The Kenyan education system has very limited re-entry options for learners who drop out before attaining secondary school certificate. It is very difficult to access training and or secure a job that requires at least secondary school education. This study examined the prospects of initiating Open and Distance e-Learning(ODeL) in re-entry…

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…

This paper reports on a case study of an online pre-service teacher education course in a New Zealand university aimed at exploring the potential of student-generated podcasts as a form of interactive formative assessment at a distance. The study was part of a wider two-year funded project with the overall goal of documenting, developing, and…

Academic workloads in online learning are influenced by many variables, the complexity of which makes it difficult to measure academic workloads in isolation. While researching issues associated with academic workloads, professional development stood out as having a substantive impact on academic workloads. Many academics in applied health degrees…

This study focused on the civic education course at Universitas Terbuka (UT). Its purpose was to design a new approach for the online tutorial for the course by analyzing the literature related to online and distance education and investigating participant feedback on the current offering of the course and tutorial, which is a compulsory course in…

This paper reports on an action research study investigating the use of online learning activities or "e-tivities" to enhance the learning and assessment experience of students on a distance master's programme. The study suggests that to be successfully integrated in a programme, such activities need to be carefully aligned with learning…

The purpose of this study has been to examine the impacts of aesthetic design on learner experience in an e-assessment environment, specifically on cognitive load and task performance. Sixty-six postsecondary students were randomly assigned to one of two aesthetic design configurations of the e-assessment environment: (1) an environment with low…

This article discusses the role of open and distance learning to widen participation and promote social inclusion within Australian higher education, as well as the benefits that open educational resources (OER) could bring to that context. It also explores some of the most relevant social inclusion policies and related initiatives developed in…

Success in open educational resources (OER) has been reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and the Open University in the UK, among others. It is unclear, however, how valuable OER are in learning and teaching. Approaches to OER policy and sustainability are just two other key aspects that remain unresolved across the…

This article considers the uses and non-uses of digital technology by international distance learners. It draws upon data from in-depth interviews with 60 learners from around the world following distance education degree courses provided by a large UK federal university. The article focuses firstly on learners' descriptions of technology's role…

Like many universities worldwide, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement, making a selection of teaching and learning materials available through its OER directory, UCT OpenContent. However, persuading and then supporting busy academics to share their teaching materials as OER…

To improve student retention in distance education, Simpson suggested in 2003 that institutions analyse their own retention characteristics and "spot the leaks." In 2008 the Centre for Distance Learning at Laidlaw College, New Zealand, employed two part-time academic support coordinators in an effort to improve student retention and…

This article reports a grounded theory study of the moderation of asynchronous online discussions, to explore the processes by which tutors in higher education decide when and how to moderate. It aims to construct a theory of e-moderation based on some key factors which appear to influence e-moderation. It discusses previous research on the…

A key component of conventional distance education organizations has been the network of local study centres, set up to serve as a bridge between students and the educational organization. With the capacity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enable direct contact between the educational institution and its dispersed students,…