Research is being conducted at the Florida State University (FSU) School of Information Studies to determine the importance of interaction (teacher-student, student-teacher, student-student) to the success of World Wide Web-based learning graduate degree programs. Success will be measured in terms of retention, student satisfaction, and learning…

In this lesson, students work as marketing teams hired by a U.S. fast food company to study the feasibility of selling fast food in Latin America. Teams are composed of cultural, production, marketing, and advertising experts. Each marketing team will investigate a product and a Latin American country. Teams will present their research and…

Online learning is a relatively young field that is still being defined as a discipline. As faculty members wrestle with decisions about how to structure online courses for collaborative, connected learning, student perspectives of successful courses can provide valuable insights for decision-making. This paper presents general research findings…

"Projet Mercure," or the Mercury Project, was a consortium of universities in North America that used videoconferencing to link with university classrooms in France; its purpose was to provide a new approach to teaching French language and civilization. This paper examines one such videoconference between both Austin Peay State…

This report focuses on trade unions in Britain as negotiators for and providers of education and training, either alone or in partnership with employers and educational institutions. Section 1 introduces the report's aims. Section 2 gives an overview of union involvement in education and training. It also introduces the tensions within current…

This paper reports on the evolution of a software environment called ClassACT (Class Annotation and Collaboration Tool) from a simple multimedia annotation program to a multi-domain archival database management system. ClassACT was developed at Northwestern University (Illinois) for instructional use, and, although its original goal was to solve a…

In January 1999, an interdisciplinary seminar of doctoral students from cognitive, educational and computational sciences was organized to study theoretical texts that might provide insight into how to support collaborative learning with perspectives-based software. The seminar uses a Web-based tool called WEBGUIDE to mediate and structure…

Educational Research Information Center (ERIC) Trends are analyses of higher education literature contained in the ERIC database describing major concerns in institutional practice. Literature on teaching and learning has grown within the higher education literature base over the last decade. However, the themes are basically still the same as…

This paper provides a checklist of suggestions, hints, and competencies needed to take an online course from ideas to reality. The introduction addresses the pedagogical potential of the World Wide Web. Migrating the course to the online environment is discussed in the first section, focusing on the following considerations: determining course…

This paper documents a collaborative effort between faculty members from Pellissippi State Technical Community College (Tennessee) and Northwestern Technical Institute (Georgia) to create and deliver an online class on medical terminology. The following six aspects of the project are described: (1) the collaborative effort, including the viability…

This paper presents the results of the implementation of an instructional approach that supports teachers' learning of instructional design (ID) and honors their beliefs and concerns within the ID process; participants included two instructors and 23 practicing K-12 teachers enrolled in an instructional design course as part of a masters program.…

Since the restoration of Latvian independence in 1991 the issues of citizenship for non-Latvians and civic participation for all the people of Latvia have become acute. The paper provides statistical data on Latvia and states that, politically, Latvia is a parliamentary system of representative democracy that is directly accountable to the…

Experiences from a distance course conducted during 1996-97 for high-school teachers in Sweden and reports from other experiments have yielded the conclusion that collaborating via electronic conferencing systems demands new communication patterns. This paper uses theories about communication, group processes, and shared symbolic order and social…

Extensive reading (ER) programs involve students in silently reading large quantities of material. Research suggests that extensive reading is associated with gains in first and second language proficiency. Further, extensive reading can help learners develop a reading habit and increase their level of autonomy. This paper begins with a discussion…

As a compulsory part of the study in Pedagogical Information Science at the University of Bergen and Stord/Haugesund College (Norway) during the spring term of 1999, students participated in a distributed group activity that provided experience on distributed collaboration and use of online groupware systems. The group collaboration process was…