With the advent of affordable technology and increasing bandwidth, more and more higher-education institutions are implementing online educational opportunities. Often the transformation from face-to-face instruction to online instruction simply represents the repurposing of the instruction rather than a systematic course development that incorporates best online teaching and learning practices. Current learning theories and pedagogies are often overlooked in the interest of rapid implementation of an online course. This paper presents a case study of an online graduate level science education course, Try Science. It discusses the systematic curricular adaptations within Try Science that exemplify best practice online teaching and learning through inquiry-based science instruction and the incorporation of current learning theories frequently cited as the foundation of quality education.
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" Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it."
-Marian Wright Edelman
Also In This Issue:
An Action Research Study of the Collaborative Learning Process involved participants new to the collaborative process and documented their experiences in a collaborative learning group. It was assumed that the theory of collaborative learning could be rather directly expressed in action, thus allowing an action research approach consistent with Lewin, Lippitt, and WhiteÕs (1939) definition of action research. The research also had the added feature of being a participatory action research project, in that the participants in the collaborative learning group conducted the research in an attempt to further understand their practice and experiences as collaborators. The study was guided by the research question: What are the attributes of a successful collaborative learning experience?
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