Medical school curricula are undergoing transformational change in response to calls for integrating content across courses and years to enable better retention and application and for individualizing learning to meet the diverse backgrounds and thus differing needs of students. To address the related teaching challenges, faculty can employ solid…

The term "interactive" appears in two distinct strands of educational research discourse: one concerning pedagogy and the other concerning new technologies in education. As new technology increasingly pervades most classrooms in the UK, it seems likely that it would be fruitful to explore, both theoretically and empirically, links…

WebTOP is a three-dimensional, Web-based, interactive computer graphics system that helps instructors teach and students learn about waves and optics. Current subject areas include waves, geometrical optics, reflection and refraction, polarization, interference, diffraction, lasers, and scattering. Some of the topics covered are suited for…

Laptops for students, increased teamwork and group interaction, and teaching as a facilitator of active learning have successfully converged in the classrooms of Northern Michigan University. This paper offers practical guidelines for integration strategies, theory, and outcomes assessments, based on a study undertaken for the 1999-2000 academic…

A distinction between interpersonal and content interaction was identified in the literature, and applied in research undertaken on a selection of 36 courses. These courses differed in both the kinds of interaction offered and its integration in the teaching and assessment. They included different combinations and use of conferencing, email,…

While there has been a significant amount of research on technical issues regarding the development of agent-based learning environments (e.g., see the special issue of Journal of "Interactive Learning Research," 10(3/4)), there is less information regarding cognitive foundations for these environments. The management of control is a prime issue…

Effective use of media and technology is a challenge and an opportunity for educators. The traditional educational paradigm presents a situation where educators provide instruction based on their knowledge and experience. The technology-based paradigm provides access to modern storage technologies at a student workstation, so that students can now…

Perhaps some of the most engaging, unique, Web-based activities are virtual quests that take student participants along on real expeditions, following a team in the field as they explore new territory or do research on authentic scientific problems. Virtual quests, such as the MayaQuest expedition produced by Classroom Connect, are excellent…

The purpose of this study is to examine how technology, namely virtual reality (VR), can be developed as a critical pedagogical tool. More specifically, the study explores whether the use of VR can challenge the traditional lecture format and make the classroom a more student-centered environment. In this instance, VR is defined as a set of…

To travel is one of the greatest ways to learn about the world. It is the "getting there" that provides the learning experience, not so much as the destination itself. Education is also a journey, one that should last a lifetime, but for many students today, it is one that lasts only as long as they are in the classroom. In such short…

The purpose of this paper is to advance the argument that universities should move toward using distance education as rapidly and as fully as possible. The paper discusses three reasons to support the proposition: (1) Technological advances have brought us to a point that most of the university curriculum can be individualized and delivered via…

Explores the issues involved in implementing a technology-enhanced student-centered unit in order to provide recommendations to improve and enhance these types of learning activities. Results suggest that a variety of factors impact the success or failure of student-centered activities, including student orientation to the unit problem, student…

This paper describes the use of commercial application and programming software to provide language students with self-access materials used in their own time. In all cases, it assumes such students will be unsupervised. The idea is that in place of buying expensive and restricted commercially produced authoring packages, a teacher with limited…

This article aims to provide an overview of the various uses for e-mail in foreign language learning. It describes the advantages that have been referred to in the literature about the use of e-mail in foreign language learning contexts and provides an overview of the different types of contexts and possibilities for communicative interaction…

A middle school language arts teacher relates how she used the Internet to "scaffold" students' learning. She notes teachers have begun the shift from assigning rote homework to assigning independent work that gives the student the opportunity to test the information on his or her own, and that children need time to make the shift from…