Mathematics has been singled out as a challenging discipline to teach fully online (FO). Yet both the demand for and development of FO mathematics courses is increasing with little known about the quality of these courses and many calling for research. Whereas most research has investigated the nature of these courses by examining instructional outputs such as student grades this research seeks the same insight but by examining instructional inputs. Specifically, it seeks to investigate the nature of current assessment practice in FO mathematics courses. To conduct this investigation, deep learning (Marton & S??lj??, 1976a, 1976b) is used as the principle theoretical framework. From the growing body of literature associated with deep learning, two studies are selected to investigate current FO mathematics instructors assessment practices. An additional framework based on empirical findings related to the use of different kinds of feedback is also used. In total, six study measures are used to conduct a mixed methods study in two parts. The target demographic and course context are tertiary instructors from Western nations that teach introductory level mathematics (particularly statistics and calculus). The first study explores current FO mathematics assessment practices using an online survey (n=70) where the majority of participants originate from US higher education institutions. In the second study six of the US survey participants are interviewed about how their assessment practices and approaches used in their FO mathematics courses differ from those used in their face-to-face (F2F) mathematics courses. This study represents the first known attempt to investigate the nature of tertiary FO mathematics instructors assessment practices using appropriate theoretical frameworks. In particular, it investigates mathematics instructors experiences of the affordances and constraints of the FO course context when adapting their F2F practice to this new environment. Findings suggest the FO course context is a challenging environment for instructors to orient their teaching and assessment practice in a way that helps develop students understanding of mathematics. Analysis of interview responses suggests the problem lies with the nature of interactivity provided in the FO course context.

This diploma thesis focuses on the role of social network Facebook in the process of English teaching and learning at the second level at Czech primary schools. The theoretical part concentrates on the methodology typically used in TEFL during 20th and 21st century, online teaching and learning as well as communication, describes the history and development of Facebook and deals with the question of online safety. The practical part firstly informs the reader about the development of the research procedure, states the aims and describes the research background. Secondly it deals with the data collection, assessment and evaluation and presents the results acquired from the research. The research was designed to reveal the possible benefits of the use of Facebook in the TEFL process; it consisted of a questionnaire and two types of observation performed by the author of this thesis.

Beneath the Surface is a collection of seven individual literary nonfiction essays. Five of the essays are personal essays, and three come from the author's contribution to UNO's Katrina Narrative Project. The collection represents the author's cumulative body of work upon completion of her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at UNO. Titles include: "Beneath the Surface, " "Hello, Harry, " "My One-Summer Bike, " "Just Like Jazzfest, " In Defense of Sodom, " "'Every Year It's Something, '" and "Revising my Approach. The essays explore themes such as sibling bereavement, Latin American travel, the incomprehensibility of death, experiencing new cultures, online teaching, and hurricane evacuation.

The emphasis on education fluctuates with the economy. When education is encouraged, many individuals flock to colleges and universities to increase earning potential or achieve goals. Thanks to advancements in technology, distance education in the 21st century can be similar to face-to-face education. Students spend many hours sitting in front of a computer completing course work. Although still in infancy stages, online education has vastly improved. Perspectives like teaching adults (andragogy), transformative learning, and teacher immediacy all address teaching individuals from afar. In consultation with these three perspectives, several qualitative measures have been developed aid with online course design. This graduate project intends to assist faculty with setting up an online course using Andragogy, Transformative Learning Theory, and Teacher Immediacy as the backbone. In addition, the Quality Online Course Initiative, Quality Matters, and Quality Online Learning and Teaching tools are applied.

Professors need alternative programs to support their online teaching. This dissertation reports an initial study in a long-term research agenda for developing a faculty online teaching solution. The primary purpose of the study is to explore faculty perceptions of a case library to help decision makers and researchers determine whether they would pursue the use of such a tool to support faculty online teaching. The secondary purpose of the study is to generate design knowledge to inform future development of and research on this or similar case libraries. The methodology of this study includes three components: development research, rapid prototyping, and qualitative methods. Development research and rapid prototyping provided a three-stage framework for this study: conceptualization, development, and research. I synthesized the literature to create conceptual models of an Online Teaching Case Library (OTCL) at the conceptualization stage, built a prototype to implement the models at the development stage, and conducted research to evaluate the prototype at the research stage. Qualitative methods guided data gathering and analysis. I recruited seven faculty participants based on a purposeful sampling technique. To gather the data, I followed a three-step data collection process: initial interviews, contextual interviews, and final interviews. This process allowed me to observe and interview faculty participants while they were exploring the prototype. I analyzed the data by following an 11-step procedure synthesized from the works of Miles and Huberman (1994) as well as LeCompte and Schensul (1999a). This study found that on one hand, faculty members might use an OTCL, because they perceived that this tool could support their apprenticeship approach to learning to teach. On the other hand, however, their perceived decision to use an OTCL would also be influenced by the perceptions of the usefulness and usability of the tool. The study identified the initial evidence supporting an OTCL as an online teaching resource and the challenges involved in developing and implementing such a solution. It provides a base for decision makers to determine whether they would adopt this tool. It also offers some design guidance for those who do want to pursue this solution to faculty development.

The purpose of this study was to explore how instructors of online courses accommodate and make provisions for culturally diverse learners in an online community of inquiry. Ten instructors from two Alberta higher education institutions participated in two phases of research. To explore this phenomenon in the CoI model, intercultural competency indicators were created to test how they could develop and expand teaching and social presence in a cross-cultural environment. In the first phase, analysis of the open-ended survey questionnaire (AMEQ) revealed that in the absence of any cross-cultural design, instructors use facilitation and open communication strategies to foster learning and prevent conflict. The second phase, informed by the first phase, involved augmenting the original 34-item CoI survey instrument. Additional roles that relate to instructor cross-cultural efficacy were incorporated into both teaching presence and social presence elements in the CoI survey instrument. The revised 37-item CoI survey instrument was then administered to the same respondents for face validity. Findings revealed that the incorporated cultural indicators correlated highly with the teaching and social indicators, indicating their usefulness to measure multicultural efficacy in the CoI model. / 2012-April

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T15:13:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese final -alzino.pdf: 986421 bytes, checksum: 26f621183b75e6b3c7876707f71a25d9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-03-25 / This research has been carried out in the Pos-Graduation Program in Education of the Faculdade de Educação da Universidade Federal de Goiás , being part of the research line , Professor Formation and Professionalization, which aims to study the relationship between the teaching work together with information and technologies as well as the epistemological, cultural, pedagogical and institutional implications of these relations. It selects as its scope the exercise of docent work in virtuality and the knowledge that the communication by means of a computer net demands on the professor in his effective exercise. Under the title Online education: computers mediated communication in the teaching practice, seeks to understand what the socioeconomic environment constituent of contemporaneous time has specifically, and how such specifity expresses itself in the teaching practices. The general target of this research is to understand this new socio technical means, identifying its specificities and discussing its implications in the teaching practices. The specific targets are: to characterize the process of communication by means of a net of computers, discussing its potential in the educational field; to describe how the exercise of online teaching occurs and to interpret the collected data in the empiric field. For the understanding of the multiple relations, which constitute the education phenomena in computerized nets, it makes use of the concept of informational society, of Castells, as a background to understand the contemporaneous socio technical environment, and its communicational logics. It also relies on Pierre Lévy for the understanding of social relations brought about in the social fabric, permeated by information and communication technologies also present in the teaching and learning processes. When reporting to the first three decades of online education, it recalls the theoretical contributions and practices of the researchers and educators who have become pioneers of online education. The investigation employs the qualitative broaching of ethnographic study case as a methodological option, by means of participation procedures, observation, interpretative description and production of the studied case report, a course given totally online, the empiric field work as well as the analysis and interpretation of the collected data converge to the conclusion that the communication by computer net, breaking the space time barriers and allowing the non linear, hypertext, multimedia and multidirectional communication opens new possibilities, and also, triggers implications in the relations with knowledge, making evident the necessity to take into account, in the exercise of online teaching, the twofold mediation process: pedagogical and technological. Such possibilities and implications become more evident when the use of the most recent digital technologies seek base in other knowledge areas, noticing currently a variety of proposals set on different conceptions about education and online teaching, a field of theoretical and practical investigation still on the buildup / A presente investigação foi desenvolvida no âmbito do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade Federal de Goiás e faz parte da linha de pesquisa Formação e Profissionalização Docente, que busca estudar as relações do trabalho docente com as tecnologias de informação e comunicação bem como as implicações epistemológicas, culturais, pedagógicas e institucionais destas relações. Elege como objeto de estudo o exercício da docência na virtualidade e os saberes que a comunicação mediada por computadores em rede exige do professor no seu efetivo exercício. Sob o título Docência online:comunicação mediada por computadores em rede na prática docente, busca compreender o que o meio sociotécnico constitutivo da contemporaneidade tem de específico e como tal especificidade se expressa na prática docente. É objetivo geral desta pesquisa compreender este novo meio sociotécnico, identificando suas especificidades e discutindo suas implicações na prática docente. São objetivos específicos: caracterizar o processo de Comunicação Mediada por Computador (CMC) em rede, discutindo seu potencial no campo educacional; descrever como se dá o exercício da docência online; analisar e interpretar os dados colhidos no campo empírico. Para a compreensão das múltiplas relações que constituem o fenômeno da educação em redes informatizadas, recorre ao conceito de sociedade informacional, de Castells, como pano de fundo para se entender o meio sociotécnico contemporâneo e sua lógica comunicacional. Apoia-se, também, nas reflexões de Pierre Lévy, para a compreensão das relações sociais instauradas no tecido social permeado pelas tecnologias de informação e comunicação e presentes, também, nos processos de ensinar e aprender. Ao se reportar à história das três primeiras décadas da educação online, faz um resgate das contribuições teóricas e práticas dos pesquisadores e educadores que se tornaram pioneiros da educação online. A investigação utiliza, como opção metodológica, a abordagem dialética e da pesquisa qualitativa e, mais precisamente, o estudo de caso do tipo etnográfico, mediante os procedimentos da participação, observação, descrição interpretativa e produção do relato do caso estudado, um curso ministrado totalmente online. A revisão bibliográfica realizada, o resgate das primeiras formulações teóricas e práticas da docência online, o trabalho empírico de campo, bem como a análise e interpretação dos dados coletados convergem para a conclusão de que a comunicação mediada por computadores em rede, abre novas possibilidades, ainda não totalmente exploradas. Por outro lado, ao romper com as barreiras espaço-temporais e permitir a comunicação não linear, hipertextual, multimídia e multidirecional, acarreta, também, implicações nas relações com o conhecimento, evidenciando a necessidade de se levar em conta, no exercício da docência online, o processo de dupla mediação: a pedagógica ou tecnopedagógica e a tecnológica ou tecnocomunicacional Tais possibilidades e implicações tornam-se mais evidentes na medida em que o uso das mais recentes tecnologias digitais busca fundamentação em outras áreas do conhecimento, observando-se, atualmente, uma variedade de propostas assentadas em diferentes concepções a respeito da educação e da docência online, um campo de investigação teórica e prática ainda em construção.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / This is an exploratory study that aims to find out how computer-based tutorials can be conducted effectively for large first year Statistics classes. The study focuses on the student's perceptions, advantages of being able to access tutorials anywhere, anytime and lastly the challenges of implementing the system. More specifically for the University of the Western Cape (UWC) environment, without sufficient staff, the effectiveness of learning in this initial stage is focused on the experience whereby students can do extensive problem-solving anytime and anywhere. Data were collected at UWC using first-year introductory Statistics students, during the first and the second semester. Structured questionnaires (self-completed) were used to measure student's perceptions and learning experiences. The results pointed to a positive overall perception towards computers and feelings about computers amongst all groups of first year students. The major advantage with these randomly generated computer-based tutorials is the fact that one could access the questions anytime, anywhere. The challenge now remains with educators to provide an environment where new methods of learning and delivering information can be accessed effectively.

The Corona pandemic and Covid-19 has affected the entire globe where we had to adapt to a new way of living and a new standard of doing things. For the universities in Sweden and around the world this generally meant that the universities had to switch to online teaching and digital examinations to the largest extent possible. Even though we have lived in this new kind of every day we know barely anything about how this has affected the grades of the students, and what we can learn about it to do things more effectively in the future. In this paper, I examine the possible effects on grades for students at the university level by using newly collected data from Linnaeus University’s department of economics and statistics. Results show that the grades after the decision to switch to online teaching and digital exams in March of 2020, overall became higher for both males and females but no significant difference between the genders were found.

The theoretical part of the diploma thesis Digital competences of teachers and their specifics in the period of distance education, based on the analysis of relevant literature, deals with the specifics of distance learning and conducts a survey of existing national and international frameworks dealing with the level and development of digital competencies of teachers. It also works with the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), which was created especially for educators and educational institutions as a certain standard for setting the level of digital technology skills. The aim of this work is to propose the addition of the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators with specific skills needed to lead distance learning. As part of a qualitative research survey, carried out in the empirical part of the work, nine teachers from different types of schools underwent observations in classes and then post-observation interviews. They focused not only on the course of teaching during distance learning but also tried to identify the necessary teaching equipment in the field of digital competencies. The research was conducted in an unexpected situation because of the sudden closure of schools due to a pandemic situation caused by Covid-19. Based on the...