This multicase study describes the unique experiences of online instructors within a novel context of grant-funded online course design assistance in a large Midwestern university. Five instructors reflected on their experience, from conception to implementation of their asynchronous online courses, in individual debrief sessions conducted by the…

Undergraduate students living on-campus and taking online and face-to-face courses concurrently, are the predominant consumer of online classes (Seaman et al., 2018). However, they have lower rates of persistence for online courses as compared to face-to-face courses (Hart, 2012; Xu & Jaggars, 2011). Part of the reason could be due to the…

Blended learning has a muddled history but is still evolving. Technological innovations and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 led higher education to create a new blend to blended learning, one that did not follow the generally accepted and most numerous definitions or previous examples of blended learning. This new blend of blended learning lacks the…

Discussion forums are often a primary tool used for teaching and learning in asynchronous online courses. In this article, the author shares her experiences using discussion forums to promote learning, teacher presence, and community. In a retrospective microanalysis of discussion forums posts and interactions, the author identified five major…

According to the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000), an enriching educational experience online in a collaborative learning environment requires three interdependent elements: social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. Social presence provides interaction in the online environment that allows…

As e-resources become more ubiquitous, and the technologies available to access them more sophisticated, libraries have greater opportunities to reach out to global users. However, this same distance means that some users never even set foot in a physical library. This case study will describe how one large academic library started a business,…

Teacher professional development and course work using asynchronous online environments seems promising, yet little is known about how mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) develop practices for such spaces. Research has shown that views of learning impact design of online learning spaces, enabling and constraining particular student action. More…

Background: New emerging online technologies have made dynamic changes in the structure of the online environment possible to address varying needs of diverse learners. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the changes that occurred in online instructional design and strategies in mathematics education courses taught over a course of…

To date, teacher perceptions of online language teaching have attracted very little attention. However, these perceptions may influence decisions regarding instructional design, teaching practices and eventually the learning experience. Furthermore, teacher perceptions can contribute to the design of teacher training programs. This study provides…

This paper builds on Grossman's notion of approximations of practice as scaled-down opportunities for preservice teachers to learn to teach by doing. The authors propose the use of media rich, collaborative web-authoring tools for preservice teachers to create, complete, or edit scenarios in which they practice particular activities of teaching,…

Using a qualitative content analysis approach, this study reviewed 47 published studies and research on online teaching and learning since 2008, primarily focusing on how theories, practices and assessments apply to the online learning environment. The purpose of this paper is to provide practical suggestions for those who are planning to develop…

Asynchronous discussion boards are an important element of online courses in higher education settings. Currently, questions persist about the quality of online interaction and discussions in which students are engaged. In addition, online instructors may not be utilizing instructional strategies that are appropriate for web-based learning…

This study investigates the effects of an optional and required (jigsaw) task on learners' quantity and quality of use of language under synchronous and asynchronous conditions. The question raised is: Does performing either of these task types under synchronous conditions cause a compounding effect that either positively or negatively impacts…

This paper offers insight into learning Slovak in an e-learning environment. The need to reach distance-learners of Slovak led to the implementation of a web-based course on Slovak language and culture in 2008-2010. The pedagogical basis of the course, called Virtual Slovak, is the socioconstructivist approach to teaching and learning, in which…

After a discussion of the state of both misaligned and informative online and distance education research, the authors in this special issue (hereafter called the collective) extract evidence-based principles about strategies that work. Both are addressed in this article. First, their criticisms centered on the value of comparative research. Those…