This report is the first in a series published by the IDEAL (Impact of Distance Education on Adult Learning) project. The IDEAL project ran from October 2013 to September 2015 with financial support from the EU Lifelong Learning Programme. The project aims to: (1) offer insights on the needs of adult learners to both policymakers and distance…

The purpose of this article is to analyze the perspectives of doctoral students on creativity and learning in the virtual environment. The researchers investigated the following central research question: to what extent is creative thinking fostered in virtual environments? In addition, the paper also examined how creativity is practiced in…

In recent years the educational community has increasingly embraced digital technologies for the purposes of developing alternative learning environments, providing diagnostic feedback, and fostering the development of so-called 21st-century skills. This special issue is dedicated to bridging recent work from the disciplines of educational and…

Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) is attracting a great deal of attention at present (Stockwell & Sotillo, 2011). However, it is important that teacher and researcher exploitation of technological developments be guided by more than just enthusiasm. "Language Learning & Technology's" commitment to empirical studies is admirable but, for…

Researchers investigated perceived satisfaction of undergraduate students with high-enrollment online course sections at a research-intensive university. A modified survey instrument was administered to all undergraduate students enrolled in 2 online statistics courses in which interaction was not a central element of course design. Students were…

It is an exciting time for online education. Lately, there has been breathless talk of a "revolution" and massive "disruption," largely based on Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) models pioneered by universities such as MIT and Stanford, and headline-grabbing start-up companies such as Udacity and Coursera. Meanwhile,…

Analytics has a significant place in the future of higher education by guiding reform and system change. As this case study has shown, analytics can do more than evaluate what students have done and predict what they will do. Learning analytics can be transformative, altering existing pedagogical processes, research, data management, and…

M-learning is the style of learning for the new millennium. Decreases in cost and increases in capabilities of mobile devices have made this medium attractive for the dissemination of knowledge. Mobile engineers, software developers, and educationists represent the supply side of this technology, whereas students represent the demand side. In…

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the process of generating natural language text from an input, which is a communicative goal and a database or knowledge base. Informally, the architecture of a standard NLG system consists of the following modules (Reiter and Dale, 2000): content determination, sentence planning (or microplanning) and surface…

This study explored an online learning community in a non-formal educational setting and the process participants used in order to share, create, and construct knowledge through their interactions in the online community. Participants in the study were college interns who were part of a grant that focused on providing professional development for…

Online learning communities supporting educator professional development are increasingly emerging and a growing body of research suggests that these communities may have the potential to improve professional practice. Effective online learning communities enable teachers to engage in collaborative learning, focus on improving learning outcomes,…

You've heard about blended learning, which mixes online learning with traditional classroom instruction. You have the support of your principal, the backing of your district, and you are ready to take the leap. Now what? In this step-by-step guide, teacher and education blogger Catlin Tucker outlines the process for integrating online discussion…

For e-learning initiatives to succeed, they must be designed to support a variety of trainees, methods, and content. Two important considerations in the design of any learning environment are the complexity of the tasks being learned and the socialization and connections of the trainees. Therefore, the goal of this research was to investigate how…

The protection of proprietary information that users print from their information systems is a significant and relevant concern in the field of information security to both researchers and practitioners. Information security researchers have repeatedly indicated that human behaviors and perception are important factors influencing the information…

Previous research suggests asynchronous online computer-mediated communication (CMC) has deleterious effects on certain cooperative learning pedagogies (e.g., constructive controversy), but the processes underlying this effect and how it may be ameliorated remain unclear. This study tests whether asynchronous CMC thwarts belongingness needs…