The rapid growth in online and virtual learning opportunities has created culturally diverse classes and corporate training sessions. Instruction for these learning opportunities must adjust to meet participant needs. "Online Course Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications" is a comprehensive reference source for the…

Prior research has identified four kinds of interaction that affect the learning process in distance education (D. Hillman, D. Willis, and C. Gunawardena, 1994; M. Moore, 1989). This paper defines, characterizes, and describes a fifth form of interaction of particular importance to certain learners, especially within the context of…

Discussion of Internet 2, a partnership in educational efforts, focuses on the Internet 2 Commons which is a collaborative framework for the advancement of research and pedagogical activities. Discusses the use of videoconferencing to improve communication and to create an environment for group collaboration; networking and collaboration; video…

In addition to giving an overview of Delphi methodology and describing the methodology used by the researchers in two Delphi studies, the authors provide information about electronic communication in Delphi studies. Also provided are suggestions that can be used in a Delphi study involving any form of communication. (SLD)

Discusses the term distributed education and its relationship to distance education. Topics include distributed training on corporate intranets; distributed expertise, which refers to the use of mediated communication for education and training by experts in different locations; and distributed, or situated, cognition, which would include…

Reports on one professor's use of integrated synchronous electronic office hours (i.e., a "chat room") with asynchronous course conferencing (i.e., email) in a class on introductory marketing. Describes its uses, limitations, benefits, potential problems, and results from a student survey. (EV)

This article describes a system that autonomously mediates threaded discussions in distance learning environments. The objective is to produce large-scale threaded discussions among an arbitrary number of participants with no human mediation effort.

Questionnaire data have many important uses, but is laborious for the subjects to provide. EDUFORM tries to alleviate this problem by enabling the creation of adaptive online questionnaires. The idea is to build a probabilistic model from previously gathered data, and employ it for predicting the profiles of new users on the basis of a subset of…

This column describes the latest innovation in iPod use, podcasts, which are audio files that can be downloaded and played either through a computer or an MP3 player such as an iPod. Because they are feeds, users can subscribe to podcasts and have them downloaded automatically to their computers. The author discusses ways in which podcasts may be…

Previous computer conferencing research has been concerned with the organizational, technical, social, and motivational factors that support and sustain online interaction. This article studies online interaction from a different perspective. Rather than analyze the processes that sustain discourse, the following research examines how and why…

Instant digital communication is going to say and the wise teacher needs to acknowledge and keep pace with the technology that eases and speeds up the way the DIG (digital immediate gratification) generation learns. Some DIG- friendly strategies that teachers can employ to make learning more attractive and meaningful are presented.

The results of this study show that effective questioning skills increase student intellectual moves that, in turn, facilitate the process of knowledge construction in online synchronous discussion (OSD). The open-ended questions elicited multiple perspectives by promoting student participation, while OSD enabled them to share and debate multiple…

This article reports on a project (electronic role-play) run at Nottingham Trent University. It investigates how knowledge can be constructed collaboratively in an open setting based on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the internet as primary source for material. The analysis will concentrate on evidence of (1) focus on language form and…

This paper puts forward a series of theoretical underpinnings and design considerations for embodying emotional and aesthetic aspects of virtual (reality) and learning environment (VLEs) in support of ubiquitous teaching, studying and learning. The authors assert that a VLE should be considered as an interactive and sensation-producing affordances…

Since 1992, the Chilean Ministry of Education is developing a sustained process to incorporate ICT (Information and Communications Technology) into schools by providing equipment and training to faculty members. Schools appoint one of their teachers as a coordinator who will then receive an intense technological and pedagogical training. The…