In 2015, nearly 18 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in online courses at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS; UCCS 2016a). Human geography is taught at the UCCS Department of Geography and Environmental Studies in both traditional face-to-face and online settings. Roughly 40 percent of students who take the Introduction to…

Social media (SoMe) is increasingly used in higher education (HE) to access knowledge and enable global communication. The SoMe platform Twitter® is particularly beneficial in these contexts because it is readily accessible, easily searchable (via hashtags) and global. Given these advantages, the twitter platform @AskAnatomist was created to…

It is generally accepted that effective teacher professional development is critical to effective educational improvements and reforms of any educational institution. However, a conventional form of teacher professional development is constrained by time and space and, more often than not, there is a lack of perpetual support to teachers in the…

Entrepreneur is a process or a way to conduct a business that aims to obtain the expected results or profits by producing, selling or renting a product of goods or services. In college, entrepreneurship courses are given to equip the students so that after they graduate they can entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship courses are still not effective…

This paper investigates the emergence of an engineering education research (EER) community in three Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden. First, an overview of the current state of Nordic EER authorship is produced through statistics on international publication. Then, the history of EER and its precursor activities is described in three…

This paper summarizes a veteran instructor's experience during a short, yet intensive mentorship within a Community of Practice (CoP) framework. As a member in a Participatory Action Research mentoring/coaching project, the educator gained new insights and knowledge about how to better serve first-year, entry-level, College 100 learners. Key…

This evaluation research study investigated the impact of differences in independent and collaborative teaching models in a blended graduate teacher education program. Using the Community of Inquiry model as a framework to evaluate the student experience in this program, data were collected over a two-year period regarding student perceptions of…

Grounded in the frameworks of action research, Critical Friends Groups (CFGs), and reflective practice, this article presents an overarching action research study connected by individual action research studies to explore what a cohort of preservice elementary Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) candidates learned from the process of teacher action…

Facebook is social media that is ubiquitously used in higher education contexts by both staff and students. It provides a platform for student networking and expression. The authors illuminate how pre-service teachers in an Australian university, undertaking undergraduate units, use Facebook as a student-initiated social media community. Although…

Historically, American public schools played an important role in assimilating immigrants with different cultures into the mainstream. This process is currently occurring in other parts of the world that are undergoing demographic changes due to immigration. Some of these countries have turned to multicultural education as a tool to respond to…

Studies have often focused on promoting students' basic psychological needs to support their learning in K-12 education and even in college education, although less work has been performed to determine the ways in which the needs are fulfilled in graduate school education. The current study examined reports by 11 graduate students who were…

In the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, higher education institutions should change practices of educational programs and services, which are mainly based on traditional classroom-based instructions, to allow students to have more diverse experiences. Since college students spend relatively more time engaged in out-of-class activities than…

The purpose of this manuscript is to present strategies and resources for advisors of doctoral students in online programs. The strategies include an approach to creating a community of doctoral students, a video initiative to provide encouragement to students in the doctoral program, and assignments that enhance students' writing skills to…

This article describes a learning partnership between district or county leaders and school leaders to create a system of principal professional learning that came to life in principal learning communities across a district or multiple-district region. For more than a decade, Learning Forward has engaged with district-level leaders as learning…

The purpose of this study was to examine communities of practice that contribute to undergraduate professional identity construction. Participants were music education, performance, and therapy majors in a university school of music in the southern United States. Each participant completed an online survey regarding their experiences in school of…