This report provides short descriptions of systemic approaches for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding including: (1) 21st Century Classroom; (2) Comprehensive Professional Development; (3) Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems; (4) Formative Assessment; (5) Digital Content; (6) Virtual Learning; and (7) Learning Management Systems.

Online learning provides learners with more convenient and flexible ways of learning than does a traditional learning environment. Many Thai universities have implemented online learning for their students despite a lack of knowledge and understanding about students' attitudes toward and behavioral intention to using the system. The purpose of…

This report investigates enrollment patterns and academic outcomes in online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses among students who enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges in the fall of 2004. Students were tracked for nearly five years, until the spring of 2009. Results were similar to those found in a parallel study in…

Community colleges play an important role in the U.S. economy, providing access to higher education for low-income young people, a path to higher-earning employment for low-income workers, and a supply of well-trained employees for local industry. In order to remain competitive with other major economies, however, the U.S. must sharply increase…

This article considers some of the ways in which the transformative power of Web 2.0 digital technology is reconfiguring learning, knowledge and academic identities in the contemporary university. Through a focus on five specific examples, we consider the impact of virtualization processes on spatiality, materiality and embodiment, and pedagogic…

Purpose: The need to establish more flexible and adaptable university curricula has been recognised as a strategic priority in recent years and has been supported by a number of initiatives including the Curriculum Design and Delivery programme funded by the Joint Information System Committee (JISC) in the UK. The challenges of addressing…

We report on the incorporation of e-book readers into the delivery of two distance-taught master's programmes in Occupational Psychology (OP) and one in Education at the University of Leicester, UK. The programmes attract work-based practitioners in OP and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, respectively. Challenges in curriculum…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usability (effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction) of e-feedback interfaces. The experiment compares a traditional visual approach with a multimodal approach in order to determine the impact of multimodal metaphors upon the user's understanding, reasoning and engagement with the…

Recent research indicated that students' ability to construct evidence-based explanations in classrooms through scientific inquiry is critical to successful science education. Structured argumentation support environments have been built and used in scientific discourse in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, no research work in the…

E-learning is an increasingly popular form of education for college students (Allen & Seaman, 2007). There are a number of best practices for teaching online courses (Lewis & Abdul-Hamid, 2006) which should be followed by leadership educators. In addition, for a wide variety of reasons, women comprise a significant portion of the distance…

Population growth (Broad, 1997), institutional competition (Daniel & Cox, 2002), and changing learner needs (Willis, Tucker, & Gunn, 2003) are among the issues influencing the increase in online teaching and learning. Related to this, emergent and expanding distance learning technologies have subsequently pitted "brick and…

The Community of Inquiry model provides a framework for recognizing and evaluating interpersonal behaviors in online educational settings. One of its three components, teaching presence (TP), describes those behaviors that are under the auspices of the online instructor. By examining these interactions and behaviors through the theoretical lens…

A comparative evaluation framework of instructional interventions for implementation of online training for public library staff would enable a better understanding of how to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and efficacy of training in certain training environments. This dissertation describes a quasi-experimental study of a two-week,…

This literature review explores research regarding the perception of potential employers or "gatekeepers" about online degrees in comparison with those earned in a traditional format. This review contributes to the field of knowledge because higher education can benefit from understanding how these perceptions affect students' employment…

This study was set up in a Chinese university in Beijing by implementing a Flemish e-learning course in a Chinese setting. A main feature of the e-learning environment is the asynchronous "task-based" online group discussion. The purpose of the study is to understand Chinese students' perceptions of a collaborative e-learning environment…