A key problem in facilitating a successful online course is the highly time -consuming nature of the administrative and pedagogical tasks involved. It is also difficult to achieve a community of learners online, since the lecturer has to overcome the natural reticence of students to post in shared class spaces. In computing courses an additional factor is the tendency of some students to work t...

On-line discussion boards play an important role in distance education and web enhanced courses. Recent studies have pointed to on-line discussion board as a promising strategy for promoting collaborative problem solving courses and discovery-oriented activities [Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996]. However, other research indicates that existing systems for on-line discussion may not always be fully...

Benefits of Social Software in teaching and learning are a research subject of great interest, especially in higher education. Even though the opportunities to encourage students’ participation are promising, there is a neglected area we intend to illuminate: heteronomy. Compulsion and external control are used to foster participation. In our study we examined 16 international evaluation and re...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how different levels of participation, tutorship styles, and metacognitive reflection in an online course can influence the group’s knowledge building. 131 undergraduate students in Psychology and 59 students in the Educational Sciences and Primary Education Sciences participated in the study. Results show that a central level of participation is associat...

In the past many didactic models have been developed for regular courses. But didactic models for e-learning courses and specific for MOOCs are still under development. Such a model should provide a basis for measurements against the high drop-out rate of MOOCs. Recently we introduced FETCH 2.0 as didactic model for e-learning using social media. In this paper we discuss a didactic model for re...

background: when the lesson plan is performed correctly in the classroom, the value of this program and the time spent for it are exactly clarified. the aim of this study is to survey the coordination of theoretical lessons teaching for the   students of dentistry in the ninth term in comparison with the lesson plans presented in 1388.      methods: a copy of all lesson plans offered in the nin...

FitzPatrick KA, Finn KE, Campisi J. Effect of personal response systems on student perception and academic performance in courses in a health sciences curriculum. Adv Physiol Educ 35: 280–289, 2011; doi:10.1152/advan.00036.2011.—To increase student engagement, active participation, and performance, personal response systems (clickers) were incorporated into six lecture-based sections of four re...

Online discussion forums have been shown to contribute to the trust and cohesion of groups, and their use has been associated with greater overall engagement in online courses. We devised two experimental interventions to encourage learners to participate in forums. A collectivist (“your participation benefits everyone”), individualist (“you benefit from participating”), or neutral (“there is a...

This study addresses the longitudinal associations between youths' out-of-school activities, expectancies-values, and high school course enrollment in the domains of math and science. Data were collected on 227 youth who reported on their activity participation in 5th grade, expectancies-values in 6th and 10th grade, and courses taken throughout high school. Math and science course grades at 5t...