This book describes the history, structure and institutions of open and distance education in six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. It discusses how open and distance education is evolving in a digital age to reflect the needs and circumstances of national higher education systems in these countries, and explores…

Positioning in learning networks is a process that assists learners in finding a starting point and an efficient route through the network that will foster competence building. In the past we have explored computational approaches to positioning based on the contents of the learning network and the behaviour of those participating in it, more or…

Purpose: The paper aims to study how the present distance learning libraries can improve upon their existing services and introduce new ones to enhance quality of services to distance learners. Design/methodology/approach: The paper includes a review of literature on quality assurance in open and distance education in general and student support…

The "Technology Outlook Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis" reflects a collaborative research effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and Open Universities Australia to help inform Australian educational leaders about significant developments in technologies supporting teaching,…

This book, written by authors representing 12 countries and five continents, is a collection of international perspectives on distance learning and distance learning implementations in higher education. The perspectives are presented in the form of practical case studies of distance learning implementations, research studies on teaching and…

This study investigated the efficiency of video as an additional teaching aid for a statistics course offered by the Fernuniversitat (Open University, West Germany). A total of 65 distance students and internal students from the Universities of Bochum and Dortmund were divided into five groups to test the effects of five alternative treatments:…

This report from the 1987 annual meeting of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology contains biographical data on the panelists in a session on selected international distance learning institutions and brief summaries of the following presentations: (1) "The Central Agricultural Broadcasting School of China"…

This report makes recommendations for the establishment of an active research and evaluation program for the Open Learning Institute (OLI) and the Knowledge Network (KN) of British Columbia (Canada). It is suggested that the OLI and KN programs develop a framework for evaluating their own performance, that the database be improved to provide…

Discusses process of continuous assessment that involves many tutors grading papers at Great Britain's Open University and the problem of grade unreliability within such a system. A longitudinal experiment involving grading of papers in one course by all tutors and comparing their grades to determine grading reliability is described. (MBR)

Essentially concerned with distance education as innovation in higher education, this paper identifies specific aspects of this innovation through references to three Canadian institutions offering university level courses for credit. It is primarily concerned with Athabasca University in Alberta, a distance education university which originally…

Reports views of students and tutors of the Radio and Television University (RTVU) in China on a new distance learning material package on digital computers; the RTVU; and study in general, including media role, how each medium should be designed, self-study, teaching in general, tutorials, examinations, and study problems. (Author/MBR)

At the end of 1986 a survey of 1,200 new and 1,200 continuing undergraduate students of the Open University (Great Britain) was undertaken which addressed the related issues of costs of studying and access to television and video equipment for study purposes. The overall response rate was 75.4% when the data were analyzed in March 1987. Analyses…

This examination of educational institutions and their acceptance of the design and implementation of technologically based instruction considers instructional technology as a subset of technology. Methods of institutional analysis from other disciplines are presented to stimulate research that uses aspects of educational institutions themselves…

Describes design and production of the award-winning software used to control Great Britain's Open University Materials Science videodisc, the Teddy Bear Disc, which is used to teach undergraduate students about materials engineering. The disc is designed for use in one-week sessions, which students attend in July or August. (MBR)

This nine-paper collection from a June 1983 Open University (OU) campus workshop in Milton Keynes, England, describes an interactive video project developed for an OU undergraduate course, T252, Introduction to Engineering Materials, and discusses varied aspects of interactive videodisc program development. The following papers are included:…