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Building and Sustaining Learning Communities

Students benefit from education in ways that go beyond the classroom. Interaction-based learning communities have been increasingly popular over the past ten years as a part of the educational process. Building new educational strategies and delivery methods are required for the growth of learning communities (Palloff & Pratt, 1999). The following three crucial factors influence the growth of learning communities: 1) individual competencies – time management skills, communication skills, and networking skills for developing social capital; 2) quality course design – establishment of social presence, integration of technology, authentic and project-based learning; and 3) learning environments – conducive to learning, to fostering a social climate, and to sustaining a learning community. It is argued that community learning will impact the quality of education, and contribute to the developing social capital that will benefit humankind. Students must have the opportunity to partici
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Constructivist Learning Environments to Enhance e-Learning

Even if there is a lot of potential for e-Learning, there are many instances where it is just a copy of conventional (didactic) learning environments. The emphasis on constructivism as a learning philosophy, epistemology, and pedagogical approach has also grown recently. Constructivist Learning Environments (CLE) have the ability to offer real and interesting settings for e-Learning. Using the cognitive apprenticeship concept and project-based learning, we have offered some guidelines in this work for the creation of one such CLE.                                        The approach suggests learning about information systems through actual usage of information systems, with less emphasis on overt lecturing and conventional teaching methods. Information Systems is not learnt by only studying practice, but by really engaging in it for the duration of the module/course. For the sake of concision, students should work on complicated, challenging tasks that mirror real-world complexity. T

Team Teaching: Working Together to Support Student Learning

A productive teaching team can help create an effective learning environment by providing the student with innovative and distinct experiences through the collaborative and creative context.  Any team-teaching project's level of success will depend on the participants themselves, both from a professional and personal standpoint, as well as the chemistry of their relationship. The value of each member's unique personality and life experiences is noted by Bakken, Clark, and Thompson: "We felt that we were mature enough to compromise, secure enough to share power, wise enough not to take things too seriously and to find humor in most situations, confident enough to try new strategies, and professional enough to seek feedback to make improvements" (Bakken, Clark and Thompson, 1998).  Being committed to team teaching necessitates being prepared to collaborate closely with another professional and having the self-awareness to be open and truthful about one's own traits

The Role of Interaction in e-Learning

One of the most significant components of learning experiences, both in traditional education and distance education, has been identified as Interaction. According to Berge (1999), interaction in a virtual environment can be broadly defined as,  "two-way communication among two or more people within a learning context, with the purposes of either task/instruction completion or social relationship building, that includes a means for teacher and learner to receive feedback and for adaptation to occur based upon information and activities with which the participants are engaged". Wagner (1994) defines interaction as: "reciprocal events that require at least two objects and two actions. Interactions occur when these objects and events mutually influence one another. An instructional interac-tion is an event that takes place between a learner and the learner's environment. Its purpose is to respond to the learner in a way intended to change his or her behavior toward and

Video, Voice and Virtual Collaboration: The 3V's of Asynchronous Education

  Asynchronous versus Synchronous is without a doubt one of the most contentious issues in online education. Discussions almost often center on the idea that synchronous courses are dynamic and so offer more learning fidelity than asynchronous courses, which are characterized as static but less time-intensive. The proponents of either kind of online education tend to indicate there is no gray area — you are either a supporter of one or the other, for reasons that are not quite clear. There are numerous excellent definitions of both synchronous and asynchronous delivery methods. Synchronous Online Education refers to Internet-based instruction in which the teacher and students engage in learning activities simultaneously. Asynchronous Online Education refers to online learning in which the teacher and students engage in learning activities at various times. Here in this blog we will discuss the possibility of delivering asynchronous course with the advantages associated with s

Web Resources for English Language Teaching and Learning

Technology can help and assist the teaching of the four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) in a diverse range of ways. There is a connection between technology and the aspects of these skills today. Technology provides access to many different materials for students to read and write also to master their listening and speaking skills. In this writing, we will look into some the web resources that are available for teaching and learning English language. 1.     Reading As technology provides access to so many different materials for students to read, teachers can select texts form the internet for their students. Students and teachers can choose the text of their interest. For example, On the Voice of America ( https://www.voanews.com/ ) website, students can access stories about current events. This up-to-date website includes news stories from the U.S. and around the world as well as stories about science, health, culture, and many more topics Students and teache

25 Years of Ed Tech by Martin Weller

       Every human endeavor is impacted by one of the domains that is evolving most  quickly in the current era: technology. One area that has benefited from these technological advancements is education. While some educational institutions have adopted these technological advancements without a hitch, others have found it difficult to keep up with the evolving needs and expectations of students. The speed of technical advancements and the shifting conditions the educational system has seen over the past few decades might be better understood from a historical viewpoint. How to meet the needs of educational seekers from three different generations is these schools' greater task (Gen X, millennials, and postmillennials). The book “25 Years of Ed Tech” has successfully completed the work of chronicling these important historical turning points in technological advancement and use in education beginning in 1994. Instead of starting with its inception, the author has provided an overvi