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Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Journey to textbook affordability: An investigation of students’ use of eTextbooks at multiple campuses

eTextbooks have steadily and recently more rapidly penetrated the textbook market. In order to effectively support students’ learning, it is important to comprehend students’ experiences using eTextbooks. This survey study was designed to gain an understanding of students’ experiences in using eTextbooks and variables that impact their experiences, perceptions, and attitudes towards eTextbooks. In a […]

MOOCs: A Systematic Study of the Published Literature 2008-2012

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some […]

Instructional Design in Distance Education: An Overview

Farhad Saba, Ph. D. Founder and Editor, Distance-Educator.com In this series of articles, I presented several issues that are challenging the future of higher Education. I also have been providing a systems approach for planning and managing distance education systems, as each educational institution is different and should develop its unique strategy and plan to […]

Assigning Wikipedia editing: Triangulation toward understanding university student engagement

Professors across the United States participated in the first direct effort by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports Wikipedia, to engage the academic community and integrate Wikipedia into a class assignment. Three project participants, from different areas of study, conducted independent research into university student motivations for a Wikipedia assignment. We triangulate those data […]

Effect of external events on newcomer participation in open source online communities

Newcomer participation is a strong determinant of the success of online communities, particularly of open source software (OSS) development communities. Most research on newcomer participation in online communities so far has been limited to understanding the socialization experiences of participants once they join a community. No study we are aware of has looked at the […]

Economics of scholarly communication in transition

Academic library budgets are the primary source of revenue for scholarly journal publishing. There is more than enough money in the budgets of academic libraries to fund a fully open access scholarly journal publishing system. Seeking efficiencies, such as a reasonable average cost per article, will be key to a successful transition. This article presents […]

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) in a Distance Learning Course on Mathematics Applied to Business

This paper argues that the dominant form of distance learning that is common in most e-learning systems rests on a set of learning devices and environments that may be outdated from the student’s perspective, namely because it is not supportive of learner empowerment and does not facilitate the efforts of self-directed learners. For this study […]

High School Open On-line Courses (HOOC): A Case Study from Italy

The first implementation of complete high school, open on-line courses (HOOC) aiming to support the training and basic scientific knowledge of young students from the Liceo Ginnasio Dante Alighieri in Gorizia, Italy, is discussed. Using the open source and automated recording system openEyA, HOOC give an student the opportunity to watch on-line, at their own […]

Learning Object Repositories in e-Learning: Challenges of Learners in the Saudi Arabia

The advent of the millennium has seen the introduction a new paradigm for ICT-enhanced education. Advances in ICT have led to the emergence of learning networks comprising people who want to discover and share various innovative technologies on a global scale. Over the past decade, there has been tremendous worldwide interest in the concept of […]

Design of Instruction in Higher Education: A Short Overview

Farhad Saba, Ph. D. Founder and Editor, Distance-Educator.com In this series of articles, I presented a hierarchical model of distance education consisting of seven interrelated nested systems levels. These systems have been present in most distance education organizations that I observed, or planned and built over the past 30 years. In the previous weeks, I […]