Online learning environments afford opportunities for participation and equally offer a new perspective on engaging vicariously. Drawing on the concept of vicarious learning and taking account of the roles of input and interaction for language development, this paper reports on an enquiry into students' retrospective use of recorded group…

Distance students are time poor and some drop out of their studies because they fall behind with coursework. This raises the issue of how course teams decide upon how many study hours should be included in a course. This article presents a number of Open University projects that have addressed student workload management and relates how learning…

In independent learning contexts, the effectiveness of the feedback dialogue between student and tutor or, in the absence of a tutor, the quality of the learning materials, is essential to successful learning. Using the voices of participants as the prime source of data through a combination of data-driven and concept-driven approaches, this…

Explores some recent theory and research developments on the role and character of television, and its impact on learning in distance education. The implications for learning of distributional and social, control, and symbolic (audiovisual) characteristics of television are discussed. Fifteen references and an outline of television applications…

This study investigated the experience of learners enrolled on an Open University (UK) French course, and included personality factors, motivation, and tutor and student roles. The data gathered via multiple elicitation methods gave useful insights into issues of special relevance to distance language education, in particular the lack of fit…