The widening participation agenda was instigated by a government seeking to develop skilled workers in the global economy, yet it has consistently refused to fund the burgeoning student population adequately. Managers and academics within the HE sector have to reconcile requirements for the implementation of policies with an increasing "audit"…

The causal relationships among the three presences in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework are explored and tested in this paper. The CoI framework has been used extensively in the research and practice of online and blended learning contexts. With the development of a survey instrument based on the CoI framework, it is possible to test the…

As graphically driven, animated, interactive applications offer educators new opportunities for shaping course content, new avenues for research arise as well. Along with these developments comes a need to study the effectiveness of the individual tools at our disposal as well as various methods for integrating those tools in a classroom setting.…

As Internet technology encroached on the public school classroom about a decade ago, Kim Ross, superintendent of the Houston School District in Houston, Minnesota, saw an opportunity. At first, he and his administrative team simply wanted to offer students in the district of 1,300 access to more classes via the web than what a district that size…

Professional teacher communities appear to be positively related to student learning, teacher learning, teacher practice and school culture. Teacher collaboration is a significant element of these communities. In initial teacher training as well as in-service training and other initiatives for teacher learning, collaborative skills should be…

Teachers are searching for new venues through which they may meet stringent professional development requirements. Under competitive funding from NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Office of Education and the NASA Explorer Schools Project, U.S. Satellite Laboratory, Inc. created a series of live, online, interactive…

The purpose of this study was to review the asynchronous and synchronous tools of the Web assisted foreign language instruction. This study was conducted on the base of literature survey, so the findings was interpreted and evaluated for the purpose of the study. In the study, firstly, we were preferred to give a brief description of the each Web…

Describes a study that explored best practices for community building in university Web-based learning environments. Explains use of embedded case study design and discusses results that indicated that incorporating community-building strategies during course design, and encouraging interactions between participants during the course, can…

Describes an Internet-based simulation used in a course about business strategy in an emerging economy. The simulation, when coupled with today's dominant strategy paradigm, the Resource Based View, appears to yield a course design that attracts students while emphasizing the actual substance which is crucial in such a course. (EV)

Suggests that classroom learning ("c-learning") is not going to go away, despite the rise of instructional technologies and that a combination of classroom and web-based training may be the ideal. (JOW)

Factors driving the trend toward customer-focused electronic learning (CFEL) include the increased sophistication of products and services, the need to reduce the customer training burden, and the need to bolster revenues. CFEL can shift training from a support role to a marketing tool and a profit center. (JOW)

Investigates undergraduate student preference for overt vs. covert responding in a Web-based tutorial using a within-subject design. Explains covert question format, which requires passive thinking, and overt format, which requires active responding; and discusses results which show a preference for the overt format. (Author/LRW)

Teachers' clear perceptions of technology use and competence in planning and implementation affect their attitudes towards using technology in general and in the classroom in particular (Almekhlafi, 1999). However, the number of research studies to inform implementation of Web-based instruction (WBI) has been low and the interest in student…

Purpose: Aims to examine a negotiation-oriented and partly web-based game "Surfing Global Change" (SGC) invented by the author based on didactics of self-managed learning and successfully implemented in WebCT. Design/methodology/approach: Along three historic generations of web-based teaching (WBT), the key functionalities of any platform…

Collaborative e-learning delivers many enhancements to e-learning technology; it enables students to collaborate with each other and improves their learning efficiency. Semantic blog combines semantic Web and blog technology that users can import, export, view, navigate, and query the blog. We developed a semantic course blog for collaborative…