From 2005 to 2008, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is funding a series of distance education (DE) studies in its Pan Asia Networking (PAN) region. Eight collaborative projects are under way in Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Viet Nam. The…

The significant increase of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the United States raises complex questions about how to provide these students with access to high quality education that can improve both their content knowledge of school subjects and their English proficiency, particularly their academic English proficiency. The development of…

This study looked at the instructional and assessment effects of using learning journals in three distance asynchronous computer conferencing courses (n = 18, n = 16, n = 17). The instructor used a design-research methodology: each iteration of the course involved modifications to how learning journals were used based on analyses of the responses…

Contextualised and ubiquitous learning are relatively new research areas that combine the latest developments in ubiquitous and context aware computing with educational approaches in order to provide structure to more situated and context aware learning. The majority of recent activities in contextualised and ubiquitous learning focus on mobile…

The cost of health and safety (H&S) failures to the UK industry is currently estimated at up to 6.5 billion British Pounds per annum, with the construction sector suffering unacceptably high levels of work-related incidents. Better H&S education across all skill levels in the industry is seen as an integral part of any solution.…

One recent goal of the British Higher Education Funding Council has been to find ways to use technology to cope with the increasing size and diversity of the student population. A development team at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) received a grant to investigate how technology might be used to identify and help students put at risk by…

A computer-based training (CBT) system was designed to train learners to recognize six styles of 18th century American antique chairs. The project consisted of five phases. The first phase consisted of a needs analysis to determine the training needs for the target population. Three groups of learners were identified: antique sales personnel,…

Discusses current assumptions about what constitutes excellence in software for reading and writing instruction by describing commonly accepted guidelines and arguing that evaluation criteria focuses mainly on technical rather than on learning and educational issues. A priori questions emphasizing learning issues are proposed to strengthen…

Describes the development and pilot testing of an interactive software lesson series designed to increase reading and writing abilities of illiterate adults and adolescents. Results of pilot studies of the High Quality Educational Program indicate the microcomputer approach to instruction combined with appropriate software offers a promising tool…

The rapid advancement of communication technologies is resulting in a wide array of design and development choices for distance learning projects. The 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, is developing a prototype distance learning project designed to serve geographically separated learner populations. Project staff…

What are research-based, pedagogically sound ways to use Web-packaged courseware to impact student learning? This paper deals with these issues, and provides seven different, pedagogically sound ways to use such software in support of higher education. The paper first outlines several features that are common to most courseware products: one-stop…

New approaches to teaching and learning are common, but nothing will change unless these ideas are brought to the frontlines of the classroom. Facing the challenge to incorporate varied innovative teaching and learning strategies, set statewide and schoolwide goals, and implement standards, schools need a systematic, consistent framework and high…

International collaborative learning is becoming more viable through a variety of Internet enabled software products. Group Support Systems appear to offer promise. But it is not well understood how to facilitate the teaching and learning process in electronic environments. If education is to involve an interactive process of collaborative inquiry…

This paper demonstrates that the axis between cognition and multimedia language teaching is very short by introducing three fundamental concepts: (1) mediatizing, i.e., the direct use of any medium as a way of expressing oneself; (2) multimediatizing, i.e., the choice of a multimedia support to express a didactized informational content; and (3)…

The emergence of wide-spread interest in computer managed instruction systems brought a course in the design of software systems. The resulting course Hardware/Software Systems for Instructional Use'' is described. (Author/HB)