This study compared the impact of proctoring on the final course grades of community college students enrolled in distance education mathematics courses. The goal was to determine whether distance education students who are evaluated entirely online, in environments that are not proctored, receive grades that differ from distance education…

In this article, the community of inquiry cognitive presence model was mapped to a recently developed semistructured approach to online discourse called SQUAD to detect aspects of critical or higher-order thinking online by cleaning online message transcript through the use of code-recode. It is argued that using code-recode in the way suggested…

This study explored the relationship between specific social tasks and student perceptions of a sense of community during online group work. A survey instrument was developed, piloted, and deployed to 125 students in six different online classes. Results revealed few significant relationships between each of the five social tasks examined and…

Bruce Chaloux is director of Student Access Programs and Services at the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) in Atlanta, Georgia. He founded and directs the sixteen-state Electronic Campus initiative of the SREB, and he also directs the Distance Learning Policy Laboratory, which addresses policy "barriers" in distance learning. Chaloux was…

As enrollments in correspondence schools soared in the early twentieth century, unethical practices marred the reputation of this type of learning. Prominent schools created the National Home Study Council in 1926 to combat the proliferation of sham schools. At the same time, council members knew that the better schools also needed to change their…

This study was designed to examine performance as a function of grade and course satisfaction in online undergraduate level courses, specifically students' self-efficacy for online technologies and self-regulated learning strategies. This research included a sample (N = 815) of community college students enrolled in liberal arts online courses…

Two lines of research have emerged to study the causes and prevention of student failure in virtual (K-12) schools: studies of learner characteristics and studies of learning environment characteristics. To develop a useful model for predicting failure and promoting success in virtual school environments, a study was designed to measure the…

Senior executives who completed the two-year distance education program of the United States Army War College showed significant development of their strategic-level cognitive skills. The Modified Career Path Appreciation (MCPA) survey was administered to seventy participants at the beginning of their graduate program in strategic studies and at…

This study, a naturalistic inquiry conducted between 2002 and 2005, presents an integrated portrayal of issues and concerns of twenty-seven directors of postsecondary distributed/distance learning programs as well as the results of a survey that examined technology utilization and methods in 316 postsecondary schools. The major issues and concerns…

The study that informs this article investigated how online learners' participation in and perception of their sense of learning community contributed to or affected their relationship to their workplace environment and their workplace colleagues. The findings support contentions that, in the workplace, the work itself constitutes the most…

This article presents an interview with John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and a former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)--a position he held for nearly two decades. While head of PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such…

With an increasing prevalence of virtual high school programs in the United States, a better understanding of evaluative tools available for distance educators and administrators is needed. These evaluative tools would provide opportunities for assessment and a determination of success within virtual schools. This article seeks to provide an…

This article discusses the impact of patents for computer algorithms in course management systems. Referring to historical documents and court cases, the positive and negative aspects of software patents are presented. The key argument is the accessibility to algorithms comprising a course management software program such as Blackboard. The…

As distributed problem-based learning (dPBL) emerges as an interactive online methodology, it is necessary for instructional designers who want to develop this approach to understand the practices experienced designers of dPBL recommend. This phenomenological study examined the practices that designers of dPBL use and recommend. Ten experienced…

This article presents an interview with Chere Campbell Gibson, a professor emerita in the School of Human Ecology and graduate program in Continuing and Vocational Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gibson shares her years of experience in distance education, discusses her book titled "Distance Learners in Higher Education:…