Failure rates in first year calculus courses are high in most post-secondary institutions across North America and other parts of the world. This Inukshuk-funded open education project involved the development of five stand-alone pre-calculus learning modules. The design and revision phases of this project occurred between the fall of 2007 and…

The open educational resources initiative has been underway for over a decade now and higher education institutions are slowly adopting open educational resources (OER). The use and creation of OER are important aspects of adoption and both are needed for the benefits of OER to be fully realized. Based on the results of a survey developed to…

Just a few years ago, virtual worlds were credited with the power to transform the universe. Used since the late 1990s in military and medical applications, virtual worlds first gained mainstream media attention when Linden Lab released Second Life in 2003. While other worlds, including open source environments, have launched since then (examples…

Education in the 21st century is diverse not only in content and discipline but also in format and delivery. Today's students have access to a broad range of information, knowledge, ideas, and opinions well beyond their classroom. Never before have learners been able to interact so closely with instructors, mentors, subject-matter experts, and…

This paper discusses students' experiences with the use of identification codes in a graduate course delivered asynchronously via the Internet. While teaching an introductory masters level graduate course in distance learning, the authors discovered that the learning management system, Moodle, was programmed to display identification codes rather…

This reflective case study was based on our independent use of the debate as an online instructional approach and our shared interest in teaching strategies. In an interdisciplinary manner, using narrative inquiry and action research, we melded our data sources and analyzed the findings, including our individual experiences with the technique. Our…

A growing literature suggests that there is a disjuncture between the instructional practices of the education system and the student body it is expected to serve, particularly with respect to the roles of digital technologies. Based on surveys and focus group interviews of first-year students at a primarily undergraduate Canadian university and…

As new models of scholarly communication emerge, librarians and libraries have responded by developing and supporting new methods of storing and providing access to information and by creating new publishing support services. This article will examine the roles of libraries and librarians in developing and supporting open access publishing…

A virtual world was created in an effort to supplement the study of the novel "The Natural Daughter". The educational impact of the virtual world experience on college students of English Literature was assessed using concept mapping as a measure of conceptual change. While conceptual change was evident, the origin of the growth was…

Recent research in learning technologies has demonstrated many promising contributions from the use of ontologies and semantic web technologies for the development of advanced learning environments. In spite of those benefits, ontology development and maintenance remain the key research challenges to be solved before ontology-enhanced learning…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…

This paper examines how emergent technologies could influence the design of learning environments. It will pay particular attention to the roles of educators and learners in creating networked learning experiences on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The research shows that it is possible to move from a pedagogy of abundance to a pedagogy that…

A principal characteristic of the Canadian experience with e-learning is the uniquely Canadian feature of provincial jurisdiction over education. Canada is the only country that does not have a national department or ministry of education. Therefore, any investigation of e-learning in Canada must focus more on specific provincial initiatives in…