In this paper, we consider an approach to developing critically thoughtful e‑Learning communities of practice„where participants are deliberate about the use of specific intellectual tools supporting critical thinking. We address Garrison & Anderson's (2003) argument that such critical thinking should play a central role within the ecology of e‑ Learning communities and provide our view of what such communities might look like. To do this, we offer four categories of strategies helping to develop such communities„collaborative agreement on goals; facilitator(s) modelling and teaching the tools supporting critical thinking; and shaping communicative interactions within the e‑Learning environment to encourage thinking. We provide examples from a current study involving 36 kindergarten to grade 12 teachers' blended use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and face‑to‑face sessions to illustrate our view. 

As a matter of fact e‑Learning still has not really caught on for corporate training purposes. Investigations on the reasons reveal that e‑Learning modules like WBTs often miss any relevance for the tasks to be accomplished in the day‑to‑day workplace settings. The very learning needs both from an organizational and individual perspective are neglected. Content brought to the learner very often meets neither the individual competency gaps nor the organizational learning goals. Time passed between acquisition and application of knowledge is too long. In short, business processes on the one side and learning‑related processes on the other are not aligned adequately. Thus, we see an urgent need for concepts on how to derive corporate training actions from business tasks in order to improve employees' business performance. This paper presents an integrated approach for competency‑ and business process‑driven learning management supported by information technology (IT), developed within two projects named PROLIX and EXPLAIN. 

To improve the management of hybrid courses, the relationship between learner characteristics and learning performance was analyzed in two regular university courses. Undergraduate and graduate students participated in two 15‑week hybrid courses which consisted of face‑to‑face lectures (Information Industrial issues), and the corresponding modules with online test. Subjects included 36 freshmen and 48 graduate students. Learner characteristics, consisting of motivation, personality, thinking styles and learners? impression of their e‑Learning experiences were measured at the beginning and end of the term. Additional data was collected from the number of days attended, the number of modules completed, test scores and final grades for the course. Final assessment grades for the class were also analyzed. There was no significant difference in learner characteristics between bachelors and masters students who completed the course. There was no significant difference in learner characteristics between bachelor and master students, but there were some differences in conscientiousness scores between masters and bachelor students and between those who received a final grade of A and B. Scores on "learning strategy" as a factor to indicate learning experience were in favour of master students. Master students? evaluation of their e‑Learning experience increased significantly throughout the course. Conscientiousness (one of the five factors in the personality construct) correlated positively with the number of e‑ Learning modules completed by master students (r=0.35). They seem to understand better the benefits of e‑Learning experience and being the more motivated students, they applied what they have learned from previous e‑Learning experiences more effectively. Students with high grades evaluated their e‑Learning experience positively and had significantly higher conscientiousness scores than master students who received lower grades (p<0.05). For bachelor students, the number of modules completed correlates with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Other learner characteristics did not affect learning performance. The reason may be that bachelor students have yet to understand well the benefits of e‑Learning and still lack the learning strategies needed for university coursework. The causal analysis was conducted using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique, and the result indicated that learner characteristics had an effect on learning experience and learning performance. These results suggest that understanding the benefits of e‑Learning and learner characteristics, as well as knowing how to learn with e‑Learning content could provide important key for promoting student success in online learning. 

In today's global society, individuals with an understanding of different cultures that have the ability to apply this understanding to real world problem solving are more likely to become leaders. Preparing students for a global society is becoming a significant part of education. While many international online exchange projects have been conducted at schools to help expose students to the world and experience international collaborations, few studies have focused on both developing intercultural competence for elementary school students and discovering practical ways of implementing a cross‑cultural exchange program into the public elementary school systems as well. This study, International Virtual Elementary Classroom Activities (IVECA), planned to explore how American and Korean students can develop culturally meaningful interactions through asynchronous online communications in a content management system (CMS), Blackboard; and investigate the factors or strategies useful for integrating IVECA into public school curricula. Data were collected using observation and interview methods, and also included reviewing students' journals. The data analysis involved interpretive analytic induction. Findings indicated that IVECA (a) promotes students' intercultural competence; (b) developed their social interaction skills both in the regular classrooms and the virtual classroom; (c) facilitated diverse students' motivations for learning at school; (d) enhanced writing and reading skills; and (e) engaged learning disabled students in the classroom activities. Additional findings from this study indicate that (a) a systematic support system for teachers' technology use and instructional design is necessary, and (b) school administrators' positive perception toward cross‑cultural exchange activities and their coherent connections between state learning standards and IVECA objectives are important. Further considerations are addressed and the different influences of IVECA on the U.S. students and Korean students and its implementation, which takes into consideration such influences, will also be discussed. 

Rapid eLearning is an ongoing trend which enables flexible and cost‑effective creation of learning materials. Especially, lecture recording has turned out to be a lightweight method particularly suited for existing lectures and blended learning strategies. In order to not only sequentially playback but offer full fledged navigation, search and inspection of the recorded lecture, chapter marks and search indices have to be embedded. To solve this, two basic approaches for lecture recording tools can be identified — both of them having certain advantages and drawbacks. On the one hand there are systems based on symbolic representation of common slideshow formats like MS PowerPoint. Therefore, they preserve structure and symbol information contained therein, but are lacking flexibility of supported dynamic and interactive formats. On the other hand there are systems based on pixel representation and screen grabbing technologies. While supporting any presentation content, structural and symbolic information cannot be extracted directly and thus has to be post‑processed from the recorded video. This paper discusses a perspective of combining these approaches by widening the slide‑metaphor to a more flexible scene‑based presentation, preserving both the structural and symbolic information. One possible attempt for this is identified by introducing a browser‑based scene concept. Symbolic information can be directly extracted from the XHTML source code and structural information derives from switching through scenes. The browser itself is capable of presenting a wide range of dynamic and interactive formats, thus offering more flexible presentations. For approving the proposed concepts, a prototype called "Virtual Overhead" was developed and evaluated. 

Free, open, online homework help sites appear to be extremely popular and exist for many school subjects. Students can anonymously post problems at their convenience and receive responses from forum members. This mode of tutoring may be especially critical for school subjects such as calculus that are intrinsically challenging and have high attrition rates. However, educational research has focused on tutoring sessions that instruct students on a pre‑determined set of material or topics, and there has been no systematic research on these dynamic, free, open, online tutoring communities. In order to distinguish the student‑initiated e‑help episodes from traditional tutoring sessions, we refer to them as "tutorettes." Each tutorette was assigned a participation code that contained information on the number of contributions by each participant, the sequence of contributions, and the number of different participants. Student problem solving activity, defined by mathematical contributions and efforts, was measured for initial postings and for subsequent contributions. Finally, each tutorette was examined for evidence of mathematical errors and these were classified according to type: pre‑calculus, operational, and conceptual. A tutorette on the limit concept is provided to demonstrate how mathematical queries are resolved in an SOH e‑help community. Participation and problem solving attempts provided evidence of active student learning. Instead of simply using the tutors to do their homework, many students made initial attempts at solutions, queried tutor responses, and applied the help they received to make progress on solving problems. This behaviour appeared to be influenced by the actions of the tutor: Providing solution sketches accompanied by asking direct questions encouraged dialogue, whereas providing quasi‑complete worked solutions seemed to have the opposite effect. In contrast to classroom instruction, students in this e‑help community appeared comfortable in presenting incorrect work and tutors were open and forthright in their commentaries, evaluations, and explanations. In addition, tutors modulated their responses according to the type of error. Pre‑calculus errors and operational (calculus) errors were not accorded the same depth of explanation as conceptual misunderstandings. 

The Scottish Science and Technology Network (SSTN) is a major collaboration between Careers Scotland and Scottish industry to promote science and technology via an on‑line and integrated learning programme. An initial two‑ year pilot project has grown considerably and has now been running for over 7 years. The SSTN programme is a web‑ based application that supports teachers with automatic identification of learning resources, course planning tools, classroom‑based delivery (within the 5‑14 curriculum) and mentoring support. This paper presents a summary of this project and examples of typical usage scenarios. We present our project findings from this 7 year programme and details of our further development plans. Findings presented include lessons learnt, our best practice guidelines, effective user interface design for learning, integration learning resources and strategies for hiding complexity.