Now that most of the innovators and early adopters of online instruction are comfortably teaching online, many institutions are facing challenges as they prepare the next wave of online instructors. This research study examines how faculty in this "next wave" (the majority of adopters) differ from the innovators and early adopters of online…

In 1992, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation began its "Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program", the purpose of which was to explore educational alternatives for people who wanted to pursue an education via Internet technology. Part of this grant activity was a research award to the Babson College Survey Research Group to examine online learning in…

This qualitative research study was designed to inform the development and implementation of effective online learning environments by exploring, from both teacher and student perspectives, what constitute effective online learning experiences. The study examined course content, tasks, and pedagogical approaches, as identified by students and…

This paper reports on preliminary findings from ongoing design-based research being conducted in the fully online Master of Arts in Teacher Leadership (MTL) program at a small, Midwest public university. Researchers are using the Quality Matters (QM) and Community of Inquiry (CoI) frameworks to guide the iterative redesign of core courses in the…

This paper presents an empirical study grounded in the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson Archer, 2000) and employs quantitative content analysis of student discourse and other artifacts of learning in online courses in an effort to enhance and improve the framework and offer practical implications for online education. As a…

A FIPSE-funded project was designed to provide support and training to community college faculty electronically, and to develop a model to offer innovative, interactive strategies to support their students' academic and career needs. The goal of the mentoring/coaching program has been to support instructors in their online efforts, provide…

In recent years, several scholars have called for more inquiry on the role of emotions in education. And while the dynamics of the emotions that emerge during online learning may be difficult to observe, limited evidence suggests that, not unlike traditional classroom instruction, emotions have important affects on learning, engagement, and…

Online learning continues to grow, but there is limited empirical research on the personal factors that influence success in online contexts. This investigation addresses this research gap by exploring the relations between several discrete achievement-related emotions (boredom, frustration, and enjoyment) and self-regulated learning behaviors…

In an effort to expand existing research on the barriers of instructors experience in online learning environments (OLEs), a qualitative study was conducted at a large mid-Atlantic university. Six instructors teaching in different OLE formats (e.g., asynchronous, hybrid, and synchronous via videoconferencing) participated in two focus groups in…

This empirical study investigates students' learning choices for mathematics and statistics in a blended learning environment, composed of both online and face-to-face learning components. The students (N = 730) were university freshmen with a strong diversity in prior schooling and a wide range of proficiency in quantitative subjects. In this…

Online learning has become a reality for many students in higher education. Unfortunately, something that has also become a reality is a sense of isolation in online courses, and Moore (1980) has warned that students' sense of distance can threaten their ability to learn. The community of inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) has…

Online learning may be particularly sensitive to self-regulatory trade-offs between maintaining interest and performance. Undergraduates in online or on-campus sections of the same course rated strategies used to motivate studying for the first exam, and interest after the first exam and at semester's end. First exam and final class grades were…

This commentary investigates the extent to which the control-value theory of emotions (Pekrun, 2006) is applicable in online learning environments. Four empirical studies in this special issue of "The Internet and Higher Education" explicitly used the control-value theory as their theoretical framework and several others have components of the…

As the presence of online and hybrid coursework at institutions of higher education has increased, so too has interest among educators and scholars in understanding personal and contextual factors that predict success in different types of learning environments. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations among temporally-ordered…

This study aimed to explore the correlates among teachers' epistemological beliefs concerning Internet environments, their web search strategies and search outcomes. The sample of this study included 105 teachers from 63 grades 1 to 9 schools in Taiwan. The results show that the teachers with more advanced epistemological beliefs concerning…