The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally affected all the spheres of human life, including education. Universities worldwide have established distance learning, which demanded combining and improving both traditional and innovative education forms. The article offers a comprehensive analysis of pre-recorded mini-lectures in the educational space of…

The lecture is often posited as the prototypical "face-to-face" educational encounter, seen as embodying key features of the pre-networked academy. These are implicitly characterised as forms of boundedness or impermeability, in terms of both the physical and temporal context, and the ontological status of the participants and the nature of the…

Internationally there is concern about levels of student absenteeism. Research underpinning this article consisted of a survey of academic staff and 25 interviews with first year students in a well regarded "new" university in Britain. The article explores the issue of poor attendance and why a significant number of students seem to have…

One of the most explosive areas of growth in the field of higher education is currently in emerging international markets. In developing nations, lack of access to high-quality teachers and educational materials is often the key obstacle preventing students from gaining the skills and knowledge they need to pursue new opportunities and advance in…

Currently little is known about how students use podcasts of exercise material (as opposed to lecture material), and whether they perceive such podcasts to be beneficial. This study aimed to assess how exercise podcasts for phonetics are used and perceived by second year speech and language therapy students. Eleven podcasts of graded phonetics…

The Personalised System of Instruction is a form of mastery learning which, though it has been proven to be educationally effective, has never seriously challenged the dominant lecture-tutorial teaching method in higher education and has largely fallen into disuse. An information and communications technology assisted version of the Personalised…

Social work education research frequently has suggested an interaction between teaching techniques and learning environments. However, this interaction has never been tested. This study compared virtual and face-to-face learning environments and included active listening concepts to test whether the effectiveness of learning environments depends…

For more than 20 years, two courses, History, Education, and Guidance of the Deaf/Hard of Hearing and Introduction to Instructional Methods for the Deaf/Hard of Hearing, have been taught at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania using a traditional lecture format. A state grant provided funding to explore the use of technology to teach online…

We further evaluated the Virtual Lecture Hall (VLH) (Cramer, Collins, Snider, & Fawcett, in press), an instructional computer-based platform to deliver PowerPoint slides threaded with audio clips for later review. Students from either an in-class or online section (ns = 810 and 74 respectively) of introductory psychology had access to live…

This book presents a wide selection of issues currently of interest and concern in higher education institutions in Ireland. The chapters are snapshots of the intersection between theory, practice and research in particular settings; they are not meant to be comprehensive. Nevertheless, they present practice approaches, new theoretical…

The number of virtual learning environments (VLEs) is increasing. Already a few case studies claim that VLEs are more effective as a learning method than traditional lecturing. Many of these case studies are in the area of information and communication technology (ICT). Therefore, the good learning results are not surprising. The aim of this paper…

From 3rd to 5th March 2008 the International Association of Technology, Education and Development organised its International Technology, Education and Development Conference in Valencia, Spain. Over a hundred papers were presented by participants from a great variety of countries. Summarising, this book provides a kaleidoscopic view of work that…

This book will improve the quality of instruction that college students need. It makes numerous suggestions that must be tended to when teachers instruct students. For example, the authors speculate about ways teachers can present what may at times seem to be a mountain of information without burying students under it; why teachers must…

This paper summarizes the activities of the Darmstadt University Department of Computer Integrated Design (Germany) related to: (1) distributed lectures (i.e., lectures distributed online through computer networks), including equipment used and ensuring sound and video quality; (2) lectures on demand, including providing access through the World…

Higher education is undergoing radical shifts that are part of the larger wave of changes taking place in the society. The transformation affects all sectors of higher education, especially distance learning and how it relates to the University's regular offerings. In this article, the author begins with clarifying the terms commonly associated…