Members of the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC) report the development and sustained efforts to provide virtual professional development sessions: Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable (SLiThEr). SLiThEr's emerged from a community need at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic; since then,…

The usage of various media methods in distance education shows its historical development path. It is said that AIOU has been using radio and television broadcasts, special textbooks and reading materials for distance education. To assess the level of technology usage and its role in AIOU model, Non-Random, Purposive Sampling, technique was used…

Virtual Exchange (VE) is of great import to language and culture teachers and researchers but is also gaining popularity in other fields. However, around the world and in the Asia-Pacific region in particular, the number of exchanges is not high and the quality of those that exist needs to continue to improve. It is essential that the latest…

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…

Field trips and the outdoor classroom are a vital part of many areas of education. Ideally, the content should be taught within a realistic environment rather than just by providing a single field trip at the end of a course. The archaeo-astronomy project located at Nottingham Trent University envisages the development of a virtual environment…

Twenty-first century education includes dynamic learning that is complicated by interactions in both fixed and protean virtual spaces, and it is important to consider the degree of power, agency, and awareness students have as producers and consumers of interactive technology. Outside of school, students engage in meaning making practices, and…

In this article, we present an experiment carried out in an 11th grade class in the curricular subject of DG (descriptive geometry). In a context where failure is more in the national exam, as well as in the discipline's attendance, the main objectives that motivated the implementation of this educational experience, were, on the one hand, to…

After centuries of rethinking education and learning, the current theory is based on technology's approach to and affect on the planned interaction between knowledge trainers and trainees. "Online Tutor 2.0: Methodologies and Case Studies for Successful Learning" demonstrates, through the exposure of successful cases in online education…

Realizing the potential for web-based communication provides a challenge for educators. The purpose here is to report students' behavioural and cognitive strategies for active learning when using an unrestricted blog in an academic context. This provides insight into how students are making sense of the incorporation of Web 2.0 technology into…

The purpose of this paper is to provide faculty with creative ways to use tools such as wikis and synchronous virtual classrooms to build a sense of community within their distance classes. A review of the literature provides an understanding of the many significant benefits of including collaboration, engagement, and interaction in e-learning…

In our previous two columns, we discussed the potential for using blogs and wikis with developmental education (DE) students. Another Web 2.0 technology, virtual environments like "Second Life", provides a virtual world where residents create avatars (three-dimensional [3-D] self-representations) and navigate around an online environment (Caverly,…

In this article, the author explains how she used online blogs with more than 263 students over a period of four semesters in an introductory social problems course. She describes how she uses blogs to enhance student participation, engagement, and skill building. Finally, she provides an overview of students' qualitative assessments of the blog…

Blended learning is using online tools to communicate, collaborate and publish, to extend the school day or year and to develop the 21st-century skills students need. With blended learning, teachers can use online tools and resources as part of their daily classroom instruction. Using many of the online tools and resources students already are…

In this paper we examine the transferability of the Jigsaw and Fishbowl collaborative learning techniques to the Second Life platform. Our aim is to assess the applicability of Second Life for collaborative learning by developing virtual tools and metaphors and exploiting the representational richness of this novel medium. In order to enhance the…

The paper reports the theoretical underpinnings for the pedagogical role and rationale for adopting 3D virtual worlds for socialisation and knowledge creation in distance education. Socialisation or "knowing one another" in remote distributed environments can be achieved through synchronous technologies such as instant messaging, audio and…