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Introduction
Twenty-first-century learners have expectations that are not met within the traditional model of mainstream higher education (Castle & McGuire, 2010; Jean-Louis, 2011; Siemens, 2005). Further, as cutbacks to educational budgets continue, and centralized professional development opportunities decrease along with them, it will be difficult for universities to keep up with expectations and demands of students. Dialogue has begun to emerge on the future of higher education. Within this context, the massive open online course (MOOC) has been introduced as a movement that threatens to fragment higher education (Daniel, 2012; Friedman, 2013; Harden, 2013; Kolowich, 2013). With this dialogue and administrative attention directed toward MOOCs, it may be distracting higher education leadership from focusing on alternative options for supporting the needs of learners who demand both personalization and access to learning opportunities. "Universities and academics are, as always, faced with choices about how to change, and these choices need to be better informed about the kinds of students that are entering [our] institutions" (Jones, Ramanau, Cross, & Healing, 2010, p. 731).
Postsecondary institutions (PSIs) are moving toward learner-centered designs, shifting focus to process and not product. For example, 47 European nations who are members of the Bologna Process have adopted the Budapest-Vienna Declaration on the European Higher Education Areacalling for reform and cooperation among European PSIs, but most importantly calling upon institutions to "foster student-centered learning as a way of empowering the learner in all forms of education" (European Higher Education Area, 2010, p. 2). Further, at the program level, instructional approaches such as problem based learning (PBL) (Jurewitsch, 2012; Klegeris & Hurren, 2011; Salvatori, 2000) and inductive teaching and learning (Prince & Felder, 2006) foster the development of problem solving and inquiry skills in real-world contexts. Medical schools in Canada were among the first to use PBL as a core instructional approach and since then, "the PBL methodology has spread to a variety of different content areas ... and is practiced in many universities and colleges around the globe" (Klegeris & Hurren, 2011, p. 403). In a recent review of the literature, Spronken-Smith and Walker (2010) found that inquiry-based learning was gaining in popularity across many academic disciplines. Although these instructional approaches foster critical-thinking and problem-solving development in students, not enough has been...