One institution's attempts to implement an ambitious wholly online learning policy is examined in the Australian higher education setting. The conditions that led to a diversity of models of wholly online unit development are considered, along with teachers' design intents in establishing their online teaching and learning environments. The…

Policy formulation and implementation is a highly contested domain within the South African Higher Education landscape. This contestation can be attributed to the lack of wide stakeholder involvement and the architecture of the policy-making process. The contestation is also born of an absence of a systemic monitoring and evaluation mechanism to…

Adaptive LMS have not yet reached the eLearning marketplace due to methodological, technological and management open issues. At aDeNu group, we have been working on two key challenges for the last five years in related research projects. Firstly, develop the general framework and a running architecture to support the adaptive life cycle (i.e.,…

Instructional engineering provides methods to conduct the design and adaptation of competence development programmes by the combination of diverse learning components (i.e. units of learning, learning activities, learning resources and learning services). It occurs through an established process workflow in which models with diverse levels of…

For the past decade the buzz words in teaching and learning have consisted of "the knowledge economy," "information literacy," and "transferable skills." The idea being; ensure students emerge from higher education with the skills needed to participate in the "knowledge economy." In response academics have…

According to Barab "et al." (2004), the ideal community of practice (CoP) is a "persistent, sustained social network of individuals, who share and develop an overlapping knowledge base, set of beliefs, values, history, and experiences focused on a common practice and/or mutual enterprise" (p. 55). Thus, a CoP has a social…

Any application of information and communication technology in education (ICTE) sits, at times uncomfortably, at the intersection of three key disciplines: technology, education and sociology (including reflexivity). To confuse matters, any specific study may need to take account of specific knowledge within subdisciplines, such as organisational…

There has been interest recently in how mobile devices may be motivating forces in the right contexts: for example, one of the themes for the IADIS International Conference on Mobile Learning in 2007 was "Affective Factors in Learning with Mobile Devices" (http://www.mlearning-conf.org). The authors have previously proposed six aspects…

At last year's ECEL [European Conference on e-Learning] conference e-Learning in practice was often concluded to be more e-Teaching in that it focused on delivery and technology, with relatively little attention paid to the context of learning or the long-term consequences. This paper uses the example of a highly entrepreneurial company, who have…

Work undertaken on the development of Foundation degrees at the University of Glamorgan directly addressed employer and higher education concerns that the new award should aim to build on, and not reinvent, the HNC/HND awards it sought to replace. One of the key factors in this was to reconsider the role and purpose of "work experience."…

Online instruction has grown about as much as it possibly can within current educational structures. Educators are at the point where something has to give: Either schools will stay the same and leave online efforts at a standstill, or educators' concept of school will change and allow online instruction to grow. The primary obstacle to growth is…

It is commonly agreed that professional development of teachers in the use of information and communication technologies should be sustained over time. Most professional development, however, is delivered in single or short sequences of face-to-face sessions, paying little heed to this requirement. Once the face-to-face training is completed, a…

EDUCAUSE inaugurated its annual Current Issues Survey in 2000 by asking the primary representatives, typically CIOs, of its member institutions to identify up to three critical IT issues (five starting in 2004) from among 30 to 40 in response to each of four questions. The survey response rate has typically been 35 to 40 percent, with a…

Open and distance education has integrated quality assurance processes since its inception. Recently, the increased use of distance teaching systems, technologies, and pedagogies by universities without a distance education heritage has enabled them to provide flexible learning opportunities. They have done this in addition to, or instead of,…

The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of professional group membership on the rate of adoption of e-learning. The sample consisted of Engineering, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, and Marketing professionals from a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. Professional groups were categorized based on Rogers (1995) five categories of…