One institution's attempts to implement an ambitious wholly online learning policy is examined in the Australian higher education setting. The conditions that led to a diversity of models of wholly online unit development are considered, along with teachers' design intents in establishing their online teaching and learning environments. The…

Policy formulation and implementation is a highly contested domain within the South African Higher Education landscape. This contestation can be attributed to the lack of wide stakeholder involvement and the architecture of the policy-making process. The contestation is also born of an absence of a systemic monitoring and evaluation mechanism to…

Adaptive LMS have not yet reached the eLearning marketplace due to methodological, technological and management open issues. At aDeNu group, we have been working on two key challenges for the last five years in related research projects. Firstly, develop the general framework and a running architecture to support the adaptive life cycle (i.e.,…

Instructional engineering provides methods to conduct the design and adaptation of competence development programmes by the combination of diverse learning components (i.e. units of learning, learning activities, learning resources and learning services). It occurs through an established process workflow in which models with diverse levels of…

For the past decade the buzz words in teaching and learning have consisted of "the knowledge economy," "information literacy," and "transferable skills." The idea being; ensure students emerge from higher education with the skills needed to participate in the "knowledge economy." In response academics have…

According to Barab "et al." (2004), the ideal community of practice (CoP) is a "persistent, sustained social network of individuals, who share and develop an overlapping knowledge base, set of beliefs, values, history, and experiences focused on a common practice and/or mutual enterprise" (p. 55). Thus, a CoP has a social…

Any application of information and communication technology in education (ICTE) sits, at times uncomfortably, at the intersection of three key disciplines: technology, education and sociology (including reflexivity). To confuse matters, any specific study may need to take account of specific knowledge within subdisciplines, such as organisational…

There has been interest recently in how mobile devices may be motivating forces in the right contexts: for example, one of the themes for the IADIS International Conference on Mobile Learning in 2007 was "Affective Factors in Learning with Mobile Devices" (http://www.mlearning-conf.org). The authors have previously proposed six aspects…

For the thirty-third year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the national AECT Convention in Anaheim, California. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

Mobile computing facilities may provide many assets to the educational process. Mobile technology provides software access from anywhere and at any time, as well as computer equipment independence. The need for time and place independence is even greater for medical instructors and medical students. Medical instructors are usually doctors that…

Readers will find several papers that address high-level issues in the use of technology in education, for example architecture and design frameworks for building online education materials or tools. Several other chapters report novel approaches to intelligent tutors or adaptive systems in educational settings. A number of chapters consider many…

Encouraging continuous improvement in the quality, scale and breadth of online education, the Sloan Consortium invites practitioners to share effective practices. This report synthesizes effective practices submitted by Sloan-C members to the online collection at http://www.sloanconsortium.org/effective as of November 2010. The synthesis includes…

This study explores factors that predict learner satisfaction and transfer of learning in an online educational program at a multinational corporation, established to improve organizational learning by providing training in technical skills. A mixed-methods design was used, selecting both quantitative methods (utilizing survey research) and…

This paper argues that if new communications technologies and online spaces are to yield "new relationship[s] with learners" then research that is tuned to recognize, capture and explain the pedagogical processes at the center of such interactions is vital. This has implications for the design of pedagogical activities within Initial…

This article presents the results of a three-year study of "Gamestar Mechanic" (www.gamestarmechanic.com), a flash-based multiplayer online role-playing game developed for the MacArthur Foundation's digital media learning initiative by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Gamelab in New York. The game's objective is to help children…