Skype, Edmodo, iApps, and Shutterfly may sound like fantasy characters or mythical creatures from some futuristic novel. But the students at Paine Primary School in Trussville, Alabama, will gladly explain that these odd-sounding names belong to the Web 2.0 applications in which they are fast becoming fluent. For these kids--and those at other…

In a previous Techtalk column, Peterson and Caverly (2005) introduced the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001) as a guide for online learning. The CoI model has maintained longevity and applicability to a variety of both synchronous and asynchronous technologies (Ice, Curtis, Phillips, & Wells, 2007). In this…

Education is one of the pillars in which a Welfare State is effectively based on in order to achieve an equitable distribution of wealth. In contemporary society, knowledge and education are among the most appreciated goods, and everyone should have the right to acquire them, without distinction of gender, race, age, health or religion. From our…

In this article the authors describe their efforts to support teachers' development of deep, connected understandings of school mathematics and to find ways to make use of the teachers' learning as a context for subsequent mathematical and pedagogical development. The authors detail the evolution of their model for Online Asynchronous…

Using open-ended virtual spaces can be challenging and time consuming for teachers. Fortunately, there are many resources in-world and on the web with general guidelines and specific tools to help teachers be more productive. Most of the groups that host these resources recruit professional members with experience in simulation and game-based…

This article discusses whether the very act of accessing online students' experiences of teaching may itself foster students' sense of belonging to a learning community. The article reports and reflects on the application of Brookfield's critical incident questionnaire (CIQ) in postgraduate courses delivered online in 2008-2010 through the…

This paper discusses students' experiences with the use of identification codes in a graduate course delivered asynchronously via the Internet. While teaching an introductory masters level graduate course in distance learning, the authors discovered that the learning management system, Moodle, was programmed to display identification codes rather…

In this paper, we urge practitioners to consider the potential of podcasting for teaching, learning and assessment. Our perspective is drawn from research on IMPALA (Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation), which showed that there is a range of successful podcasting approaches for students on campus. After briefly surveying the…

Recently, many counselor education programs have considered whether and how to offer courses online. Although online counselor education courses are becoming increasingly common, the use of synchronous (real-time) teaching approaches appears to be limited at best. In this article, we provide a context and rationale for incorporating online…

Given the importance of administrative attention to blended learning, this article adumbrates the institutional benefits but also the institutional challenges of this integration of online and on-campus instruction. The reasons for engaging in blended learning determine how it will play out, so the "why" is given precedence over the "how". But…

Distance education strategies for remotely deployed, highly mobile, or institutionalized populations are reviewed and critiqued. Specifically, asynchronous, offline responses for special military units, Native Americans on remote reservations, prison populations and other geographically, temporally or technologically isolated niche populations are…

Capstone courses provide an opportunity to integrate several topics and to help prepare students for the real world. This paper examines the process of developing an undergraduate finance capstone course for both onground (face-to-face) and online course delivery. The process begins with the determination of the core competencies employers require…

The purpose of this study was to share the author's experience of using the virtual classroom when teaching online mathematics course. Various softwares including MyMathLab and Wimba are introduced and the teaching methods and tips are provided and analyzed. Results show that the use of the virtual classroom enhance the communication in the online…

The last decade has seen a great variety in the ways in which instructors have incorporated the World Wide Web into their traditional classroom courses; however, this combination has not always translated into changes or improvements in teaching and learning. The real challenge has proved to be not the addition of web resources to the traditional…

In November 2008 the Sloan Consortium published "Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States." This study produced survey statistics relating to enrollments in online courses. The study confirmed what most administrators and faculty members already suspected: the growth of online higher education continues to be astounding;…