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Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Faculty supporting and developing a CBE program – strategies implemented at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

Faculty play key roles in developing and supporting academic programs. For traditional modes of delivery, the ways faculty support and develop academic offerings are well-defined and understood. However, for new modes of delivery like CBE, successful faculty support will only occur through the use of intentional strategies aimed at inspiring support and encouraging lasting involvement. […]

E-mentoring and its relevance for competency-based education for students with disabilities: research from the GSAA BreakThru model

Background Communication and learning technologies to enable mentoring for students are important topics for online courses and competency-based education approaches. However, research results have been limited. The Georgia STEM Accessibility Alliance (GSAA) is a research project of the US National Science Foundation’s Research in Disabilities Education (RDE) program. It is a collaborative RDE Alliance between […]

Localizing OER in Afghanistan: Developing a Multilingual Digital Library for Afghan Teachers

The Darakht-e Danesh (‘knowledge tree’) Online Library is the first open educational resource (OER) initiative in Afghanistan, established to enhance teacher subject-area knowledge, access and use of learning materials, and to foster more diverse teaching methodologies in order to improve learning outcomes in Afghan classrooms. This paper describes our experience developing this local language digital […]

Download New Book: Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning: Foundations and Applications

Educational systems worldwide are facing an enormous shift as a result of sociocultural, political, economic, and technological changes. The technologies and practices that have developed over the last decade have been heralded as opportunities to transform both online and traditional education systems. While proponents of these new ideas often postulate that they have the potential […]

Blending Formal and Informal Learning Networks for Online Learning

With the emergence of social software and the advance of web-based technologies, online learning networks provide invaluable opportunities for learning, whether formal or informal. Unlike top-down, instructor-centered, and carefully planned formal learning settings, informal learning networks offer more bottom-up, student-centered participatory but somewhat disorganized learning opportunities for students. This paper presents a research study where […]

Identifying Tensions in the Use of Open Licenses in OER Repositories

We present an analysis of 50 repositories for educational content conducted through an “audit system” that helped us classify these repositories, their software systems, promoters, and how they communicated their licensing practices. We randomly accessed five resources from each repository to investigate the alignment of licensing information between the resources themselves, metadata pages and overall […]

Winning One Program at a Time: A Systemic Approach

Many Universities are missing an opportunity to focus student recruitment marketing efforts and budget at the program level, which can offer lower priced advertising opportunities with higher conversion rates than traditional University level marketing initiatives. At NC State University, we have begun to deploy a scalable, low-cost, program level marketing system across 18 online and […]

Faculty Professional Development and Student Satisfaction in Online Higher Education

With the ever-increasing availability of online education opportunities, understanding the factors that influence online student satisfaction and success is vital to enable administrators to engage and retain this important stakeholder group. The purpose of this ex-post-facto, nonexperimental quantitative study was to investigate the impact of faculty professional development, faculty degree status, and faculty longevity upon […]

Online professional learning for rural teachers of mathematics and science

Professional learning is crucial for the ongoing development of teachers and the improvement of student outcomes. Professional learning in mathematics and science education has the potential to address concerns about shortages in these areas and their impact on economic growth. However, attendance at face-to-face professional learning is problematic for many teachers located in rural areas. […]

Design and evaluation of an online tool for open learning with blogs

Blogs are used in higher education to support face-to-face courses, to organise online courses, and to open up courses for a wider group of participants. However the open and distributed nature of blogs creates problems that are not common in other learning contexts. Four key challenges related to the use of blogs in learning were […]

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