By 2001, 15.9 million students were enrolled in 4,074 American colleges and universities; 2.2 million were enrolled in graduate and first-professional programs, more than half of them--1.4 million--at the master's level. Graduate enrollments rose about 38% between 1985 and 2001; first-professional enrollments increased 13% between 1990 and 2001…

Anecdotal evidence suggests that instructor performance in the online discussion portion of online courses has a major impact on learning and learner satisfaction. If this is the case, faculty development is an important component of success. This paper describes the development of a taxonomy of six categories to describe instructor postings to…

Purpose: To illustrate the applicability of "kaizen" in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: "Kaizen" process was used for ten courses contained in a part-time executive MS degree program in management. Findings: "Kaizen" was found to be an effective process for improving graduate business school courses and the value proposition for…

The system of higher education like the public education system was designed to meet the needs of the industrial age and now is attempting to meet the needs of the informational age. At the higher education level, a need exists to develop new ways to deliver instruction to adult learners who are mobile and pressed for time with their jobs and…

Teacher education in California is currently under attack. Politicians and the general public have lost confidence in the entire educational system. While some critics argue that too many credential courses are required, the majority seem to criticize Colleges of Education for simply failing to produce quality teachers. One question asked by both…

Ulises Mejias examines how social software--information and communications technologies that facilitate the collaboration and exchange of ideas--enables students to participate in distributed research, an approach to learning in which knowledge is collectively constructed and shared. During Fall 2005, Mejias taught a graduate seminar that provided…

With clockwork regularity, the real or perceived shortage of scientists and engineers in the US pops up as a topic of debate in academic and industry circles. Discussions of an imminent shortage have deep impact for education, career prospects, immigration, and "The American Dream." The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it poses a…

The current paper builds on Reports #34 and 35 in this series, which discussed the use of collaborative software to develop online communities in distance education (DE). The paper illustrates the manner in which an educational community's needs should be carefully examined, in the process of designing techniques that fulfill these needs at a…

Online learning is here to stay. Many studies have examined factors that facilitate online learning in many disciplines, but few exist on counselor training. This research surveyed online counseling graduate students for factors that they found facilitative. Instructor characteristics such as frequency of participation in discussion forums,…

This essay aims to provide beginning and experienced history teachers as well as history teaching methods professors with a helpful strategy designed to improve students' knowledge of historical content and competence in historical thinking. It introduces a systematic approach to the use of primary sources which emphasizes the "doing" of history,…

This study explored graduate pre-service teachers' language learning strategies and language self-efficacy and the relationship between these two constructs. Seventy-four graduate English-as-a-second-language (ESL) pre-service teachers (13 males, 61 females) from a teachers' college in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, participated in this study. These…

This article develops a model of problem-based learning (PBL) and shows how PBL has been used for a decade in one graduate management program. PBL capitalizes on synergies among cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning. Although management education usually privileges cognitive learning, affective learning is equally important. By focusing on…

This paper discusses the use of online classroom collaborative environments to support the face-to-face teaching of a graduate course in English Literature. Online data from graduate students and the professor were collected and analyzed. Results show that students benefit from the online interaction to learn English Literature. There are,…

Teamwork skills such as conflict resolution and communication strategies are challenging to teach. The use of stories may help develop these complex skills. Although engagement is generally seen as a key component of learning environments, what constitutes engagement has not been fully explored. The purpose of this study was to examine how…

A cacophony of voices is continuing to place mandates on education and yet the voices of teachers are seldom heard. Teacher education can attempt to address this issue by facilitation of advocacy experiences via service-learning. The experiential and transformative nature of service-learning is illustrated through three case studies in which…