Learning communities can emerge spontaneously when people find common learning goals and pursue projects and tasks together in pursuit of those goals. Bounded learning communities (BLCs) are groups that form within a structured teaching or training setting, typically a course. Unlike spontaneous communities, BLCs develop in direct response to guidance provided by an instructor, supported by a cumulative resource base. More...

The Internet is the world's largest knowledge common and the information source of first resort. Much of this information is open and freely available. However, there are organizations and companies today that are trying to close off the Internet commons and make it proprietary. These are the “copyright controllers.” The preservation of the commons and expanding access to digital content and applications are very important for distance educators. More...

This article highlights the current dialogue about educational technology and ways of knowing in visual art education. The authors outline and evaluate the development and testing phases of a hypertextual online visual art course offered at the then Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design
(http://www.eciad.ca/www/) in the summer of 2001. More...

Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Baha'i, Jewish, and Christian organizations are all experimenting with distance education for various reasons and to different extents, due to religious, economic, and political factors. Religious institutions worldwide are not only turning to the World Wide Web (WWW) to place information concerning religious beliefs and provide virtual services for their constituents but are also getting more involved in formally educating their members at a distance. More...

This study was designed to evaluate the use of asynchronous discussion in distance education in terms of student perceptions of its value for learning and for affective support. At the end of the third and sixth years of a distance delivered teacher education programme, students completed a survey to determine the extent to which the nature and characteristics of the online aspects of the programme contributed to learning and afforded affective support. More...

This paper reports the results of a survey conducted to examine the root causes leading to student dropout at a Greek distance education university. Data was gathered from two different courses – an undergraduate course leading to a Bachelors degree in Informatics (characterized by high dropout rates), and a postgraduate course leading to a Masters degree in education (characterized by low dropout rates). A comparative analysis of these two different courses revealed important similarities in dropout percentages and the reasons cited by students for dropping out. More...

This case study describes three main strategies used from March 2002 to November 2003 at the Open University and Distance Education Coordination (CUAED) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to consolidate distance education at the University. The author explains how, in just 18 months, these three main strategies enabled the UNAM to emerge as model of distance education for other public and private institutions in Latin America. More...

E-Learning is an important tool for delivery, interaction, and facilitation of both teaching and learning processes. Faculty members at the University of Bahrain’s College of Education are being encouraged to become involved in e-learning activities. To assess faculty opinions on e-learning, a questionnaire was sent to 30 faculty members of the University’s College of Education to determine how they perceive e-learning, and how they might choose to integrate it into their everyday teaching activities. More...

This article presents the concepts of interaction and immediacy and discusses their theoretical frameworks, implications, and relationship with one another. The authors propose the development of a new conceptual model and recommend additional antecedent research. More...