Read/write social technologies enable rich pedagogies that centre on sharing and constructing content but have two notable weaknesses. Firstly, beyond the safe, nurturing environment of closed groups, students participating in more or less public network- or set-oriented communities may be insecure in their knowledge and skills, leading to…

This case study illustrates how DS106, a computer science course in Digital Storytelling from the University of Mary Washington (UMW) and accessible as an open course on the web, is being explored in a corporate environment at 3M, an American multinational corporation based in St. Paul, Minnesota, to build community, collaboration, and more…

Online learning environments offer new opportunities for learning and over the last decade or so a variety of online learning environments have been developed by researchers to facilitate collaborative learning among students. In this paper we will present a case study of a successful collaborative learning design. This involves a near synchronous…

At the Open University in Scotland "openness" is part of our sense of self; our engagement with Open Educational Resources and Practices (OER/OEP) seems obvious. In this paper we explore some of those obvious aspects and using our partnership with a third sector organisation explore some of the less apparent aspects of openness. In…

Open educational resources (OERs) are designed to be globally reusable. Yet comparatively little attention has been given to the cultural issues. This paper addresses the issue of culturally sensitive factors that may influence the design of reusable learning objects. These influences are often subtle and hard to manage. The paper proposes a…

This paper discusses the use of videoconferencing as a tool to enhance collaboration amongst online learners in an open learning context. We present quantitative data from a longitudinal study of naturalistic videoconferencing interactions held via the FM videoconference tool, indicating its global use. The case study presented is analysed…

The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is an open educational resources project at Carnegie Mellon University that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OLI creates web-based courses that are designed so that students can learn effectively without an instructor. In addition, the courses are often used by instructors…

Investigates a graduate-level online course in which groups of four students were used to lead online discussions. The teams were examined for their ability to bring instructional design, discourse facilitation, and direct instruction to the discussion. Results indicate that the peer teams fulfilled each of the three roles and valued the…

Describes a Web-based tool, WebGuide, being developed to mediate and structure collaborative learning. This software uses an innovative mechanism to define a flexible system of perspectives on a shared knowledge construction space. WebGuide provides an electronic and persistent workspace for individuals and teams to develop and share distinctive…