Researchers and teacher educators have called for contextualizing the learning of pedagogy and content within the complex context of schools. This account provides an overview of a web-based simulation called Sim-School[C] that provides a realistic framework for students to contextualize curricular decisions, differentiate instruction and reflect…

This study analyses the academic achievement of students enrolled in part-times studies at on-campus and outreach centres at three dual-mode Nigerian universities, during the 1996/97 to 1998/99 academic years. Research subjects in this study were examination and record officers employed by on-campus and outreach institutions. A checklist was…

As the 50th anniversary of the landmark "Brown v. Board of Education" decision arrives, a notably gesellschaftliche (individualist, freedom-oriented, rationalist) paradigm in the education policy agenda prevails. That is to say, in the wake of a series of Supreme Court decisions and the proliferation of publicly funded, ethnocentric charter…

Over the past twenty years American education has seen many changes, and most notable have been those related to accountability and assessment. One aspect of these changes has been the movement toward more specified student learning outcomes. In discipline after discipline content standards have been developed outlining that which students should…

This paper outlines the main findings of research about online portfolio information systems. This research focused on the educational integrity of these educational systems and the maximisation of value across all stakeholders, in particular the value gained from the automation and interaction potential of the online environment. The findings and…

This article presents research findings investigating the fundamental characteristics in online Spanish instruction (at the university level in the United States) designed to maximize learning outcomes. The researcher collected data to develop a rubric of the fundamental characteristic in online Spanish instruction and then to determine whether…

Assessment is one of the key elements of the teaching and learning process. It provides teachers with a means of evaluating the quality of their instruction. Students also use it to drive and direct their learning. Online teaching and learning will continue to become more important to Australian universities in order for them to remain competitive…

An old adage--the truly educated never graduate--has come to exemplify the rationale for the growth and expansion of professional continuing education (PCE) programs in the United States. This monograph is about the trends and best practices in professional continuing education. It explores how this area of higher and adult education, once the…

This article discusses the role of a multimedia learning environment in teaching foreign languages to engineering students. Arguing for a subject-specific and skills-oriented approach in teaching Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) in the university, it outlines possible targets and skills for a language course for engineers. The paper goes on…

This study examines the sociocultural trajectories of children's conceptual thinking in a technology-enriched early years science classroom (N=22). Of specific analytic interest is the intertextuality of children's science-related explanations constructed during adult-child dialogic interviews and peer-centred inquiry around a multimedia…

Purpose: To distinguish sustainable development education from environmental education and stress the importance of problem-based interdisciplinary learning to sustainable development education. Design/methodology/approach: A range of published works relating to sustainable development education are critiqued, an introduction to complexity theory…

John Shank and Steven Bell describe A_FLIP (Administrators, Faculty, Librarians Instructional Partnership), a model of professional collaboration that promotes the fuller integration of appropriate library resources into the overall structure of course management systems as well as the online design of specific courses. As they outline their…

Many administrators are moving toward using online student evaluations to assess courses and instructors, but critics of the practice fear that the online format will only result in lower levels of student participation. Joan Anderson, Gary Brown, and Stephen Spaeth claim that such a concern often fails to acknowledge how the evaluation process…

A system for "anchored discussion" is compared with a system for traditional forum discussion (Blackboard), and their collaborative and communicative affordances for the collaborative processing of academic texts are investigated. Results show that discussion in the system for anchored discussion is more directed at processing the meaning of texts…

Future CSCL technologies are described by the community as flexible, tailorable, negotiable, and appropriate for various collaborative settings, conditions and contexts. This paper describes the key design issues of a generic synchronous collaborative learning environment, called Omega+. In this approach, model-based genericity is applied to the…