Creation of teams in professional and student contexts has been well researched and written about. The research landscape can be divided into instructor selected and student selected teams, both of which have advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this paper is to combine the two techniques for creating teams in an effort to maximize the…

This article highlights the accomplishments of the Healthy Homes Partnership, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Since the program began in 1999, funds totaling $2.7 million have been distributed to 34 states and Virgin Islands Extension programs through a competitive process. Extension professionals have used the funds as seed grants…

Students, teachers, administrators, community members, and policymakers are collectively responsible for ensuring that the literacy learning required to earn a living and lead a well-rounded life is available to all. To meet that responsibility, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) urges legislators to practice civil discourse by…

With the ceaseless development of new and more advanced technologies, along with their growing influence and control over business and commerce, it is no surprise that the educational community is struggling to come up with programs to educate students to adequately handle these developments. Textbooks are becoming a thing of the past, for…

The current business environment requires various communication skills to succeed. The skills include the use of a number of technologies that were not available 20 years ago. For this research, students were required to complete a project with students not in their own class using alternative communication methods. A questionnaire was…

The authors have previously reported the effectiveness of using self and peer assessment to improve learning outcomes by providing opportunities to practise, assess and provide feedback on students' attribute development. Despite this work and the research of others, a significant number of students and, indeed, many academics focus on the…

This paper describes the creation and evolution of an undergraduate dynamics and vibrations course for civil engineering students. Incorporating vibrations into the course allows students to see and study "real" civil engineering applications of the course content. This connection of academic principles to real life situations is in…

For the state of Washington's one-hundredth birthday, in 1989, Native peoples there decided to revive a distinctive mode of transportation--long-distance journeys by canoe--along with an entire culture associated with it. Born as the "Paddle to Seattle," during the past two decades these canoe journeys have become a summertime staple for…

Background: Hospital adoption of health information technology (HIT) systems is promoted as essential to decreasing medical error and their associated 44,000 annual deaths and $17 billion in healthcare costs (Institute of Medicine, 2001; Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 1999). Leading national healthcare groups, such as the Institute of Medicine,…

The rapid proliferation of technology can have profound effects on the evolution of teaching, learning, scholarship, and governance in higher education (Katz, 2008). However, instructors report that simply "keeping up" with new instructional technologies, let alone integrating them productively into one's teaching, can be a significant…

Many efforts to improve the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both of these approaches depend on a complete division of work between…

Authentic design commonly involves teams of designers collaborating on ill-structured problems over extended time periods. Nonetheless, design has been studied extensively in sequestered settings, limiting our understanding of design as process and especially of learning design process. This study addresses potential shortcomings of such studies…

There is a rich body of research devoted to the causes and remedies of social loafing in workplace teams. However, the social loafing phenomenon remains underinvestigated from the perspective of students in undergraduate business classroom teams. In particular, how they define and respond to loafing remains unknown. This article reports findings…

The busy instructor wants to help their students learn but is often pressed for time. This article presents 6 grading techniques that help the students learn without taking a lot of time. First, not grading an assignment saves time and can still be valuable as long as the instructor carefully structures it so the students still have an incentive…

In the fall of 2004 a college began a program to integrate service-learning (S-L) projects into required engineering courses throughout the curriculum, so that students would be exposed to S-L in at least one course in each of eight semesters. The ultimate goal is to graduate better engineers and more engaged citizens and to improve communities,…