The rapid growth of charter schools has encouraged innovation and led to new models of schooling. Foremost among these are cyber charter schools where students learn from computer-based lessons beyond the walls of the traditional schoolhouse setting. The authors present the case of cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania. They describe how cyber…

From a constructivist point of view, the importance of MUDs (Multiple User Dungeons) in education is justified based on their community-forming, learning, and role-playing functions. The authors propose a typology for educational MUDs and discuss their individual instructional approaches in order to measure MUD potential in ten-os of…

This article provides an account of how one manager considered the alignment of an organisational vision with an implementation strategy for creating an effective organisational infrastructure. The discussion reported in the article provides a manager's view, a case, of how one institution introduced online learning initiatives. Critical to this…

Most of the time, technology in the classroom is a "we" or "they" issue: On one side are the people who deploy and operate the systems, on the other, the academics and staffers who use them. But, typically, on both sides, everyone is so busy trying to prepare for the next class or the next term that there's little opportunity…

The present case study consists of the content analysis of anonymous student responses to open-ended evaluation of teaching questions submitted by 202 students for fully online and on-campus versions of the same graduate courses taught by the same professors over four academic years. Online courses received both more praise and more negative…

Becoming a Webhead (BaW) is a 6-week free teacher development online workshop, one of the TESOL Electronic Village Online (EVOnline) sessions offered annually as preconvention activities for members and nonmembers of TESOL. The main goal of BaW is to introduce language teachers around the world to different web communication tools and explore the…

Digital images and image databases can support a wide range of learning objectives. The EURIDICE project aims to assess the requirements for the image databases, on one hand, and to incorporate images into higher education teaching (HEI) teaching, on the other. The aim of this paper is to analyse the tasks and process of evaluation of the EURIDICE…

Web-based technologies are the medium of choice for most universities as they move their offerings off campus and online. As we continue to move our own programs online we are challenged to consider what elements of our traditional experiences to preserve online, and which ones to modify, and to recognize the impact of the tools we use on our…

Interest in online school courses is surging nationwide, especially at the high school level, according to those who follow trends in educational technology. Much of that demand is coming from those who enroll in just one or two a year to meet a particular academic need or resolve a scheduling hang-up. Online courses have become so popular, in…

The Portable and Mobile Classroom (PortMoC) began as an idea to bring Internet connectivity to places where there was no connectivity for education and healthcare, but still make the connection reasonably sustainable in terms of cost and manpower. Through trial and error and several research iterations, Saint Francis University's Center of…

This report is based, in part, on a conference that examined the implications of virtual schools for public education. It also draws on other studies of online education to highlight issues that policymakers should consider when developing virtual schools. The document presents three major findings: (1) Virtual schools are an important tool for…

The background of this paper is an internal research project at the German National Research Center for Information Technology, Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute, (GMD-IPSI) dealing with software engineering, computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL) and practical biotech knowledge. The project goal is to develop a…

Most educational institutions lag far behind business and industry in the adoption and use of technology. This paper explores the applications of technologies that are currently being used in business and industry, to education. The following technologies are reviewed: virtual learning, wireless networking, collaboration tools, digital video,…

Correspondence schools, motion pictures, radio, educational television, and computer-assisted instruction have all been hailed as technological innovations that would revolutionize education, reducing, if not eliminating entirely, education's dependence on traditional schools and their teachers. The latest innovation is "virtual…

Discusses trends in e-learning, such as: its use has crossed a threshold level which has brought it to the serious attention of policy makers, institutional planners are beginning to use the Web to restructure campus services, and there is growing interest in finding a way to share online academic materials. (EV)