Distance learners must balance many challenges when studying away from their home institution, including balancing work, family and study times. How, where, and when a student organizes and interacts with his or her study environment is a significant factor in student persistence and retention. Support services provided by the home institution,…

Instructors play a role in helping online students develop a sense of community in virtual classrooms, but little is known about instructors' roles in online graduate programs. To explore the ways in which online instructors helped students create a learning community, defined as a space of connection, closeness and interactivity, the researcher…

The introduction of technologies into the teaching and learning environment has implied changes to the way education plays out in an e-Environment. Previous research has highlighted the many barriers and challenges in integration technology into teaching and learning. Technology is said to be underutilised. However there are studies that have…

In higher education, undergraduate teaching materials are increasingly becoming available online. There is a need to understand the complex processes that happen during their production and how social networks between different groups impact on their development. This paper draws on qualitative interviews and participant drawings of their social…

Tutoring involves providing learners with a suitable level of structure and guidance to support their learning. This study reports on an exploration of how to design such structure and guidance (i.e., learning scaffolds) in the Chinese online educational context, and in so doing, answer the following two questions: (a) What scaffolding strategies…

Medical education helps ensure doctors acquire skills and knowledge needed to care for patients. However, resident duty hour restrictions have impacted the time residents have available for medical education, leaving resident educators searching for alternate options for effective medical education. Classroom situated e-learning, a blended…

This article reports on the findings of senior leadership interviews in a nationally funded project on distributed leadership in the quality management of online learning environments (OLEs) in higher education. Questions were framed around the development of an OLE quality management framework and the situation of the characteristics of…

Gquest is a mobile platform for administering interviewing and learning material. It relies on a model that supports adaptivity in the dialog with its users and enforces consistency rules to constrain their input. Gquest downloads its modules over the air making them available to the users, then a synchronization engine collects any input provided…

To be fully prepared for the professional workplace, Engineering students need to be able to effectively communicate. However, there has been a growing concern in the field about students' preparedness for this aspect of their future work. It is argued that online writing tools, to engage numbers of students in the writing process, can support…

The aim of the current study is to develop an adapted version of User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and evaluate a learning management system. Although there is a growing interest on User Experience, there are still limited resources (i.e. measurement tools or questionnaires) available to measure user experience of any products, especially…

This case study aims to identify relevant policies and practices for digital and online learning (DOL) in vocational education and training (VET) in Serbia, with a focus on initial VET (IVET). The study was commissioned by the European Training Foundation (ETF) with the following specific objectives: (1) gather information and analyse DOL…

Increasingly, universities are embedding reflective activities into the curriculum. With the growth in online tertiary education, how effectively is reflection being promoted or used in online learning spaces? Based on the notion that teachers' beliefs will influence their approaches to teaching, this research sought to understand how a group of…

Online learning has continued to grow in recent years. However, retaining students in online courses and programs has posed a challenge. Whether the university is public, private, offers both face-to-face and online programs, or is 100% online, retaining students in online programs can be an issue. This study reflects the widespread desire at a…

This paper explores teachers' use of textbooks in the digital age. After discussing student expectancies and needs, textbook use and the affordances of modern technology, the paper reports the results of a small-scale pilot study involving eight higher education teachers in Australia who discuss the use of textbooks in higher education in the…

Past evidence suggests that constructive misalignment is particularly problematic in International Business (IB) education, though this paradigm has received limited research attention. Building on the literature of three independent teaching methods (threshold concept, problem-based learning, and technology-based learning), this study contributes…