New and newly widespread communications technologies make it possible for students to enjoy many of the benefits of an ethnographic field school with less commitment of money and time, thereby expanding access to a valuable cross-cultural research experience. This article reflects on the challenges, successes, limitations, and lessons learned from…

This book explores a variety of facets of online learning environments to understand how learning occurs and succeeds in digital contexts and what teaching strategies and technologies are most suited to this format. Business, health, government and education are some of the core sectors of society which have been experiencing deep transformations…

In this paper, we outline the structure, goals, and lessons from our international teaching and learning collaboration in the spring 2015 semester. We took two public affairs courses with students in a U.S. and a Colombian university and combined them into a single hybrid course with the use of technology. The main goals of the course were to…

Following the trend of increased interest by students to take online courses and by institutions to offer them, scholars have taken many different approaches to understand what makes one student successful in online learning while another may fail. This study proposes that using the situational theory of publics will provide a better understanding…

This paper presents an empirical study grounded in the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson Archer, 2000) and employs quantitative content analysis of student discourse and other artifacts of learning in online courses in an effort to enhance and improve the framework and offer practical implications for online education. As a…

In this 2011 investigation, a modified Delphi technique was introduced to determine whether an informed group of post-secondary online faculty and students could arrive at a consensus regarding the importance of previously recognized verbal immediacy behaviors. Two expert panels were presented with Gorham's (1988) Verbal Immediacy Scale and tasked…

Purpose: Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) have become increasingly popular in educational settings and the role of 3D content is becoming more and more important. Still, there are many challenges in this area, such as lack of empirical studies that provide design for educational activities in 3D CVEs and lack of norms of how to support…

The past decade has witnessed an explosion in online learning opportunities for post-secondary students throughout the United States. The university has developed a Faculty Online Observation (FOO) model to allow for an annual observation of online adjunct faculty with a focus on five major areas of facilitation. To test the effectiveness and…

Online learning has become a reality for many students in higher education. Unfortunately, something that has also become a reality is a sense of isolation in online courses, and Moore (1980) has warned that students' sense of distance can threaten their ability to learn. The community of inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) has…

Online learning may be particularly sensitive to self-regulatory trade-offs between maintaining interest and performance. Undergraduates in online or on-campus sections of the same course rated strategies used to motivate studying for the first exam, and interest after the first exam and at semester's end. First exam and final class grades were…

Case study methodology was used to describe the challenges experienced in the development of a virtual component for a freshman-level undergraduate course. The purpose of the project was to use a virtual environment component to provide an interactive and engaging learning environment. While some student and faculty feedback was positive, this…

Virtual spaces allow abstract representations of reality that not only encourage student self-directed learning but also reinforce core content of the learning objective through visual metaphors not reproducible in the physical world. One of the advantages of such a space is the ability to escape the restrictions of the physical classroom, yet…

Three experiments examined whether the design of virtual learning environments influences undergraduates' enrollment intentions and anticipated success in introductory computer science courses. Changing the design of a virtual classroom--from one that conveys current computer science stereotypes to one that does not--significantly increased…

Which aspects of e-learning courses do students experience as being favorable for learning? When do students prefer online or face-to-face learning components? These questions were the subject of a research study in a sample of 2196 students from 29 Austrian universities. The students completed a questionnaire on their experiences attending an…

This paper discusses the proposed model of the collaborative virtual learning system for the introductory computer programming course which uses one of the collaborative learning techniques known as the "Think-Pair-Share". The main objective of this study is to design a model for an online learning system that facilitates the…