The article documents the creation of and rationale behind best practices to maintain high performance for teaching and learning at an online university. The grassroots involvement of faculty, building on best practice efforts that guided faculty in the past, the effort to engage the full faculty in the review of documents describing best…

Technologically-mediated learning environments are an increasingly common component of university experience. In this paper, the authors consider how the interrelated domains of policy contexts, new learning cultures and the consumption of information and communication technologies might be explored using the concept of technography. Understood…

This article discusses the demographic profile, employment motivations, and changing roles of virtual faculty who hold part-time appointments. These insights are drawn from a 2006-2007 survey of forty-two part-time faculty working for virtual universities under the purview of the Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities for the…

Educators have long debated the usefulness (or otherwise) of final examinations; a debate that has typically revolved around the relative merits of closed-book exams, open-book exams, take-home exams or their substitution by some other assessment format (e.g., project work). This paper adds a new dimension to the debate by considering how the…

This paper is a report of the replication of a seminal study on cognitive presence in computer mediated conferencing (CMC) by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2001). A comparison of cognitive presence coding by three different researchers is also demonstrated. The study re-ignites debates about what constitutes the segment of CMC data to be coded…

Considering the popularity of the Internet, an automatic interactive feedback system for Elearning websites is becoming increasingly desirable. However, computers still have problems understanding natural languages, especially the Chinese language, firstly because the Chinese language has no space to segment lexical entries (its segmentation…

In this article we present a review of the state of the art in mathematical e-learning and some personal experiences on this area developed during the last eleven years at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), a completely online university located in Spain. The article discusses important aspects related to online mathematics courses offered in…

Montclair State University, a public New Jersey institution with more than 17,000 students enrolled, has harnessed the cell phone and cellular broadband technology to foster a stronger sense of community and provide students with a safe, secure, and rich learning environment. This paper discusses the potential for new technologies to foster…

A prototype virtual university server in Lebanon (VUSIL) has been designed and implemented. The server is to be used as a basis for the creation of a digital campus facility in Lebanon. An important aspect of the server has been its use as a tool for attempting to assess potential students' attitudes to this approach to learning. This paper…

During academic year 1999-2000, the Geography Department at Michigan State University (MSU) launched a program of online geography courses. Since then, four undergraduate online geography courses have been collectively developed and delivered to over 4,500 domestic and international students in association with MSU's Virtual University Design and…

For the African Virtual University and its consortium of African universities the implementation of quality promoting initiatives are not without challenges and scepticisms. To be discussed in this article is the case of a teacher education qualification in ten different African countries. Seven countries were sampled and visited in 2006 with the…

Prior to 2003, virtual universities were being created at a rate that would question the usual perception that higher education rarely changed, or changed (if at all) at a glacial speed. No comprehensive study of what was actually being created had been done; nor had anyone tapped the experiences of the developers in the states to see what was…

As e-learning in the academic sector serves as a crucial driving force in the development of e-learning in Thailand, this article looks at e-learning readiness in Thailand with a focus on the academic sector. The article is divided into four parts: (1) a brief history of e-learning in Thailand; (2) the infrastructure related to e-learning…

Discusses the need for new educational paradigms that take into consideration the need for lifelong learning and presents an image of a virtual university based on Banathy's three-dimensional model for image-building. Considers the importance of values in educational systems design and describes a framework for creating images of a virtual…

As one of the nation's top virtual university systems, the Tennessee Board of Regents' Online Degree Programs (RODP) has a great story to tell. And at Tennessee Tech University, Kevin Liska and students in the Business-Media Center specialize in telling great stories through technology. Together, the two groups will soon release marketing…