There is widespread recognition that universities are now delivering higher education to diverse student populations with very different needs and aspirations from the more traditional cohorts of the past. In order to prepare students for a broad range of employment opportunities, universities are also fostering the development of "graduate…

While elements of Deleuze's theory, notably the "geophilosophical" concepts of "rhizomes," "smoothness" and "striation" have been applied to educational technologies, his work on time has, to date, been comparatively neglected by educational theorists. This article explores practices and outcomes of…

This study, commissioned by the HEA and the QAA focuses on directed independent learning practices in UK higher education. It investigates what stakeholders (including academic staff and students) have found to be the most effective practices in the inception, design, quality assurance and enhancement of directed independent learning and explores…

Creative and critical thinking skills are the abilities, which can sometimes be used interchangeably in definition. In fact, they have different constructs because they differentiate in outcome of human behaviours. Also one of today's requirements is that individuals should approach everyday problems by using both competences. So, one of the…

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the rapid growth in the MOOCs offering brought about a new educational landscape, posing new challenges to teaching and learning, mainly due to massive participation, ubiquity and free enrollment. These courses embody a confluence of technological and pedagogical mediations yet to be fully…

With the proliferation of standards and accountability systems in education, questions about how they function and intersect with broader patterns of institutional relations await investigation. The existing literature in social studies education is replete with studies that frame teachers' expertise for managing how instruction unfolds in the…

Blended learning, structured as a combination of traditional course instruction and additional supporting multimedia course content, can be used in higher education for a variety of reasons. In the case study that we examine, the introduction of blended learning was initiated three years ago with the purpose of creating more resources for…

Over the past decade, a handful of researchers have studied the most important skills for becoming an effective instructional designer (Kenny, Zhang, Schwier, & Campbell, 2014; Lowenthal, Wilson, & Dunlap, 2010; Ritzhaupt, Martin, & Daniels, 2010; Sugar, Brown, Daniels, & Hoard, 2011; Sugar et al., 2012). While nearly all employers…

The purpose of this study was to research and identify which elements of a collaborative, hands-on series of STEM training sessions may have related to perceived changes in teachers' self-efficacy, classroom lesson design, and conceptual understanding of engineering within STEM at the elementary level. The study involved eleven teachers of grades…

Learning business related courses, especially accounting, in English is a challenge for many Chinese students. The purpose of this study is to provide some insights into the role of the language in accounting learning. We investigate this issue in the program of Teaching Business Related Courses in English for undergraduate students at Guangdong…

In this video ethnographic study, a social semiotic approach has been used to explore how the use of digital tablets in preschools may enable children's communication in a minority language. The results show how preschool children use the emerging affordances of digital tablets in order to act as producers of minority language activities, where…

Teachers in their practice make choices grounded in their teaching experience resulting in what could be labelled design solutions. An identified problem is that these design solutions stay at the level of individual solutions and do not reach the teaching community. The aim of this article is to study how teachers´ design solutions can be…

There are only a handful of studies focused on assessing online teaching. Yet, the uniqueness of online course environment provides instructors more opportunities to conduct self-assessment of their own teaching than the traditional face-to-face classroom. In this paper, we demonstrate two types of self-assessment through two cases that online…

The aim of this study is to validate MOOC-based curriculum in higher education in Iran. The research method is mixed and of exploratory type. Method of grounded theory is used in the qualitative section and the Validation Test Pattern among the faculties and PhD students of Tehran's Universities is considered in the quantitative part. The…

This article analyzes the effect of working with the abridged version of some novels in order to promote students' communication in English. Two fourth semester English courses, from a private university, were randomly chosen to develop the different activities during one semester. The data was collected through students' written papers, the…