Distance education started being limited in comparison to traditional education. Distance teachers and educational organizations have overcome most of these limits, but some other limits still remain as challenges. One of these challenges is to collaboratively learn concepts in an immersive way, similarly to the education "in situ".…

Studies show that affordances of social media have not yet been fully exploited in the promotion of authentic e-learning in higher education. The e-Learning of the Future project (2009-2011) has met these challenges through working life mentoring using social media. In this paper, we examine the planning and implementation of social media in nine…

This research reports the results of a literature synthesis conducted on digital gaming in education research literature. Seventy-three digital gaming research articles in education were identified through a systematic literature search and were coded across several relevant criteria. Our research indicates trends and patterns from empirical…

Part of ongoing research into the efficacy of blended learning in higher education within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The need for, and development of, a Blended Learning Environment Instrument (BLEI) are explained. This new instrument assesses student perceptions across five core aspects of blended learning environments: Infrastructure,…

Many universities are currently using Course Management Systems (CMSes) to conduct online learning, for example, by distributing course materials or submitting homework assignments. However, most CMSes do not include comprehensive activity tracking and analysis capabilities. This paper describes a method to track students' online learning…

In the corporate world, with its global, competitive environment, many firms have become learning organizations in order to survive and thrive. Similarly, 21st century universities that succeed will be lean, flexible, and nimble, enabling them to cross geographic and time boundaries, and to better meet the needs of future generations. The…

This study is part of an ongoing attempt to develop a usable and valid scale for assessing the flow experience in educational games. The purpose of the paper is to operationalize the dimensions of flow experience in an educational game context and to test a constructed GameFlow questionnaire. Furthermore, the study strives to validate flow…

The underlying aim of the work related in this article, was to define Design Patterns for recording and analyzing usage in learning systems. The implied "bottom-up" approach when defining a Design Pattern brought us to examine data collected in our learning system through different lights: (1) the data type, (2) the human roles involved in the…

Although the advent of VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) promised more flexible and independent learning, concerns have also been raised about the quality of their pedagogical effects. This article presents the results of a case study which endeavoured to explore the relationship between approaches to learning and studying, and perceptions of…

This article provides an empirical evaluation of an indexing technology, topic maps (ISO 13250), in the context of an academic task in a higher education context. Topic maps are a form of indexing that define and display the interrelationships between various topics in a given domain, as well as anchor these topics to specific resources that help…

Several practitioners and researchers consider interactivity as the essential mechanism for effective and successful self-regulated learning within web-based learning environments. Even so, there are few studies that address the question of how students deal with the interactivity provided and how this may be related to their achievement. To…

In business and commerce, the concept of marketing myopia has been a useful tool to predict, analyze and explain the rise and fall of businesses. In this article, we question whether the concept can also be used to predict the ultimate downfall of online learning in higher education, if universities continue to confuse their key mission-education-…

This article discusses the processes of interaction among learners in higher education using a model of content analysis to examine their social construction of knowledge through computer-mediated communications. We examined students' conference transcripts for evidence that their collaborative communicative acts generated constructions of new…

In this article we describe the initial investigations that we have conducted on student data collected from a web-based tutoring tool. We have used some data mining techniques such as association rule and symbolic data analysis, as well as traditional SQL queries to gain further insight on the students' learning and deduce information to improve…

Explores the different forms and potential applications of computer mediated communication (CMC) for Web-based and Web-enhanced courses. Based on their experiences with three different Web courses (Research Methods in Psychology, Statistical Methods in Psychology, and Basic Learning Processes) taught repeatedly over the last five years, the…