This brief paper describes a comparison of two different courses, both of which have been approved by the state of Georgia's Professional Standards Commission (PSC). These courses fulfill the PSC requirement that all teachers be competent with technology and know how to integrate technology into teaching and learning by the year 2006. The method…

Educators have focused their literacy education efforts on teaching children to code and decode words. In spite of all the efforts to teach literacy, the various report cards indicate that, perhaps, a new way of doing teaching literacy should be investigated. Today's media-centric youths could benefit from using mediated programs to help motivate…

This paper reviews more than a decade of investigations undertaken to determine what motivates and what discourages faculty participation in distance education. The presenters describe the evidence that faculty extrinsic and intrinsic conditions both influence willingness to participate. The researchers compare the findings of this study with…

This paper discusses how the authors' department curricula, classroom environments, and ultimately student learning might be improved by "high tech" assessment and evaluation techniques to find out "what people really care about." Collaborative technologies are used to gather and process the opinions of students, faculty, and other stakeholders.…

Thirty six senior students in chemical engineering were randomly assigned to three treatment groups in an experimental study that examined the impact of different instructional strategies for troubleshooting malfunctions in a computer-based simulation of a chemical processing plant. In two groups, different types of worked examples,…

Online learning has been hailed as a huge step forward for education. Academia is increasingly offering Internet-based distance courses because they allow "anywhere, anytime" learning and access to a wider pool of students. Firms and organizations like it for training employees because it permits consistency and repeatability in training delivery.…

The demand for the integration of technology into our K-12 schools dictates the technology curriculum in higher education. Since the evolution of new technologies is continuous and rapid, it is an ongoing challenge to keep post-secondary education current. Teacher education programs are no exception. Today's pre-service teachers are the classroom…

College and university faculty face many demands on their time: research, teaching, service, committees, family, and other obligations. One of the major challenges faced by instructional support personnel at colleges and universities is to get their training efforts entered into the faculty members' busy calendars. This paper looks at a new option…

Teacher professional development is assumed to be enhanced through reflective, collective, collaborative professional communities (Little, 2003). Universities in these teacher community developments play a big role by providing teachers with pedagogical helps and professional developments. By not only encouraging teachers to go to conferences,…

Within the realm of the knowledge-based economy, technology is considered as one of the main force for the contemporary organizational developments. EPSS provides solution when there are specific needs for performing job task effectively. Generally, it provides help, demonstrations, advice, customized templates, access to database, or any other…

Pre-service teacher programs have a central goal of fostering skills necessary for students to become successful professional educators. This goal is often challenging because students typically do not have sufficient opportunities to gain realistic experiences before becoming teachers (Andrews, 2002). In addition, teaching is a complex, dynamic…

This paper considers student use of a web-based discussion forum in a second year, non-major Biology course. The authors discuss how meaningful participation in the forum is a form of public writing and may be an indicator of overall student success in the course. The authors also discuss how this success in the course is not tied to the students?…

This paper considers four aspects of online communities. Design, mechanisms, architecture, and the constructed knowledge. We hypothesize that different designs of communities drive different mechanisms, which give rise to different architectures, which in turn result in different levels of collaborative knowledge construction. To test this chain…

This study was designed primarily to investigate the impact of anonymous peer feedback on student meaningful learning in higher education. Forty-seven students from three undergraduate classes from a central US university participated in this study. Students were asked to build a web-based project. In the experimental group, technology-mediated…

The purpose of this case study was to analyze the characteristics of an online learning community from the perspectives of 18 adult learners all of whom completed an online master?s degree program in instructional design and technology. This program was taught at a distance using the Blackboard.com e-learning system. Several program…