This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to "story" their experiences of this virtual environment,…

The changing online learning environment requires that instructors depend less on the standard tools built into most educational learning platforms and turn their focus to use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and free or low-cost commercial applications. These applications permit new and more efficient ways to build online learning communities…

Assessing speaking is one of the most difficult tasks in computer based language testing. Many countries all over the world face the need to implement standardized language tests where speaking tasks are commonly included. However, a number of problems make them rather impractical such as the costs, the personnel involved, the length of time for…

Much research has been done on blended learning and the design of tasks most appropriate for online environments and computer-mediated communication. Increasingly, language teachers and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) practitioners recognise the different nature of communications in online settings and in face-to-face settings; teachers do not…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has become a part of contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. ASR systems however are being criticized for their erroneous performance especially when utilized as a mean to develop skills in a Second Language (L2) where errors are not tolerated. Nevertheless, these errors can…

This paper reports on an exploratory case study of learner participation within the context of online language learning in virtual world platforms. Data for this investigation was collected through a case study of a Business English course within a qualitative Case-Study Research framework. This study examines learner activity in virtual worlds in…

Students live and work in worlds where virtual communities, such as those created via social network sites (e.g. Facebook) may interplay with their formal learning, but scholars of design pedagogy know little about how these spaces can support design learning. In this study, we describe how a set of informal communications, encapsulated in five…

Social media is the new face of global communication, and, instead of blocking it, schools should be embracing it. Twitter presents opportunities for teachers to link students with real-time information and diverse ideological perspectives. The authors describes the use of Twitter in a high school civics class during the 2012 presidential election.

This comparative study investigates how two groups of design and technology students generated ideas in an asynchronous computer-mediated communication setting. The generated ideas were design ideas in the form of sketches. Each group comprised five students who were all 15 years of age. All the students were from the same secondary school but…

In seeking to prepare students to be "citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world," teachers engage students in live, online discussions about what justifies war, while at the same time grappling with the requirements to teach the memorization of people, places and isolated events. Teachers and a…

This essay is a response to the third biennial conference showcasing research and scholarship on academic identities held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in July 2012. The first conference, with the theme of "academic identities in crisis", was held at the University of Central Lancashire in 2008; the second, "academic…

Theoretical models of collaborative learning through online discussions presuppose that students generally attend to others' posts. However, a succession of studies over the last decade has shown this assumption to be unwarranted. Instead, research indicates that learners attend to others' posts in diverse and particular ways--an…

Case studies hold great potential for engaging students in disciplinary content. However, little is known about the extent to which students actually cover the problem space afforded by a particular case study. In this research, we compared the problem space afforded by an instructional design case study with the actual content covered by 16…

In distance education system use of different media enable the learners to start the course of study independently. The appearance of the internet and the expansion of web have now changed distance learning from a broadcasting way to an interactive way, and allowed connecting the learners and instructors who are geographically divided.…

The implementation of e-learning as a strategy has risen exponentially over the last 20 years as more adults use this medium to enhance their skills and acquire knowledge. The utilization of technology offers significant advantages to both learners and organizations in terms of cost, time and rich learning content. E-learning has been widely…