The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of the students' perceived levels of collaborative learning, social presence and overall satisfaction in a blended learning environment. This research studied the relationship of these three variables and identified critical factors related to them. The participants were 48 graduate…

The latest installment of the Fordham Institute's "Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning" series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online-schooling experts to estimate today's average…

This Facilitator's Guide is based on What Education Leaders Should Know about Virtual Education, an online course designed by the Center on Instruction and the New England Comprehensive Center. The Facilitator's Guide demonstrates step-by-step how to build the course on a learning management system (LMS) and provides instructions on all phases of…

Teachable agent is a type of pedagogical agent which instantiates Learning-by-Teaching theory through simulating a "naive" learner in order to motivate students to teach it. This paper discusses the limitation of existing teachable agents and incorporates intrinsic motivation to the agent model to enable teachable agents with initiative…

This study empirically examines the instructional value of online video lectures--videos that a course's instructor prepares to supplement classroom or online-broadcast lectures. The study examines data from a classroom course, where the videos have a slower, more step-by-step lecture style than the classroom lectures; student use of videos is…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of using learner-generated and instructor-provided multimedia annotations on foreign language reading comprehension and attitudes. The four research questions are: (1) what are the effects of using different multimedia annotations on reading comprehension for learners of different…

An increasing number of higher educational institutes are offering remedial, bridging, preparatory or transitional courses in a blended and online format to remediate and enhance students' knowledge and skills. This article addresses how teachers and institutes design and implement these courses. The descriptions of transitional courses were…

hapTEL, an interdisciplinary project funded by two UK research councils from 2007 to 2011, involves a large interdisciplinary team (with undergraduate and post-graduate student participants) which has been developing and evaluating a virtual learning system within an HE healthcare education setting, working on three overlapping strands. Strand 1…

In this article, we present a co-adaptive design approach named TE-Cap (Tutoring Experience Capitalisation) that we applied for the development of an assistance environment for tutors. Since tasks assigned to tutors in educational contexts are not well defined, we are developing an environment which responds to needs which are not precisely…

A traditional approach centred on weekly lectures, perhaps supported by tutorials, still predominates in modern legal education in Australia. This approach tends to focus on the transmission of knowledge about legal rules and doctrine to students, who adopt a largely passive role. Criticisms of the traditional approach have led to law schools…

The Australian Government's widening participation agenda--also referred to as the social inclusion agenda--considers equity through the triple focus of access, participation and outcomes. These foci are catalysts for re-examining teaching and learning approaches in formal education. This article considers this national refocus and the…

This article aims to demonstrate how the use of an online journal, a bilingual blog, can contribute to filling in the language and cultural gaps of foreign language learners. This case study focuses on the participation, interaction, motivation, language acquisition, feedback and cultural input improved by students of Spanish as a Foreign Language…

In response to the challenges created by the implementation of a new medical school curriculum at the University of Otago in 2008, we aimed to develop a blended learning course for teaching rheumatology within the existing musculoskeletal course. We developed a multimedia online learning resource structured to support class based problem-based…

This article introduces "expertise-based training" (XBT) as an instructional design theory that draws on the theories, findings, and methods of expertise research in order to create instructional strategies that can hasten the development of advanced learners into experts. The central tenants of XBT are: 1) Key cognitive sub-skills that…

Educational technologists might well describe online distance education as "a series of instructional events over the Internet that find their expression as learning events in a student". As a legal construct however, "online distance education" is simply "the intellectual property of its owner". This description is…