Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia researchers developed the Cost-Feasibility Analysis (CFA) Toolkit to help education leaders estimate whether implementing supplemental online programs is affordable given a school or district's available resources. The CFA Toolkit guides users through a four-stage process that yields cost information that…

Background: Although much is known from educational research about factors that support K-12 teacher professional learning, it has been an ongoing challenge to incorporate these factors into practice in new contexts and environments. We argue that these factors are too often treated like a checklist of discrete elements, either present or not,…

Open online courses provide a unique opportunity to examine learner preferences in an environment that removes several pressures associated with traditional learning. This mixed methods study sought to examine the pathways that learners will create for themselves when given the choice between an instructor-directed modality and learner-directed…

The authors of this paper are academic developers in an Australian university. In this paper, we discuss the outcomes of a small pilot study about value tensions; completed to inform a larger research project about the possibilities of making collaborative collegiality an explicit aim of a curriculum review. After interviewing four course leaders,…

With a view to attracting more students and offering flexible learning opportunities, online teaching and learning is becoming increasingly wide-spread across the higher education sector. This research reports on the experiences of eight initial teacher education students who studied an outdoor education unit in the online space. Using a…

Software developers rely on the abundance of online resources to meet their informal learning needs. Designing systems to effectively support this relies on a sound understanding of the informal learning process. In this paper, we show how the development and implementation of an ontological model can be used to increase understanding of informal…

MOOCs have been seen as holding promise for advancing Open Education. While the pedagogical design of the first MOOCs grew out of the Open Education Movement, the current trend has MOOCs exhibiting fewer of the original openness goals than anticipated. The aim of this study is to examine the practices and attitudes of MOOC educators at an African…

Mobile technologies and mobile learners have transformed the way people learn languages. In particular, they give rise to a new form of language learning: the use of online language learning platforms, a kind of virtual learning environment that offers learning opportunities that are mobile, social and multimodal (Jones and Hafner, 2012; Richards,…

Nursing students have regularly experienced high levels of clinical testing anxiety. Previous research, conducted in face-to-face nursing programs, revealed high-stakes clinical testing, particularly the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), was consistently rated as the most anxiety producing component within nursing education. A gap…

Online learning is dynamic, and due to increased popularity, it is rapidly expanding at the post-secondary level. Technology has changed the way students acquire new information. Online faculty are responsible for supporting the academic success of their online undergraduate students in a technology-rich learning environment. The instructional…

Research has suggested that independent study students in online courses may benefit from engaging with a proximate community of engagement (PCE) and that students perceive that such engagement will help them succeed. Independent Study students were surveyed at the completion of their course to assess the level at which they actually interacted…

The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to examine online learner self-efficacy in terms of instructional strategies and course supports. Prior studies have focused primarily on factors within learners (e.g., motivation, satisfaction, achievement). The current study, with a foundation in adult learning theory, bridged the gap between…

Although the number of online academic degree programs offered by universities in Turkey has become increasingly significant in recent years, the current lack of understanding of administrators' motives that contribute to initiating these programs suggests there is much to be learned in this field. This study aimed to investigate administrators'…

This paper addresses a relatively new phenomenon in higher education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and explores conceptions around this new and emerging development from the perspective of a number of stakeholders in the university. A phenomenographic approach is adopted. The study explores how different stakeholders at a university…

This study focused on student achievement in remedial math through online and traditional delivery modes at Northwest Mississippi Community College. Student participants were interviewed through a semi-structured interview process to determine perceived influences and challenges that affected success in remedial math courses. The perceived…