This paper attempts to compare the availability, quality, similarities and differences of students' support services in United Kingdom Open University (UKOU) and Sri Lanka Open University (SLOU) and also to identify and enlist the deficiencies that SLOU students are facing in the student support services. To get the desired end four hundred…

This paper reviews the themes emerging from Bangladeshi teachers' experiences of taking part in the initial research and the development stage of a professional development programme they were involved with. The Secondary Teaching and Learning Programme is an information and communications technologies-enhanced supported open distance learning…

This paper analyses the experience of a teacher and her Year 6 class (10-11 year-olds) over a school year, while participating in a pilot project introducing Personal Digital Assistants as a learning tool. The intervention was initiated and supported by the local City Learning Centre, which was concerned with how best to use technologies for…

The "Literacies for Learning in Further Education" (LfLFE) research project has been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme in the UK. The project involves collaboration between two universities and four further education (FE) colleges. The intention is to investigate…

Purpose: This paper seeks to look into Gabriel--the Worldwide web server for those European national libraries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), providing a single point of access on the internet for the retrieval of information about their functions, services and collections. Above all, it serves as a gateway…

This pilot project investigates second language (L2) learners' attitudes towards three varieties of English: American (AmE), British (BrE) and Australian (AuE). A 69-word passage spoken by a female speaker of each variety was used. Participants were 30 Chinese students pursuing Masters or Doctoral degrees in the United States, who listened to each…

A pilot study investigated the feasibility of a survey of students completing undergraduate programmes in the UK regarding their experiences of learning and teaching. A questionnaire containing 45 items in six scales was distributed to 44,209 students from 22 institutions. It was returned by 17,173 students, and analysis of their responses broadly…

The Basic Skills Agency (formerly the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit--ALBSU) is the national development agency for literacy, numeracy and related basic skills in England and Wales. This agency defines basic skills as " the ability to read, write, and speak in English and use mathematics at a level necessary to function and progress at…

A wide range of tools is now available to enable teaching practitioners to create web-based educational materials from PowerPoint presentations, adding a variety of different digital media, such as audio and animation. The pilot study described in this paper compared three different systems for producing multimedia presentations from existing…

This paper discusses a university-wide pilot designed to encourage academics to creatively explore learner-centred applications for digital audio. Participation in the pilot was diverse in terms of technical competence, confidence and contextual requirements and there was little prior experience of working with digital audio. Many innovative…

The importance of collaborative practice between those who provide services to children with special educational needs is now regarded as essential and is supported strongly by the UK government. However, joint working is often difficult to implement, despite the goodwill of all involved. This paper describes a pilot study aimed at developing…

In this article I draw attention to the current legitimising of new forms of identity of vocational and higher education learners. Using identity as a lens for examining pedagogy I focus on one of these new forms--the learner-worker identity. I examine one teaching and learning practice portfolio development, by discussing the program within which…

This article outlines a pilot project to offer a personalized online library service to Open University MBA alumni. A review of the literature and results of a desktop analysis of other UK Higher Education alumni library services are included. Content procurement and systems issues are considered along with the underlying organizational, resource…

Psychology undergraduates need to produce good quality essays in order to succeed at university. Students find the transition to university writing difficult. Using a rubric, a profile of student weakness in psychology essay writing was described. The students were generally poor at the structural organisation of their essays. A pilot intervention…

Background: Many of the potential benefits of using virtual worlds for teaching and learning are difficult to define and often become overly focused on the functionality of the technology or on its ability to support informal or "social" forms of learning. Purpose: The aim of the paper is to highlight the experiential nature of virtual…