Students who are solving open-ended problems would benefit from formative assessment , i.e., from receiving helpful feedback and from having an instructor who is informed about their level of performance. Open-ended problems challenge existing assessment techniques. For example, such problems may have reasonable alternative solutions, or conflicting objectives. Analyses of open-ended problems a...

The Course Improvement Matrix was designed to provide a structured approach for online instructors – critical but sometimes marginalized stakeholders – to become more involved in the continuous improvement of online courses. This paper describes the development of this tool and its application at an online university. An online instructor successfully spearheaded the improvement of an undergrad...

This paper reports on a qualitative study of the use of social technologies, explored in the context of an intensive 650-hour Greek language course. Qualitative content analysis of instructors’ field notes, students’ and instructors’ reflections, interviews and a focus group was employed aiming at identifying the use of social technologies as a platform for constructing an online artifact. To t...

Globalization requires new methods of delivering education and training, partly to enhance traditional methods of knowledge acquisition and to impart new skills and tools (Adam, Awerbuch, Slonim, Wegner and Yesha, 1997). Traditional classroom learning doesn’t seem to fit well with the notion of lifelong learning, since it requires the physical presence of instructors and students. It is instruc...

Finding the time for developing or locating new class materials is one of the biggest barriers for instructors reforming their teaching approaches. Even instructors who have taken part in training workshops may feel overwhelmed by the task of transforming passive lecture content to engaging learning activities. Learning cycles have been instrumental in helping K-12 science teachers design effec...

The objectives of this research were to recognize, interpret and discuss themes that arise out of the speeches of instructors of an undergraduate course of Nursing as guiding sources to a humanized teaching-learning experience in the light of Edgard Morin's Theory of Complexity. It is a qualitative, exploratory and analytic research. The study tried to verify principles of the paradigm of compl...

Because of the importance of students’ and teachers’ implicit beliefs about intelligence, we designed a study to determine: (a) How is intelligence defined—as a malleable or fixed entity—in introductory educational psychology textbooks? and (b) To what extent are classroom applications of intelligence topics included in the textbooks? We conducted a content analysis of the intelligence topics p...