There is a breadth of psychological research that points to potential cognitive benefits of game play. Games engage and motivate learners while promoting mastery of skills and content knowledge. Further, thoughtfully applying gaming elements and structures to classroom environments, an approach called gamification, has the potential to optimize…

Using computer technology and digital classrooms to conduct 4-H Club meetings is an efficient way to continue delivering quality 4-H programming during times of limited resources and staff. Nineteen Junior and Senior 4-H'ers participated in seven digital classroom workshops using the Wimba Classroom application. These digital classroom sessions…

The student cohort on the University Science Extended Degree (SED) course is diverse in terms of educational experience. One of the key facets of teaching at this level is to engage and prepare students for higher levels of education in the sciences. The purpose of this evaluation is to relate a specific virtual framework, designed for students…

Feedback is central to pedagogic theory, and if feedback is to be effective, students need to engage with it and apply it at some point in the future. However, student dissatisfaction with feedback--as evidenced in the National Student Survey--suggests that there are problems which limit student engagement with feedback, such as their perception…

In this article, we present an experiment carried out in an 11th grade class in the curricular subject of DG (descriptive geometry). In a context where failure is more in the national exam, as well as in the discipline's attendance, the main objectives that motivated the implementation of this educational experience, were, on the one hand, to…

This paper illustrates the experience gained within an online course, where a collaborative technique, namely Role Play, was used within an asynchronous text-based environment to trigger collaboration and interactions among students. In a pilot study, the technique was analyzed using an evaluation model and two different means: on the one hand,…

This study investigated the effects of processing instruction (PI) and structured input (SI) on the acquisition of the subjunctive in adjectival clauses by 92 second-semester distance learners of Spanish. Computerized visual input enhancement (VIE) was combined with PI and SI in an attempt to increase the salience of the targeted grammatical form…

The aim of this investigation was to get an insight into how teachers and students responded to the use of virtual learning environments (VLE) in engineering education and what their expectations were from online courses. Teachers designed their online courses with the assistance of a support e-learning team and questionnaires were used for…

This article examines distance education (DE) in the context to which is most frequently applied, i.e., higher education, and from the perspective of some of its most important actors, i.e., teachers. This study, of a qualitative nature, was conducted at a public university in Brazil. Data were collected by means of unstructured interviews,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the results of research aimed at collecting the data necessary for preparing personalised content of e-learning courses. Its aim is to show how the information describing individual learning styles can be linked to the rules of creating tailored online courses. Design/methodology/approach: The paper…

Educators in medical schools around the world are presently experimenting with innovative ways of using web-based learning to supplement the existing teaching and learning process. We have recently used a popular open-source course management system (CMS) called the modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment (Moodle) to construct an…

This paper reports the findings from an investigation into the distance learning support systems of a UK University's overseas MBA programme. This programme is provided to several countries around the world in alliance with the overseas' local higher educational institutions (HEIs), and is delivered primarily via online courses, but also with…

This article discusses the relationship between social presence and subjectivity in online learning environments. Drawing from views of subjectivity synthesised by de Sousa and an exploratory study into online social presence (by Kehrwald), the presentation identifies the links between various forms of subjectivity and the operation of social…

Self-regulatory skills have been associated with positive outcomes for learners. In the current study, we examined the self-regulatory skills of students who are first-generation online learners over the course of their first semester of online instruction. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the online self-regulatory skills of…

With increasing student numbers and a diverse student body, it is crucial to consider a range of methods to engage students in learning and teaching activities. This project was used to encourage 1st-year undergraduate students to engage in out of class activities between taught sessions. The project used a virtual learning environment (VLE) known…