Achieving student participation, it has been argued, is one of the most important challenges in distance education. This explorative study examines whether a synchronous communication medium, instant messaging (IM), may enable students to participate more actively in online group work. When comparing two groups that adopted IM with two groups that…

The paper outlines a new paradigm and its underlying rationales for implementing networked learning environments that is emerging from new technologies such as multi-user platform, virtual worlds, virtual learning community, and intelligent agents. The proposed paradigm of the networked learning environments is described as inhabited virtual…

Acknowledging the fact that teachers are at the heart of any educational reform effort, the European Union funded project EarlyStatistics aims to enrich European children's learning of statistics by offering their mathematics teachers a high-quality online professional development program. A central conviction underlying the design of the program…

Multiple states set coursework in content area literacy as a requirement for secondary teacher licensure. This paper discusses the author's Content Area Reading and Writing course at the University of Louisville, designed for secondary preservice teachers who are in a range of disciplines: secondary English, science, mathematics, foreign language,…

"FACTC Focus" is a publication of Faculty Association of Community and Technical Colleges (FACTC) with the purpose of presenting diverse views on faculty issues. Included in this issue are: (1) Teaching Underwater (Jill Stukenberg); (2) The Ready Made Audience (Jason Nix); (3) Success or Insanity (J. Salas); (4) U Tube and Flickr…

This paper examines the practice of online discussion in a course specially tailored for in-service teachers who are pursuing their basic degree qualification at a teacher training institute. Analyses of postings to the asynchronous electronic discussion group were made according to the type of postings as proposed by Poole (2000). Four focus…

Web-based (or online) learning provides an unprecedented flexibility and convenience to both learners and instructors. However, large online classes relying on instructor-centered presentations could tend to isolate many learners. The size of these classes and the wide dispersion of the learners make it challenging for instructors to interact with…

This study investigates differences in use of, and attitudes toward the Internet and computers generally for Chinese and British students, and gender differences in this cross-cultural context. Two hundred and twenty Chinese and 245 British students' responses to a self-report survey questionnaire are discussed. Significant differences were found…

In information systems and end-user computer research, "using" appears to encapsulate a range of activities, such as reading, writing, viewing and so on. And yet it is a grossly inadequate descriptor for any of these activities, failing to account for the fact that texts--digital or otherwise--are produced and engaged by humans for a variety of…

With the increasing number of online courses within many higher education institutions, experienced instructors are facing the possibility of teaching online. These faculty members may face the task of converting their well-established face-to-face teaching strategies into an online environment. To better understand this transition, we analyzed…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe development of a component in a management principles course to develop university students' virtual team skills. There were several challenges in creating and implementing this new component. The paper aims to describe how these challenges were addressed and discusses outcomes associated with this…

"Instant Messaging" (IM) and "Presence," which is essentially the ability of being able to detect if other users are logged in on the network and send them messages in real time, has become one of the most popular applications of the Internet, causing people to want to stay connected to the Internet for inordinate amounts of…

This article presents a synthesis of the theoretical and research literature on facilitating asynchronous online discussions effectively. Online courses need to be designed so that they provide motivation for students to engage in productive discussions and clearly describe what is expected, perhaps in the form of a discussion rubric.…

The analysis of the process of collaboration is a central topic in current CSCL research. However, defining process characteristics relevant for collaboration quality and developing instruments capable of assessing these characteristics are no trivial tasks. In the assessment method presented in this paper, nine qualitatively defined dimensions of…

We present COLLECT-UML, a constraint-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that teaches object-oriented analysis and design using Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML is easily the most popular object-oriented modelling technology in current practice. While teaching how to design UML class diagrams, COLLECT-UML also provides feedback on…