Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

“They Look at Themselves and Say: “Well, Okay…””: The Contribution of Video to Professional Identity Development

This paper focuses on the development of professional identity by the use of video technology. On the basis of empirical material from a professional bachelor’s e-learning programme, it is argued that the use of video can contribute to reflection of professional identity through its opportunities for visual reification of the professional “Me”: while acting in […]

Are They Thinking Differently: A Cross-Cultural Study on the Relationship of Thinking Styles and Emerging Roles in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Numerous studies have recognized collaboration as an effective way of learning. When collaboration involves students from different cultural backgrounds, a question arises: Will cultural differences influence the manner in which roles are adopted within collaborative learning? In this study, a correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship between cultural factors and emerging roles among […]

Designing and Implementing Web-based Scaffolding Tools for Technology-enhanced Socioscientific Inquiry

This study explores how web-based scaffolding tools provide instructional support while implementing a socio-scientific inquiry (SSI) unit in a science classroom. This case study focused on how students used web-based scaffolding tools during SSI activities, and how students perceived the SSI unit and the scaffolding tools embedded in the SSI activities. A web-based SSI unit […]

Ethical Considerations in the Practical Application of the Unisa Socio-Critical Model of Student Success

The prediction and classification of student performance has always been a central concern within higher education institutions. It is therefore natural for higher education institutions to harvest and analyse student data to inform decisions on education provision in resource constrained South African environments. One of the drivers for the use of learning and academic analytics […]

Web-based Collaborative Writing in L2 Contexts: Methodological Insights from Text Mining

The increasingly widespread use of social software (e.g., Wikis, Google Docs) in second language (L2) settings has brought a renewed attention to collaborative writing. Although the current methodological approaches to examining collaborative writing are valuable to understand L2 students’ interactional patterns or perceived experiences, they can be insufficient to capture the quantity and quality of […]

Sharing a Multimodal Corpus to Study Webcam-mediated Language Teaching

This article proposes a methodology to create a multimodal corpus that can be shared with a group of researchers in order to analyze synchronous online pedagogical interactions. Epistemological aspects involved in studying online interactions from a multimodal and semiotic perspective are addressed. Then, issues and challenges raised by corpus creation and sharing are examined with […]

Current Issue Another Simple Yet Effective Best Practice for Increasing Enrollments at an Extended Campus

This article is a follow-up to a previous article, “Six Ways to Increase Enrollments at an Extended Campus,” published in this journal (vol. 17, no. 4, winter 2015), wherein a seventh best practice to increase course offerings and increase enrollments at an extended campus is presented. This best practice seeks to identify those areas of […]

Exploring the Factors Associated with MOOC Engagement, Retention and the Wider Benefits for Learners

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have and continue to change the way in which non-traditional learners’ access education. Although the free element of these has been linked to low completion rates due to no invested interest, the MOOC platform enables innovative technologies and practices to be trialled. Therefore, rather than attributing varied intentions of learners […]

Assuring Quality in E-Learning Course Design: The Roadmap

Quality Assurance (QA) concepts and applications in Higher Education (HE) emerge from evolving meanings related to HE’s dynamic relationship with social, economic, cultural, and technological developments.  The latter has been redefined by the growth spurred by the forms distance and online education acquired during the last decades.  Creating a roadmap with clearly articulated meanings of […]

Digital

Enabling Reproducibility for Small and Large Scale Research Data Sets

A large portion of scientific results is based on analysing and processing research data. In order for an eScience experiment to be reproducible, we need to able to identify precisely the data set which was used in a study. Considering evolving data sources this can be a challenge, as studies often use subsets which have […]