One of the claims the OER movement makes is that availability of (open) digital learning materials improves the quality of education. The promise is the ability to offer educational programs that take into account specific demands of the learner. The question is how to reach a situation where a customized demand can be met using OER with…

Teaching in higher education in the 21st century can be a demanding and complex role and academic educators around the globe are dealing with questions related to change. This paper describes a new type of a professional development program for teaching faculty, using a pedagogical model based on the principles of authentic e-learning. The program…

Mobile cloud learning, a combination of mobile learning and cloud computing, is a relatively new concept that holds considerable promise for future development and delivery in the education sectors. Cloud computing helps mobile learning overcome obstacles related to mobile computing. The main focus of this paper is to explore how cloud computing…

A field enquiry in French distance education allows us to analyze the evolution of a specific institution towards new public management: Parallel to a trend of free courseware and open education, there is a paradoxical reality of distance education monetization. Whereas history shows how traditional French education is a state controlled public…

Foundations like Hewlett, Mellon, and Gates provided start-up funding and support that nurtured the field of open educational resources (OER) from infancy to a robust early adolescence characterized by energy and idealism (Casserly & Smith, 2008). However, foundation grants typically focus on establishing exemplars and cannot be relied on for…

Massive open online courses ("MOOCs") provide free access to higher education for anyone with Internet access. MOOCs are considered a means for democratizing education. These courses will hopefully provide an opportunity for individuals to learn from the best educators in the world, as well as help expand their personal networks, and…

One notable "disruptive" impact of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been an increased public discussion of online education. While much debate over the potential and challenges of MOOCs has taken place online confined largely to niche communities of practitioners and advocates, the rise of corporate "xMOOC" ventures such…

The past few years have seen increasingly rapid development and use of open educational resources (OER) in higher education institutions (HEIs) in developing countries. These resources are believed to be able to widen access, reduce the costs, and improve the quality of education. However, there exist several challenges that hinder the adoption…

Learning management systems (LMS) have been proven to encourage a constructive approach to knowledge acquisition and support active learning. One of the keys to successful and efficient use of LMS is how the stakeholders adopt and perceive this learning tool. The present research is therefore motivated by the importance of understanding teachers'…

This article reports on the pedagogical value of Web 2.0 tools at Unisa (i.e., whether these tools can improve teaching and learning). A quantitative approach was used to conduct the study, with a questionnaire as a data collection instrument. The sample size was 301 lecturers drawn using stratified sampling, with proportional allocation drawn…

Distance learning technologies offer a multitude of ways to build interaction into online courses to support learning. Based on social constructivism theory, this study explored which types of interaction are most predictive of students' sense of community in online graduate courses at a regional comprehensive university. Surveys were used to…

Making personalized paper recommendations to users in an educational domain is not a trivial task of simply matching users' interests with a paper topic. Therefore, we proposed a context-aware multidimensional paper recommendation system that considers additional user and paper features. Earlier experiments on experienced graduate students…

This paper outlines an action research project involving the development of an educational online role-playing website, known as Lake Devo. Designed in keeping with constructivist principles, the website is used in select post-secondary courses at Ryerson University and allows learners to work synchronously, using visual, audio, and text elements…

MOOCs (massive open online course) is a disruptive innovation and a current buzzword in higher education. However, the discussion of MOOCs is disparate, fragmented, and distributed among different outlets. Systematic, extensively published research on MOOCs is unavailable. This paper adopts a novel method called blog mining to analyze MOOCs. The…

Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. A company called Flat World Knowledge both gives away and sells open-source textbooks in a way it believes to be financially sustainable. This article reports on the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open-source textbook model after one…