The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), with the generous support of Dell and Intel, have jointly released the "Technology Outlook for Community, Technical, and Junior Colleges 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Sector Analysis." This report applies the process developed…

The "Technology Outlook Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis" reflects a collaborative research effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and Open Universities Australia to help inform Australian educational leaders about significant developments in technologies supporting teaching,…

Describes the Adjusted Agreement Index, a strategy for analyzing collected data from questionnaires utilizing Likert-type scales. Steps involved in using this index and its strengths and weaknesses are outlined, and a case study illustrating how it was used to summarize data on a distance education course package is presented. (MBR)

Data on the intrinsic characteristics of an educational program are essential in pilot testing new programs in order to determine how successfully design components have achieved their intended purpose. At the outset of an evaluation of such data, it is necessary to define the evaluator's role and determine what intrinsic information will be…

The linking of research and action, basic methods of social research, and the uses of research in distance teaching are examined, with examples drawn from the Lesotho Distance Teaching Centre and other distance teaching programs. Ways in which research can be useful and early stages of research design and planning are discussed. An explanation of…

This paper describes a computer support system that eliminated many of the problems associated with the usual methods of transcribing and analyzing questionnaire data. The system was created to support the course evaluation system at Athabasca University, a distance education university in Canada. The courses evaluated were all home study courses,…

Listening skills research has tended to focus on strategy use in classrooms and on theory and practice of second language (L2) teachers. This study examined the teachers' and learners' perceptions of listening skills in non-classroom learning situations. Five (n = 5) study skills teachers and 19 former learners in a distance study skills course at…

Describes a process-tracing study which investigated study approaches adopted by four distance learners enrolled in the Bachelor of Education Program at James Cook University and their mental processes when learning from distance-teaching materials in order to identify textual features which activated mental processes for use in textual design.…

Describes a computer-aided personalized system of instruction (CAPSI) and its implementations for both on-campus and off-campus teaching at the University of Manitoba. Highlights include electronic mail, student reactions, the use of data that are saved throughout the course, and future possibilities. (Author/LRW)