Higher education institutions are under significant pressure to provide affordable, sustainable approaches that will prepare their students with the skills they will need after graduation to achieve success in the 21st Century workplace. Digital Media Simulations are among the new technologies that have emerged with the promise to help…

Interactive relationships in online learning communities can influence the process and quality of knowledge building. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between network structures and social knowledge building in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums in a learning management system. The…

In distance education both the physical separation between learner and instructor, and the use of technology create an educational environment that is characterized by learning autonomy and the learner's active involvement. Because of these, self-regulated learning constitutes an inseparable concept of distance education. This study explores the…

This paper discusses findings of a study investigating how students, in four online courses, engaged in inquiry-based learning with and without support from a facilitator. The investigation was conducted by analyzing discussions of the online courses using the community of inquiry model. The results of the study imply that students in online…

Various Web 2.0 technologies can be used to support pedagogy. Examples include wikis, blogs, and social media including forum discussions. Online class forum discussions involving electronic text can result in robust strings of data containing meta-knowledge, inherent meaning, themes and patterns. Based on instructional design, learning outcomes…

Over five and a half million students in higher education were taking online classes in fall 2009. The annual growth rate (21%) in online enrollments from 2002 to 2009 far exceeded the enrollment growth (2%) in higher education for that seven year period (Allen & Seaman, 2010). Continued rapid growth in online enrollments is predicted despite…

Research has shown that simply linking learners from different countries using technology does not automatically bring about learning benefits; instead it frequently ends in tensions that, if not addressed, could potentially hinder learning. Using the lens of Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory, activity theory, and Engestrom's activity systems…

This study examined the effect of civil servants' Self-Directed Learning Readiness (SDLR) and network literacy on their online learning effectiveness in a web-based training program. Participants were 283 civil servants enrolled in an asynchronous online learning program through an e-learning portal provided by the Regional Civil Service…

The framework of this study is cooperation between students of English at a Chinese university and their counterparts at a Danish university, i.e. neither group of students are native speakers of English. The theoretical framework for the study is Vygotsky's sociocultural approach combined with the work by a number of researchers on the link…

This study explored the use of the Web-based virtual environment, Adobe Connect Pro, in a postgraduate online teacher education programme at the University of Waikato. It applied the tenets of Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance (Moore, 1997) in examining the efficacy of using the virtual classroom to promote quality dialogue and explored how…

Purpose: The rising popularity of social software poses challenges to the design and evaluation of pedagogically sound cross-cultural online collaborative learning environments (OCLEs). In the literature of computer-mediated communications, there exist only a limited number of related empirical studies, indicating that it is still an emergent…

Research into tutoring at a distance has a fairly long history and the functions of tutors in distance education institutions are well understood. Over the past 20 years research into online tutoring has advanced significantly as such institutions have "gone electronic": in this paper we cite published research from the UK Open…

This case study focused on whether women, enrolled in a graduate course, would engage in online debate, and if so, whether their postings would contain traditional elements of argumentation (i.e., argue, elaborate, critique). Content analyses for two debates were performed. For the most part, the overarching messages in both debates were…

Approximately 3.9 million students enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2007. According to Allen and Seaman (2008), online education growth rates have continued to outpace total higher education growth rates and there are no signs of online growth slowing down. As higher education institutions offer increasing numbers of online and…

The inclusion or not of chat services within Virtual Reference (VR) is an important topic for university libraries. Increasingly, email supported by a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database is suggested in the scholarly literature as the preferred, cost-effective means for providing university VR services. This paper examines these issues and…