Purpose: Aims to outline the issues and debates about a five-week fully online staff development program piloted in the University of Paisley, Scotland. Design/methodology/approach: A case study was the approach taken. Findings: The programmer was designed to introduce lecturers to the theoretical and pedagogical issues surrounding online…

Purpose: Aims to investigate reactions to online delivery, student perceptions of the rates and depth of participation, and levels of engagement with the learning process in a Western Australian University. Design/methodology/approach: The sample for this study comprised 108 students who were enrolled in both undergraduate and postgraduate…

Schools and colleges of education have been criticized for not adequately preparing preservice teachers to integrate technology in their future classrooms. It has been proposed that a central component in the preparation of preservice teachers is for the instructors of content methods courses to model strategies for integrating technology that…

Finding ways to better understand prospective teachers' development is central to teacher preparation. To effectively foster development, teacher educators must determine how their students conceptualize and understand teachers' work: How do they understand learning and learners? What are their general and specific understandings of subject…

This article discusses the way online communications, and more precisely e-mail, can be used for English language teaching in a Primary Education classroom in Greece. The first part: (a) briefly describes the context where this particular technology will be used; (b) considers the pedagogical issues and language learning potential of using e-mail…

This article describes research on the learning of object-oriented programming (OOP) by novices. During two academic years, we taught OOP to high school students, using Java and BlueJ. Our approach to teaching featured: objects-first, teaching composed classes relatively early, deferring the teaching of main methods, and focusing on class…

The research discussed in this manuscript was supported by a capacity building grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education as a "Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to use Technology Grant (PT3)". The problem was to determine the effect on teacher candidates of a field experience in which candidates used technology to support the teaching of a…

Pressure for better measurement of stated learning outcomes has resulted in a demand for more frequent assessment. The resources available are seen to be static or dwindling, but Information and Communications Technology is seen to increase productivity by automating assessment tasks. This paper reviews computer-assisted assessment (CAA) and…

Student retention is an important issue in distance education. In the literature of higher education literature, however, information on student retention in online courses is incomplete. Few empirical studies have been conducted. Many articles reference the issue and then provide descriptions of best practices to address retention. Seldom,…

For years, the author has been a fan of assigning students in business communication classes to draft messages that explained complex decisions or situations. The assignment is the author's variation of the negative or bad news message. This traditional genre has generated a new Web-based method by which people and organizations respond to public…

Employers consistently rank communication skills, in particular writing ability, among the most important skills for undergraduate business students to possess. However, improving writing skills, especially with respect to punctuation, grammar, and word choice, often requires substantial teacher time and effort. To assess and improve student…

The MIT Libraries enthusiastically implemented real-time online reference service in September 2001. After 15 months, Ask Us!--Live was suspended due to ongoing software problems. This article describes the four-part assessment of the service with recommendations for the future. (Contains 6 figures and 21 notes.)

Childhood overweight has received increased national attention as a social and health problem. Childcare providers play an increasingly prominent role in the lives of young children and are therefore important in initiating change. This qualitative study determined the role of childcare professionals in the prevention of childhood overweight.…

This study compares mean ratings, inter-rater reliabilities, and the factor structure of items for online and paper student-rating forms from the University of Washington's Instructional Assessment System. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

This article examines the key concepts of active learning, metacognition, and transfer of knowledge, as put forth by the National Research Council's approach to the new science of learning, in relation to ways that E-Learning applications might improve learning both inside and outside the classroom. Several initiatives are highlighted to…