This brief focuses on the efforts of the nursing programs at Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas (PCCUA) to reduce time to completion, increase achievement, and enhance student support. To accomplish these goals, PCCUA involved healthcare providers, faculty, students, college curriculum committees, the Accreditation Commission…

Ten years ago, AAC&U (then AAC) issued a landmark report, "Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community". Anticipating the academy's sternest external critics by nearly a decade, "Integrity" offered a sweeping and incisive critique of curricular practice throughout higher education. "As for…

Many academicians are asking the following question: "Are we ill-preparing our business students if we fail to offer future business professionals the opportunity to engage in a greater understanding of the ethical decision making process?" The authors provide a current review of the literature on the state of ethics education in…

Opportunities for K-12 students to choose virtual and blended learning experiences continue to grow. All 50 states including Washington, D.C., now offer some virtual experience in K-12 education. Of these, 40 states have state virtual schools or state-led online learning initiatives. In addition, federal and state support for this type of learning…

In massive open online courses (MOOCs), low barriers to registration attract large numbers of students with diverse interests and backgrounds, and student use of course content is asynchronous and unconstrained. The authors argue that MOOC data are not only plentiful and different in kind but require reconceptualization--new educational variables…

This article suggests that student engagement research is not often investigated critically. It attempts to change this. After briefly outlining a conceptual framework for student engagement, it explores three critical questions about it. First, it asks whether in trying to be all things in teaching and learning, student engagement focuses too…

The last couple of years have witnessed a growing debate about online learning in higher education, notably in response to the global massive open online course (MOOC) phenomenon. This paper explores these developments from an institutional policy perspective, drawing on an analysis of the initial stages of different approaches to MOOCs and…

Although the clinical clerkship model is based upon sound pedagogy, including theories of social learning and situated learning, studies evaluating clinical performance of residents suggests that this model may not fully meet the learning needs of students. Here our objective was to design a curriculum to bridge the learning gaps of the existing…

Over the last 30 years, higher education has received the assessment movement with a substantial amount of skepticism. The purpose of this study is to advance our understanding of political science's responsiveness to assessment reform pressures using neoinstitutional theory. The influence of public status, institutional type, and…

America's great public universities were founded with the highest expectations of academic excellence and service to their states. Overall, these institutions, often called the "flagship universities," do a poor job of ensuring that undergraduate students engage in an intellectually vibrant campus culture and leave with a solid…

Purpose: The purpose of this directory was to identify, describe, and evaluate evidence that the education practices improve academic performance, close the achievement gap, and improve persistence towards graduation for low-income, first-generation, and historically-underrepresented 6th grade through college students. Method: The sample for the…

ACTA's 12th state higher education report examines questions of great urgency for the state of Mississippi: How should individual public universities choose their leadership? Are the public universities careful stewards of taxpayer dollars? Is free speech protected on Mississippi's college campuses? The report assesses institutions on measures of…

The author believes there are three conceptual and somatic (from the Greek, meaning "of the body") changes that could be made in order to better educate the student body and, thereby, help sustain the intellectual and social relevance of the liberal arts as a program of study. First, the commitment to what Sir Ken Robinson has called "the…

This article argues that the traditional idealist-realist divide on educational thinking have been and shall continue to be regarded as "normal" so long as education is a continuum which derives its being from the disparity in human thought. To commute one to the other--specifically, idealist to realist--to meet desperate industrial needs would be…

This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.