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Blended courses, which combine face-to-face and online learning experiences, are showing substantial growth in higher education. Such a course modality has also been identified in the literature as a favorable ground for increasing student engagement and accordingly, diverse learning outcomes. Although the importance of the instructor’s role in a blended course is recognized in the literature, little research has studied instructional strategies in this course modality, particularly in relation to student engagement. This qualitative case study explores the instructional strategies that foster student engagement in graduate level blended courses in a business faculty. Semi-structured interviews of eight instructors were conducted, and information gathered was complemented by content analysis of the course plans and web portals. The findings revealed three categories of engagement strategies in blended courses: socio-affective, design and organization. Interestingly, most instructors emphasized one of these categories more than the others, in relation with a focus on emotional, cognitive or behavioral engagement of students. Several engagement strategies were detailed and illustrated for each category, both in online and face-to-face learning experiences, in relation to the dimensions of student engagement. Particularities of engagement strategies in blended courses were be discussed with respect to the literature.

Blended courses are rising in business education, and new modalities have emerged to increase flexibility of students. HyFlex courses combine online asynchronous activities with “flexible- synchronous” activities where students choose to attend online synchronously, face-to-face, or online asynchronously through recordings, bringing them full flexibility of participation. Addi- tionally, the flexible-synchronous activities preserve interaction opportunities between students and the instructor and support student learning. This study reports on the transformation of an operations course into a HyFlex modality to enhance student engagement through regular flexible-synchronous sessions as well as equivalent T&L activities across course sections. The study also brings a new perspective by highlighting effective strategies for engaging students in a HyFlex course. First, exploratory qualitative data suggested that the course organization with weekly flexible-synchronous activities, providing regular interaction opportunities and video- recorded, encouraged student engagement. Engagement strategies were also identified using both quantitative and qualitative data. The main strategies were open and trustful interactions for student behavioral engagement, links with practice and learning support for emotional engage- ment, and links with practice, learning support and instructor’s facilitation role for cognitive engagement. The study suggests that HyFlex is a promising course modality for fostering student engagement at the graduate level, especially in large-group business courses.

Les modalités de cours hybrides, qui combinent des activités synchrones (en classe ou virtuelles) et en ligne asynchrones, représentent un terrain potentiel d'augmentation du niveau d'engagement des étudiants dans leurs cours. L'étude de l'engagement des étudiants dans ces modalités nécessite toutefois l'élaboration d'une échelle de mesure, soit l'objectif de cet article. La nouvelle Échelle multidimensionnelle d'engagement des étudiants dans des modalités de cours hybrides (EMEECH) vient outiller chercheurs et formateurs pour mesurer l'engagement des étudiants dans ces modalités selon une perspective multidimensionnelle. Nous présentons son élaboration ainsi que des preuves de validité pour sa structure interne obtenues par analyses factorielles exploratoires et de cohérence interne sur la base de données diversifiées provenant de trois institutions universitaires. Un premier échantillon (n1 = 234) a permis d'identifier trois dimensions de l'engagement des étudiants : émotionnelle-cognitive, sociale et comportementale. Un second échantillon (n2 = 231) a appuyé la structure interne de la nouvelle échelle en confirmant sa structure factorielle et en présentant une très bonne cohérence interne.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital shift in higher education and forced university faculty to transform their courses into a blended or online modality to comply with current public health measures. Many instructors have implemented blended online courses, which combine synchronous and asynchronous online teaching and learning activities. The purpose of this study is to document university students’ learning experiences in blended online courses during the pandemic, and to identify instructional strategies to support student engagement in these courses. It adopts a mixed-methods research strategy in which data were collected through questionnaires from students who took a blended online course in the summer semester of 2020, in a variety of disciplines and academic cycles at four Quebec universities (n = 482). Following the analysis of student responses to open-ended questions, five recurring themes were identified: the enhancement of student-student interactions, the dynamism of synchronous and asynchronous sessions, the structured presentation of the course, the explanations and feedback from instructors, and the accessibility and involvement of instructors. For each theme, suggestions from student feedback are provided to facilitate student engagement in blended online courses.

The realities of the 21st century have led professors and lecturers to renew their learning assessment practices so that they are more adapted to and contextualized in the current professional world. Despite advances in teaching and learning, assessment methods may still deviate from practice in authentic contexts. Although some instructors are already familiar with more authentic assessments, most are accustomed to using exams as standard practices to test students' achievement of course objectives and essays to prepare students for research or written argumentation. Despite their benefits, such typical assessments often lack authenticity and do not develop the full potential of students' 21st-century learning or literacy skills such as communication, creativity, or working with technologies. Over the past decade, we have been witnessing the beginnings of a broader reflection on teaching, learning, and evaluating with technologies, including more authentic assessments. This reflective essay will present how technologies make it possible to diversify assessment methods, resulting in enhanced authenticity and development of 21st-century learning and literacy skills. Authentic assessment methods with technologies will be illustrated, e.g., recorded video presentations, explanatory interviews with descriptive assessment grids, PechaKucha presentations, blog posts, and social media and e-portfolios, with examples from several disciplines. Authors will also explain how proposing a number of methods to students for the same assessment may help answer their various needs and preferences without increasing instructors' grading load. Furthermore, authors will discuss how diversifying assessment methods with technologies often results in a transformation of assessment modalities. Beyond assessments as an evaluation of knowledge and/or skills at a fixed schedule, authentic assessments with technologies may become continuous or iterative processes with multiple feedbacks from i

This study aimed at building a reliable and valid scale for environmental factors related to student persistence in online courses, particularly relevant for adults or lifelong learners. Drawing on Kember and colleagues (1994)’ social integration and external attribution scales and subscales as a starting point, data collected in Canadian universities were randomly split into two samples. The first sample (n1 = 385) was used to explore the data set through principal component and reliability analyses. These confirmed a two-factor environmental scale composed of encouragements (factor 1) and time-events items (factor 2), as well as a two-factor persistence scale that included potential dropout (factor 3) and cost-benefit items (factor 4). All factors showed a very good internal consistency. The second sample (n2 = 381) was used to confirm the structural validity of environmental and persistence scales through confirmatory factor analyses and to compare this new structure to Kember et al. (1994)’ subscales. While the latter resulted in an insufficient model fit, the new environmental and persistence scales yielded a very good model fit with strong goodness-of-fit indices and statistics. These results confirmed the structural validity of the new scales, which can trustfully be used in further empirical studies related to online student persistence. The new scales can also be used by practitioners to detect at-risk students early in a semester, allowing to offer them specific individual support to foster student persistence in online courses.

Having a child who lives with a Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) can represent a high burden for parents. The objective of our study is to identify and analyze the main challenges expressed by parents so that health care services better meet the needs of parents of T1D children. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents of 19 T1D children regarding detection and diagnosis, initial management at the hospital, post-discharge adaptation including daycare or school reintegration, and long-term T1D monitoring. Data analysis was performed following an inductive approach. The results showed a lack of knowledge regarding T1D in the society, especially for parents and educators. Furthermore, most parents felt overwhelmed at the hospital, and not ready for the intense self-management education (SME). They suggested it could be split over an extended period and discussed from a more practical perspective. Parents' burden is highest in the post-discharge adaptation stage especially for school reintegration, management of blood glucose levels and calculation of carbohydrates. Finally, returning to a social life was difficult, but contacts with diabetic families was a relief. In conclusion, the SME ought to be flexible and adapted to parents' needs. Spreading it over a longer period would ease families' experience. Efforts should also be made to alleviate the parents' burden on the post-discharge adaptation perceived as the most difficult stage, especially for school reintegration where training and resources on T1D should be given to key staff. Public education campaigns would raise awareness and ensure better knowledge of T1D by general population.

In online or blended environments, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework sets that a meaningful educational experience derives from the interrelation of teaching, social and cognitive presences. Each presence is subdivided, resulting in a structure in ten categories at the basis for the CoI survey instrument. Although the survey structure in three presences was repeatedly validated in the literature, the categories within presences were not and were consequently investigated in this study. High internal consistencies between items of each category demonstrated that the structure is reliable. Its convergent and discriminant validity were confirmed using multi-group confirmatory factor analyses, that further allowed to reinforce the construct validation by evaluating its factorial invariance across independent samples collected in two universities and varying in gender and age (n1 = 343; n2 = 420). To assess its discriminant validity and because high estimated correlations between categories were observed, alternative structures in eight, seven and six factors were also compared to the original ten-category structure. They were all valid despite yielding inferior fits. The partial structural invariance of CoI structures in categories were also confirmed across groups. Next, a CoI structure in three presences resulted in an insufficient fit to data across independent groups. Much more conclusively, a second-order structure including both presences and categories demonstrated a very good fit to the data, highlighting the importance of categories to reflect students' perceptions. This paper, although presented at a conceptual level, enlightens the potential of studying the influence of categories on each other, learning outcomes, or to identify areas of improvement in online and blended courses by relying on meaningful and trustful categories that further characterize the well-known presences.

Blended online courses, which combine synchronous and asynchronous online activities, have expanded rapidly in higher education. How to enhance student engagement in such courses is unclear, although it is recognized that student engagement is malleable through instructional strategies. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the influence of categories of strategies on student engagement in blended online courses. A conceptual framework of instructional strategies indicated as fostering student engagement in the relevant literature was first presented, divided in eight categories (structure, pace, relevance, active, choice, relationships, explanations, guide). Then a research framework linking the categories of strategies to student engagement dimensions (emotional-cognitive, social, behavioral) was built and tested in blended online courses. Data collected in various disciplines and university levels at four universities (n = 482) were examined using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The structural model examination confirmed the combined effects of categories of instructional strategies on student engagement in such courses in all disciplines. Particularly, this study revealed that 1) establishing trusting relationships, 2) demonstrating the relevance of activities, content, and resources, and 3) maintaining a sustained course pace significantly impacted student engagement in blended online courses in all disciplines. Providing a large-scale portrait of how instructional strategies relate to student engagement in blended online courses, practical implications for teachers were also discussed.

Cette thèse porte sur les stratégies mises en place par les enseignants pour favoriser l’engagement des étudiants dans les cours hybrides en enseignement supérieur et sur l’influence de ces stratégies sur l’engagement des étudiants dans ces cours, selon une perspective multidimensionnelle. Les différentes modalités de cours hybrides (cours hybrides traditionnels, en ligne ou mixtes), qui combinent des activités d’enseignement et d’apprentissage synchrones en présentiel ou en ligne avec des activités d’enseignement et d’apprentissage asynchrones en ligne, sont de plus en plus populaires en enseignement supérieur. L’engagement des étudiants dans ces cours, qui a notamment des retombées sur leur persévérance, leurs apprentissages en profondeur et leur réussite académique, est toutefois encore peu étudié dans la littérature scientifique. En particulier, cette dernière n’a jusqu’ici apporté que des informations parcellaires sur la façon dont les enseignants peuvent favoriser l’engagement des étudiants (et ses différentes dimensions) dans les cours hybrides, ci-après dénommées stratégies d’engagement des étudiants. Suite à la recension des écrits et à la définition des trois concepts clés à la base de cette recherche doctorale, soit les cours hybrides en enseignement supérieur, l’engagement des étudiants dans ces cours et les stratégies d’engagement des étudiants, trois objectifs spécifiques ont été déterminés : (O1) décrire les stratégies d’engagement des étudiants, selon les enseignants, dans les cours hybrides en enseignement supérieur, (O2) construire une classification des stratégies d’engagement des étudiants dans les cours hybrides en enseignement supérieur, (O3) analyser l’influence des catégories de stratégies sur l’engagement des étudiants dans les cours hybrides en enseignement supérieur, selon une perspective multidimensionnelle d’engagement. Une méthodologie mixte séquentielle exploratoire a été adoptée dans cette thèse par articles, qui a impliqué autant des

Having a child who lives with a Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) can represent a high burden for parents. The objective of our study is to identify and analyze the main challenges expressed by parents so that health care services better meet the needs of parents of T1D children. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents of 19 T1D children regarding detection and diagnosis, initial management at the hospital, post-discharge adaptation including daycare or school reintegration, and long-term T1D monitoring. Data analysis was performed following an inductive approach. The results showed a lack of knowledge regarding T1D in the society, especially for parents and educators. Furthermore, most parents felt overwhelmed at the hospital, and not ready for the intense self-management education (SME). They suggested it could be split over an extended period and discussed from a more practical perspective. Parents’ burden is highest in the post-discharge adaptation stage especially for school reintegration, management of blood glucose levels and calculation of carbohydrates. Finally, returning to a social life was difficult, but contacts with diabetic families was a relief. In conclusion, the SME ought to be flexible and adapted to parents' needs. Spreading it over a longer period would ease families’ experience. Efforts should also be made to alleviate the parents’ burden on the post-discharge adaptation perceived as the most difficult stage, especially for school reintegration where training and resources on T1D should be given to key staff. Public education campaigns would raise awareness and ensure better knowledge of T1D by general population

We consider the problem of setting revenue-maximizing tolls on a subset of arcs of a transportation network, assuming that the users of the network are assigned to shortest paths with respect to the sum of tolls and initial costs. Our main results are concerned with a polyhedral study of the problem, i.e. the design of valid inequalities and facets for this pricing problem and some of its variants. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., SCOPUS: cp.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Consider the problem of maximizing the revenue generated by tolls set on a subset of arcs of a transportation network, where origin-destination flows (commodities) are assigned to shortest paths with respect to the sum of tolls and initial costs. This thesis is concerned with a particular case of the above problem, in which all toll arcs are connected and constitute a path, as occurs on highways. Further, as toll levels are usually computed using the highway entry and exit points, a complete toll subgraph is considered, where each toll arc corresponds to a toll subpath. Two variants of the problem are studied, with or without specific constraints linking together the tolls on the arcs. The problem is modelled as a linear mixed integer program, and proved to be NP-hard. Next, several classes of valid inequalities are proposed, which strengthen important constraints of the initial model. Their efficiency is first shown theoretically, as these are facet defining for the restricted one and two commodity problems. Also, we prove that some of the valid inequalities proposed, together with several constraints of the linear program, provide a complete description of the convex hull of feasible solutions for a single commodity problem. Numerical tests have also been conducted, and highlight the real efficiency of the valid inequalities for the multi-commodity case. Finally, we point out the links between the problem studied in the thesis and a more classical design and pricing problem in economics. /Considérons le problème qui consiste à maximiser les profits issus de la tarification d’un sous-ensemble d’arcs d’un réseau de transport, où les flots origine-destination (produits) sont affectés aux plus courts chemins par rapport aux tarifs et aux coûts initiaux. Cette thèse porte sur une structure de réseau particulière du problème ci-dessus, dans laquelle tous les arcs tarifables sont connectés et forment un chemin, comme c’est le cas sur une, Doctorat en Sciences, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Consider the problem of maximizing the revenue generated by tolls set on a subset of arcs of a transportation network, and where origin-destination flows are assigned to shortest paths with respect to the sum of tolls and initial costs. This work is concerned with two new combinatorial formulations of this problem and provides a framework for deriving valid inequalities. Copyright ©2006 IFAC., SCOPUS: cp.p, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished