Teaching Artists are an important component of the Utah Shakespearean Festival's Education Department's outreach touring program that visits K-12 schools throughout Utah each year. However, the Education Department could be using Teaching Artists in different and better ways to help K-12 teachers infuse theatre into their curriculum. This work looks carefully at the outreach offered by the Utah Shakespearean Festival's Education Department and then compares it to the outreach work being done by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Based on the analysis of the three festivals, assessment benchmarks are identified to aid the Education Department in evaluating their use of Teaching Artists and suggestions are made to help them strengthen their outreach programs through the creation of a Teaching Artist training program that would allow more Teaching Artists to work in Utah K-12 schools. The work concludes with ideas for lesson and unit plans for Teaching Artists of various levels to use in the K-12 classroom that align with the State Common Core Standards for Language Arts that were adopted by Utah in August, 2010.

Interaction is a core element in the design of blended and distance learning environments. The importance of understanding these interactions and what might increase effectiveness of such interactions in education is paramount for meaningful learning. This dissertation consists of two qualitative case studies designed to provide a rich, descriptive look at interactions in a high school distance/blended-learning context in the home-study and technology-meditated seminary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the study article, Moore's (1989) interaction framework was used as a lens for understanding the learner experience. Thematic narratives were used to highlight themes related to students' perceived learning gains from learner-content interaction and their hesitancy to engage in learner-learner and learner-instructor interactions if they had not met personally. In the second study, Garrison's (2007) Community of Inquiry framework was used to understand the impact that teacher decisions, other than the selection of content, had on the cognitive and social climate of the learning experience. This study describes how a teacher's facilitation of social interaction influences the course learning outcomes. The results highlight the teacher's role in providing the educational and social climate needed to foster learner interactions. This study noted that when the teachers gave learners the opportunity to interact in a live setting, it appeared to foster the relationships needed to interact online. The narratives also highlight how a teacher helped learners interact with one another around content online.

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A gap exists in education research in the area of online readiness for secondary courses. In the current study, I examined the use of an online readiness assessment to inform students and educators of the necessary skills, aptitudes, and propensities needed for secondary course completion. In this research study, the perceptions of 17 secondary students in a North Texas public school were examined. Using a three-phase design, qualitative demographic surveys, focus groups, and open-ended end-of-course success questionnaires were collected and analyzed. The findings revealed the Revised McVay Online Readiness Assessment beneficial for providing students with information regarding skills needed for their online course success. Students were interested in how prior online experience influences online readiness and successful completion as well as the influence prior expectations of online learning had on online success. In addition, the study revealed the importance of student readiness relating to more specific self-regulatory skills including time-management, metacognitive self-monitoring, and task-strategies. The study results also revealed students found importance in knowing their comfort with online communication. K-12 school system and curriculum leaders may consider and take action to ensure effective curriculum and programs are implemented to achieve the desired results of student online course completion as well as providing students with necessary skills, such as comfort in online communication, and self-regulation specific to time-management, metacognitive self-monitoring, and task-strategies. The study results suggest an online readiness assessment would prove even more useful with the inclusion of such specific skills.

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