In order to promote pedagogically informed use of technology, educators need to develop an active, inquisitive, design-oriented mindset. Design Patterns have been demonstrated as powerful mediators of theory-praxis conversations yet widespread adoption by the practitioner community remains a challenge. Over several years, the authors and their…

Many scholars call for more diverse data on learners' behaviour in CALL (Colpaert, 2012; Fischer, 2007, 2012; Stockwell, 2012). Student retention and the inconclusive efficacy of online language courses (Gaebel, 2013) has received increased attention with the proliferation of MOOCs (Koller, Ng, Do & Chen, 2013). In this paper we introduce…

The educational system has witnessed a number of laudable programs since inception in both formal and non-formal systems of education programs that were set up to empower adult educational skills, knowledge, decision-making processes.Correspondence education transformed into distance education which--with the advent of information and…

This paper explores the potential of open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) in helping achieve women's empowerment in the developing world. Our evidence comprises the Open Education Research Hub open dataset, featuring survey responses from 7,700 educators, formal and informal learners from 175 countries concerning…

Education is considered a priority sector in Bangladesh and a means of socio-economic development by all citizens -- urban and rural, rich and poor. This attitude has created a demand for education which traditional systems have been unable to cope with, mainly in three ways -- they cannot reach the massive and circumstantial unreached and the…

Despite the expansion of online and blended learning, as well as open education, little research has been undertaken on what motivates students to enrol in particular study modes at university level. This project addresses this gap in higher education research by exploring the reasons why humanities students choose to study through specific modes.…

Theoretical education is mainly based on university text-books, which usually include texts not structured according to any theory of text comprehension. Structuring a text is a demanding process. Text should be organized and structured in order to include descriptions on micro and macro-level representation of the knowledge domain. Since this is…

International Standards in High and Open and Distance Education are used for developing Open Educational Resources (OERs). Current issues in e-learning community are the specification of learning chunks and the definition of describing designs for different units of learning (activities, units, courses) in a generic though expandable format.…

Many Open and Distance Learning (ODL) providers report that their students are prone to lower rates of retention and completion than campus-based students. Against this background, there is growing interest around distance-specific learning support. The current research investigated the experiences of students during their first semester as…

Open educational resources and open educational practices are being increasingly used around the globe to train and support professionals in areas where funding and resources are scarce. This paper evaluates the open educational practices (OEP) of three global health projects operating outside academia--the International Association for Child and…

What comes next in the field of academic e-learning? Which e-learning trends will dominate the discourse at universities? Answering such questions is the basis for the adaptation of service strategies and IT-infrastructures within institutions of Higher Education. The present paper therefore introduces methodology and findings of a trend study in…

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…

With this research and design paper, we are proposing that Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) publications give increasing access to high quality online educational and research content for the development of powerful domain-specific language collections that can be further enhanced linguistically with the Flexible Language…

In this article, the author talks about the education technology journey and a future driven by disruptive change. The author first provides a definition of disruptive change. To understand the potential for disruptive change in higher education--a disruption fueled by technology and related trends--the author begins with a look at the past and…

The third in a series published by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), this booklet reproduces five addresses and one article from late 2006 and early 2007. This collection of speeches is entitled "Learning for Development" because that is the focus of the work of the COL's work. The addresses presented here were given at the opening and…