This exploratory study investigates how American and Canadian parents living in Saudi Arabia perceive enrolling their children in an online virtual school. This research is relevant to North Americans living and working overseas and how these parents access educational opportunities for their children. North American parents living in Saudi Arabia with children have limited local educational options. If parents decided not to enroll their child in traditional private local international education, alternatives include boarding school, homeschool, or online school. Of the surveyed participants, 68% of parents had enrolled their children in online education or expressed interest in enrolling their children in online education but many lack information and knowledge about online education. A qualitative study analyzed participants in semi-structured interviews. Besides academic satisfaction, the most common reasons for alternative education are the lack of available competitive sports and the arts, including theatre and music. Four themes emerged from the data. Parent satisfaction about their children's education shifts from positive to negative around 8th or 9th grade. Parents are, in general, unwilling to take a risk on an unproven online school. Local private international schools are the focal point of extra-curricular activities and social events, but families lack connections and a supportive environment within the local Saudi Arabian community. Overall, parents do view full-time online education as a viable option for K-12 education; however, perhaps not for their children. Though standalone online classes, within a traditional face-to-face school, was received positively by many families.

The aim of this work is to design and implement E-learning system. This system will be targeted on the Algorithms course education in English. Thanks to this fact, foreign students will be able to attend the course, too. The introduction part offers an overview of basic conceptions related to E-learning systems: conceptual and detailed design of E-learning system, system development, designing system testing and maintenance and system improving. Theoretical part of this project is focused on selected topics from data structures, searching and sorting algorithms. The work is dealing with the development of E-learning system from the entire beginning to activities related with its release. Through the interface of administrator the application enables administration of courses and users. The other part of the system serves for checking of students´ results. Student part of the application makes the Algorithms course materials available and provides convenient means of knowledge testing. The results of tests are processed in a form of statistics within the system.

Digitalization through the use of Information and Communication Technologies is a phenomenon which has a great influence on our way of living. Organizations and society at large are not left behind. With the ubiquitous nature of technological devices, the need for digital competency in the constantly changing and advancing digital landscape is of utmost importance. In 2020, people’s lives and everyday activities were altered on a global scale, due to the outbreak of a viral disease named COVID-19, which resulted in a worldwide pandemic. Educators were suddenly faced with teaching challenges, due to the need for adoption of electronic learning tools and technologies for delivery of learning activities. Transitioning from traditional face-to-face teaching to distance learning was seamless for teachers who were digitally competent. However, the same transition for those with little or no digital competence and experience, resulted in great challenges in the delivery of academic activities through electronic learning platforms.The educational system however is still recuperating from the COVID-19 induced online method of teaching. The digital competence of teachers and their perceived experience during the transitioning phase has therefore become of great importance to study in qualitative research within an interpretive case study. As a result, this research work aims to compare responses of teachers who serve at two secondary schools in Greece and Sweden, both of which are located in the European Union. By answering two research questions, this study follows an inductive approach, using educational technology affordance framework. This provides insight into effective delivery of online learning in the education sector. The methodological approach of this research follows data collection through semi-structured interviews, addressed to teachers and validated through IT personnel who work in the selected schools; and the use of additional data collection through documents available online, which are related to the context of study. The data collected were examined using thematic analysis, followed by a general discussion, answers to research questions, and analysis about the theoretical framework. The findings of this research work reveal that there are interrelationships between teachers’ experience with online learning and their digital competencies, and these interrelationships play a major role in determining the successful implementation of digital technologies in academic activities. This is because, despite the challenges faced by teachers during the transitioning phase from traditional teaching method to online delivery, teachers with significantly higher levels of digital competence managed the new digital procedures easily. On the contrary, those with little or no digital competence level found the new procedure a difficult task. Thereby resulting in professional stress during this transition. Hence, the successful implementation of digital technologies into the educational work procedures is highly dependent on the digital skills levels of the teachers who will implement these technologies, as well as suitable and user-friendly platforms.This research work is descriptive, and it contributes to the knowledge as it concerns the need for digital competence among teachers. It provides further clarification on what school management, education specialists and software developers are doing with respect to improving the digital competence level of teachers. In addition to this, the study provides insights on what education policy makers can do to support teachers’ readiness towards digital skill acquisition. This is seen as a necessity to achieve optimum results for a successful future delivery of online education.

The purposes of this research project were to identify the extent to which online courses are available to high school students in Tennessee, to describe the characteristics of current online programs, to identify barriers to the implementation of online courses in school systems that are not currently offering such programs, and to offer recommendations that could facilitate implementation of these programs. The research went in two directions. A study of past and current online educational programs was completed in order to learn the nature of successful programs across the country. Then, a survey was constructed and sent to appropriate technology personnel in Tennessee schools to evaluate both their current online programs and to determine those needed in the state. There are only two school systems in Tennessee that allow students to earn online credits to be used towards high school graduation. One is a larger school system and the other is a medium sized school system; both are in the eastern region of the state. One survey respondent summed it up by saying: I really think the State Department of Education should step up and provide some direction. Florida has a vanguard program; I’d like to see the same type of program implemented in Tennessee. If individual school districts are left to design their own programs, then there is going to be a lot of duplicated effort, a wide range of implementation strategies, and varying degrees of quality. That’s likely to breed confusion and disillusionment.

This dissertation in practice was designed to provide an evaluation case study of two institutions, one college and one university, in the field of online learning and quality assurance. The writer evaluated these two institutions of higher learning to discover what online teaching criteria are required and what quality assurance processes are being used to assess the quality of the institutions* online courses. An analysis of the data revealed that both institutions were at the appropriate stage of development, support, training and quality assurance measures for their sizes, online populations and for the length of time they have been involved in online learning. Findings revealed that both institutions had a quality assurance process in place that is appropriate to their location, population and faculty. There is much to be learned by examining the two different credentialing and quality assurance approaches to online teaching and learning that these two different institutions employ for anyone interested in improving their institutions* processes.

This study investigates the effects of self-regulated strategy development (Harris, Graham, & Mason, 2009) for cognitive strategy instruction in persuasive writing (POW+TREE) using a synchronous online learning environment for special education students. Participants are four adolescent students with learning disabilities (LD) with low achievement in writing. One undergraduate research assistant delivered instruction using a synchronous online platform (e.g., Adobe Connect) in conjunction with collaborative writing software (e.g., Google Docs word processing). A multiple probe across participants design was used to demonstrate a functional relationship between instruction and number of essay elements (EE). Number of correct minus incorrect word sequences (CIWS) was used as a secondary dependent measure. A nonexperimental pre-post design was used to compare the mean performance of holistic writing quality scores and standard scores from the TOWL-3. All four participants gained EE and CIWS from baseline to treatment and demonstrated standard score changes from pre to post-test on the TOWL-3. Implications for writing instruction for students with LD using online learning environments are discussed.

Florida Virtual School (FLVS) was established in 1997 as an online education alternative for the residents of Florida. The purpose of this study was to identify policy changes at the organizational, state, and federal levels that had the propensity to impact student success (as measured by student's final letter grade) at FLVS. In addition, this study identified which type of institutional isomporphic policy (coercive, mimetic, or normative) best classified major policy changes in the organization from 1997-2007. The use of institutional theory as the guiding framework for this study proved to be beneficial and enabled the researcher to conclude which types of policy are the most effective in increasing student success in the secondary online education environment. This study utilized ANOVA and regression analysis to detect whether or not changes in policy at the organizational and federal level have a statistically significant impact on student success in the secondary online education environment. This study reveals that student success at FLVS is consistently decreasing and that the change is statistically significant. Regression analysis found that the policy changes at FLVS in this study explain some of the variance detected in the change in the mean, or GPA, of the school. This study found that both coercive and mimetic policies have a statistically significant impact on student success in the secondary online education environment as identified in the isomorphic mechanisms outlined in institutional theory. This study is important to the field of literature regarding secondary online education in that it opens the discussion regarding types of policy and the potential impact that policy changes have on student success in the secondary online education environment. In addition, this study serves as a framework upon which future studies can be conducted and are recommended in this study.

The aim of the study is to analyze how the practice of teaching history in Swedish upper secondary school was impacted by the covid-19 pandemic. The study used qualitative interviews with five history teachers to gain an understanding about how they felt that the pandemic came to affect them and their teaching.  To analyze the result the frame factor theory, and frame factory frames: pandemic and remote teaching have been used.  The result of the study shows that online education and the pandemic effected most aspects of teaching, especially the social collaboration between students’ and students and their teacher. All five teachers reported that not being able to read their students’ body language and alertness during their lectures was an issue, since they were unable adapt their lesson after their students' needs. The teachers believe that these issues resulted in a lower quality learning environment.  Remote teaching also increased the workload for teachers, especially when they needed to develop their technical skills to meet the demands of remote teaching. The teachers preferred to teach in classrooms with their students present, but they also saw the value in their own professional development during this challenging period.  Despite the challenges, the teachers’ view of remote teaching is positive and they see several advantages with the tool. One example of this is that certain group of students that tend to stay at home and avoid school, performed better during remote teaching period. Another example is that teachers had an easier time having deeper and more meaningful conversations with their students. However, the main take away from the study is that the teachers recognize the importance of remote teaching as a tool in case something similar, like the covid pandemic, should occur in the future.

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The rapid development of information communication technologies has created unique, exceptional opportunities for conducting education. Thus, the transposal of learning into the virtual world constituted the biggest transformation that education went through- a real paradigm change. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the most abrupt virtualization of education until today. The educational systems in most of the countries experienced significant transformations and had to reconceptualize their whole learning models, in order to adjust them to the online environment. This sudden change did not have the same impact on all the countries- some of them adapted easier and quicker to virtualization than others. The transition to online learning also varied with the educational branch and type of courses that had to be transposed into the digital medium. Whereas the translation of the theoretical courses into the virtual environment did not constitute an immense burden, transposing practical courses into the digital world represented a real challenge for educational institutions. For medical universities in particular, the pressure of adapting to the conditions of the pandemic was even bigger than for other educational organizations, as these had to enable timely graduation of the students in order to support the overwhelmed healthcare systems fighting the pandemic.      Existing studies looked into topics such as online education, virtualization of education and other related themes, but very few scholars researched into the matter of education virtualizability. Moreover, studies were mainly conducted in digitally developed countries like the USA. Practical courses were also not being studied very extensively in the existing research context, theoretical ones being mostly underlined. Additionally, study branches such as management and business were the main focus of the existing papers, which did not center their discoveries around the medical area. The named gaps in the current literature underlined the need of a clear view on the medical students' perception on the virtualizability of practical courses in a country such as Romania. Thus, the aim of this master's thesis was to look into the named matter. In order to provide a contribution to the existing literature, after gaining the opinions of students, a theoretical model was created, that depicts the main characteristics that have to be applied to a virtual practical course, so that it reaches a high virtualizability. Using as a framework the process virtualization theory, a qualitative study was conducted through semi-structured interviews made with Romanian, medical undergraduates. The collected information was analyzed with the use of thematic deductive analysis and was classified according to the four requirements presented by the adopted theory. Hence, themes and categories were identified, that helped classify and organize students' view on virtualizability.      The empirical results showed that all the regarded requirements, i.e., sensory, relationship, identification & control and synchronicity requirements were at a high level. This means that in order to transpose practical medical courses into the virtual environment, there are specific, mandatory elements that need to be implemented, so that the process of education can be conducted in a beneficial way. The registered high requirements resulted in a low virtualizability of the analyzed type of courses. However, together with the detected themes and categories, a new theoretical model was built, which offers valuable insights into the needs that need to be fulfilled, in order to improve the depicted virualizability. Future research can use the developed conceptual model as a base and extend the existing knowledge to further countries, course types and/or educational branches.