The Internet has disrupted or threatened to disrupt the traditional business models in many different areas, including publishing, record companies, retail sales, motion pictures, and advertising. One potential source of disruption for higher education is online learning, especially the recent focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Can…

Although not everyone needs textbooks, they still actively serve four audiences within the discipline. The four audiences that benefit from textbooks are students, instructors, the textbook sales force, and the textbook authors themselves. With a growing number of online classes where students have less and less, or even no, face time with their…

In order to improve the learning process for students with different pre-knowledge, personal characteristics and preferred learning styles, a certain degree of adaptability must be introduced to online courses. In learning environments that support such kind of functionalities students can explicitly choose different paths through course contents…

The Chinese National Quality Course Plan is a large-scale project by the Ministry of Education, which has led to the production of more than 12,000 courses from some 700 universities since 2003. This paper describes in detail the purpose of the project and how it is organized at all levels, including how individual courses get selected at…

Less than half of the students in the United States graduate from high school and are ready to take college-level math courses. Many years and varieties of remedial math programs have failed to dramatically improve outcomes, especially at scale. The question we face is whether technology in general, and open educational resources in particular,…

This paper reports on a controlled experiment on the effects of three types of reflection triggers in an online course. Fifty-four volunteers, distributed in five groups, used these structured opportunities for reflection during learning. Results show that reflection triggers were extensively employed by the test persons and were perceived as…

The free and open publication of course materials (OpenCourseWare or OCW) was initially undertaken by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other universities primarily to share educational resources among educators (Abelson, 2007). OCW, however, and more in general open educational resources (OER), have also provided well-documented…

Over the past decade, a small revolution has taken place at some of the world's leading universities, as they have started to provide free access to undergraduate course materials--including syllabi, assignments, and lectures--to anyone with an Internet connection. Yale offers high-quality audio and video recordings of a careful selection of…

This reflective case study was based on our independent use of the debate as an online instructional approach and our shared interest in teaching strategies. In an interdisciplinary manner, using narrative inquiry and action research, we melded our data sources and analyzed the findings, including our individual experiences with the technique. Our…

CADMOS is a graphical learning design (LD) authoring tool that helps a teacher design a unit of learning in two layers: (i) the conceptual layer, which seems like a concept map and contains the learning activities with their associated learning resources and (ii) the flow layer, which contains the orchestration of these activities. One of CADMOS'…

The instructional value of web-based education systems has been an important area of research in information systems education. This study investigates the effect of various teaching methods on program design learning for students with specific learning styles in web-based education systems. The study takes first-year Computer Science and…

This paper discusses findings of a study investigating how students, in four online courses, engaged in inquiry-based learning with and without support from a facilitator. The investigation was conducted by analyzing discussions of the online courses using the community of inquiry model. The results of the study imply that students in online…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…

The ability to predict a student's performance could be useful in a great number of different ways associated with university-level learning. In this paper, a grammar guided genetic programming algorithm, G3P-MI, has been applied to predict if the student will fail or pass a certain course and identifies activities to promote learning in a…

For the thirty-fifth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the national AECT Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…