This paper describes the functionality, scalability, and cost of implementing and maintaining a suite of open source technologies, which have supported hundreds of thousands of learners in the past year, on an information technology infrastructure budget of less than US$10,000 per year. In addition, it reviews pedagogical opportunities offered by…

There is an increasing focus within Higher Education on the wider student experience. Student engagement and a well-developed community are associated with greater levels of retention, student satisfaction and success. Whilst creating opportunities for students to engage with each other and staff may be easier in a face-to-face environment, the…

Twitter has over 326 million monthly active users with the number of daily users growing every year since 2016 and is increasingly used by students and academics to interact and build online learning communities. For distance language learners, Twitter offers an open, free, and accessible environment for interaction and engagement which is…

Although collaboration skills are highly valued by employers, convincing students that collaborative learning activities are worthwhile, and ensuring that the experience is both useful and enjoyable, are significant challenges for educators. This paper addresses these challenges by exploring students' and tutors' experiences of a group project…

This research examines selected online comments from open courses available on Chinese websites. These courses were created by universities in the West as an effort to build open educational resources (OER) and were recently translated into Chinese and were relocated to some popular Chinese websites. This research aimed to understand why the…

How do open and distance learning institutions review and renew themselves to ensure their continued fitness for purpose? Here we report on the work of a change team in the UK Open University, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning created to examine, innovate and improve student support. The existence of the Centre for five years from…

Research into tutoring at a distance has a fairly long history and the functions of tutors in distance education institutions are well understood. Over the past 20 years research into online tutoring has advanced significantly as such institutions have "gone electronic": in this paper we cite published research from the UK Open…

We report on a study involving Masters-level students who blogged as a part of a distance-learning course at the Open University, UK. We present an empirically-grounded framework that can be used to guide educators when they are considering blogging as part of their courses, and can be used by students' whose courses include blogging activities.…

An online group work project for off campus students, using wikis as the collaboration platform, has been conducted successfully for several years. Students were given the opportunity and technical means to collaborate, and staff could assess individual students' participation. However, the actual level of collaboration was less than hoped for,…

When asked what they would find most helpful to enable them to use technologies more in their teaching, most teachers say "give me examples, in my subject area" and "point me to relevant people I can discuss these issues with". Web 2.0 technologies--with their emphasis on sharing, networking and user production--seem to offer a…

Since the early years of the twenty-first century there has been an increasing interest in using Web 2.0 technologies to support learning in Higher Education. However, previous research suggests that the integration of blogging into courses can be difficult and cites problems with issues such as student compliance. We adopt a learner-centred…

The need to support users of the Internet with the selection of information is becoming more important. Learners in complex, self-organising Learning Networks have similar problems and need guidance to find and select most suitable learning activities, in order to attain their lifelong learning goals in the most efficient way. Several research…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on a study into how a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world (Second Life) can facilitate socialisation and team working among students working on a team project at a distance. This models the situation in many commercial sectors where work is increasingly being conducted across time zones and between…

The authors studied a course in which an instructor allowed individuals at a distance to participate. Although these students were not formally enrolled in the university where the class took place, the instructor gave them full access to all course materials and encouraged them to complete course assignments. The authors examined the time and…

Computer-mediated-communication (CMC) tools allowing learners to be in contact with native speakers of their target language in other locations are becoming increasingly flexible, often combining different modes of communication in a single web- and internet-based environment. The literature on telecollaborative exchanges reveals, however, that…