We investigated how high school students taking a university preparatory economics course would engage with the learning and assessment components of a Behavioural Economics MOOC that was integrated into their school-based course. Students were divided into two groups, MOOC-only, with no teacher support, and blended-mode, with weekly tutorials.…

This mixed method research examined instructors' use of video feedback and its impact on instructor social presence in 12 blended sections of three preservice educational technology courses. An independent samples t-test was conducted and found no significant difference in perceptions of instructor social presence between students who received…

The main objective of this research is to investigate efficiency of use of supplementary video content in multimedia teaching. Integrating video clips in multimedia lecture presentations may increase students' perception of important information and motivation for learning. Because of that, students can better understand and remember key points of…

Interaction plays a critical role in the learning process. For online course participants, interaction with the course content (learner-content interaction) is especially important because it can contribute to successful learning outcomes and course completion. This study aims to examine the relationship between learner-content interaction and…

Open educational resources (OER) can be described in numerous ways (Creative Commons, 2012). In this visualization based context, however, OER can be defined as ...teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by…

Software allowing real-time online video connectivity is rapidly evolving. The ability to connect students, staff, and guest speakers instantaneously carries great benefits for the online distance education classroom. This evaluation report compares four software applications at opposite ends of the cost spectrum: "DimDim", "Elluminate VCS",…

Over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) initiatives have created new possibilities for knowledge-sharing practices. This research examines how, where, and when OER are attracting attention in the higher education sector and explores to what extent the OER discussion has moved beyond the English-speaking world. This study analysed…

The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has created opportunities for learning that are clearly in high demand, but the direction in which MOOCs should evolve to best meet the interests and needs of learners is less apparent. Motivated by our interest in whether there are potential and purpose for archived MOOCs to be used as learning…

This report explores the first iteration of a teacher professional development courselet grounded in constructionist theory and activities. This online teacher professional development (oTPD) courselet provided opportunities for teachers to engage in just-in-time, ongoing TPD within a social networking site for educators. The topic of the oTPD was…

A rapid scene indexing method is proposed to improve retrieval performance for students accessing instructional videos. This indexing method is applied to anchor suitable indices to the instructional video so that students can obtain several small lesson units to gain learning mastery. The method also regulates online course progress. These…

This paper deploys notions of emergence, connections, and designs for learning to conceptualize high school students' interactions when using online social media as a learning environment. It makes links to chaos and complexity theories and to fractal patterns as it reports on a part of the first author's action research study, conducted while she…

Print-based instructional materials have been more popular than any other medium for teaching practical skills during the delivery of technical and vocational education and training via distance learning. However, the approach has its shortcomings and in recent times alternatives have been sought. The comparative instructional effectiveness of one…

As video-based instructional materials become available to distance learners to learn practical skills at a distance, it is important to assess the instructional effectiveness of these materials and to understand how students respond to them. This paper is the second part of a larger exploratory study that assessed the instructional effectiveness…

This article highlights the current dialogue about educational technology and ways of knowing in visual art education. The authors outline and evaluate the development and testing phases of a hypertextual online visual art course offered at the then Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (http://www.eciad.ca/www/) in the summer of 2001. Through…

The increasing range of options provided by two popular conferencing freeware products, "Yahoo Messenger" and "MSN Messenger," are discussed. Each tool contains features designed primarily for entertainment purposes, which can be customized for use in online education. This report provides suggestions for optimizing the educational potential of…