Close listening, perhaps the most important skill in music education is seldom practiced in the 21 st century. The ability to listen, understand, communicate, and interpret what you hear is central to education in general and transferable to many life situations and modes of communication. For this reason, listening is the primary focus of most first year post-secondary music history courses. It is also one of the most challenging skills to teach in large classroom formats. To address these challenges, we developed a blended delivery approach to support recognition, comprehension, and communication of musical materials. Based on the literature on music cognition and Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) Representational Redescription Model (RR Model) of knowledge acquisition, we designed a cognitive framework to support the design of enhanced listening models. This paper describes the results of a pilot project which presented the students with selfpaced on-line listening activities followed by a virtual listening/discussion session with peers. Both activities were well-received by the students and level of music experience was not associated with students' perceived value of the activities, indicating that students with varied backgrounds found the activities useful. The results support our cognitive framework as a foundation for technologicallyenhanced listening activities for postsecondary music courses.

At a comprehensive, public university in Western Canada, a fourth-year course in risk and safety management was recently made a requirement for all engineering students; depending on their program, students may take this course in their second, third, fourth, or fifth year of their program. As a result of increasing class sizes, this course was shifted from traditional to blended instruction. Since blending and opening this course to students with varying years of undergraduate engineering experience, instructors noted a difference in students’ maturity (e.g., a change in quantity and quality of in-class discussion, questions, participation, student-teacher interactions, and problem solving capabilities) and questioned whether this impacted their interactions with online material. Research examining the impact of blended learning in Engineering has primarily focused on large first-year undergraduate courses; research about blended learning in upper-year engineering courses is sparse. Studies investigating courses with students of varying years of experience in the program are virtually non-existent. Therefore, to better understand students’ interactions with online material during blended learning as connected to years in their program, we examined the relationship between levels of interaction and performance of students by year in program. This study analyzed approximately 2000 students’ interactions with online material and performance across five sections of a risk-management course in engineering. We found that students who had completed more years of their program interacted less with online material than students earlier in their undergraduate careers. Academic performance, on the other hand, was higher for students who had interacted more with online material and slightly higher for students who had completed more years in their program. These results suggest that the delivery of instructional materials may need to be tailored to students’ year in their program. Further implications and areas of future study are discussed.

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This study is an extension of previous research on the infusion of technology into a postsecondary music course to promote the skill of close-listening of music. Due to many in-class hindrances (e.g., time, equipment, acoustics, class size) students in postsecondary music courses do not often experience quality listening opportunities to be able to detect important musical elements. For this study, we developed on-line, supplemental listening activities using Articulate Storyline, Adobe Connect and the virtual world OpenSim. We pretested students on music experience, computer experience and level of self-regulation. At the end of the course, students answered a survey on their enjoyment, tendency to recommend, engagement, perceived increase in understanding of material and whether the activities were worthwhile. In a comparison of 2014 and 2015 results, we found that students with high selfregulation levels rated the above items more positively when the content included more advanced musical concepts. In addition, we found that students who interacted with the supplemental on-line activities and materials achieved higher grades than those who did not. Students who accessed the comprehensive on-line activities close to when the material was presented in class performed better than those who waited until exam time.

Universities around the world are increasingly moving towards blended learning models to engage their 21st century learners (Alammary et al., 2014; Brenard et al., 2014; Tandoh et al., 2014). However, students’ engagement and satisfaction with blended learning in dental education remain understudied. To address this gap, this study examines the effects of a blended learning approach on students’ satisfaction and engagement within dental hygiene and dentistry oral radiology courses. Thirty-five students participated in a survey designed to measure two main constructs: student engagement (per Fredericks et al., 2005) and student satisfaction (per Owston et al., 2013) with the addition of one student providing interview data on each of these constructs. It was found that students were generally satisfied (67%) with the blended learning course format with 65% of students expressing a preference for the blended format. This finding was complemented by students’ also expressing that they were emotionally engaged (70% engagement score), cognitively engaged (69% engagement score), and behaviourally engaged (61% engagement score). These findings suggest that blended learning may be of benefit to the engagement and satisfaction of dental students’ learning the interpretation of dental radiographs.