can prove quite beneficial to them before and especially during their course/programme of study. Potter posited that the goal of a programme's academic learner support services for distance learners must be to meet their needs by linking them with fellow students, faculty…

Taiwan English teachers in secondary schools are facing a new challenge of having to teach listening comprehension skills to their students. Many instructors are not equipped to deliver adequate listening instruction although listening comprehension has become a benchmark for senior high students aspiring to enter a tertiary institution and earn a…

First year learning community (LC) freshmen entering as education majors participated in year-long activities related to service learning and leadership development. Activities included fall cohort classes with shared content, a common read, and a spring seminar that included leadership learning, fund raising, and a short-term service project in…

This research is an exploratory study that evaluates the affordances of WeChat for the development of a community of inquiry (CoI) in semi-synchronous language exchange supported by WeChat. WeChat is an instant messenger that facilitates a multimodal environment in which interaction can happen synchronously, semi-synchronously and asynchronously…

This article describes the process by which the authors created a Virtual Learning Community for cultural and linguistic exchange between college students of Portuguese in the United States and undergraduate and graduate students of English in Brazil. In addition to describing the way the so-called tandem model for telecollaboration was adapted to…

This study investigated leadership supports provided by an elementary principal of 15 years in a high performing diverse school. Employing document analysis and interviews, the researcher gathered and analyzed data in an effort to identify those leadership strategies that could be replicated at other school sites. The study identified the…

Within the background where education is increasingly driven by the economies of scale and research funding, we propose an alternative online open and connected framework (OOC) for building global learning communities using mobile social media. We critique a three year action research case study involving building collaborative global learning…

Here we share findings from a 9-month qualitative case study involving a school-university professional development inquiry into how teachers develop, implement, and interpret community-based pedagogies (CBPs), an asset-based approach to curriculum that acknowledges mandated standards but begins with recognizing and valuing local knowledge. After…

Many have documented the positive benefits of Living and Learning Communities (LLCs), but creating an environment that truly integrates living and learning across campus can be a challenge. In this paper we chronicle an LLC program that was intentionally built upon a broad foundation. By including faculty, staff, and student leader representation…

Creativity, invention, and innovation are values championed as central pillars of engineering education. However, university environments that foster open-ended design-build projects are uncommon. Fabrication and prototyping spaces at universities are typically "machine shops" where students relinquish actual fabrication activities to…

As qualitative research methodologies continue to evolve and develop, both students and experienced researchers are showing greater interest in learning about and developing new approaches. To meet this need, faculty at the University of Manitoba created the Qualitative Research Group (QRG), a community of practice that utilizes experiential…

This qualitative case study examines an after-school, bilingual family literacy programme that brought together several groups to form a community of practice (CoP) that worked to support the literacy development of English language learners and their families. We explored the following question: How do parents, teachers, students, and other…

Retention and graduation rates for engineering disciplines are significantly lower than desired, and research literature offers many possible causes. Engineering learning communities provide the opportunity to study relationships among specific causes and to develop and evaluate activities designed to lessen their impact. This paper details an…