This think piece by Carolyn Alexander-Bennett is a reflection of her keynote speech at DEANZ2016 conference, which was held from 17-20th April at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. In her speech Carolyn revisits the issues, developments, and technology trends that led to the birth of FarNet (an online cluster of schools catering for the…

This article presents the findings of a field experiment in medical English with first-year medical students at the University of Pavia, Northern Italy. Working in groups of 8-10, the students were asked to produce a corpus of medical texts in English demonstrating how the human body is itself a meaningful text (Baldry and Thibault 2006: Ch. 1).…

As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design…

This research explored online graduate students' preferences using the Constructivist Internet-Based Learning Environment Survey (CILES) and how everyday learner attributes affected their preferences. The purpose of this study was to identify graduate students' preferences for various types of learning in order to aid designers with aligning…

It has well been established that it is important to be able to leverage any organization's processes and core competencies to sustain its competitive advantage. Thus, one learning objective of an online MBA is to teach students how to apply the VRIO (value, rarity, inimitable, operationalized) model, developed by Barney and Hesterly (2006), in…

Despite the central role that well organized and structured course content plays in engaging online learners with content, the authors point to the absence of guidelines for organizing content in ways that meet course learning goals. Recognizing the need for a design solution and, perhaps, the need for a new design model, "design…

Social networking platforms and computer games represent a natural informal learning environment for the current generation of learners in higher education. This paper explores the use of game-based learning in the context of an undergraduate chemical engineering remote laboratory. Specifically, students are allowed to manipulate chemical…

Given the changing dynamics of society and the pressures on Extension organizations to adapt, leadership effectiveness has become a crucial element of success. The program presented here is designed to enhance individual emotional intelligence. Through in-depth engagement of the participants, they learn to apply dynamics of emotional intelligence,…

Despite the numerous health benefits, population physical activity levels are low and declining with age. A continued increase of Internet access allows for website-delivered interventions to be implemented across age-groups, though older people have typically not been considered for this type of intervention. Therefore, the purpose of this study…

In many societies e-learning has become the main mechanism supporting distance education. Although e-learning efforts are considered to be a significant corporate investment, many surveys indicate high drop-out rates or failures. This research uses an integrated model in order to assessing the influence of IS-oriented, psychological and behavioral…

The rapid growth of online higher education has necessitated increased employment of adjunct faculty. Correlational analyses were implemented to determine whether a relationship exists between adjunct undergraduate faculty's perceptions of organizational support, overall job satisfaction, and online teaching experience, and their work engagement.…

This paper reports on the first stage of an Italian national project, Access Thorough Text (ACT henceforth), designed to respond to issues related to reading strategies, textual barriers and online access to web texts in English in educational environments, with specific reference to English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The first stage of the work…

This study involves an evaluation of online learners' experiences with two Internet-based clinical social work courses. The evaluation sought to discover whether there were differences in learning between traditional (under 25 years old) and nontraditional age learners (25 years and over) who completed the asynchronous online course. The study…

The "community of inquiry" is a techno-pedagogical framework that has gathered significant attention in online education research. It has been implemented in diverse disciplines, (foreign) language learning being one of particular interest for the authors of this paper. Due to the dynamics proposed by the framework, it appears as a…

Now a day, the buzz word for a language classroom is "learner autonomy" that is defined differently by different experts. The fundamental of learner autonomy, however, is to involve the learning in the teaching and learning process. The term "webquest" is also a new concept to the teachers in this part of the world. A webquest…