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Posts Tagged ‘Instructional Systems’

An Examination of the Relationship between Online Class Size and Instructor Performance

With no physical walls, the online classroom has the potential to house a large number of students. A concern by some is what happens to the quality of instruction in courses with high enrollments. The purpose of this research was to examine online class size and its relationship to, and potential influence on, an instructor’s […]

Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade

The authors present findings from the first stage of research into a ‘home-grown’ connectivist MOOC, Rhizomatic Learning: The Community is the Curriculum (Rhizo14). We compare the surface view of the MOOC that has been presented in a range of open blog posts and articles with the view from beneath the surface that we have found […]

Social Interaction in Self-paced Distance Education

In this paper we present a case study of a self-paced university course that was originally designed to support independent, self-paced study at distance. We developed a social media intervention, in design-based research terms, that allows these independent students to contribute archived content to enhance the course, to engage in discussions with other students and […]

Aesthetic Literacy: Observable Phenomena and Pedagogical Applications for Mobile Lifelong Learning (mLLL)

This paper proposed a method for developing capacity for lifelong learning in open spaces, defined here as places without predefined learning structures or objectives, through the cultivation of aesthetic literacy. This discussion will be situated within fieldwork performed by the authors in Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia, in 2013. Based on the researchers’ experience in […]

Peer Observation for Online Distance Learning Tutors: Creating the Conditions for Effective Peer Exchange

This article explores how online distance learning tutors working within a higher education context may be supported in their professional development through participation on an institutional peer observation programme. Drawing on the reflections of participants from two cohorts (2011 and 2012) at the University of York, the article reviews the learning outcomes arising from the […]

Enrollment in MITx MOOCs: Are We Educating Educators?

Surveys of 11 MITx courses on edX in spring 2014 found that one in four (28.0 percent) respondents identified as past or present teachers. Of the survey respondents, nearly one in 10 (8.7 percent) identified as current teachers. Although they represent only 4.5 percent of the nearly 250,000 enrollees, responding teachers generated 22.4 percent of all discussion forum comments. One in 12 of the total […]

A different perspective in building tools to collect and share educational resources

Until now, a large amount of effort has been spent on structuring educational repositories. Standard metadata for learning objects have been provided and large databases have been deployed both from academia, and private organizations following mainly a content-centric approach. Vice-versa, a pedagogy-centric approach to the collection and sharing of learning resources still remains under-investigated. In […]

Personalization, adaptivity, attunement

The complexity of the current educational context, that is, the fragmentation of knowledge and the diversity which characterizes the students in our schools requires new competences. One of the answer is certainly to think about personalized path. The personalization of paths is a hard task for the teacher and, thus, the efficacy and also the […]

ESL Teacher Training in 3D Virtual Worlds

Although language learning in 3D Virtual Worlds (VWs) has become a focus of recent research, little is known about the knowledge and skills teachers need to acquire to provide effective task-based instruction in 3D VWs and the type of teacher training that best prepares instructors for such an endeavor. This study employs a situated learning […]

Supporting In-service Language Educators in Learning to Telecollaborate

The importance of teachers’ capacity to integrate and exploit computer mediated communication (CMC) in the foreign language classroom has been recognised by many of the leading publications in foreign language teacher education, including the European Profile for Language Teacher Education (2004) and the European portfolio for student teachers of foreign languages (EPOSTL) (2007). One of […]