Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) that employ a model-tracing methodology have consistently shown their effectiveness. However, what evidently makes these tutors effective, the cognitive model embedded within them, has traditionally been difficult to create, requiring great expertise and time, both of which come at a cost. Furthermore, an…

The North Carolina Virtual Public School completed its first session during the summer of 2007. Evaluation results revealed differences between accelerated and credit recovery students, including a significantly higher likelihood for accelerated students to rate their courses as high quality, to express interest in taking another online course,…

Two perspectives are used to reflect on the learning design of a postgraduate online course--that of the designer/facilitator and that of the learner. While the course focus is on online pedagogical approaches, the main aim is to connect learners with each other and with the facilitator so that together they may investigate, trial, challenge and…

This paper describes an ongoing EU project concerned with developing an instructional design framework for virtual classes (VC) that is based on the theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) (1983). The psychological theory of Multiple Intelligences (Gardner 1983) has received much credence within instructional design since its inception and has been…

This article reports the results of a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the suitability of 13 commercially available, authorized software programs for teaching reading and writing in the primary grades. These programs were assessed on interface design, content, instructional design, whether manufacturers' educational claims were supported…

Vocational education by its nature has a need for delivery methods that place a strong focus on the relationship between school and work and seeks to deliver instruction in a manner that bridges the two as seamlessly as possible. This paper presents a curriculum and constructivist-based instructional delivery approach, designed to emphasize a…

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments…

In this paper, we go beyond what have been described as "mechanistic" accounts of e-learning to explore the complexity of relationships between people and technology as encountered in cases of networked learning. We introduce from the social informatics literature the concept of sociotechnical interaction networks which focus on the…

The main purpose of this study is not to compare online and traditional face-to-face instruction merely to prove which one is better, but rather it aims to highlight some of the possible risks and strengths which may help to improve the role of teachers in both methods. The scene consisted of various thematic blocks from a training programme, with…

Spurred by preservice teachers' perceptions that diversity issues such as poverty would not affect their teaching, professors in 1 southeastern U.S. elementary teacher-preparation program took action, which resulted in this examination of the culture of poverty and the identification of strategies to best serve children living in poverty. The…

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights…

Rapid advances in educational and information communications technology (ICT) have encouraged some educators to move beyond traditional face to face and distance education correspondence modes toward a rich, technology mediated e-learning environment. Ready access to multimedia at the desktop has provided the opportunity for educators to develop…

Quality Matters[TM] (QM) is a set of standards to measure the quality of instruction and design in online or hybrid courses. Adopted by a growing number of institutions nationwide, QM is based on best practices and instructional design research. To meet or exceed QM standards requires that resources and learning activities in an online course…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a computational approach and a toolset to infer spatial displacements as they occur in route narrative documents and report on first experiments done to produce computer-aided learning (CAL) applications and instructional design editors that exploit the inferred georeferenced itineraries.…

Group social structure provides a comfortable and predictable context for interaction in learning environments. Students in face-to-face learning environments process social information about others in order to assess traits, predict behaviors, and determine qualifications for assuming particular responsibilities within a group. In online learning…