The roles of distance education teaching staff are changing, necessitating role clarity and the development of appropriate competency frameworks. This article investigates the perceptions of the teaching and research staff at the University of South Africa, regarding the current and future roles of distance educators, their own competencies in…

The community of inquiry (CoI) framework suggests social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence are essential elements to foster successful educational experiences in computer-mediated distance learning environments. Although thousands of CoI-based articles have been published, those critical of the framework and related research…

This study examines university student's attitudes toward Facebook use, focusing specifically on how they feel about using a social network that encourages the performance of personal and social identity to support learning and interaction among classmates and instructors. Two surveys elicited student habits, preferences, and beliefs related to…

This study examines the relationships between students' academic levels, the use of motivational regulation strategies, and cognitive learning strategies. A total of 141 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in online distance courses participated in the study. The findings show that students use different motivational regulation strategies…

This study attempts to make inferences about the mechanisms that drive network change over time. It adopts simulation investigation for empirical network analysis to examine the patterns and evolution of relationships formed in the context of a massive open online course (MOOC) discussion forum. Four network effects--"homophily,"…

Learning a language through distance means is becoming increasingly widespread. The investigation reported in this paper was part of a large study (n = 590) carried out in 2011, which examined the experience of English-speaking students learning French pronunciation in a distance setting. This paper explores the hypothesis that there is a link…

Self-paced online courses meet flexibility and learning needs of many students, but skepticism persists regarding the quality and the tendency for students to procrastinate in self-paced courses. Research is needed to understand procrastination and delay patterns of students in online self-paced courses to predict successful completion and…

The principal contradiction of online distance education is the disparity that exists between economies of scale and the new interactive capabilities of digital technologies. This is particularly felt where mega-universities in developing countries seek to make better use of these affordances while at the same time protecting their economies of…

The changing work roles and resulting workloads of distance educators hold significant implications for the wellbeing and mental health of academics. New work roles include redesigning curricula for online delivery, increasing staff-student ratios and demands for student-support, management of part-time staff, and 24-h availability. This research…

Academic workloads in online learning are influenced by many variables, the complexity of which makes it difficult to measure academic workloads in isolation. While researching issues associated with academic workloads, professional development stood out as having a substantive impact on academic workloads. Many academics in applied health degrees…

This study examined the actual practice and effectiveness of a satellite educational TV program in Ethiopian secondary schools. Participants in the survey were 228 students and 63 teachers from secondary schools. The results of the data analysis indicate that Ethiopian students and teachers scored highly in the evaluation areas. Levels of…

Transactional distance has been defined as barriers to students' engagement with learning in the online environment. This research updates Zhang's (2003) scale of transactional distance, which quantified the extent of the barriers, in light of the massive changes in today's web-based learning environment. The resulting revised scale of…

Enrollment in online remedial mathematics courses has increased in popularity in institutions of higher learning; however, students unskilled in self-regulated learning (SRL) find online remedial mathematics courses particularly challenging. We investigated the role of SRL, specifically motivation, emotion, and learning strategies, in students'…

Although research has demonstrated that an increased rapport between instructors and learners can positively relate with increased learning gains, perhaps mediated by the positive attitudes toward the course and self-efficacy beliefs in the coursework, little has been done to test what instructional strategies might increase this rapport in online…

This study was designed to investigate whether course content self-efficacy, online technologies self-efficacy, and task value change over the course of a semester. Sixty-nine participating students from four classes provided data through two instruments: (1) the self-efficacy instrument and (2) the task value instrument. Students' self-efficacy…