This research explores what constitutes an educational tool for students in the Sultanate of Oman, using a quantitative questionnaire with face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Students and teachers at Nizwa College of Technology and Salalah College of Technology participated in the study. Educational tools are widely used as part of…

The purpose of the this study was to explore how peer coaches support the development of collaborative communication skills in an online format for consultants in training (CITs). The program examined was Instructional Consultation which pairs a consultant with a teacher to work collaboratively to resolve the teacher's concern regarding a student.…

This report documents the upward trend in "secret shopping" among today's prospective student Web users, along with the latest changes in electronic communications technologies used by college and university admissions offices. The report is based on a survey of college and university enrollment and admissions officers across the U.S. in March…

This dissertation explores the effects of a cross-cultural, cross-lingual virtual exchange on students' foreign language skills and intercultural competence. Specifically, the dissertation investigates the effects of students' participation in a twelve-week telecollaborative exchange on their use of syntactic complexity in foreign language writing…

This qualitative case-study explores the ways in which an innovative M.Ed. program facilitated the development of future ECE reflective leaders. Using case study methodology, it presents the transformational process two recent graduates underwent during their studies. The findings indicate four main sources that initiated the deep student…

Despite advances in spam detection software, anti-spam laws, and increasingly sophisticated users, the number of successful phishing scams continues to grow. In addition to monetary losses attributable to phishing, there is also a loss of confidence that stifles use of online services. Using in-class activities in an introductory computer course…

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook are one of the latest examples of communications technologies that have been widely-adopted by students and, consequently, have the potential to become a valuable resource to support their educational communications and collaborations with faculty. However, faculty members have a track record of…

Many university faculty value email as an important tool for communicating with colleagues, but express frustration with a high incidence of unprofessional email correspondence from students. The goals of this study were to document the frequency of specific formatting mistakes that contribute to faculty's unfavorable perception of student emails…

EFL essay writing is considered one of the most important academic courses in the teacher education programmes that should help develop students' skills to write cohesively and coherently. Teachers' feedback plays a crucial role in improving and enhancing the quality of students' written essays. The aim of the current study was to shed light on…

Formative assessment generates feedback on students' performance, thereby accelerating and improving student learning. Anecdotal evidence gathered by a number of evaluations has hypothesised that audio feedback may be capable of enhancing student learning more than other approaches. In this paper we report on the preliminary findings of a…

The framework of this study is cooperation between students of English at a Chinese university and their counterparts at a Danish university, i.e. neither group of students are native speakers of English. The theoretical framework for the study is Vygotsky's sociocultural approach combined with the work by a number of researchers on the link…

This paper examines undergraduate student use of laptop computers during a lecture-style class that includes substantial problem-solving activities and graphic-based content. The study includes both a self-reported use component collected from student surveys as well as a monitored use component collected via activity monitoring…

E-mail messages received from 460 graduate and undergraduate students were analyzed for types of requests, academic needs, reasons for seeking author's help, communication strategies and cultural differences. Findings showed that 47% of the undergraduate subjects sought help with assignments; 31% asked an academic question about their courses; 22%…

Faculty who have taught in a traditional classroom are finding themselves having to teach in a setting in which they are unable to interact face-to-face with their students. Online instruction increases yearly. An important factor in the success of online instruction is the degree of student engagement. Though academic content remains…

Businesses and other organizations are relying increasingly on virtual teams to perform a range of business activities. A key challenge in utilizing virtual teams is to support collaboration among team members who are separated by distance and/or time. In this paper we use a research model based on a combination of the Technology Acceptance Model…