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Higher education institutions utilize faculty who possess subject-matter expertise and terminal degrees in specific disciplines. Often, faculty are not formally trained in educational theory, pedagogy, or best practices related to student learning. Best practices in course design standards are available to faculty who seek them out. However, with little formal education or design training, faculty deploy courses lacking best practices in course design to students. This creates a mismatch between how faculty perceive they are utilizing subject-matter expertise to educate students and how students receive the educational information from faculty. Before an investigation into whether focused training in best practices of course design standards may be helpful to faculty, a comparison of the course design standards faculty perceive they implement to the design standards that can be observed in their courses needed to be completed. Utilizing a quantitative approach, this study compared faculty self-perception of their inclusion of course design quality elements in a self-designed fully online course to investigator-observed course design quality elements in the faculty's self-designed fully online course. Faculty participants in this study all taught at least 1 fully online course for a small Midwestern health care college during a single academic year. The results of the study demonstrated disconnects between faculty self-perception of the inclusion of best practices in course-design elements and the observed inclusion of best practice course-design elements in these areas. The disconnects were identified in the following areas: The presence of materials in the course that support efficient student course navigation and communicate general faculty expectations of students, the presence of materials that help students to clearly understand the syllabus and what work is expected to be completed within a certain timeframe, and the presence of clear information about the delivery method of the course.

Engineered DNA-binding proteins enable targeted manipulation of the genome. Zinc fingers are the most well characterized DNA-binding domain and for many years research has focused on understanding and manipulating the sequence-specificities of these proteins. Recently, major advances in the ability to engineer zinc finger proteins, as well as the discovery of a new class of DNA-binding domains - transcription activator-like effectors (TALEs), have made it possible to rapidly and reliably engineer proteins targeted to any sequence of interest. With this capability, focus has shifted to exploring the applications of this powerful technology. In this dissertation I explore three important applications of engineered DNA-binding proteins.