Globalization has stretched the scope of the online learner population from a homogeneous profile of mostly adult, mostly employed, place-bound, goal-oriented, and intrinsically motivated to one that is heterogeneous, younger, dynamic, and responsive to rapid technological innovations. This paper describes the emerging characteristics of the…

"Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006--Southern Edition" is based on data collected for the fourth annual report on the state of online education in U.S. higher education. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based on responses from over 700 southern colleges and universities, this year's study, like…

Attrition continues to be a major issue in higher education. Attrition rates for classes taught through distance education are 10-20% higher than classes taught in a face-to-face setting. Educators should engage students early and often, using different learning strategies customized to the class content and the students' pre-existing knowledge.…

The paper addresses the question of how to design for learning taking place on mobile and wireless devices. The authors argue that learning activity designers need to consider the characteristics of mobile learning; at the same time, it is vital to realise that learners are already creating mobile learning experiences for themselves. Profound…

The University of Florida is a large research institution with a freshman class of more than seven thousand students out of a total enrollment of about fifty thousand. Although a partnership with the University Writing Program has allowed the Libraries to reach almost four thousand students this past academic year, certain barriers still exist.…

E-learning on the Internet is constituted by the options that this global technology gives the user. This article explores these options in terms of the lifestyle choices and decisions that the learner will make about the virtual worlds, textual meanings and cultural groupings that they will find as they learn online. This is a non-linear process…

IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) is a promising technology aimed at supporting learning processes. IMS-LD packages contain the learning process metadata as well as the learning resources. However, the allocation of resources--whether data or services--within the learning design is done manually at design-time on the basis of the subjective appraisals…

Ideally, learning resources should be built over a shared pool of fine reusable granular learning objects. However, in order to avoid contextual lacks, dynamic creation of such resources would mostly rely on the conceptual relationships among learning objects inside a repository. These conceptual relationships, as well as the learning objects…

Learning object repositories and evaluation tools have the potential to serve as sites for interaction among different cultures and communities of practice. This article outlines Web-based learning object evaluation tools that we have developed, describes our current efforts to extend those tools to a wider range of user communities, and considers…

This study explores the concept of "transactional distance", a term coined by Moore (1993), which relates to the distance that exists in all learning relationships and can be more evident and potentially problematic in online learning environments. Reducing this psychologically perceived distance to help learners develop social presence…

European education today is characterized by two dominant trends. First, e-learning has made impressive advances in the past five years. Second, European higher education has become increasingly internationalized. The authors wanted to determine how e-learning is used in higher education in The Netherlands, their home country, to increase and…

Quality of e-learning systems is one of the important topics that the researchers are investigating in the last years. This paper refines the concept of quality of e-learning systems and proposes a new framework, called TICS (Technology, Interaction, Content, Services), which focuses on the most important aspects to be considered when designing or…

Today's young people--the Net Generation--have grown up with technology all around them. However, teachers cannot assume that students' familiarity with technology in general transfers successfully to pedagogical settings. This volume examines various technologies and offers concrete advice on how each can be successfully implemented in the second…

Teacher and trainer training is one of the most important determinants of the success of reforms in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) systems in recent years in the Mediterranean region. This is based upon the assumption that the role of teachers and trainers in the reform of TVET is a dual one; that of stakeholder and…

Expanded captions are designed to enhance the educational value by linking unfamiliar words to one of three types of information: vocabulary definitions, labeled illustrations, or concept maps. This study investigated the effects of expanded captions versus standard captions on the comprehension of educational video materials on DVD by secondary…