Our universities are becoming increasingly diverse at the same time as online asynchronous discussions (OADs) are emerging as the most important forum for computer mediated communication (CMC) in distance education. But there is shortage of studies that explore how graduate students from different ethnic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds use…

Can mobile technology improve flexibility and quality of interaction for graduate students in distance programs? This paper reports the results of an innovative study exploring the usability, learning, and social interaction of mobile access to online course materials at a Canadian distance education university. Through a system called MobiGlam,…

Obstacles to the classroom implementation of the fourth grade Math component of Louisiana's web-based testing tutorial were addressed in this informal pilot. Technology integration improved standardized test preparation for students with special needs. Supplemental test preparation sessions give the benefits of (a) increased familiarity with…

This article introduces the Nokia Mobile Learning for Mathematics Project in South Africa, which made use of mobile technology to support mathematics learning at 30 public secondary schools. It draws on the evaluation of this project from January to June 2010. The article discusses learner access to mobile devices, learner and teacher uptake and…

In this paper, I describe an assignment designed to give students an intermediate level of understanding of the causes of the crisis using online educational resources widely available on the internet. I implemented the assignment in an undergraduate intermediate accounting course. Feedback from students indicate the assignment enhanced their…

Increasing instructor-student interactions and improving support personnel interventions with students positively affects their academic performance, retention, and graduation rates. This article discusses the Grade Performance Status (GPS) which is Northern Arizona University's new online, academic early alert tool for increasing instructor…

A number of contemporary factors have combined to create a situation that encourages and supports international collaboration among institutions of higher education. Factors such as the globalization of the economy, the increasingly international nature of higher education, and the development of an inexpensive and virtually worldwide system of…

This paper identifies a set of universal instructional design (UID) principles appropriate to distance education (DE) and specifically tailored to the needs of instructional designers and instructors teaching online. These principles are then used to assess the accessibility level of a sample online course and the availability of options in its…

Advocates of ubiquitous computing have long been documenting classroom benefits of one-to-one ratios of students to handheld or laptop computers. The recent sophisticated capabilities of the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad have encouraged further speculation on exactly how K-12 teaching and learning might be energized by such devices. This paper…

Imagine a computerized learning management system that enables teachers to deliver pertinent learning materials to students. Lectures are prerecorded and made available to download from the learning management system. If all their lectures were prerecorded, what would teachers do in the classroom? Classroom time could be used to coordinate…

Increasing use of screencast and Flash authoring software within libraries is resulting in "homegrown" library collections of digital learning objects and multimedia presentations. The author explores the use of Google Analytics to track usage statistics for interactive Shockwave Flash (.swf) files, the common file output for screencast and Flash…

The objective of this research was to better understand the transfer of learning between different variations of pre-algebra problems. While the authors could have addressed a specific variation that might address transfer, they were interested in developing a general model of transfer, so we gathered data from multiple problem types and their…

This paper describes how we can move from a single Learning Management System sc. as Sakai, Blackboard, Moodle, or Desire2Learn to a cooperating collection of networked learning content and tools. The move from a single silo of functionality to the ability to use tools from anywhere on the web will greatly increase the variety of tools available…

Over the past several years, the authors have been developing an instructional technology, called Teachable Agents (TA), which draws on the social metaphor of teaching to help students learn. Students teach a computer character, their "agent," by creating a concept map of nodes connected by qualitative causal links. The authors hypothesize that…

The challenges of teaching large classes are well documented in the literature on teaching in higher education. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to address some of these challenges, but, used inappropriately, technology can perpetuate entrenched practices and simply support performance models of teaching that…