The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a virtual, collaborative parent education program for parents of school-age children. Although parenting websites and online discussion forums have been around since the world wide web became widely available in the early 1990s (Lupton, Pedersen & Thomas, 2016), a rise in the use and necessity of…

Improving instructor and student satisfaction with training in a global semiconductor company was the focus of this dissertation in practice. This study followed the Performance Improvement/Human Performance Technology (HPT) model as the overarching framework (Van Tiem et al., 2012). Fifty students and four instructors participated in this…

This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

Learning is a complex, subjective process. An important perspective on learning is that anyone, regardless of their level of education, can participate in learning about science and contribute to their community. The public increasingly looks towards online resources to find answers to challenges, so it is necessary that people become empowered to…

While plenty of literature exists that explores faculty-to-student mentorship in higher education, the bulk of this scholarship focuses on graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students, not first-year undergraduates. This is problematic as the first year of college is the one in which mentorship has the largest impact on student…

The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of teaching sight-singing to novice, vocal music readers using a structured instructional model through an asynchronous format. Sight-singing literature is inconclusive on definitively best systems, resulting in educators using a variety of methods in the classroom. Research has shown however that…

Predicting learning and human behavior in general is a challenging endeavor. Machine learning driven predictive modeling have been an increasingly popular means to understand disparities in student performance. With more than a handful of approaches to predictive modeling, the current literature of predicting learning is plagued with issues such…

The purpose of this study was to conduct an evaluation on a workplace training program using the Community of Inquiry (COI) model as a guide for course construction. Given that online and blended learning programs have gained popularity in the past two decades, companies have struggled with how to prepare trainers in the areas of online teaching…

Educational data mining focuses on exploring increasingly large-scale data from educational settings, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), and developing computational methods to understand students' behaviors and learning settings better. There has been a multitude of research dedicated to studying the student learning process, leading to…

An education benefit available to all corporate and franchisee employees of the large quick service restaurant (QSR) under study is an opportunity to achieve a high school diploma at no cost by enrolling in online high school (OHS). The purpose of this research was to explore the role of Thomas Gilbert's behavior engineering model…

This dissertation will look at large scale collaboration through the lens of online communities to answer questions about what makes a collaboration persist. Results address how collaborations attract contributions, behaviors that could give rise to patterns seen in the data, and the properties of collaborations that drive those behaviors. It is…

The purpose of this study was to help determine teachers' beliefs about multimedia and its relationship to literacy and the literacy standards of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). It looks at how four teachers' professional development experiences through an online graduate course at Rutgers University called "Web-Based Multimedia…

Many of the digital tools teachers currently implement in their courses are still embedded within the hierarchical banking principles that humanities instructors have long abandoned in favor of problem-posing and collaborative models. The institutional learning management system (LMS) is in need of a redesign if humanities educators, especially…

Low success rates in developmental mathematics courses have caused a growing concern for many institutions including moderately selective four-year universities. As a result, institutions have adopted various course redesign models, such as the emporium and replacement models, which take advantage of interactive online learning tools. Though these…

We live in an increasingly mobile society on many levels. Mobile devices, including the smartphone, tablet, and wearables, allow for composing and communicating from anywhere and in new ways, a phenomenon that is especially deserving of attention by composition studies scholars and teachers. Mobile composition processes are impacted by the…