This qualitative study explored health sciences students' perceptions of their experiences in online problem based learning (PBL) and focused on their views about learning and group process in the online environment. Participants were novices to online learning and highly experienced in PBL, therefore, they could reflect on past face-to-face PBL…

We inhabit a social world in which identity is complex, no longer closely tied to place or territory, delineated by nationhood, nor simply created, as psychology suggests, through acts of identification. Instead, it is argued, identity is produced through action and performance. Popular digital culture provides a rich context for identity play and…

School administrators, eager to raise student achievement levels to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, are increasingly looking to staff development as a means to enhance student achievement. In this article, the author describes how Mountain View Alternative High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, an alternative high school…

A quantitative study of a university chat reference service (online synchronous) addresses the following research questions: (1) What types of questions are being asked? (2) Who is asking the questions of the service? and (3) Did the customers get correct answers to their questions? All the transcripts (351) from January through August 2002 were…

"Do you blog?" That's a question educators are hearing frequently these days, and more and more are responding with an enthusiastic "yes!" The reason? Teachers have discovered that technologies like weblogs--Web sites that are a snap to update--can be powerful teaching tools. And librarians are gearing up to help them. The educational community's…

This study aimed to examine gender and status effects in the kind of e-mails used to manage course administrative issues in an educational setting. Students were asked to respond to an e-mail presented as being from a member of staff, informing them of failure to submit coursework and asking for an explanation to be provided. The sex and status of…

Past studies of online discourse found social presence to be a critical element in the learning process. Social presence connotes the extent to which students perceive themselves as intellectually connected to the other participants in an online dialogue. Impediments to the development of social presence can disrupt knowledge formation as a group…

This paper reports on a case study on the implementation of "language games" as a pedagogical tool for analyzing, assessing and promoting the quality and the level of collaborative knowledge building in online learning dialogues. Part of the overall objective is to explore the use, strength, weaknesses, and limitations of using the…

This study quantitatively synthesized the empirical research of the gender effects on people's communicative, interactive, affective, and process patterns using computer-mediated communication (CMC). In total, 321 independent effect sizes were extracted from 50 studies involving a total of 63889 users exploring the gender difference in the use of…

This qualitative study explores the dynamics of exchanging e-journals among counseling trainees who participated in an interpersonal growth group. Interviews were conducted with participants who discussed the influence of e-journals on their group experience. E-journaling extended the group both spatially and temporally, and participants reported…

In this article, the author describes how he introduced a history project that blended a book discussion activity and the use of blogs to his eighth-grade class. Over four weeks, his class participated in a lively collective journal centered on an assigned piece of reading: "Guerrilla Season" by Pat Hughes. The historical novel, set…

The main objective of this pilot research project was to determine whether the use of an internet broadband link to stream physiotherapy clinical education workshop proceedings in "real-time" is of equivalent educational value to the traditional face-to-face experience. This project looked at the benefits of using the above technology as…

An increasing number of students are choosing online education programs to complete their higher education. Research concludes that student satisfaction and retention are related to program completion. Furthermore, research indicates that physical distance alone does not influence student satisfaction and retention. In this study, we examined…

The convergence of mobile technologies into student-centered learning environments requires academic institutions to design new and more effective learning, teaching, and user experience strategies. In this article we share results from an mLearning design experiment and analysis from a student survey conducted at the National College of Ireland.…

This paper explores four issues that have emerged from the research on social, cognitive and teaching presence in an online community of inquiry. The early research in the area of online communities of inquiry has raised several issues with regard to the creation and maintenance of social, cognitive and teaching presence that require further…