This study investigates the correlation between students' learning styles, computer competency and student satisfaction in Web-based distance learning. Three hundred and one graduate students participated in the current study during the Summer and Fall semesters of 2002 at the University of North Texas. Participants took the courses 100% online and came to the campus only once for software training. Computer competency and student satisfaction were measured using the Computer Skill and Use Assessment and the Student Satisfaction Survey questionnaires. Kolb's Learning Style Inventory measured students' learning styles. The study concludes that there is a significant difference among the different learning styles with respect to student satisfaction level when the subjects differ with regard to computer competency. For accommodating amd diverging styles, a higher level of computer competency results in a higher level of student satisfaction. But for converging and assimilating styles, a higher level of computer competency suggests a lower level of student satisfaction. A significant correlation was found between computer competency and student satisfaction level within Web-based courses for accommodating styles and no significant results were found in the other learning styles.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Public key cryptography and the infrastructure that has been designed to successfully implement it: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a very promising computer security technology. As a significant enhancement to this infrastructure, the DoD is now issuing smart card tokens, in the form of the Common Access Card (CAC), to its service members. This card is a relatively complex cryptographic device that contains its user's private keys, digital certificates, and other personal/administrative information. Service personnel are being issued these cards with little or no training regarding what they are or how they function. Such an omission detracts from the infrastructure's overall security. This thesis presents an introductory-level description of public key cryptography and its supporting infrastructure (PKI). The thesis then goes on to develop a web-based training tool that could provide all DoD CAC holders with the rudimentary knowledge of how their CAC fits into the broader infrastructure. The training tool will require no instructor, and will present a validation test to each user. DoD commands could utilize this tool to provide basic CAC training to their members.

With the application of work-based learning theory and cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) via qualitative research methods, this study considered the reported learning experiences of a group of multidisciplinary practitioners who employed the edX platform in the delivery of massive open online courses (MOOC) for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This exploratory case study focused on a pioneering MOOC program, established in 2014 at the Hemispheric Development Fund (fictional organization name) for offering professional development opportunities to the LAC region. Using interviews, observation, and document analysis, it identified the kinds of knowledge, skills, or behaviors, as well as the multidisciplinary collaborations and organizational conditions that participants considered critical for the successful performance of their work activities. The study included 20 participants, divided evenly among 4 subject matter experts, 4 instructional designers, 4 media producers, 4 platform technicians, and 4 administrative assistants. The study was based on the premise that improving our understanding of the work activities and related learning experiences among participants may benefit the training of future practitioners and organizations interested in the multidisciplinary design of edX MOOCs for LAC and, thus, may contribute to the improved adoption of the edX MOOC platform for developing regions. Through the iterative modeling and analysis of activity systems, as well as illuminating the significant incidents and systemic tensions reported by participants as potential triggers for their learning, four key findings emerged: 1) The totality of participants described experiences of work-based learning as they engaged in activities of value production during the MOOC design cycle; 2) Developing practical knowledge in the preparation and administration of educational resources or learning activities, and mastering effective communication skills enabled participants to excel in the performance of their work activities; 3) The need for improving organizational processes was cited as the most essential contextual condition impacting participants’ work performance; and 4) A majority of participants expected future learning pressures at work in response to constant changes with the technological tools they employ for doing their jobs.

Master of Education (MEd) Research Report University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, 2016 / This study investigates the impact of the Flipped Learning Model (FLM) on the teaching practices of four educators in a private school in Johannesburg. It investigates the pedagogic processes and experiences of these educators’ respective attempts to shift from their standard educator-centered methodologies to the FLM’s highly collaborative and blended methodology. In so doing, the study exposes the educators’ resistance to the primary assumptions of constructivist epistemologically informed pedagogies. It also demonstrates the extent to which epistemological assumptions underpinning the ‘official curriculum’ are imbued within the dominant pedagogic discourse and aligned with educators’ beliefs and professional identities. The study exposes the necessity for transformations in educators’ traditional thinking, epistemological assumptions, perceptions, attitudes and roles to occur before any substantial attempts to introduce the FLM in ‘classrooms’ are made. Furthermore, the FLM takes for granted the ease of embedding technology in the teaching/learning process. This study exposes the relationship between a lack of technological familiarity/ know-how and the strength of resistance to ‘flipping the classroom’. South African educators work in an environment that promotes very strong boundaries between: classroom/home; educator/learner; and schoolwork/homework. Flipping, weakening or altering these, challenges educators’ strongly held notions of what it means to be a professional educator. It is within this context that Bernstein’s work with respect to the development of such seminal concepts as ‘pedagogic device’, ‘classification’ and ‘framing’ provided the language of description and analytical basis for this research study. / MT2017

The purpose of this research study was to determine K-12 school leaders' concepts of ability and technology readiness. The Theories of Intelligence Scale (TIS) was used to analyze concepts of ability and the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) 2.0 was used to analyze the technology readiness of K-12 school leaders. Data from the two instruments were used to determine if there was any relationship between K-12 school leaders' concept of ability and technology readiness. This analysis filled a blank spot in the research contributing to the literature on leadership, Mindset Theory (Dweck, 2006; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995), and Technology Readiness (Lin & Hsieh, 2012; Parasuraman, 2000). Furthermore it helped to determine the state of K-12 school leaders' status as 21st century leaders. The sample consisted of the school leaders of School District of Palm Beach County (SDPBC). This included 158 principals from 104 elementary, 31 middle, and 23 high schools. The researcher was a school district employee and therefore had access to the participants. Each of the four null hypotheses were rejected as SDPBC school leaders scored significantly higher on the TIS (p < .05) and TRI 2.0 (p < .01), there was a significant (p < .0125) positive relationship between TIS and the TRI 2.0, and that relationship was affected (p < .05) by gender, race, and experience. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The history of science is rich in examples of the importance of theories and hypotheses. Among the various disciplines of science, theories and hypotheses have been important in guiding research, including such large ideas as the atomic theory, theory of evolution, laws of motion in physics, and plate tectonics. One of the major ways science progresses is to gather evidence in relation to theories and hypotheses and to refine our explanations of how natural events occur both at very small scales of space and time or at the level of the universe. This dissertation research focused on understanding science teachers' conceptual models about theories, and the use of corroborating evidence based on a critical rationalist stance in science. The study explored a sample of science teachers' level of understanding of critical rationalism, and issues in modeling science within a `critical rationalist', post-positivist framework. During the initial phase of the research, a pilot study was done to gather contextual evidence obtained from a sample of teachers' views on the nature of science (NOS) who responded to an online questionnaire. Subsequently, a more comprehensive study based on the findings from this initial pilot study was done. In the subsequent more comprehensive study, an online learning module on NOS, containing core concepts within a critical rational stance, was presented to a second sample of pre- and in-service teachers. This module specifically focused on how theories are initiated and rigorously tested under the highest risk conditions within a critical rationalist model. It also explained why this is a more productive approach than an exclusively verificationist cognitive framework underlying some logical positivist approaches. The results of a pretest, and post-test assessment, following the completion of the online learning module, provided robust evidence that the teachers who initially demonstrated significantly weak understandings of a critical rational stance improved to a level where they reached a preset benchmark level of accomplishment established by the researcher prior to the online intervention. The pretest results of the comprehensive study also aligned well with the results of the pilot study. That is, science teachers' pre-learning views on scientific theories and experimentation fall mostly within inductive verification-based models, more closely aligned with a positivistic worldview, outside of a contemporary critical rationalist view of a hypothetico-deductive or falsification approach. In this study, a convenient and reliable method of online learning and associated assessment instruments regarding critical rationalist understanding of NOS is presented and evaluated. The evaluation of the pre- and post-learning assessments, and analyses of questionnaire responses by the participants, showed that the use of the online learning module significantly improved science teachers' cognitive understandings of the nature of science, and that the learners generally reported favorable responses about the learning experiences based on quantitative and qualitative evidence. Based on this initial evidence, the online learning module and related assessment instruments appear to be a valuable resource for assessing teacher understanding of a modern critical rational view of science, and as a potentially productive way to introduce pre-service and in-service teachers to these modern views of NOS through application of the online learning module.

This study investigated the potential application of web-based pedagogy for teachers of elementary statistics, using A Pedagogical Information System (APIS), in order to explore ways in which teachers can enhance instruction via technology in the classroom. This information system would provide new opportunities for practical teacher education, given that the literature on statistics pedagogy and web-based teaching and learning is sparse. The purpose of the study was to examine issues of efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness of the use of Internet websites in the instruction of introductory statistics at the college level. The design of the study was qualitative and used a phenomenological interpretive method. The participants in this study were four instructors of introductory statistics courses at the undergraduate level of higher education in a northeastern state in the United States. They were interviewed individually for approximately 60 minutes in a semi-structured format in which they discussed their experiences and perceptions about using Internet sources for instruction of students in Introductory Statistics. The results of the study indicated that teachers welcomed incorporating technology into their classrooms. Participants found that having students with different learning styles, allocating time to deal with details, and having difficulty managing the interplay between topics as being key problems that could arise in the organization of a web-based introduction to an elementary statistics course. Although all participants agreed that there is a lack of uniformity among statistical topics, most wanted to emphasize descriptive statistics, distributions, probability, inference, confidence intervals, and regression. They acknowledged that web-based learning would radically alter student and teacher roles, so that the teacher would become a mentor and students would become active learners. Instruction would be geared more to practical applications than to theory. Instructors would have to make decisions about how much web-based information they would use and would have to become knowledgeable about web content.

Drawing upon qualitative methods of semi-structured interviews and observational talk-through interviews, this qualitative dissertation investigates the ways in which graduate students in an online course context experience online instructional videos. A conceptual framework of user experience and multimodality, as well as the framework of sense-making developed by McCarthy and Wright (2004) guided this study and data analysis. The findings of this dissertation have implications for how students are participating in, interacting with, and making sense of online learning environments. Some of the findings of this research include: (a) students do not necessarily experience course videos as discrete elements (or differentiate them with other aspects of the course); (b) the times and contexts in which students view instructional videos shifts (e.g., between home and commuting); (c) student motivations and expectations shape how they approach and orient themselves towards watching online course videos; and (d) multimodal design elements influence students’ meaning-making of online instructional videos. These data findings are all in support of the overarching conclusion of this dissertation, which is that students have significant agency in these online environments, and their meaning-making of online videos may not align with designers’ intentions. This conclusion argues against deterministic views of design. The emerging findings have design implications related to the creation of learning environments in online spaces, such as: (a) fully integrating videos within the broader instructional design of a course; (b) foregrounding the embedded context of instructional videos; and (c) accounting for the shifting times, places, and contexts in which viewers watch instructional videos. This dissertation is situated in the growing field of online education, in particular higher education, where significant money and resources are increasingly dedicated towards the development of online spaces while still much is unknown in relation to the design, experiences, and impact of these online learning environments.

The purpose of this study was to compare student achievement and satisfaction in online versus traditional introductory statistics courses. The sample studied were undergraduates at a small liberal arts school enrolled in introductory statistics over a period of six semesters. There were a few significant findings in student achievement in the overall sample and other meaningful results were found when assessing nursing and business majors specifically. Student satisfaction results between the two formats were inconclusive. Future studies on this topic can include hybrid education data in addition to online and traditional to see if there are any differences in achievement or student satisfaction in that population. Another possible study could be done regarding achievement in students who took preparatory training prior to enrolling in an online course.

Disruptive innovations are used to lower costs and augment access to high-quality, affordable higher education, but little systematic research is available on the topic. Higher education institutions use disruptive innovations to save students time and money. To understand the process of disruptive innovation, I investigated the rapid diffusion of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are free or low-cost college courses available online. Specifically, I examined the drivers of disruptive innovation over time and by institution type, and augmented the existing theory on the diffusion of disruptive innovation in higher education. The key for this systematic study was to have a dataset that encompassed a large sample of adopters and non-adopters. I constructed a new dataset merging 4 years of IPEDS data with MOOC data (n = 1,470). Analytically, I used competing drivers of institutional change, specifically prestige-seeking versus economic competition, to investigate rate and drivers of adoption, how drivers varied over time, and which institutions were most and least likely to innovate. I employed time-series inferential statistics, specifically discrete time hazard modeling (DTHM), and latent class analysis (LCA), as well as descriptive statistics. Three research questions guided this dissertation. 1. When is MOOC adoption most likely? How does prestige-seeking behavior compared to economic competition influence the adoption of MOOCs? 2. Does partnership with a for-profit versus nonprofit provider differ by prestige-seeking behavior or economic competition? Do these partnerships change over time? 3. To what extent does a typology of institutional innovators based on prestige-seeking behavior and economic competition exist? To what extent does this typology of innovators relate to MOOC adoption? How does the adoption of innovation by institutional subgroup vary over time? The findings suggested that rate of adoption, at its height, was a little over 3% in academic year 2013, 2 years after the launch of MOOCs. Both prestige-seeking behavior and economic competition were important predictors of innovation, although institutions most likely to innovate were very prestigious and strategic about the markets they chose for competition. Specifically, the most likely adopters of disruptive innovation were highly competitive in distance education and in pursuing private grants and contracts from industry, but often did not cut costs (e.g., replacing full-time faculty with adjuncts or expanding managerial capacity) to streamline affairs on campus or manage market expansion. By contrast, institutions that did not innovate often exhibited the opposite characteristics. Finally, because the first two results suggested different adopters, I found five different types of institutional innovators (Accelerators, Wealth Managers, Pragmatists, Opportunists, and Laggards). Approximately 15% of colleges were Accelerators (primed to be disruptive innovators), while the rest were characterized by limited motivate to change or limited institutional capacity to innovate.