This paper shows how concept mapping can be used to measure the quality of e-learning. Six volunteers (all of them 3rd-year medical students) took part in a programme of e-learning designed to teach the principles of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Their understanding of MRI was measured before and after the course by the use of concept mapping.…

Wiki empowers users in generating, revising, and organizing their own content. In this study, we review literature to gain theoretical support for wikis that impact learning. In a context of student journalists learning news writing, we design a two-phase field study: (1) Phase I--to examine learners' reflections on learning news writing in wiki…

As an educational theorist, the author finds Dreyfus' reflections on education, on skill, competence and proficiency, on embodiment and on commitment and risk, to be of deep importance and deserving widespread debate. Moreover, as an educator whose teaching is done at a terminal and whose practice is inextricable from the Internet, the author…

Individualized exercises are a promising feature in promoting modern e-learning. The focus of this article is on the QuizPACK system, which is able to generate parameterized exercises for the C language and automatically evaluate the correctness of student answers. We introduce QuizPACK and present the results of its comprehensive classroom…

This article highlights basic issues that have hindered e-learning systems from becoming the revolutionary force it could be for education. While current systems aim to foster significant improvements in learning, this article argues that most systems are still limited to just being online repositories. This and the lack of learning…

The field of education is experiencing a rapid shift as internet-enabled distance learning becomes more widespread. Often, traditional classroom teaching pedagogical techniques can be ill-suited to the online environment. While a traditional entry-level class might see a student attrition rate of 5-10%, the same teaching pedagogy in an online…

This Academic Year Report 2009-10 provides a snapshot of funding, facilities, staffing, and enrollments in community and technical colleges in the past academic year. The report also describes key measures of student outcomes and addresses the most frequently asked questions related to expenditures, personnel and students. Additional demographic…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) To Be Continued: Congress Passes Continuing Resolution to Keep Government Running, Buys Time to Pass Appropriations…

In the education world, it is widely accepted that language learning is one of the pioneering disciplines in the application and use of the information and communication technologies, initially preceded by the widespread use of audiovisual resources which, finally integrated in the digital space, bring about the use of multimedia. Additionally,…

The 5 year KP-Lab project funded under the FP6 of the European Commission's Programme for Research and Technological Development is about developing theories, tools, practical models, and research methods that deliberately advance the ways in which knowledge is created and which help to transform knowledge practices in education and in the…

Developing a software environment to enhance 3D geometric proficiency demands the consideration of theoretical views of the learning process. Simultaneously, this effort requires taking into account the range of tools that technology offers, as well as their limitations. In this paper, we report on the design of Virtual Spaces 1.0 software, a…

This paper reports on a collaborative staff development activity run across two Australian universities, for academic staff integrating Web 2.0 technologies into their teaching. It describes a three-week long virtual workshop on teaching with wikis, where participants in two groups developed a group project as students and then assessed the work…

This small scale action research study investigated the experiences of learners over two iterations as they completed a patchwork text assignment within the digital medium of a personal learning system (PLS). The aim was to investigate the extent to which using a PLS can facilitate formative and collaborative feedback to assist student learning. A…

Much Second Language Acquisition research focuses on young learners in the conventional classroom. Instructed adult learners, and in particular those who are learning at a distance, have attracted less attention. This group is substantial and growing: the Open University, the largest higher education language provider in the UK, alone recruits…

The main aim of this study is to integrate cooperative learning strategies, mastery learning and interactive multimedia to improve students' performance in Mathematics, specifically in the topic of matrices. It involved a quasi-experimental design with gain scores and time-on-task as dependent variables. The independent variables were three…