The Infusion of Technology into Teacher Education Programs

In this chapter, student achievement, the differentiation of instruction, and 21st Century Skills are examined along with their relationship to the use of technology in an educational setting. Characteristics of highly qualified teachers are also examined from multiple standpoints within the educational system. Standards from INTASC, NCATE, NCTAF, and NCLB point to the importance of the university faculty and quality teacher education programs to support the needs of preservice teachers. In addition, the joining of business and education across the nation and the world to infuse technology into education has shown positive results. This merger between business and education exemplifies the need for the acquisition of 21st century skills needed for all students to be a literate part of the 21st century workforce.

Combining the TAM and IS Success Models to Validate E-Learning System Satisfaction and Continuance Intention

Many e-learning studies have evaluated learning attitudes and behaviors based on TAM. However, a successful E-Learning System (ELS) should take both system and information quality into account by applying ISM developed by Delone and McLean. In addition, the acceptance for information system depends on the perceived usefulness and ease of use according to TAM. This research combines TAM with ISM by introducing system quality, quality of platform information, and course information as an antecedent of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. These factors are crucial for understanding users’ intentions to continue their use of ELS. The research model was examined with data collected from 164 practicing students with ELS experiences. The results indicated that system quality, platform information, and course information had a significantly positive effect on users’ satisfaction and their intention to use ELS continuously.

Creating an Authentic Space for a Private and Public Self through E-Portfolios

The chapter reports work that investigated the use of e-portfolios developed by teaching practitioners as part of an award-bearing academic development programme in the UK. The project aimed to enable teaching practitioners to access and gain familiarity with pedagogically sound e-portfolio opportunities. The project was designed to foster a reflective approach, promote critical thinking focused on learning and teaching, and enhance continuing professional development. The outcomes of this project are discussed in terms of an appreciation of e-assessment by the teaching practitioners involved, recommendations for an e-portfolio environment that uses technology enhanced learning resources to foster a reflective approach that can enable and enhance continuous professional development for academic staff.

Faculty and Chair Perceptions and Ratings about System-Wide Assessments in the Higher Colleges of Technology

This chapter examines use of System-Wide Assessments (SWAs) in the Higher Colleges of Technology of the United Arab Emirates. These end-of-course assessments were designed to ensure consistency of standards, to measure student learning outcomes, and to improve the quality and effectiveness of instruction, courses, and programs. The author reviews literature highlighting the importance of outcome assessments, the relevant issues and trends in higher education, the challenges with implementation, and the type of support necessary for enhancing best practices. The chapter primarily describes the design and use of SWAs among the 17 Federal Colleges. It summarizes 2013 survey findings from 232 randomly selected respondents about the level of satisfaction and agreement among faculty and academic chairs about the purpose, process, value, and impact of SWAs. Findings identify what is perceived to be working well including the challenges and issues to promote continuous improvement in SWAs. From experiences and research findings, recommendations are offered for applying best practices and enhancing the effectiveness of assessments in higher education.

A Systematic Map of Evaluation Criteria Applicable for Evaluating E-Portfolio Systems

This chapter examines the literature on evaluation methods within e-learning with respect to their applicability to evaluate e-portfolio systems within higher education as evaluation criteria for reviewing e-portfolio provisions do not currently exist in the literature. The appr­oach taken is to initiate two extensive literature searches and reviews. The first search was undertaken in 2009 involved reviewing over 600 articles by abstract dating from 1995 to 2010 to develop evaluation criteria suitable for Blackboard LMS e-portfolio systems evaluation. The second search undertaken in 2013 involved extending the search criteria to include further terminology and databases and returned over 4107 articles, which were read by title and abstract dating from 2009 to 2013, in order to systematically map evaluation methods used within e-learning to assess their quality and applicability for evaluating e-portfolio systems. The implications of the research undertaken provide a starting-point for further research into the development of robust e-portfolio evaluation models and frameworks. The lack of evidence uncovered in the 2009 and 2013 searches of the literature justify the need for further research into the design, development, and testing of evaluation methods for the evaluation of e-portfolio systems.

Newly Created Heterogeneous Groups

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of racial and gender diversity on group process and problem solving in an academic setting. The importance of this dynamic is its value in preparing students for the workplace. The supposition is if heterogeneous groups had enough time to resolve group process conflicts, they could significantly increase their performance on group tasks (Davis, 2012). Moreover, their later performance on tasks should exceed the performance of the homogeneous groups (Davis, 2012). However, how much time, as well as tasks, does it take heterogeneous groups to start to exceed the performance of the homogenous groups? Data for the study was collected from upper-level undergraduate male and female students registered in a sixteen-week business course taught by one instructor at a large university in a metropolitan city in the northeastern United States. There were five racially mixed groups of seven members in the four sections of the course. During this period, group members met frequently for a series of case analyses. Only balanced heterogeneous groups significantly enhanced their groups’ performance on complicated problem-solving tasks over time. They exceeded the performance of all homogeneous groups, except that of the Black American female homogeneous groups. Ultimately, the academic grades of the balanced heterogeneous groups as well as their individual members were in the upper half of all grades issued.

Mobile Devices as Effective Language Training Tools of Digital Era

Students of this digital era are proficient users of various gadgets, and it is the responsibility of language teachers to tap that expertise for facilitating learning beyond the classroom. Teachers can offer training to enhance students’ language skills with the help of mobile devices through which modules could be shared. It helps students to get adequate practice in using the language skills. A short study was conducted recently by the author with a few engineering students who received training in business English through mobile devices. This chapter explores the current study. It must be stated that this study was a continuation of the pilot study conducted, in which students were encouraged to record and share their presentations through mobile devices.

Online Interest Groups for Graduate Students

This chapter extends discussion of an educational innovation project where faculty (the authors and associates) provided virtual gathering spaces (Clinical Interest Groups) for online health professions students to congregate. Unlike gathering spaces offered in discrete courses, the non-graded Clinical Interest Groups were open to all students in the nursing faculty’s graduate programs. Getzlaf, Melrose, Moore, Ewing, Fedorchuk, and Troute-Wood (2012) found that students believed the virtual gathering spaces offered a valuable place where learners could discuss common interests and support one another. However, findings also revealed that participation in the groups was limited due to competing demands on students’ time from other commitments. As online learning programs become commonplace, and as online social networking spaces also increase in popularity and usage, educators must consider both the benefit and the burden of inviting professional learners to participate in supplemental activities such as online interest groups. Areas for future research are suggested.

Medical Education

The notion that the medical professions are grounded in sound social and philosophical commitments to human well-being and advancement is the very foundation of medicine since time in memoriam. Caring is the essential work of all health professionals, since most patients have no medical condition explainable by the mechanistic biomedical model. Health, illness, and disease, and biomedically defined disease distributions in the community follow a Pareto distribution (aka the 80/20 split) (i.e. only a minor percentage require tertiary hospital interventions). This chapter unravels important failures inherent in current medical education approaches – the misconceptions about science, the limitations inherent in the prevailing worldviews, the shaping of attitudes and behaviors resulting from social interactions in health professional institutions, and the impact of the lack of flexibility within health professional institutions. Positing that health is a personal dynamic balanced state, represented through a somato-psycho-socio-semiotic model, is the basis on which principles for a patient-centered educational approach are developed. Such a new curriculum would embrace the complex adaptive systems principle – focusing on the interdependencies between teachers and learners, allowing the curriculum to emerge over the course based on learners’ clinical exposures and experiences, fostering a critical engagement with the multifaceted knowledge base of the disciplines, and most importantly, building the necessary resilience for handling, individually and collectively, the emotional demands of caring.

An Extenics-Based Learning Performance Evaluation Scheme in Distance Learning

In recent years, Web-based learning has become one of the major applications of the Internet. For Web-based learning, it is important to design an intelligent curriculum Website for students and to make teachers understand the learning situation of each student in order to provide adequate auxiliary learning materials to individual students. Seven factors, including learning behaviors, were assumed to affect the learning performance of students. These assumptions have been analyzed to determine their effectiveness, and five factors, the degree of interest in the course, the degree of the familiarity with the computer, the number of Web pages browsed, the length of the course content, and the degree of difficulty of the course content are selected for evaluating the learning performance of students. In the research, a Moodle-based curriculum Website was established as the experimental platform to record students’ learning behaviors for analysis. By applying the extenics engineering method, a learning performance evaluation scheme is proposed to generate an evaluated learning performance of individual students for instructors’ reference. Thus, according to the evaluated learning performance, instructors can provide students with more adequate learning materials in accordance with individual students’ learning performance.