The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of three deadline conditions (i.e., frequent-instructor-set-deadline condition, flexible-instructor-set-deadline condition, and self-imposed-deadline condition) on students of different academic procrastination levels (high, medium, and low) in terms of their perceived learning, academic performance, and course satisfaction in an online course. A 3 x 3 factorial quasi-experimental design was adopted for this study. One hundred and seventy three students from three classes of different majors voluntarily participated in the study with 50 students majoring in Agriculture, 61 in International Trading, and 62 in Food Manufacturing. The three classes were randomly assigned to three deadline conditions. Data were collected through an online survey and a final exam. This study found that there were significant differences in perceived learning and course satisfaction among high, medium, and low procrastinators, but there was no significant difference in academic performance among students at different procrastination levels. Low and medium procrastinators had significantly higher perceived learning and were significantly more satisfied with the course than high procrastinators. Among the three deadline condition groups, there were no significant differences in perceived learning and course satisfaction, however, the difference in academic performance was significant. The flexible deadline group achieved the best academic performance followed by the frequent and the self-imposed deadline groups. There was no interaction effect between procrastination and deadline conditions on any of the dependent variables. Limitations of the present study, recommendations for future research, and implications for practice are discussed.

The purpose of this dissertation in practice is to address the problem of online credit recovery. Although online enrollments have skyrocketed in recent years and all preliminary research indicates a large percentage of those enrollments are from students seeking credit recovery, much of the curriculum currently being offered is not research-based. Following a literature review focused on the history of credit recovery as well as successful current methods, we designed CRIT (Credit Recovery Instructional Treatment), a research-based approach to curriculum design for credit recovery. CRIT is a standards based curriculum relying on criterion based assessments. This approach was then applied in the creation of specific curriculum for English 4 credit recovery and as a general approach for all subjects. A step by step evaluation plan for current and proposed approaches for credit recovery was then defined. Additionally, we provide a detailed implementation strategy specific to our organization but easily retrofitted for other organizations. We focus on the organization of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a state run K-12 virtual school run as a special school district in Florida because it is a familiar organization; however, the model and results may be generalizable for online or traditional education.

This thesis examines issues that affect women in online learning, and discusses four women's particular experiences in the University of Central Florida's distance learning program. Online education involves aspects of support and communication that may affect women's learning experiences either positively or negatively. Distance learning may also allow women to pursue their education while still taking care of their families and outside work. In order to get a better idea of how distance learning impacts women, I discuss several studies that examine how distance learning affects women in particular. I identify three areas from this literature that seem to be particularly important in order for women to have a successful distance learning experience: social support, technical support, and awareness of differences in discussion style. After reviewing the existing literature, I discuss how this literature applies to four women's experiences here at UCF. I talk with them about how they perceive their online learning experiences, and about how they feel that the issues identified in the literature are reflected in their own lives. I discuss their issues with support, technical support, and online discussions, and relate these to existing literature in order to come up with areas that may need further exploration or improvement. I conclude the study by providing suggestions and recommendations for professors who deal with women in their online classes. I also suggest areas for further exploration in the field of women's distance education.

Content augmentation strategies (CAS) are instructional methods which specify the overlaying of content objects by content augmentation objects in order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of instruction. The goals of this research were to build a comprehensive framework around CASs, determine the experimental effects of CASs in an instructional virtual environment (VE), and make recommendations regarding the employment and further study of CASs in instructional virtual environments. The VE experiment examined the effectiveness and efficiency impact of six different content augmentation strategies which overlayed different content augmentation objects onto four immersive VE scenarios. Sixty university students, 40 men and 20 women, executed three CAS-enhanced training missions and one no-CAS test mission. The task involved the recall and correct application of specific rules for three subtasks of a military helicopter landing zone scouting mission. The strategies included a no-strategy control condition, an arrow condition, an audio coaching condition, a text coaching condition, an arrow plus audio coaching condition, and an arrow plus text coaching condition. Statistical and decision analyses were conducted on the effectiveness and efficiency performance data. Statistically significant differences were found which supported the general superiority of the audio content augmentation strategy for these tasks. This dissertation may be the first use of a decision analysis approach for analyzing the results of behavioral data for instructional design decisions. The decision analysis approach used decision trees, simulation and optimization to obtain content augmentation strategy rankings. As this approach is normally used for course of action analysis and comparing alternative system configurations, the validity of this approach in this context has yet to be determined. The decision analysis approach obtained plausible and similar, but not identical recommendations to the statistical approach. The decision analysis approach may constitute a limited instantiation of a proposed optimal stimulus set instructional design model which conceptually framed the experiment. Training guideline recommendations, experimental procedure recommendations, and a comprehensive framework for future research are also presented.

This study examines mass-market applications for some of the many theories of eLearning and blended learning, focusing most closely on a period from 2000-2010. It establishes a state of the union for K-12 immersive eLearning environments by using in-depth cases studies of five major mass-market, educational, and community-education based products—Gaia Online, Poptropica, Quest Atlantis, Dimenxian/Dimension U, and Folkvine. Investigating these models calls into play not only the voices of traditional academic and usability research, but also the ad hoc voices of the players, commentators, developers, and bloggers. These are the people who speak to the community of these sites, and their lived experiences fall somewhere in the interstices between in-site play, beta development, and external commentary (both academic and informal.) The works of experimental academic theorists play an acknowledged and fundamental role in this study, including those of Ulmer, Barab, Gee, and McLuhan. These visionary voices of academia are balanced with a consideration of both the political and financial constraints surrounding immersive educational game development. This secondary level of analysis focuses on how issues around equity of access, delivery platforms, and target disciplines can and should inform strategic goals. While this dissertation alone is unlikely to solve issues of access, emergent groups including the OLPC hold exciting promises for worldwide connectivity. My conclusion forms a synthesis of all these competing forces and proposes a pragmatic and conceptual rule-set for the development of a forward-looking and immersive educational MMORPG

This thesis explored the application of Media Synchronicity Theory and its potential for translating Critical Pedagogy (specifically Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed) into a computersupported collaborative work (CSCW) environment. It introduces the Maquina dos Oprimidos (Mados) prototype, a CSCW supplement to traditional asynchronous learning networks. Mados operates as a role-playing debate game, in which students debate a pre-selected prompt while performing assigned character roles. The study explores the prototype's potential to affect student's identification with their assigned character and personal attitude toward the prompt, as well as examining the effect of presence on students' performances. The study was performed with 38 8th grade students. Subjects debated a prompt which proposed a banning cell phones from classrooms. Results show that subjects collaboratively constructed solutions that compromised between both positions, while slightly favoring the antiban position. Results also show that subjects experienced gains in character identification after participating in the task regardless of assigned character, hinting at a separation between perceived similarity to characters and affinity for characters' position. The ability of subjects to defend their assigned character's position while inhabiting their own perspective, that of an 8th grade student, also hints at this separation. Additionally, results indicated correlations between subjects' control factors, a subset measure for presence, and total change in prompt agreement. Other positive correlation exist between subject's reprocessing attempts and task performance, as well as total presence and task performance

This dissertation examines distance learning within a local, particular context: UCF's English department. In order to fully examine distance learning in this specific environment, I employ institutional critique as my methodology, a rhetorical and spatial approach that allows me to map distance learning within UCF's English department. Drawing upon the work of David Harvey, I examine the experienced, perceived, and imagined spaces of distance learning in our department. Through an examination of the history of naming UCF, rhetorical analyses of institutional documents that reference technologies, analysis of survey results noting faculty attitudes and perceptions of online learning, and postmodern mapping of faculty members' perceived and ideal spaces, we can find local solutions for local problems related to distance learning.

Most research on Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988) has uncovered many instructional design considerations for learning complex tasks. Additionally, the Community of Inquiry (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) framework describes many of the learning experiences in online education. A gap existed in the literature for investigating cognitive load over the duration of a college algebra course and for investigating the relationship between cognitive load and cognitive presence. This research study has addressed this gap by investigating cognitive load and cognitive presence in an online and face-to-face college algebra course. The results of this study revealed that face-to-face students earned statistically significant higher final course grades and homework grades than the online students. The face-to-face math course was slightly more efficient because it produced learners who exerted similar cognitive load as learners in the online course but the learners in the face-to-face earned higher performance score. Online discussion prompts that ask student to apply their solution or defend their solution engaged students in cognitive presence differently. When students were prompted to apply their solution to a real world scenario, most students reached resolution in their initial posts, but they were often not cognitively present in their follow-up posts. When students were prompted to provide a defense of their solution, most of the posts demonstrated cognitive presence, but not as many individual students reached resolution. Additionally, students progressed through the stages of cognitive presence when an instructor asked them a specific question about their math problem or real life scenario in a timely manner. When instructors post questions to their students that directly ask for an application of their hypothesis or an explanation how they arrived at their hypothesis, students can reach the highest stage of cognitive presence. When instructors post messages that reach the highest stage of cognitive presence, students do not post messages that reach the highest stage of cognitive presence. Lastly, this study did not find a strong linear relationship between cognitive presence and cognitive load.

Competency-based education is intended to benefit working non-traditional students who have knowledge and skills from prior work experiences, but it also enables self-motivated students to accelerate their time to degree, thereby increasing affordability and efficiency. Competency-based education clarifies what a credentialed student will be able to do and makes assessment more transparent and relevant to those outside of higher education. Competency-based education has arisen in response to the problem defined by the national reform discourses of accountability and affordability. In the first manuscript, History & Objections Repeated: Re-Innovating Competency-Based Education, I review the history of social efficiency reform efforts in American education in order to re-contextualize the “innovation” of competency-based education as a repackage of older ideas to fit the public’s current view of what needs to be fixed in higher education. I discuss the concept of “efficiency” and how it has been interpreted in the past and today with regard to competency-based education and its rejection of an earlier attempt at increasing efficiency in education: the Carnegie credit hour. For the second manuscript, Framing Competency-Based Education in the Discourse of Reform, I analyzed four years of news articles and white papers on competency-based education to reveal the national discourses around competency-based education. I used thematic discourse analysis to identify diagnostic and prognostic narrative frames (Snow & Benford, 1988) that argue for and against competency-based education. These frames were put in the context of the politicized conversation around the current main issues in higher education: access, attainment, accountability, and affordability. Each of these issues provided a foundation of coding the discourse which was then shaped by the context of competency-based education, particularly its positioning as a solution to the Iron Triangle dilemma of decreasing cost while increasing access and quality. The third manuscript, Idea and Implementation: A Case Study of KCTCS’s CBE Learn on Demand, involves an institutional case study of a competency-based education program, Learn on Demand (LOD), within the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). Eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted with student success coaches, faculty, and staff who are directly involved with the program across seven different colleges, and documents such as marketing materials, presentations, and administrator-written articles were also analyzed as a representation of the official discourse of the program. As institutions start to explore and develop competency-based education programs, the faculty and administrators at those institutions are likely influenced by the intersection of pre-existing organizational and subgroup culture, societal beliefs about the definition and purpose of education, and how innovations may shape the experiences of individuals. Through interviewing individuals, I was able to parse out the impacts of both institutional politics and innovation-related concerns on the success of implementation.

Team-based learning (TBL) is one strategy for improving team-work and critical thinking skills. It has proven to be an engaging teaching pedagogy in face-to-face classes, however, to our knowledge, has never been implemented online in a 3-D virtual world. We implemented virtual TBLs in an online undergraduate anatomy course using Second LifeTM, and evaluated whether it engaged students. This study was conducted over 2 semesters with 39 total students. Surveys and content analysis of transcripts were used to evaluate student engagement. Our results indicate virtual TBLs were engaging for most students. The average engagement score was 7.8 out of 10 with 89.2% of students reporting a score of 6 or above. Students exhibited high levels of cognitive engagement during the clinical application portion of the TBL process. Males felt more emotionally engaged than females, however, most measures of engagement indicated no differences between groups of students (mode of communication, previous technology experience, gender, and performance); therefore, virtual TBLs may be engaging for a broad range of students. 95% of students agreed that this was a worthwhile experience. In light of this evidence, we feel that virtual TBL sessions are valuable, and could be implemented in other online courses.