Leading a classroom discussion involves multiple components, including establishing norms for participation, assisting students in engaging in careful readings of text ahead of time, and modeling features of academic discourse. In other work, Grossman and her colleagues refer to this as the "decomposition" of practice--breaking down complex…

As India marches rapidly towards an ambitious agenda of economic and social advancement, one of the greatest challenges it faces is to provide extensive access to quality higher education opportunities. An evident and expanding Open Education Resources movement offers great promise for meeting this challenge through initiatives that make quality…

This study examined how global learning teams utilized technology in a virtual collaboration to solve complex problems. The study offers an in-depth explanation of why and how the learning teams used technology to support computer-mediated communication. A model of technology application at different stages of virtual collaborative process is…

This study examines the effects of a computer-assisted learning (CAL) program in which syllabic units were highlighted inside words in comparison with a CAL program in which the words were not segmented, i.e. one requiring whole word recognition. In a randomised control trial design, two separate groups of French speaking poor readers (2 * 14) in…

Peer moderation of group work in higher education is rapidly advancing through the use of technological developments and is increasingly being informed by pedagogical research. The highly successful WebPA online assessment system has gone through a number of development phases over its 15-year history and has now evolved into a relatively mature…

As online courses are offered as an alternative to traditional instruction in higher education, there are considerable debates about online teaching and learning. Some believe that online education shows promise as an innovative and creative pedagogical method; 67% of colleges and universities agree that online education is the single significant…

This study explores the relationship between the student performance and instructional design. The research was conducted at the E-Learning School at a university in Turkey. A list of design factors that had potential influence on student success was created through a review of the literature and interviews with relevant experts. From this, the…

This article explores a number of challenges faced by e-learning or distance educators in developing and emerging countries, provides a context for many of the challenges, and outlines some measures devised to overcome them. These educators must determine a sound rationale for employing online learning, recognize that technology is only part of…

Online learning can play an important role in engaging language learners and fostering autonomy. The LondonMet e-pack, which provides online interactive language learning materials, is used as a case study to illustrate some of the theoretical and practical issues faced by those implementing online language learning programmes. This article begins…

Taiwan government has initiated a five-year program since 2002: the National Science and Technology Program for e-Learning. The national program started from 2003 and was completed at the end of year 2007, involving thirteen government agencies. This paper describes the results that the national program has accomplished at its first phase, 2003 to…

The 2008 Sloan Blended Workshop evaluation track provided participants with ideas, methods, and resources with which to design and evaluate their courses, programs, and blended initiatives. The many questions that arose from participants at the Workshop provided the motivation to document our University's evaluation experiences at course, program…

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a study conducted to investigate how the attributes of 3-D technology such as avatars, 3-D space, and comic style bubble dialogue boxes affect participants' social, cognitive, and teaching presences in a blended problem-based learning environment. The community of inquiry model was adopted…

This article attempts to describe students' process of learning physics using the notion of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on…

Mobile learning (m-learning) is a new trend in the e-learning field. The learning services in m-learning environments are supported by fundamental functions, especially the content and assessment services, which need an authoring tool to rapidly generate adaptable learning resources. To fulfill the imperious demand, this study proposes an…

A number of studies emphasized the need to capture learners' interaction patterns in order to personalize their learning process as they study through learning objects. In education context, learning materials are designed based on pre-determined expectations and learners are evaluated to what extent they master these expectations. Representation…