Online instruction is becoming increasingly common at universities; however, there is little single subject research concerning the effectiveness of the online lecture format. We investigated whether online lecture could replace in-class lecture in two sections of an undergraduate Introduction to Behavior Analysis course without detrimentally affecting student learning. Using an adapted alternating treatments design, online and in-class lecture formats were counterbalanced across the two course sections. Experimenters collected data on lecture attendance/access, percent correct on the weekly quiz, and student report on lecture format preference. The data show that, within the context of this class, students performed equally in the weekly quiz regardless of lecture format; further, that this is consistent when looking at individual student data and mean data. However, although students stated a preference for online lecture in the questionnaire, a greater percentage of students attended in-class lecture than accessed online lecture.

In distance education, lack of face-to-face communication prevents instructors from observing students&rsquo / activities efficiently, especially in crowded sessions, and consequently they fail to effectively assess the performance of distant learners. On the other hand, in spite of being physically distant, instructor should monitor students&rsquo / activities and assess their performance effectively so that learners can be informed as quickly as possible of how well they are doing. This thesis aims to develop an e-learning tool for distance education that integrates asynchronous and synchronous learning environments to offer an enriched e-learning platform. The tool enables instructor to keep track of students&rsquo / activities, assesses learners&rsquo / participation during online synchronous sessions dynamically, and provides asynchronous access to assessment data after the lectures. In this way, it is aimed to monitor performance of distant learners by the instructor more efficiently.

We present a concept and implementation on increasing the efficiency of webinar software by a remote control approach using the technology WebRTC. This technology enables strong security and privacy, is crossdevice usable, uses open-source technology and enables a new level of interactiveness to webinars. We used SlideWiki, WebRTC, and browser speech to text engines to provide innovative accessibility features like multilingual presentations and live subtitles. Our solution was rated for real world usage aspects, tested within the SlideWiki project and we determined technological limits. Such measurements are currently not available and show that our approach outperforms open-source market competitors by efficiency and costs.