Delivering meaningful professional development, engaging students in exciting yet practical curricula, and effectively communicating with faculty and staff members are challenges in any school setting. At the Louisiana Virtual School, a state-funded virtual school run by the Louisiana Department of Education, the 6,000 students, 115 instructors,…

Education is one of the pillars in which a Welfare State is effectively based on in order to achieve an equitable distribution of wealth. In contemporary society, knowledge and education are among the most appreciated goods, and everyone should have the right to acquire them, without distinction of gender, race, age, health or religion. From our…

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags behind the rest of the world in education. Less than 25 percent of qualified high school graduates in this region will make it to the university level, mainly because most countries within the region have less than three universities. Furthermore, alternatives to universities such as two year colleges and training…

Many people believed that virtual worlds would end up like the eight-track audiotape: a memory of something no longer used (or useful). Yet today there are hundreds of higher education institutions represented in three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds such as Active Worlds and Second Life. The movement toward the virtual realm as a viable teaching…

This paper describes some of the principles for building a freely available web-based university with open content. The "tutor-web" is an international project for web-assisted education, including such free and open access. This project was initiated by the University of Iceland in partnership with many universities around the world,…

This review is based on the experience of an adjunct professor teaching in the Walden University online MSED Science (K-8) program. The program described by Walden University and the actual implementation of the science component of the program as experienced by the Professor will be presented. The program, while a noble attempt at a completely…

Learners' satisfaction and persistence are considered critical success factors in online universities where all of the teaching and learning activities are carried out online. This study aims to investigate the structural relationships among perceived level of presence, perceived usefulness and ease of use of the online learning tools, learner…

Virtual universities (VUs) were formed to open up access to higher education for new and existing students, and they continue to grow and thrive. They come in all sizes and organizational and business models, and most differ from their founding institutions. However, VUs face more rigorous requirements for accountability and reporting. Most of…

This study investigated the use of online after-hours eMentoring as a nontraditional student support and retention strategy. The term eMentoring describes online support delivered to students electronically and through Learning Management Systems. An online university providing eMentors for student support was compared with a traditionally modeled…

A select group of academic officers and deans from institutions (all sectors) whose programs are primarily online and whose teaching faculty differ considerably from traditional faculty participated in the Academic Leadership Forum, October 26, 2011, held in conjunction with WCET's (WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies') Annual Meeting.…

Student persistence or retention has been a documented issue in higher education in the United States since the late 1800s. While much has been written about the topic of retention at the more traditional types of institutions, little has been written about retention at the online institutions of higher learning that have developed since the early…

Five academics from around the world plan to open a new kind of online university early next year, built upon professor star power and students learning from one another through online social tools. The teachers will be volunteers, the courses will cost next to nothing, and no official credit will be given. The organizers call it P2P University…

This article is based on the convictions that peace education is the basis for any sustainable non-violent relations between parties in a conflict, and that virtual peace education is almost the only feasible way to practise peace education in an open violent conflict as is the current Israeli/Palestinians one. Moreover, virtual peace education…

Feedback is a key element in effective teaching and learning. The issue of how teachers perceive the role of feedback will impact significantly their feedback approaches, the amount of the detail of their feedback and the time and effort expended on the feedback provision. This research was designed with the purpose of exploring how a group of…

Purpose: Numerous attempts have been made to link a particular learning style to either a particular culture, gender, or even a generation. In a typically heterogeneous online class, it is impossible to address every participant's culture or the degree of assimilation to a particular culture. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to recommend…