The Food Safety Knowledge Network (FSKN) is a collaboration between Michigan State University, the Global Food Safety Initiative of the Consumer Goods Forum, and other food industry and public sector partners. FSKN's goal is to help strengthen the food industry's response to the complex food safety knowledge and training challenges that affect…

The authors studied a course in which an instructor allowed individuals at a distance to participate. Although these students were not formally enrolled in the university where the class took place, the instructor gave them full access to all course materials and encouraged them to complete course assignments. The authors examined the time and…

This paper will detail three projects which focussed on enhancing online learning at a large Australian distance education University within a School of Business, School of Health and School of Education. Each project had special funding and took quite distinctive project management approaches, which reflect the desire to embed innovation and…

This study involved fourteen semistructured interviews with teaching staff at a Brazilian university. These interviews were aimed at unveiling possible transformations caused by distance education in classroom teaching and in medical assistance practices. The discourses collected were analyzed using qualitative methods and divided into groups with…

Ideally, learning resources should be built over a shared pool of fine reusable granular learning objects. However, in order to avoid contextual lacks, dynamic creation of such resources would mostly rely on the conceptual relationships among learning objects inside a repository. These conceptual relationships, as well as the learning objects…

This paper is about one of the central dilemmas of e-Learning: can we separate content and context, and how should we manage the relationship between the two? Or to put it another way, are Learning Objects just commoditised learning? With the growth of e-Learning over the past few years, learning objects have come into their own. They are the…

"Web services" enable partners to exploit applications via the Internet. Individual services can be composed to build new and more complex ones with additional and more comprehensive functionality. In this paper, we apply the Web service paradigm to electronic learning, and show how to exchange and maintain learning objects is a…

Learning object repositories and evaluation tools have the potential to serve as sites for interaction among different cultures and communities of practice. This article outlines Web-based learning object evaluation tools that we have developed, describes our current efforts to extend those tools to a wider range of user communities, and considers…

This commentary on the recent article, "Developing an Online Geology Course for Preservice and Inservice Teachers: Enhancements for Online Learning" by Veal, Brantley, and Zulli (2004) examines two issues related to the design of online courses. First, the concept of affordances is used to compare face-to-face and online classes for…

This study explores the concept of "transactional distance", a term coined by Moore (1993), which relates to the distance that exists in all learning relationships and can be more evident and potentially problematic in online learning environments. Reducing this psychologically perceived distance to help learners develop social presence…

This paper provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for building an online course based on the e-learning standards. It discusses the steps that should be followed to build a digital repository that facilitates the storage, retrieval, and reuse of the learning resources that comprise an online course in a standard way. The paper also examines…

The Internet makes scholarly electronic journals an opportune global mode of communication for scholarly exchange, where national and international borders are erased. The American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group, Communications among Researchers (AERA SIG CR) lists over one hundred electronic journals in the field of…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is discussing about the similarities between the life cycle of knowledge management and the processes in which learning objects are created, evaluated and used. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes LO and learning designs and depicts their integration into the knowledge life cycle (KLC) of the KMCI,…

This article explores the experience of a researcher who was part of a pan-European team exploring one of the currently available avatar worlds used for educational purposes. The article reports research undertaken as part of the European Union (EU)-funded project EQUEL (e-quality in e-learning) from the point of view of a single researcher. The…

Online learning, also referred to as distance education in this article, involves a variety of approaches, such as making resources available electronically and creating rich, interactive online experiences with class activities using Web tools like chat and discussion groups. Online courses offer flexibility as they may not require learners to…