Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell signed legislation this month promoting the growth of virtual schools. The new law requires the state to develop policies for approving and monitoring a wide array of private and nonprofit online education providers. The legislative action in Virginia is the most recent major policy move by a state to expand the…

Social work education research frequently has suggested an interaction between teaching techniques and learning environments. However, this interaction has never been tested. This study compared virtual and face-to-face learning environments and included active listening concepts to test whether the effectiveness of learning environments depends…

Because lecture-based teaching limits student learning, many instructors are interested in pedagogical strategies that support critical thinking, student participation, and group discussion in large classrooms. Audience response systems, or "clickers," are an emerging tool for addressing this problem, but predominant pedagogical models for clicker…

The characteristics of the online environment alter how students and instructors interact. Scientific discourse among students and instructors in an online text-only synchronous environment was analyzed. In converting dialogue to text, many of the nonverbal cues, such as facial expression and tone of voice, which instructors use to gauge student…

The synchronous tool that is right for developing an online course depends on the context, needs and priorities. This report compares synchronous, virtual classroom systems Elluminate Live! v. 9 and Dimdim v. 4.5. The researchers compared the features of each system in terms of facilitation of communication, presentation of course content and…

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of articles presenting a new outlook on the methods of instructional design. These articles examine the nature of the process of instructional design and are meant to stimulate discussion about the roles of designers in the fields of instructional design, the learning sciences, and interaction…

Information Technology (IT) has spawned the growth of novel and innovative market mechanisms (such as online auctions) and associated businesses (such as eBay and Priceline) that were not feasible without the capabilities and reach of these modern information technologies. Previous studies on designing trading mechanisms for online markets…

This article describes a quasi-experimental comparison of two master's level social work classes delivering content on human behavior in the social environment. One class, delivered face-to-face, was largely synchronous. The other class, delivered using distance technologies, was more asynchronous than the first. The authors hypothesized that…

As Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) supported by synchronous technologies such as Synchronous Learning Management Systems (SLMSs) are still new to distance language professionals, criteria guiding the evaluation of the appropriate SLMSs for Distance Language Education (DLE) are urgently needed. This article proposes and discusses such criteria.…

This study aimed to clarify the relationship between media, learners' perception of social presence, and output in communicative learning using synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). In this study, we developed four types of SCMC: videoconferencing (image and voice), audioconferencing (voice but no image), text chat with image (image…

Personal learning networks (PLNs) are not new. People have long relied on their families, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to supplement their knowledge about the world. But the times are changing. Information and communication technologies (ICT), including an ever-growing repertoire of open source applications, have freed content from the…

Net-based collaborative learning discourses often suffer from deficiencies such as lack of coherence and coordination. It is suggested that the provision of two functionalities, referencing and typing, which learners may optionally use to ground their contributions during a chat-based discourse, can improve collaborative learning. In particular,…

There is an increasing impression among online geography educators that interaction can be developed based on specific teaching and learning methods. The authors developed a practical research study to investigate this issue. The study was based on advanced graduate courses in geography at Beijing Normal University and Texas State University.…

The primary purpose of this study is to determine how students are impacted by the use of Classroom Response System (CRS) technology. This research explores the nature of the outcomes experienced by students and their perceptions on the leading pedagogy and practices for using CRS technology in the classroom. The research is both quantitative and…

In this dissertation we develop a framework that combines data mining, statistics and operations research methods for improving real-time decision support systems in healthcare. Our approach consists of three main concepts: data gathering and preprocessing, modeling, and deployment. We introduce the notion of offline and semi-offline modeling to…