There is now widespread recognition of the changing nature of students in higher education: they are demographically diverse, have extensive external time demands, and expect greater flexibility and support during their programs. As a consequence of this and other changes to the higher education sector, many universities worldwide have introduced…

This study explores blending virtual and physical learning environments to enhance the experience of first year by immersing students into university culture through social and academic interaction between peers. It reports on the progress made from 2008 to 2009 using an existing academic platform, the first year design elective course "Imaging…

This paper proposes the use of activity theory and multi-level activity systems as a framework to analyse the effectiveness of ICT integration in Singapore secondary school classrooms. Three levels of activity systems are developed to study the effectiveness of ICT integration at the classroom: the classroom activity system, the department…

A recommender system is a piece of software that helps users to identify the most interesting and relevant learning items from a large number of items. Recommender systems may be based on collaborative filtering (by user ratings), content-based filtering (by keywords), and hybrid filtering (by both collaborative and content-based filtering).…

In this paper we describe how we fostered learning by modifying an existing course which covered topics relevant to biosciences. This course was offered predominantly to first year undergraduate science, biomedical science and environment students. The students were trained to find reliable scientific information via computer searches, and shown…

Educators have just started to use wikis and most of the educational research to date has focused primarily on the use of local wikis with access limitations. There seems to be little research related to how students can contribute in global, transparent wiki communities such as "Wikipedia" and "Wikibooks". The purpose of this article is to argue…

The aim of this study was to investigate the use of an educational computer video game in teaching and learning. Cultural-historical activity theory is used heuristically to explore the social and cultural interactions during game play. It is argued that knowledge construction occurs when video games function as a tool to mediate learning rather…

The increasing use of innovative blended learning strategies which incorporate online discussion into the classroom requires the examination of asynchronous, computer mediated communication (ACMC) to fully understand the learners' total engagement and the contribution of such ICT tools to student learning. This study analysed students' online…

An online group work project for off campus students, using wikis as the collaboration platform, has been conducted successfully for several years. Students were given the opportunity and technical means to collaborate, and staff could assess individual students' participation. However, the actual level of collaboration was less than hoped for,…

Many excellent corpus-based language learning resources (e.g., concordancers) have been freely available on the Internet for some time. Google assisted language learning (GALL) is also gaining increasing acceptance. These tools are a potential resource for English as an additional language (EAL) university students who want to independently…

With globalisation and the advent of information technology, the English language has become more important for second language (L2) learners. This study aimed to establish a blended teaching and learning model combining online and face to face instructional blogging for an English for specific purposes (ESP) course named "English Public…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of adopting blogging upon Chinese language composition instruction in a vocational high school in Taiwan. The researchers developed a model that utilises blogging in Chinese language composition instruction. Forty randomly selected students from a public vocational high school served as the…

The trend to adopt more online technologies continues unabated in the higher education sector. This paper elaborates the means by which such technologies can be employed for pedagogical purposes beyond simply providing virtual spaces for bringing learners together. It shows how data about student "movement" within and across a learning community…

This case study explores how a constructivist-based instructional design helped adult learners learn in an online learning environment. Two classes of adult learners pursuing professional development and registered in a web-based course were studied. The data consisted of course documents, submitted artefacts, surveys, interviews, in-class…

Although e-learning has been thoroughly presented and analysed in recent years, this paper aims to present a new concept, about web-based learning used as a tool to provide "products' education" for customers, and the ways enterprises of the financial sector, may use it in order to promote their brand name and services by affecting crucial factors…