We have explored designers having empathy for the audience of focus, designers using empathy as a means to an end, and designers using empathy to deliver a meaningful design deliverable. Our research has evolved from studying how designers reflect on their own design context and the audience's given circumstance to designers acting on moments of…

In introductory electric circuits in middle school, students often carry strongly held alternative conceptions. Common to many of these is an idea of electric current as some kind of substance that originates from the battery and moves toward electronic components. Learners often argue that current influences those one by one as they are…

In this paper, we present a qualitative case study on an online graduate program for practicing teachers and educators that explores contemporary mathematics and its integration into K to 12 education. Data for the study comprised students' work in the courses, student feedback, and notes from instructor debriefings for two cohorts of the program.…

Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural reasoning about data collection and interpretation. In this paper, we extended this prior work to study…

The purpose of this study was to benchmark the workload of online instructional designers as third-space professionals at 4-year, public institutions. Interview data regarding design team composition, courseload, responsibilities, and decision-making processes was gathered from managers of online learning units offering a "white-glove"…

More than 8 out of every 10 college students are not STEM majors, yet we have little understanding about learning expectations for them. We used the results of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute BioInteractive learning objectives survey of 38 instructors teaching nonscience major courses to characterize learning objectives (LOs) in these courses.…

In this article, we examine the course "Women and Leadership Discourse" as research in practice. As Craig and Tracy have argued (1995; 2021), practical theory examines data from everyday practices and is consequential to social life. The course centers on women's leadership, issues of leadership dynamics, and women's roles in…

This exploratory sequential study of the sense of community and support experienced by women in the Organizational Leadership Doctor of Education (OLDE) online program at Home University, drew upon Kahu's (2013) holistic conceptual model of student engagement which emphasized a need for research that focuses on the student experience at individual…

The proliferation of online education has catapulted academic pedagogical modernization and digital relevancy to the forefront of every Provost's agenda. Online education continues to expand rapidly throughout the higher education sector and an agile institutional structure, personnel and operational units are necessary to meet market demand. This…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a valuable open educational resource for people around the world. Although they have been published for over a decade, there has not been a consistent means by which to evaluate their quality or establish whether they are meeting the needs of learners. This action research study sought to understand…

The following exploratory case study is a program evaluation of a certification program for online instructors at a high-enrollment, 4-year research-intensive university in the southeast. Since 2014 the Online Instructor Certification (OIC) has operated as the predominant platform for preparing faculty to teach online at the site of study. The OIC…

Spatial reasoning ability is key to an individual's understanding of geology and geosciences more broadly. One reason why is because spatial ability allows individuals to use multiple external representations (MERs) to understand information that they cannot normally interact with directly, such as the Earth. This article presents results from two…

Regardless of how prepared faculty were to teach online classes, the COVID-19 pandemic forced leaders of universities and colleges and faculty nationwide to pivot to emergency remote teaching and forced students to take online classes. To prepare faculty for the shift to online instruction, administrators in colleges and universities provided…

The content of a humanities course allows students to understand other philosophies, cultures, and values different from their own. The problem is that although the literature indicates the many benefits of completing a humanities course, the prioritization of academic performance in core courses such as reading, math, and science, coupled with…

Quantitative literacy---the use of mathematics to describe and understand the world---is an essential skill. Physics has an opportunity to contribute to how students develop quantitative literacy, as much of physics curriculum centers on making sense of quantitative models. One facet of quantitative literacy in physics is covariational reasoning:…