Archive for the ‘Theory’ Category

Creating Better Definitions of Distance Education

Distance education across all levels of education is growing at a rapid rate. As institutions and governments attempt to guide distance education, working definitions and their meanings conflict. Perhaps this is in part because administrators and practitioners are working from definitions that are decades-old. This paper suggests new definitions are needed to help guide and […]

K-12 Community of Inquiry: A case study of the applicability of the Community of Inquiry framework in the K-12 learning environment

Teaching practices and rationales of experienced online social studies teachers at one fully online high school in the southeastern United States were aligned with the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework using the descriptive case study method. Three male teachers and one female social studies teacher, all with three or more years of experience in the […]

Student Perceptions of Open Pedagogy: An Exploratory Study

With the increasing development and adoption of Open Educational Resources, many researchers and practitioners are interested in more carefully examining pedagogies connected with their use. This study describes the perceptions of 173 students of implementations of various approaches to open pedagogy by nineteen instructors in post-secondary institutions in New Hampshire. Students were asked about their […]

Facilitating Student Engagement Through Educational Technology: Towards a Conceptual Framework

The concept of student engagement has become somewhat of an enigma for educators and researchers, with ongoing discussions about its nature and complexity, and criticism about the depth and breadth of theorising and operationalisation within empirical research. This equally applies to research conducted in the field of educational technology and its application in schools and […]

Open Education and Learning Design: Open Pedagogy in Praxis

Beyond providing alternatives to traditional learning resources, there exists a gap in the literature in understanding how openness is impacting teaching and learning in higher education. This paper explores the ways in which educators describe how open education is impacting their pedagogical designs. Using a phenomenological approach with self-identifying open education practitioners, we explore how […]

Using Online Lectures to Promote Engagement: Recognising the Self-Directed Learner as Critical for Practical Inquiry

This study analyzed the relationships between teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence in online learning environments (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000), with an emphasis on examining ways in which the design of instructor presentation formats relates to student responses within discussion forums. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were used to determine the nature of […]

(Re)Tracing the Everyday ‘Sitings’: A Conceptual Review of Internet Research 15 Years Later

In 2003, Kevin Leander and Kelly McKim made the argument for connecting scholarship on physical spaces with that of online spaces. They named this fusion of scholarly areas connective ethnography, termed by Christine Hine (2000, as cited in Leander & McKim, 2003). At that time, they asked: “How might we develop research practices and frameworks […]

Empowering academics to be adaptive with eLearning technologies: An exploratory case study

This paper describes an exploratory case study investigating the capacity of a multidisciplinary approach to academic development, to empower adaptive responses to ongoing technological change impacting on teaching practice. A quasi-experimental design with an intervention group (n = 22) and a comparative control group (n = 7) was adopted. Pre and post online questionnaires were […]

Distance Education: A Review of Literature [Circa 1994]

This document provides an overview of the current literature on distance education. A historical perspective and definitions associated with distance education are presented in the first section. The following theories are also discussed: independence and autonomy; industrialization of teaching; and interaction and communication. A synthesis of existing theories and a theoretical framework for distance education […]

Efficient Strategies for Maximizing Online Student Satisfaction: Applying Technologies to Increase Cognitive Presence, Social Presence, and Teaching Presence

As online learning continues to increase in popularity, it becomes more important to explore as many strategies and tools as possible to continually improve teaching and learning in the online modality. This paper explores the experiences of an online full time faculty member in the use of Flipgrid, Loom, Remind, and the Digital Breakout/Escape Room […]