The quality assurance of online Higher Education online programmes is one of the great challenges faced by Spanish universities. Regular assessment of these programmes is essential in order to take actions to improve their quality. The said assessment should be complex and include all of the components of the programme, as well as its planning and…

One of the challenges in higher education courses is to improve learning authenticity or reducing the gap between what being taught at school and what being used in the real world. In this paper, we describe a 6-step model to employ learning authenticity in online courses. Our model infuses characteristics of authentic learning with Madeline…

For several decades, scholars have been exploring the factors that influence college students' persistence and retention. Several of the retention theories and models have emphasized the role of sense of purpose and degree commitment in contributing to college students' persistence. Students' sense of purpose regarding what motivates them, what…

To compete in today's technology-intensive competitive environment, universities need to be aware of their limitations and collaborate with other universities to overcome them. Several indices that attempt to measure innovation and rank institutions have been proposed. Nevertheless, most innovation indices measure innovation at the political or…

This study explores the reflective processes by which a grade 5 science community co-constructed shared inquiry structures to focus and guide its inquiry about human body systems over a school year supported by a collaborative online environment. The co-constructed structures included a list of collective wondering areas as the shared focus of…

Keller's book was one of the first works to suggest strategic approaches to the management of higher education institutions. His case study method proved popular with readers. However, the limitations of his approach to strategy grew more apparent over time, although many of his insights remain valid today.

Diagnostic classification models (DCMs, also known as cognitive diagnosis models) hold the promise of providing detailed classroom information about the skills a student has or has not mastered. Specifically, DCMs are special cases of constrained latent class models where classes are defined based on mastery/nonmastery of a set of attributes (or…

This study revisits the parameters of authenticity, balance, and challenge in The Kaleidoscope Career Model (KCM) concerning gender differences in midcareer. Unemployed individuals were surveyed (n = 744) to determine gender differences in the three parameters across five segmented career stages. The results showed variance in the Authenticity,…

There has been a substantial increase in the number of health-related smartphone applications (apps) available to consumers in recent years. How does one decide which apps have scientific evidence backing their claims and which are "fake news"? In this Commentary, we explore the hierarchy of scientific claims and review recent literature…

When university faculty and students use technology, they do so in a specific context and researchers have acknowledged that in order to understand use (or non-use) of technology in higher education they need to account for this. However, although the importance of context is not questioned, there is little consensus over which contexts are…

Research demonstrates that phonological skills provide the basis of reading acquisition and are a primary processing deficit in dyslexia. This consensus has led to the development of effective methods of reading intervention. However, a single phonological deficit is not sufficient to account for the heterogeneity of individuals with dyslexia, and…

Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known…

The goal of this study is to model pauses extracted from writing keystroke logs as a way of characterizing the processes students use in essay composition. Low-level timing data were modeled, the interkey interval and its subtype, the intraword duration, thought to reflect processes associated with keyboarding skills and composition fluency.…

Authenticity has been identified as a key characteristic of assessment design which promotes learning. Authentic assessment aims to replicate the tasks and performance standards typically found in the world of work, and has been found to have a positive impact on student learning, autonomy, motivation, self-regulation and metacognition; abilities…

We apply the "wisdom of the crowd" idea to human category learning, using a simple approach that combines people's categorization decisions by taking the majority decision. We first show that the aggregated crowd category learning behavior found by this method performs well, learning categories more quickly than most or all individuals…