The dominating trend in most educational programs today is converting traditional classroom teaching to variants of Problem or Project Based Learning (PBL) methods. In most programs the general experience is increased motivation among students as well as teachers. However, most programs do at the same time experience problems regarding productivity in terms of the applied teaching resources. Co...

This paper reports on an exploratory study that explores the instructional patterns within English as a Foreign Language (EFL) secondary school classrooms in Syria. Recently, the Syrian Ministry of Education (MoE) has introduced a new national curriculum which recommends a shift in EFL teachers’ instructional practices. Despite this costly innovation, there has been no attempt to check whether ...

Study abroad programs have increased dramatically. Most programs are short-term and include a cultural immersion as well as classroom and/or service learning. In this article, the authors discuss a study abroad program to China that included cultural immersion and classroom learning specific to traditional Chinese medicine. Participants kept journals with specific writing assignments and reflec...

One goal of the VaNTH Engineering Research Center is to estimate the effects of the “value added” to bioengineering student learning as a result of “How People Learn” (HPL) framework interventions. A necessary step in that process is to assess pedagogical differences in both lecture-based and HPL-oriented courses. Data from 28 bioengineering courses, over five semesters, were analyzed using a n...

Art is a valuable learning tool, regardless of discipline, that is often neglected in the college classroom. This article describes an artistic group exercise that required students enrolled in a homicide class to illustrate “warning” posters, depicting various explanations for why people kill. The author explores how this innovative group project enhanced a traditional classroom lecture on the...

The learning environment where students of the same age group learn together instructed by a teacher, was developed over the years and is known today as the traditional classroom. This traditional classroom may be changed by using the latest Web-based technology to replace and/or support the learning process. These new learning environments are accessible using the Internet as the main communic...

Team-based learning (TBL) is an active learning instructional strategy used in the traditional face-to-face (FtF) classroom. Computer-mediated communications (CMC) is a medium that complements the FtF classroom and enables active learning between FtF class times. This paper introduces a model for assessing computer-supported team-based learning that leverages a combination of collaborative lear...