Socioeconomic Status– and Gender‐Based Differences in Students’ Perceptions of E‐Learning Systems

Many universities are pursuing increases in on‐line course offerings as a means of offsetting the rising costs of providing high‐quality educational opportunities and of better serving their student populations. However, enrollments in online courses are not always sufficient to cover their costs. One possible way of improving enrollments is through marketing campaigns targeted to specific demographic groups. In this study, we take a first look into how students’ perceptions of e‐learning systems, prior to their enrollment in an online course, vary across socioeconomic status and gender. Findings suggest that prior to taking an online course, working‐class students perceive e‐learning systems more positively than their middle‐class peers but that little difference exists between genders. Armed with this knowledge, universities may improve online course enrollments by marketing online courses specifically to working‐class students or through campaigns aimed at improving middle‐class students’ perceptions of e‐learning systems.     

Education and the Contested Meanings of ‘Global Citizenship’

This article examines the oftentaken-for-granted educational policy and curricular discourses of globalization and global citizenship within their larger cultural, political, and economically uneven histories and unequal consequences. Drawing upon evidence from recent scholarship on the implications for classroom pedagogy embodied inefforts to internationalize curricula in the North American university contexts, as well as specific related efforts in one Canadian context, the University of British Columbia,this article unpacks the contested meanings of global citizenship from above and below.The author analyzes three dominant curricular discourses of global citizenship. Far from weakening the Canadian state and building instances of transnational democratic educational communities, these dominant discourses may actually reinforce notions of Canadian gendered and racialized nation-building and nationalism. The article raises questions about what an alternative curricular and educational policy discourse from below premised upon efforts to decolonize curricula might look like. By way of provisional conclusion, the author discusses some promising examples of such an alternative,showing how they depend on seeing the relations between the local and global neither as fixed abstractions nor as a slogan system to be applied in absolutist racial, geographical,national, or culturally essentialist terms.     

Issues in secondary teacher preparation

As teacher educators who have had extensive experience working in the field‐based secondary programs of two universities, the authors recognize the benefits, as well as the challenges, of forming partnerships with secondary educators to design and deliver collaboratively the teacher preparation program. In this article, experiences are shared and some of the major issues related to secondary teacher preparation that have been identified and contemplated are discussed.