Menu

Distance-Educator.com

Premier Portal for Professionals Since 1995, Covering Technology-Based Education

Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

An Investigation of Personality Traits in Relation to Job Performance of Online Instructors

This quantitative study examined the relationship between the Big 5 personality traits and how they relate to online teacher effectiveness. The primary method of data collection for this study was through the use of surveys primarily building upon the Personality Style Inventory (PSI) (Lounsbury & Gibson, 2010), a work-based personality measure, was the instrument used […]

Assuring best practice in technology-enhanced learning environments

This paper documents the development and findings of the Good Practice Report on Technology-Enhanced Learning and Teaching funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). Developing the Good Practice Report required a meta-analysis of 33 ALTC learning and teaching projects relating to technology funded between 2006 and 2010. This report forms one of 12 […]

Learning in the Café: Pilot testing the collaborative application for education in Facebook

This paper reports on a pilot study using the Café, the collaborative application for education as an online learning environment within the Facebook framework, for first-year tertiary design students. The Café, a new e-learning application, has been designed based on five principles of user interface design – visibility, usability, relevance, accessibility and interactivity – and developed not […]

Video-based feedback on student assessment: scarily personal

Assessment feedback is an important part of students’ learning experiences; however, text-based feedback has limitations. This article proposes an alternative in the form of individualised video recordings of the lecturer discussing each assignment. This research reports on 126 undergraduate and postgraduate students’ reactions to 5-minute videos recorded by their teachers. The findings confirm that the […]

Comparative analysis of public policies in open access models in Latin America. Brazil and Argentina cases

This article presents public policies for open access models in Argentina and Brazil, two countries that have pioneered the subject in Latin America. The methodology used is comparative documentation, whereby the legal and political frameworks of open access systems are contrasted, paying special attention to the education, science, culture and government sectors. The main conclusion […]

Model for democratisation of the contents hosted in MOOCs

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a new educational tool in higher education, based on gratuity, massiveness and ubiquity. Essentially they suggest an evolution of the Open Learning Movement based on principles of reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing open educational resources (OER). However, in contrast with the content of OERs, content hosed in […]

Meeting the challenge of providing flexible learning opportunities: Considerations for technology adoption amongst academic staff |

This paper reports on a subset of findings from a larger study investigating resistance from academic staff to the integration of technology with on-campus foreign language teaching at one North American higher education institution. The study revealed that the factors influencing technology adoption paralleled Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model’s tenets of perceived usefulness and ease of […]

Bilingual Facebook Users’ Cognitive Writing Processes

This study seeks to explore the cognitive processes involved as bilinguals wrote English and Spanish Facebook status updates. Three phases of data collection were employed: individual interviews, examination of participants’ Facebook status updates and a group interview. The findings suggested that regardless of the language in which participants wrote, they made a series of decisions […]

Challenges of implementing e-learning in Kenya: A case of Kenyan public universities

In this paper, we discuss the challenges experienced by Kenyan public universities in implementation of e-learning and recommend possible solutions towards its successful implementation. In the last few years, most Kenyan public universities have adopted e-learning as a new approach to teaching and learning. However, the implementation challenges faced by these universities have continued to […]

The Analysis of Iranian Students’ Persistence in Online Education

In the following research, the relationship between instructional interaction and student persistence in e-learning has been analyzed. In order to conduct a descriptive-analytic survey, 744 undergraduate e-students were selected by stratified random sampling method to examine not only the frequency and the methods of establishing an instructional interaction, but also the barriers to the student […]