A new final-year teacher education unit at an Australian university uses action research as a learning process for teacher-interns in rural schools. This year-long unit requires support in the first semester as on-campus students explore action research and identify potential areas for their improvement. Online work at this stage builds the…

A key characteristic of both high-quality professional development and successful online learning communities is peer-to-peer interaction. This paper describes the results of a study in which we examined the quality of peer-to-peer interaction among diverse groups of geographically dispersed educators in an online professional development project…

The World Wide Web is evolving from a collection of texts linked by hypertext and hypermedia toward services that operate interactively with the information user, and which offer results through use of a broad spectrum of tools. This paper presents a collection of interactive WWW services. The services are classified on the basis of the client…

An interdisciplinary project was developed in which faculty and students learned to use writing in new and innovative ways. The 3-year project focused on five problems in the teaching and practice of college writing: the negative attitude of faculty towards the teaching of writing; the negative attitude of students towards writing; the relative…

A one-year pilot program at five videoconferencing learning centers addressed the use of videoconferencing as an effective instructional delivery model in distance education for post secondary teacher education. The need to offer teachers increased continuing educational opportunities has placed a significant demand on university training programs…

Faced with declining resources, increased public scrutiny, and pressures to accommodate the needs of a changing student population, colleges and universities look to innovative uses of technology as supplements to and alternatives for mainstream instruction. Faculty are increasingly becoming involved in distance/distributed education. This study…

This collection of articles on distance learning reflects the perspectives and concerns of the learner and the facilitator of learning in distance education setting. Eight chapters are included: (1) "The Evolution and Advantages of Distance Education" (John E. Cantelon) traces the history of distance education and demonstrates how it transcends…

A "connected classroom" model was used for an educational psychology class which relied heavily on both face-to-face and Web-based collaborative discussion. As part of the class, students were required to participate in collaborative discussion that consisted of a structured environment in which students addressed open-ended questions…

This paper looks at factors affecting the success of asynchronous online learning through an investigation of relationships between student perceptions and course design factors in the SUNY (State University of New York) Learning Network, one of the largest asynchronous learning networks in the country. It finds that three such…

This paper discusses how the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) can be adapted for use in online instruction. The four basic stages of the NGT (listing, recording, collating, and prioritizing) are described, and modifications for online delivery are detailed, including: (1) the instructor posts the Socratic question or problem to be posed; (2) students…

This book explores the creative opportunities offered by information and communications technology (ICT), and provides an authoritative survey of the ways in which ICT is currently transforming core teaching functions. The contributed chapters in this book are organizes around these core processes of learning and teaching: subject matter…

Driven by the inability of traditional higher education institutions to accommodate the increasing number of people demanding postsecondary education, community colleges are implementing new modes of access to their programs. One of the most popular means of access is distance education, which promises education beyond the boundaries of the…

This paper describes the struggles of one professional development project as it attempted to use networking technology to promote ongoing reflection and community building among its participating teachers. It employs Riel and Levin's (1990) framework for participant structures in computer networking environments to consider the strengths and…

Telecommunications offers teacher candidates an environment through which to delve into higher order thinking skills within the methods coursework, student teaching internship experience, as well as within the PreK-12 classroom environment. Modeling of appropriate uses of technology within the learning environment as the teacher candidate…

The authors developed a collaborative learning environment (CLE) as a student-centered approach to assist students' understanding of difficult scientific concepts. Computer-facilitated investigative group projects were designed to enhance students' communication and reasoning skills, peer-learning, and peer-teaching. Projects were structured…