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The Learning and Engagement Questionnaire (LEQ) measures instructional and environmental variables associated with learner engagement. The present study sought to determine the suitability of the LEQ to measure learner engagement with a sample of Canadian teachers and to further investigate the factorial structure in comparison with the Australian context. Canadian teachers (N = 739) from Kindergarten to Grade 12 responded to the LEQ in ways that are explained by two factors identified as "Instructional Cycle" and "Student-Directed Learning." The previously reported factor structure of the LEQ identified five factors in the Australian study: "Goal Directed Learning," "Task Selection," "Intensive Teaching," "Teacher Responsiveness," and "Planning and Learning Environment." There is a discussion of the cross- cultural differences between the Australian and Canadian participant groups and their dominant pedagogical approaches. The LEQ has the potential to raise teachers' awareness of the strategies they can use to facilitate inclusive practice through differentiated student engagement.

Although university-level distance education often sets itself up in contradistinction to conventional educational provision, the thinking most distance educators is framed by a set of un-stated axioms that derive from the conventional system. This axiomatically framed approach to university education at a distance may well blunt the potential for distance education to achieve its true potential. This paper describes the axioms and attempts to explain their continuing power to constrain education thinking in the light abundant evidence that such thinking flies in the face of the facts. It uses Athabasca University, a free-standing distance education university located in Alberta Canada, as a case in point.

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To understand the threat of ship strikes for marine predators such as whales, quantitative tools are needed that measure specific impacts without ignoring the many uncertain and stochastic elements of whale-vessel interactions. We developed a tool that focuses on one particularly complex aspect of the ship-strike problem: the encounter rate , the fraction of co-occurrences (i.e., times that whales and vessels occur within the same 1-km2) that result in an imminent collision. This tool uses iterative simulations, based in R, and basic inputs regarding marine traffic and whale biology to predict the rate at which the precise courses of the whale and the vessel intersect in space and time. The result of this simulator is a spatially explicit probability distribution of encounter rates, which can be summarized for reports as well as integrated into subsequent stages of a ship-strike impact analysis. We explain the design of this tool, provide its source code, and demonstrate its utility with four case applications. First, we estimate encounter rates for fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) in Gitga'at First Nation waters (British Columbia, BC, Canada) and quantify the differences in encounter rate between vessel classes. Second, we predict encounter rates for the same area in 2030, by which time a new shipping lane is slated to be established in Gitga'at territory, highlighting the impact of shifting traffic composition vs. traffic volume. Third, we assess the sensitivity of these estimates to changes in vessel and whale characteristics, finding that vessel length is the most important determinant of the encounter rate, followed by whale speed. Fourth, we integrate the encounter rate estimator into a shipping impact assessment for Gitga'at fin whales. Our predictions indicate that this decade's traffic increase in Gitga'at waters alone could match Potential Biological Removal for coastal BC fin whales. However, the assumptions underlying our prediction require validation and further study. The encounter rate simulator is available in the R package, "shipstrike". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a summary of the travel-time survey of the principal road network of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to mensurate congestion. It aims to formulate a transportation plan for the GTA that shall address mobility, high-quality transit, economic competitiveness, growth, and financial and environmental stability. Results of the study have documented the travel times and speeds associated with the opening of a controlled-access tolled highway going around Metropolitan Toronto.