Designing and facilitating online learning experiences require a repertoire of skills and a unique mindset. This article focuses on adult learners' characteristics, learner-centered principles, and tools for engaging learning in the online environment as a starting point for acquiring these skills.

This study examined the opportunities and difficulties of online learning in Zambia's higher education system, emphasizing the effects of self-regulation as a mediator between teacher-scaffolded online interactions and student learning engagement. Students and teachers frequently encounter significant challenges, such as low motivation,…

Building a sense of classroom community is essential for online courses, and various factors such as individual characteristics may influence this feeling. Therefore, this study investigated Chinese college students' sense of online classroom community by comparing students from rural and urban areas and their previous online learning experience.…

In the current higher education context, offering online programmes is seen as an effective means to recruit more international students. However, supporting online international students studying at a distance is not a simple task for both universities and tutors. The problem mainly stems from a lack of theoretical understanding of online…

This article examines the characteristics and challenges of online instruction and presents a model for improving learner adaptation in an online classroom. Instruction in an online classroom presents many challenges, including learner individualization. Individual differences in learning styles and preferences are often not considered in the…

A fully online learning environment requires effective learning management in order to promote pro-active education. Since student's notes are a reflection of the progress of their education, analysis of notes taken can be used to track the learning process of students who participate in fully online courses. This paper presents the causal…

With the increase of educational programs and classes offered online, any people have taken advantage of the convenience of these offerings. Along with the rapid growth of distance learning, there has been a reported high attrition rate among online learners. Some research suggests that part of the attrition involved student expectations not being…

This study empirically investigated the impact of an online learning community project on university students' motivation in learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). A newly-proposed L2 motivation theory--the L2 motivational self system (Dornyei 2005; 2009)--was used as the theoretical framework for this study. The three aspects of motivation…

About a year after January 2004 when the author decided to pursue a doctorate through an online program, the author received an e-mail about an online teaching opportunity. This came about as a result of a meeting he attended where the interim dean of City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) discussed the growing demand for quality instructors to teach…

Notwithstanding the growth of online learning, little is known about the personal factors that predict student decisions to enroll in online courses. This study examined the relations between several personal factors and students' choice of instructional format. After completing an online course, service academy undergraduates (N = 564) completed…

The impacts that the lack of physical cues and non-verbal cues of emotional expression has on the student learning experience in text based online environments were targeted separately in this study. A questionnaire was constructed with separate items for non-verbal cues of emotional expression and cues to physical identity. The survey also…

Much Second Language Acquisition research focuses on young learners in the conventional classroom. Instructed adult learners, and in particular those who are learning at a distance, have attracted less attention. This group is substantial and growing: the Open University, the largest higher education language provider in the UK, alone recruits…

Each student comes to class with certain learning experiences, expectations, and needs that have to be addressed, and to which instructors need to be sensitive, to maximize the students' learning experiences. However, because of the unknown make-up of online classes, the characteristics of online students may be unclear, making it difficult to…

The 2005 National Online Learners Priorities Report presents the responses to the Noel-Levitz Priorities Survey for Online Learners (PSOL) of 16,551 students from 60 institutions. The results include online learner responses over a four-year time period, from 2001 through 2005. Highlights include: (1) Online students' priorities for their learning…

Despite a rapidly growing trend in universities to offer flexible learning options, limited attention has been given to hearing students' voices and learning from their perceptions of their learning experiences. This study sought to learn about students who enroll in external study (off-campus learning) in the School of Early Childhood at the…