In the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom, small classes are generally perceived as desirable, but the benefits associated with particular class sizes in online education have not yet received much scholarly attention. Using a dataset of 10,648 enrollment records generated during the 2013-2014 school year at a state virtual school in the…

According to recent reports, K-12 full-time virtual school students have shown lower performance in math than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar schools. However, research is lacking in what kind of programmatic interventions virtual schools might be particularly well-suited to provide to improve math performance. Engaging students in…

Personal learning environments (PLEs) are Web 2.0 tools and services by which users' access, construct, manage, and share educational contents in order to meet their learning needs. These environments enable users to manage their learning according to their own personal preferences. They further promote socialization and collaboration with their…

Although problem-based learning (PBL) has many advantages, it often fails to connect to the real world outside the classroom. The integration with the laboratory setting and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been proposed to address this deficiency. Multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) like Second Life (SL) are…

The trend and demand for virtual education has grown nationwide. With an increase in students choosing this type of education, inevitably the demand for schools of this type of educational instruction has increased in number. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent of the relationship between virtual school size and student…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between virtual school size and student achievement in virtual schools in a southwestern state. Enrollment size and the following areas were studied in an attempt to determine student achievement: STAAR English Language Arts/Reading, STAAR Math, STAAR Science, and STAAR Social Studies…

There is a growing body of evidence that feeling present in virtual environments contributes to effective learning. Presence is a psychological state of the user; hence, it is generally agreed that individual differences in user characteristics can lead to different experiences of presence. Despite the fact that user characteristics can play a…

This study aimed to investigate the existence of cognitive presence as one of the elements of the Community of Inquiry framework in virtual centers for undergraduate students of science and technology. To achieve the purpose of this study, first a questionnaire was uniquely developed on the basis of the suggestions made in the literature reviewing…

Social capital (or the ways in which people in an organization collaborate and to a greater extent the quality of professional community in that context) has a variety of implications for organizations, specifically schools. This study examined the relationship between attitudes of administrators and faculty at the secondary level toward…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 13th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2016), October 28-30, 2016, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by the University of Mannheim, Germany, and endorsed by the…

To promote STEM higher education, avenues such as distance education must be visited. Students in most of the distance-learning classes generate great amounts of textual messages for class interaction, discussion and assignments which take up most of instructor's time to respond and grade. Researches in distance learning and computer-aided grading…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…