Driven by the inability of traditional higher education institutions to accommodate the increasing number of people demanding postsecondary education, community colleges are implementing new modes of access to their programs. One of the most popular means of access is distance education, which promises education beyond the boundaries of the…

This paper describes the struggles of one professional development project as it attempted to use networking technology to promote ongoing reflection and community building among its participating teachers. It employs Riel and Levin's (1990) framework for participant structures in computer networking environments to consider the strengths and…

Telecommunications offers teacher candidates an environment through which to delve into higher order thinking skills within the methods coursework, student teaching internship experience, as well as within the PreK-12 classroom environment. Modeling of appropriate uses of technology within the learning environment as the teacher candidate…

The authors developed a collaborative learning environment (CLE) as a student-centered approach to assist students' understanding of difficult scientific concepts. Computer-facilitated investigative group projects were designed to enhance students' communication and reasoning skills, peer-learning, and peer-teaching. Projects were structured…

This theme issue on networked teaching and learning contains 11 articles written by teachers of English and language arts in Bread Loaf's primarily rural, teacher networks. Most of these narratives describe how teachers have taught writing and literature using online exchanges or teleconferencing involving students in different locations and grade…

Preparing courses for flexible delivery and distance education is normally a time-consuming and expensive process. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a system that automatically captures and indexes audio and video streams of traditional university lectures without demanding any changes in the style or tools used by teachers. Using…

Based on a technical infrastructure that supports face-to-face university teaching, an environment that enables small groups of lecturers to develop and maintain lecture material cooperatively was developed. In order to allow for a flexible use, only a few formal workshops are imposed on the users while cooperation is supported by easy-to-use…

The purpose of this project was to investigate the perceptions of instructors and students with regard to delivering effective instruction in synchronous learning environments. The specific research goals were to attain an evaluation of the quality of distance education courses, to determine the effectiveness of the delivery medium, and to examine…

This paper deals with the use of personal technologies in decentralized university education. Decentralized education, delivered to off-campus students located in the same geographical area, is a hybrid genre combining features of both on-campus and distance education. The paper reports two studies. The first study focused on communication…

This paper reports on a project where three-dimensional (3D) online gaming environments were exploited for the purpose of academic communication and learning. 3D gaming environments are media and meaning rich and can provide inexpensive solutions for educational purposes. The experiment with teaching and discussions in this setting, however,…

The design rationale for the development of an exemplary, flexible online course for making accessible online courses is described. The authors developed the course by adopting the roles of content expert and instructional designer. The course has a dual purpose. The assessment for postgraduate students provides a guide to learning for academic…

Recently, attention has focused on developing methods for facilitating critical thinking in students. Scaffolding is a method that has been successfully used in many settings to support different learning goals. This study focused on the influence of scaffolding on critical thinking skills in a technology-mediated environment. The main research…

Higher education and learning calls for a human process, an interaction between facilitator and learner. A customized approach to individualized problems is more than just electronic delivery. The crucial issue is not the mode of delivery, but the skills required to facilitate learning. Unfortunately, evidence of a subtle re-definition of…

The purpose of this study was to examine how graduate students participated in Web-based course discussions by analyzing the interactions that occurred between synchronous (chat) and asynchronous (listserv) modes of discussions using a coding scheme developed by the researchers. The study examined whether participation was substantive (directly…

Libraries faced with the challenge of cooperative cataloging must maintain a high degree of unification within the library network (consortium) without compromising local libraries' independence. This paper compares a traditional model for cooperative catalogs achieved by means of a Union Catalog that depends entirely on replication of data…