Academic help-seeking is an invaluable learning strategy that has not yet received much attention in the distance education research literature. The asynchronous nature of distance education and many online courses presents an inherent roadblock to help-seeking. The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of academic self-regulation,…

Two studies were conducted to examine the relationship between motivational variables and satisfaction and success in online learning. College students enrolled in face-to-face psychology classes and who had taken at least one online course were surveyed. In Study 1, two hypotheses were tested: (1) that high need-for-affiliation students would be…

Polychronicity is the natural tendency or preference for structuring time that has an influence on people's behaviors. Highly polychronic individuals are involved in everything, doing many things at once because they value human relationships and interactions over arbitrary schedules and appointments. In contrast, highly monochronic…

Rural schools in the USA use online courses to overcome problems such as attracting and retaining teachers, geographic isolation, low student enrollment, and financial constraints. This paper reports on the reasons that 39% of rural high school students who enrolled in an online Advanced Placement course subsequently dropped the course. Students…

This article reports on the findings of senior leadership interviews in a nationally funded project on distributed leadership in the quality management of online learning environments (OLEs) in higher education. Questions were framed around the development of an OLE quality management framework and the situation of the characteristics of…

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of online master's students regarding their best learning experiences. The authors surveyed 86 graduate students concerning what helped them learn in the online environment. Results indicate that although graduate students learned using the same technological tools as undergraduates,…

Blended learning is an effective approach to instruction that combines features of face-to-face learning and computer-mediated learning. This study investigated the relationship between student perceptions of three types of interaction and blended learning course satisfaction. The participants included K-12 teachers enrolled in a graduate-level…

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body, so memes (ideas, behaviours, and actions) transmit cultural ideas or practices from one mind to another through writing, speech, or other imitable phenomena. This paper considers the memes that influence the evolution of open and distance education. If the…

As online learning continues to gain widespread attention and thrive as a legitimate alternative to classroom instruction, educational institutions and online instructors face the challenge of building and sustaining student trust in online learning environments. The present study represents an attempt to address the challenge by identifying the…

This article has two interrelated purposes. The first is to explain how various forms of bias, if introduced during any stage of a meta-analysis, can provide the consumer with a misimpression of the state of a research literature. Five of the most important bias-producing aspects of a meta-analysis are presented and discussed. Second, armed with…

There are many challenges for educators in using distance and online education to adequately prepare students for their future professions. These challenges are accentuated in disciplines that prepare people for relational professions, which require people skills and a certain maturity of character. Educators in many disciplines, including…

This pilot intervention focused on three courses that were redesigned to utilize the online environment to establish an online community of inquiry (CoI). The setting for this research study was the Distance Education Centre, Victoria (DECV), an Australian co-educational school with approximately 3000 students who, for a variety of reasons, are…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of goal orientation and academic self-efficacy in student achievement mediated by effort regulation, metacognitive regulation, and interaction regulation in an online course. The results show that intrinsic goal orientation and academic self-efficacy predicted students' metacognitive…

Achievement goals predict learning in children and young adults, but it is unclear whether they apply to older adults and how they are related to approaches to studying. An online survey examined achievement goals, approaches to studying and academic attainment in distance learners. The Achievement Goals Questionnaire-Revised and the Approaches to…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among students' characteristics, self-regulated learning, technology self-efficacy, and course outcomes in online learning settings. Two hundred and fifty-six students participated in this study. All participants completed an online survey that included demographic information, the…