The ubiquity of Web 2.0 technologies has led to a seismic shift in the way educational services are delivered. It comes as no surprise then that e-tutoring—otherwise known as electronic or online tutoring—is quickly supplanting face-to-face tuition for reasons of both cost and convenience. While e-tutoring is an effective form of academic support for many students, its efficacy remains tenuous for those confronted with a digital divide that figures predominantly around geographic barriers, socio-economic status, and educational levels. Premised on diffusion research, this master's dissertation explores the implementation of an e-tutoring service known as Homework Help that has effected relatively low adoption rates. It uses a concurrent mixed-methods approach—including surveys, interviews, and focus groups—to examine the factors that have led to this low adoption rate. The results are presented via two journal articles situated within a larger meta-talk: The first article contrasts the adoption patterns apparent between rural and urban students, while the second article looks at the utility of diffusion research in examining educational technologies, as it explores the use of e-tutoring for applied stream students. The findings of this study suggest that rural and urban, as well as applied and academic student subgroups, differ in terms of their perception and adoption of e-tutoring. Implications for educational policy, especially in regards to rural education, are discussed.

In the past decade, there has been an enormous growth of distance education courses and programs in higher education. However, the potential of distance education is tempered by one overriding question: How do you ensure that distance education coursework and degrees are of high quality? The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) to identify quality indicators of distance education; (2) to provide implications of the identified quality indicators for health education researchers and practitioners; and, (3) to develop an instrument to assess student opinions of the quality of distance education. Dillman's (2000) steps of pretesting and the instrument development framework in the Standards (1999) were used, and data were collected from students enrolled in four health education on-line courses during the Spring 2006 semester at Texas A&M University. MPlus (Muthen & Muthen, 2002) was used to conduct reliability and validity analyses of the instrument. The results of the study revealed common benchmarks and quality indicators that all parties deem important in designing, implementing and evaluating distance education courses and programs. Additionally, an instrument was produced that resulted in both valid and reliable scores.

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument for assessing distance learning readiness of institutions in Latin America for international projects of food and agriculture with higher education institutions in the U.S. The data collection followed two approaches: a quantitative, which was processed statistically, including mean (percentage), mode and cross-tabulation, and a qualitative, through semi-structured interviews. The population of this research was animal biotechnology institutions in Latin American countries, Spanish speaking, partners with the major funding organizations in the U.S., with Web pages on the Internet. Population included 17 countries with N=150, a random sample of n=83 for the quantitative analysis and n=20 for the qualitative approach. The instrument was developed by the researcher. Items were based on readiness surveys used widely in the U.S., and founded in two culture theories: Bank’s (2001) cultural elements and Hosfstede’s (1984) cultural dimensions. Using Bank’s theory it was concluded that English proficiency was considered an essential tool for research. Interviews exposed that researchers were aware of nonverbal communication differences between Latinos and Americans. Cultural cognitiveness showed to be exposed when researchers were confronted with another culture. The perspective of distance education showed to be considered different from face to face education. There was an appropriate perception of the need, ownership, and use of computer technologies and Internet accessibility with fast connections. Researchers perceived computer technology equipment as a measurement of the quality of their institution. Using Hofstede’s (1984) dimensions it was concluded that Latin American countries were considered to have high power distance on four of the six items assessed; had strong uncertainty avoidance with four of the six items assessed, where a collectivist society, with five items out of six. Interviews determined that a masculine dimension was predominant in the study. Assessment of technology involved: Internet, technological resources, computer proficiency, distance education and instructional design experience. Results of this assessment showed that technology must be measured through a cultural perspective to achieve accurate responses because people express and understand through their mental constructs which are tainted with their cultural experiences and their perception of life, work, academics, and society.

The purpose of this study was to 1) provide a detailed examination of the criteria for preevaluation utilized to measure quality in a distance education course for the Virtual College of Texas (VCT) and consortium members, 2) examine the process of each VCT consortium member in order to determine the criterion for the quality of distance education courses being provided by a host or provider college, and 3) develop and validate a pre-evaluation instrument to pre-determine quality in distance education courses for the Virtual College of Texas and consortium members. This was a qualitative research study that utilized document analysis, semi-structured interviews questions and incorporated a modified use of the research and development cycle. The data was gathered from the member colleges that are part of the Virtual College of Texas Consortium. The entire 43 member college?s websites were searched for documents containing the criteria that they used to evaluate the quality of on-line courses. These documents were also used to formulate the questions used in the semi-structured telephone interview questions. During the course of this study it became evident that an educational research and development strategy would be utilized due to the development of a pre-evaluation instrument to pre-determine quality in distance education courses for the Virtual College of Texas. There are 10 major steps in the educational research and design (R and D) process however in this study it was modified since not all of the major steps were applicable. It is clear that determining quality criteria is not easily accomplished due to the differences in and of the decision makers, however the participants in this agreed on the final development of a pre-evaluation instrument to pre-determine quality in a distance education course. The use of a pre-evaluation instrument to pre-determine quality in a distance education course may aid distance education in promotion of its foundational purpose of connecting the instructor with the student for learning and in promoting the value of connecting human beings in a meaningful way through the use of distance education for human resource development (Swanson and Holton, 2001).

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions of school administrators about the use of distance education in Texas public schools. A mixed-method research design was used to determine if these administrators' perceptions were barriers to the implementation of distance education. The study included a series of 17 interviews with school principals and superintendents. Based on these interviews, a survey instrument was developed and sent to a larger sample of administrators. The sample population for the survey comprised administrators from three Education Service Centers in Texas. Results of the qualitative interviews and of the quantitative survey indicated that distance education has the potential to provide greater flexibility in offering high quality coursework and activities. However, administrators perceived that they lack control of these programs, and that the number of students who excelled in distance education was limited. Additionally, administrators perceived that distance education courses were not as good as traditional courses while admitting to a lack of knowledge about distance education. Overall, administrators who believed they had the support of their local school boards were most likely to implement distance education in their districts.

With the progress of the network, peoples can communicate with each other easily. The popularization of the Broadband network makes many things that could be hard to achieved becoming possible. For example, video conference, distance education and on-line games have become a part of our daily life. However, most network services are client-server architecture. This kind of service need a expensive and powerful server. The restriction will makes it difficult to improve the quality of service. P2P (peer-to-peer) architecture embodies one of the key technical concepts of the internet and many internet users was attracted by it. A peer-to-peer computer network is a network that relies on computing power at the edges (ends) of a connection rather than in the network itself. It has been used in two kinds of applications which are file sharing and distributed computing. Instead of using P2P model, client-server architecture is used in muti-user conference. A software using P2P model still needs one of the users to become a server to deal with all the messages in the conference. When the number of the users increasing, the overhead of the server will increase linearly. This makes many communication softwares to limit the number of users in a conference. Therefore, most of the companies use an expensive and powerful server offering this kind of service. In this paper, we will implement a voice-conferencing system using P2P model and the technique of distributed computing. It makes the overhead of the server in logarithmic increase. In addition, we still can configure some low-end peers with a constant overhead. No mater how the number of users increase, these peers will have a constant overhead. With the good design, we can gurantee the quality of service easily.

Abstract The Chinese government has fulfilled the policy of ¡§revolution opening¡¨ since 1979, and it has taken ¡§outside economy¡¨ and ¡§region incline¡¨ course to fulfill the programming development with ¡§southern, middle, and western¡¨ three-route region. The Chinese government has given the programming development to keep the initiative in its own hands to attract foreign capital, technology, and enterprise management experiences. Such a development has made Chinese economy grow up rapidly, and set up a political economic environment of socialism which has been filled with Chinese characteristics. The Chinese government has carried out the policy of ¡§the ninth five-year national development program prospect goal suggestion¡¨ in 1996. The policy indicates that Shanghai is the nuclear window which can be the connection between China and the world and plans to build Shanghai to be the center of international economy, trade, finance and shipping. Thus, Shanghai has started a diversely development that can attract international enterprises¡¦ investment largely. In the demand of market institution, the process of being developed has faced a serious problem that is a lack of enough enterprise management elites. Education funds and resources, total amounts of high colleges and equipments have shown up the imbalance of the Chinese government. In order to achieve the goal of training professional elites, the Chinese government takes ¡§building nation with technology education¡¨ as a main policy and ¡§distance education¡¨ as a main artifice, and uses communication channel as network and television to train enterprise management elites of ¡§fast, effort-saving, excellent, and few amount¡¨ to make development of human resource in China, which can grow up with Chinese economy at the same time. ¡§Shanghai long-distance education group¡¨ belongs to Shanghai City Government. It is the first long-distance institute allowed by China National Council to set up with grouping. It expands Chinese education resources, merges Shanghai Television University, Shanghai Education TV Company, Shanghai Electric Education Institute, Shanghai Television Secondary Training School, and Shanghai Calculator Assessment Application Office to set up the large information platform, and uses the entire development of Shin-shi Harbor in Shanghai City to provide with the service of elites-training in all kinds of fields, and improve the competitive ability of internationalization after participating in WTO by the way. The thesis takes qualitative research of ¡§grounded theory¡¨ to combine with document probe, personal participation, deep interview, and induces the practical development situation of prospect, mission, goal, and strategy of research objects with ¡§open coding¡¨, ¡§axial coding¡¨, and ¡§selective coding¡¨. The thesis also probes deeply the regulation and market-opening policy of the Chinese government, the evaluation of putting in education market with enterprise resources, vertical and horizontal revolution of internal organization, motivation of learning, position of marketing, institution of competition, effect of internationalization, and potential of development, contrasts with the relationship between dependent and dependent variables to prove those issues near the real situation, and predicts the prospective trend. The thesis is practical and marketable. Besides probing China long-distance education of training enterprise management elites, the thesis also expects to provide Taiwan¡¦s enterprises with some related criterions of investing in China and economic competition and cooperation between Taiwan and China. Moreover, the thesis finds out Chinese electric learning and the market opportunity of electronic commerce. It will be good for integrating the resources between Taiwan and China and it will create a peaceful and prosperous environment.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, November, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D., Education)--University of Idaho, April 2009. / Major professor: Roger L. Scott. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-152). Also available online (PDF file) by subscription or by purchasing the individual file.

Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Dale Courtney. Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-54). Also available online.