For minority serving institutions, policies that support learners call for decisions about equity, quality, cost, impact on national economic performance and international global relationships.

The Community Development Master's Program is an inter-institutional, trans-disciplinary degree program that began in 2005 online at five participating universities in the North Central region. This article discusses outcomes of interviews with current and past students in the program to determine if a multi-institutional program, versus a program…

Central to the argument about the influence of media on learning is how this influence is measured or ascertained. Conventional methods which comprise the use of true and quasi-experimental designs are inadequate. Several lessons can be learned from this observation on the media debate. The first is that, conventional methods of ascertaining the…

This paper provides an illustrative example of an approach to creating and reporting individual profiles of engagement in particular behaviours in an online asynchronous discussion (OAD). Individual results of analysis of transcripts of an OAD can provide insights different from those gained by focusing on aggregate measures of group behaviours.…

Described is the administration and outcomes of an asynchronous, Web-based, comprehensive exam covering MSW foundation curriculum. Over a 48-hour period of test availability, 198 students completed the 4-hour-long exam composed of 100 randomly generated questions. Significant differences in student performance across college locations were found.…

There is increasing interest in creating frameworks for online discussions to improve learning outcomes in higher education environments. Many of these frameworks rely on and promote argumentation-based "challenge" models as the primary mode of discourse. This study tested one existing framework, created by Gunawardena, Lowe, and Anderson (1997),…

What does the future hold for educators and facilities professionals when it comes to planning, building, funding, and operating school facilities? No one can absolutely know beforehand. However, there are many, many indicators of where public education in the United States may well be destined. These indicators take the form of already occurring…

This paper explores four issues that have emerged from the research on social, cognitive and teaching presence in an online community of inquiry. The early research in the area of online communities of inquiry has raised several issues with regard to the creation and maintenance of social, cognitive and teaching presence that require further…

Training health professionals within university environments has traditionally focused on face-to-face methods. Practitioners working within the UK National Health Service (NHS) have found it difficult to gain leave from work to attend for study due to the demands of the NHS and staff shortages. In response, the authors developed a distance…

This study looked at the instructional and assessment effects of using learning journals in three distance asynchronous computer conferencing courses (n = 18, n = 16, n = 17). The instructor used a design-research methodology: each iteration of the course involved modifications to how learning journals were used based on analyses of the responses…

In this technologically advanced age, much emphasis is put on collaboration in education at many levels. As a result, faculty co-teaching (collaborative teaching) has grown dramatically. This paper introduces how two instructors from different countries (USA and Turkey), one experienced in online teaching and the other in medical informatics,…

In addition to experiencing the generic quality and cost problems faced by all colleges and universities, community colleges face problems particular to their student populations. They need to design more flexible schedules for working adult students, create a greater sense of community or engagement for commuting students, address the special…

Web-based computer-aided instruction (CAI) has become increasingly important to medical curricula. This multi-year study investigated the effectiveness of CAI and the factors affecting level of individual use. Three CAI were tested that differed in specificity of applicability to the curriculum and in the level of student interaction with the CAI.…

This study explored student-led facilitation strategies used to overcome the challenges of instructor-dominated facilitation, enhance the sense of learning community, and encourage student participation in online discussions. It presents a series of cases of students' facilitation strategies and using qualitative data analysis of discussion…

Online learning programs are designed to expand high-quality educational opportunities and to meet the needs of diverse students. While the primary reason online courses are offered in school districts is to expand offerings to courses that would otherwise be unavailable, the second most commonly cited reason for offering online learning is to…