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The purpose of this article is to evaluate value-add methods and activities applied to organizational communication college-level course work. Graduate organizational communication faculty are aware that their classes serve as direct preparation for students entering business and professional careers. The knowledge learned and the skills acquired in these communication classes are abilities that students take with them to the career marketplace. As such, instructors look for ways to extend the boundaries of the classroom beyond the text and traditional instruction. Faculty believe that each method selected adds value to the educational experiences of students. However, do these methods and activities truly add value to the educational experience as the instructors hope they will? Furthermore, are specific programs more valuable than others?

Graduate programs in creative writing featuring 'star' faculty of well-known authors, upon whose fame these programs are built and sustained, are criticized. The act of teaching creative writing becomes deprofessionalized and marginalized in such 'star' pedagogies which are neither community-based nor theoretically constructed, with the ethos-based teaching detrimental to students who would need both writing and teaching experience as future academia.

Partnerships between employers of environmental health graduates the schools that produce those graduates can help overcome three of the most serious challenges currently facing undergraduate environmental health programs: employing qualified faculty ensuring the relevance of the skills and knowledge developed by environmental health students, and motivating students to learn, One form of partnership, in which students work on real problems faced by employers, can be particularly useful in a variety of courses, The authors present several examples that have been used at Illinois State University., Introduction Undergraduate environmental health programs face three ongoing challenges: (1) employing qualified faculty, (2) ensuring the relevance of the skills and knowledge developed by environmental health students, and (3) motivating [...]

The ARCH (A Real Community Helps) After-School Program developed by two professors of Webster University helps improve the literary skills of children who do not have a strong educational background. The first ARCH program selected the students of Carver Elementary School, St. Louis, MO, and had student volunteers from Webster University, St. Louis Community College and Vashon High School as tutors. Started as a project involving individuals, the ARCH program evolved into a community program in which everyone cares for everybody else.

Correct answers don't necessarily mean students understand. Through the Developmental Activities Project, teachers learn to help children develop the mental structures that undergird learning. Lori, a 3rd grader, enrolled midyear [...]

Byline: Angel A. Juan, Thanasis Daradoumis, Javier Faulin, Fatos Xhafa We address the issue of monitoring students' and groups' activities in online collaborative learning environments. Such monitoring can provide valuable information to online instructors, who may guide and support the development of efficient collaborative learning projects. We have developed and tested an information system, Student Activity Monitoring using Overview Spreadsheets (SAMOS), which facilitates the automatic generation of weekly monitoring reports derived from data contained in server log files. These reports provide online instructors with visual information regarding students' and groups' activity, thus allowing for a quick and easy classification of students and groups according to their activity level. That way, entities with a low activity level are easily identified, which allows the establishment of just-in-time assistance for them. Furthermore, instructors can use complementary qualitative monitoring reports, issued by the students themselves, to anticipate potential problems – such as student dropouts or possible conflicts inside the groups – and take operational and tactical decisions to handle them.

The current focus of education reformers has been on educating urban school children parents, so as to improve the conditions of underperforming schools. A study evaluating a parent program, which is on lines with the social justice model and, is also a part of major school-university partnership, is presented.

A set of field notes taken in the second and third-grade classroom is presented as part of a statewide study of early literacy instruction. The coping strategies of two students as they attempt to overcome the boredom of the literacy practices at their school are discussed.

The [monarch butterfly] project helps the children connect to the environment and have an impact upon it. I hope it will help them to see school as a place where […]