Online education recently has been receiving a lot of attention at the K-12 level. Some may see it as a remedy for school budgets that are overstretched. Others view it as another means for reaching and teaching students and teachers, and some view online course delivery as an alternative educational choice. In fact, online education is simply…

This study examined the effect of physical and virtual field trips on undergraduate, nonscience majors. No significant differences were seen in achievement, attitudes, learning styles, interactions between field trip and learning styles, or students' ability to answer questions at different levels. Results imply that both field trips promote…

This paper evaluates an approach to dissertation supervision, designed to assist international students with their academic writing. It argues that a blended approach to supervision within a Virtual Learning Environment can provide high quality individualised care not otherwise available. This leads to deeper, critical learning and more meaningful…

There is no doubt that the Internet has made a profound effect on everyone's lives. It has also begun to liberate education from the confines of traditional time and space. The first incarnation of what everyone think of as K-12 virtual school appears to have been launched in the summer of 1995, with the CyberSchool Project in Eugene, Oregon.…

This article presents a summary of the results from phase 1 of a two-phase research project. Drawing on the principles of problem-based learning (PBL), the aims of phase 1 were to design, develop and evaluate a set of flexible online teaching resources for use within a virtual learning environment. Participants in the project (n = 10) were…

Online discussion is a common tool to create learner-learner interaction. Whole class discussions can result in potentially hundreds of postings with students spending more time creating the illusion of participation as opposed to critical reflection and deeper learning. The purpose of this study was to determine quality of online discussion based…

This paper presents an interactive educational environment for use over both "in situ" and distance-based modalities of teaching. Several technological issues relating to the design and development of the distributed virtual learning environment have also been raised. The PROVIDE framework proposed in this paper is a seamless distributed…

We further evaluated the Virtual Lecture Hall (VLH) (Cramer, Collins, Snider, & Fawcett, in press), an instructional computer-based platform to deliver PowerPoint slides threaded with audio clips for later review. Students from either an in-class or online section (ns = 810 and 74 respectively) of introductory psychology had access to live…

E-learning has become a significant aspect of training and education in the worldwide information economy as an attempt to create and facilitate a competent global work force. "Cases on Successful E-Learning Practices in the Developed and Developing World: Methods for the Global Information Economy" provides eclectic accounts of case…

Background: Although much has been written about the ways in which new technology might transform educational practice, particularly in the area of literacy learning, there is relatively little empirical work that explores the possibilities and problems--or even what such a transformation might look like in the classroom. 3D virtual worlds offer a…

Virtual Enterprises International (VE) is a high school program that teaches students about business through task-oriented and hands-on coursework. With the assistance of a coordinator and business mentors, VE students create and oversee a virtual firm, conducting business with other virtual firms nationally and internationally. The program…

This article explores the implementation of critical pedagogic practices into a graduate level landscape seminar Web site. Critical pedagogy seeks to reconfigure student-teacher relationships and disrupt embedded power regimes within academia and society. Critical pedagogic practices create a dialogue amongst learners, where everyone has a stake…

This paper describes a mechanism developed by the authors to gather student feedback from formative revision Multiple Choice Questionnaires (MCQs) within an on-line learning system. The MCQs provided first year Computer Science students with instant formative feedback, while data was also gathered about student responses, such as the percentage…

This phenomenological study investigated the meaning of the online teaching experience of college faculty when there was an absence of physical presence. Findings show that the online experience brings new dimensions to the teaching practice when there is an absence of physical presence: (a) The length and depth of engagement during the delivery…

It has often been suggested that education via the Internet, or e-learning, leads to a sense of separation in individual learners; this need not be the case. Teaching is a relationship: a relationship that is built on a connection between teaching and learner, between learner and learner, and between the learners and the content. What then is the…