Learning to Teach Online

The rapid expansion of distance education in higher education has left a high demand for faculty willing to design and teach online courses, often with little or no training. The path from face-to-face to online courses is not an easy one and can be filled with frustration and doubt for many faculty. Professional development often focuses on technology tools rather than pedagogical issues of online learning or course content. This chapter focuses on research that examines the experience of several faculty from the college of education at a state university in the Southeast United States, as they learned to teach online. It presents their negotiations of issues of online platform and pedagogy and their efforts to find professional development to meet their needs. The implications for institutions of higher learning are important as distance education continues to increase and more and more faculty are asked (or told) to transfer their courses online.

New Methods Exploring Facial Expressions in the Context of Leadership Perception

The aim of this chapter is to add to our knowledge of the contribution of facial expression to educational leadership perception. Although there is a considerable amount of studies investigating leaders' emotional displays, the majority of this research does not use the sophisticated facial expression coding methods available in other psychological settings. However, research using such sophisticated methods shows that even subtle facial actions can result in significantly different impressions, indicating that credibility of facial expression interpretation might depend on the accuracy of facial expression description (see Rosenberg, 2005). In this chapter, the few leadership studies that have used sophisticated facial expression coding methods are reviewed. On the basis of these studies, it is recommended that educational organizations should be aware of the added value of these methods in order increase research credibility and provide educational leaders with specialized knowledge and skills that could eventually increase their effectiveness.

Realising the Potential of MOOCs in Developing Capacity for Tertiary Education Managers

MOOCs are a recent development, with little informed consensus on the extent of their future impact on tertiary education. In this paper the authors consider one application of open online courseware, as a platform for professional development within the tertiary sector, with an agreed pathway into award programs in tertiary education management. The case presented is a recently launched ‘emerging leaders and managers program (eLAMP)' for the Australian tertiary education sector. The pedagogical, resourcing and practical issues of designing and supporting this program are examined as a means of exploring the conceptual underpinnings of online technologies and pedagogies.

Evolving Pedagogy and Practice

This chapter presents qualitative research describing the pedagogy of middle grades mathematics teachers who participated in professional development in conjunction with classroom integration of 1:1 technology. Through a multiple-case study design, the expression and development of teacher pedagogy that occurred as teachers created self-designed action research projects grounded in pedagogical goals is illustrated. The use of action research in these four case studies as a vehicle for professional growth and as a reflective evaluation tool is discussed. When viewed through the lens of the TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006), data suggest a technology-mediated shift in pedagogy in the area of differentiation in instruction and assessment in mathematics classrooms. Future implications regarding technology integration, professional development programs, and the use of the TPACK as a descriptive tool are considered.

Instructional Design for Millennials

The authors have worked since 2000 to prepare school leaders at two California Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) in partnership with K-12 public, private, and charter schools. While transforming their programs into virtual delivery models, as an option for students, both online and face-to-face hybrid formats require conditions that help students effectively succeed as learners. Over fifteen years the authors have narrowed discussions for efficient facilitation and mapping to course content while personalizing lessons to deeply engage their learners' creation of new knowledge. They make twenty-three recommendations for streamlining course content, assignments, and assessments to meet individual needs of students while meeting the expectations and challenges of changing national and state standards. The authors conclude that ‘thinking anew' through faculty ideation is a must for IHEs as the changing learner demands changing practice.

Designing a cMOOC for Lecturer Professional Development in the 21st Century

This chapter explores the design of a framework for up-scaling a lecturer professional development strategy based upon communities of practice from pockets of excellence to span across a university utilizing a cMOOC framework. The framework links global experts into an authentic professional development experience via the integration of a range of mobile social media learning technologies. The framework includes a series of triggering events designed to support the development of participants' personal eportfolios and pedagogical practice that can then be optionally validated by external CMALT accreditation. We believe the framework provides a transferable professional development model for other institutions to explore.

What 21st Century Students Want

Enrollment numbers in graduate Educational Leadership programs are dwindling in many public higher education institutions across the United States. At the same time, for-profit institutions and institutions with private marketing partnerships have experienced increasingly greater enrollments. In this article, the authors present survey results of graduate students in Educational Leadership programs (N=100) to determine the factors that motivate students to select a particular graduate Educational Leadership program. Results suggest that Master's and doctoral-level students primarily select an Educational Leadership program based on the course delivery methods (with hybrid courses most preferred) and the convenience that the program offers in terms of scheduling and location.

The MOOCs

In this chapter, the authors present the rapid rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) derived from a yearning to create and make widely available materials and conditions for participatory learning and creative space dedicated to the open education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were developed to provide open, meaning unrestricted, online courses without higher education cost constraints to students. This new technological platform was embraced, developed, and offered by some of the country's leading universities and institutions including Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Students may collaborate through strategic social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Further, according to LeCounte et al. (2014), the social media partnerships have been found to offer competitive advantages in terms of low cost and tremendous visibility to both corporations and institutions of higher learning.

Identity, Commitment, and Change Agency

It is becoming almost cliché to assert that doctoral scholars should integrate theory and practice and address critical problems of practice. Less charted territory, however, moves beyond integration of theory and practice to the cultivation of scholars' as committed people who possess a compass of values and vision as they act as catalysts for change in the world of practice. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the kind of cultivation needed to effect the transformation required for doctoral scholars to move beyond translation of theory to practice to the next step of catalyzing change. This chapter explores the intersection of core constructs or strands for creating scholars as change agents – identity, commitment and civic agency. These elements are examined from a theoretical framework, and in context of a case example of a doctoral program that bridges the academy and the community.

A Balanced Approach to Education

This chapter intends to find out answers to a rather complicated question facing almost all universities and business schools in the world: How to have a balanced approach to education. In so doing, this chapter discusses an integrative approach to curriculum development and having a best combination of teaching, research, and continuing education as a source of a balanced approach to education. All these components—curriculum development, teaching, research, and continuing education—are crucial for the existence and growth of higher educational institutions now and in the future. Furthermore, the chapter studies all the various factors that influence the development and implementation of a balanced approach to education in academic institutions and proposes strategies and models to help academic administrators design and implement balanced education approaches.