Drawing on the University of Massachusetts experience in developing successful blended local programs, this paper suggests guiding principles that include mission-driven responsiveness to local contexts and partnerships; using low-cost marketing strategies available through local relationships and brand; attending to students' preferences for…

This paper examines the concept of learning objects, the advantages they offer, and related issues. Learning objects focus on content, while the Learning Design specification addresses pedagogy. Underlying both of these approaches is the motivation to reuse, which has cost and quality benefits. Despite these benefits, adoption of the two…

The Olympiad movement has a long history in Estonia, and the national system developed several decades ago. The first Olympiad for gifted and talented students was held in mathematics in 1950. Now there are more than 20 different fields of competition for basic school and gymnasium students. In 2005/2006, Estonian teams participated in 18…

Following on the heels of charter schools, virtual high schools have gradually become more common. Typically, they are technology-driven magnet schools with competitive admission. Many are free and actively recruit traditionally underserved students. Parents of highly gifted children often cobble together academic solutions--a college class here,…

In this paper, we propose three different ways of using IMS Learning Design to support online adaptive learning modules that include educational videogames. The first approach relies on IMS LD to support adaptation procedures where the educational games are considered as Learning Objects. These games can be included instead of traditional content…

An Internet-based e-learning system offers many benefits over traditional learning environments. It provides a time, class size, and geographical location independent learning platform to students in addition to being able to consolidate e-learning content from a vast amount of Internet Web sites and deliver it to students. However, as the…

There has been a rapid proliferation of online courses and shareable content objects. These courses often include a vast array of information, yet they are not instructionally sound. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a procedure (tool) that will help instructional designers determine if existing e-learning courses and sharable…

Previous studies regarding online learning have focused on learner perspectives, such as student learning outcomes, their perception of or satisfaction with online learning, and so forth. Only a few studies have addressed the faculty perspective, which is one of major factors in the success of online learning. The few studies that claim that…

This book, written by authors representing 12 countries and five continents, is a collection of international perspectives on distance learning and distance learning implementations in higher education. The perspectives are presented in the form of practical case studies of distance learning implementations, research studies on teaching and…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…

In the mid-1990s, the University Of North Carolina (UNC) School of Dentistry entered the digital era by publishing curricula, syllabi, and modules on the Web. The School took this step in part to give students greater access to materials that supplement the lecture-based courses in the program, and in part to help students prepare for examinations…

Most educators accept the premise that, in an ideal world, learning would be delivered in the manner and environment that best suit the needs and learning styles of individual learners. In the future, technologies like personalization, integration, and electronic portfolios will progress toward this ideal by broadening the learning universe. These…

This article presents an interview with Clark Aldrich, whose expertise as an "e-learning guru" (one of three identified by "Fortune" magazine in November 2000) rests on substantial foundations: his service as the Gartner Group research director who initiated and developed the firm's e-learning coverage, his leadership of the world class team that…

This article proposes a framework that can help institutions break down and analyze the costs of online learning so they can make decisions about how to improve the cost-efficiencies of online education. The framework involves looking at costs across elements (which include the two stages of development and delivery plus administration of the…

Higher education staff involved in e-learning often struggle with organising their student support activities. To a large extent this is due to the high workload involved with such activities. We distinguish support related to learning content, learning processes and student products. At two different educational institutions, surveys were…