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Virtual adjunct faculty have largely carried higher education into the cyber classroom. Adjunct faculty have always been broadly used in higher education, especially in the community college setting. Nationally, adjuncts teach 30-50% of all credit courses. At community colleges, adjuncts compose about 60% of all faculty (Gappa and Leslie, 1993).

About 80% of all online course offerings are taught by virtual adjuncts. About 70% of the active 250 adjuncts teaching in the program reside in the state of Florida , and the other half in assorted states.

As colleges and universities work steadily to get full-time faculty onboard with distance learning, virtual adjuncts have eagerly stepped up to fill the void, thereby enabling institutions to respond promptly to market demand.

According to Vygotsky (1978), much important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful tutor. The tutor may model behaviors and/or provide verbal instructions for the child. Vygotsky refers to this as co-operative or collaborative dialogue. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions provided by the tutor (often the parent or teacher) then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate their own performance.

The more knowledgeable other (MKO) is somewhat self-explanatory; it refers to someone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or concept. 

This is an important concept that relates to the difference between what a child can achieve independently and what a child can achieve with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner.

We can process information in 3 ways: Shallow Processing - This takes two forms 1. Structural processing (appearance) which is when we encode only the physical qualities of something.  E.g. the typeface of a word or how the letters look. 2. Phonemic processing – which is when we encode its sound. Shallow processing only involves maintenance rehearsal (repetition to help us hold something in the STM) and leads to fairly short-term retention of information.  This is the only type of rehearsal to take place within the multi-store model. Deep Processing - This involves 3. Semantic processing, which happens when we encode the meaning of a word and relate it to similar words with similar meaning. Deep processing involves elaboration rehearsal which involves a more meaningful analysis (e.g. images, thinking, associations etc.) of information and leads to better recall. For example, giving words a meaning or linking them with previous knowledge.

  E-Pedagogy: Does e-learning require a new pedagogy?  5 The emergence of e-learning  As part of the technological revolution, the use of e-learning, or blended learning, isincreasing. This is particularly true of Higher Education, which offers most programmespartly or wholly online. In the future, e-learning is likely to be more widely used in thetertiary and school sectors. Another driver for e-learning is life-long learning, whichrequires on-going training and re-training of the adult workforce.In many cases, e-learning is delivered through a virtual learning environment (VLE),which is a custom built environment designed for online learning. VLEs, such as  Blackboard and Moodle , typically provide all of the software tools required for onlinelearning such as communication and file sharing facilities. These environments are oftenmodelled around the traditional campus, providing ‘virtual staff rooms’ and ‘onlinecommon rooms’. E-portfolios provide the digital equivalent to the traditional paperportfolio; these typically provide online storage for a range of media types (such asdrawings, photos and videos). Dedicated e-assessment systems, such as Questionmark ,facilitate large-scale online testing, providing many of the question types that arefamiliar to teachers.Some academics have pointed out the potential of e-learning to improve current practice.Garrison and Anderson (2003) write:“E-learning has significantpotential to alter the nature of theteaching and learning transaction.In fact, it has caused us to face upto some of the current deficienciesof higher education, such as largelecturers, while providing somepossible solutions or ways tomitigate these shortcomings. Seenas part of pedagogical solution, e-learning becomes an opportunity toexamine and live up to the ideals of the educational transactiondescribed previously.” New learning opportunities The changing environment facilitates new kinds of learning. Teachers have traditionallyfocussed on content; indeed, many consider the identification and delivery of learningmaterial to be their prime role. But it has been argued that the traditional skill of contentcreation is redundant in the information-rich learning environment. Some of this contentis very high quality, even world class, and certainly superior to a hurriedly producedhandout of the type often used by busy teachers.It has been suggested that the contemporary teacher should be more “guide on the side”than “sage on the stage”. The ready availability of information makes  facilitation moreimportant than direction . The pedagogic issue is not too little information but too much:the contempora

changing learning landscape poses fundamental epistemological questions about thenature of knowledge and how it is acquired. Dede (2008) writes: “In the Classicalperspective, knowledge consists of accurate interrelationships among facts, based onunbiased research that produces compelling evidence about systematic causes […]Epistemologically, a single right answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon […]The epistemology that leads to validity of knowledge in Web 2.0 media such as Wikipedia  is peer review from people seen, by the community of contributors, as having unbiasedperspectives. Expertise involves understanding disputes in detail and proposingsyntheses that are widely accepted by the community

hatever new theory of learning emerges in thenext decade, it will likelybuild upon thesepedagogie

We are consistently engaged in critical thought, Alex’s expectations are clear and supported with models, and we receive feedback that is not only timely, but it is also specific to our particular needs. Although we use a good amount of technology, it does seem to enhance our purpose and was chosen with objectives in mind. The technology—blogs, discussion forums, diigo, etc. serve to enhance our learning experiences and make our learning visible to one another (haven’t we heard that before!?!)

Microsystems consist of individual or interpersonal features

Mesosystems are the organizational or institutional factors that shape or structure the environment within which the individual and interpersonal relations occur

Macrosystems are the cultural contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), not solely geographically or physically, but emotionally and ideologically

The professor is the central figure, the "sage on the stage

transmittal model, assumes that the student's brain is like an empty container into which the professor pours knowledge

Rather, knowledge is a state of under- standing and can only exist in the mind of the individual knower; as such, knowledge must be constructed--or re- constructed--by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows

could actually widen the learning ga

“give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few

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One study explicitly examined the quality of the discourse environment in an online literacy course at the graduate level in a teacher education program (Many, Howrey, Race, Pottinger-bird, & Stern, 2001). The authors noted that with deliberate scaffolding by the instructor and teacher-leaders, students developed a strong support community, provided mentoring and advice, and collaborated with colleagues. In addition, research has focused specifically on the nature of scaffolding that occurred in an online reading assessment course (Many, Bates, & Coleman, 2002). In that study, bulletin board postings included support from both the instructor and the class members and focused on the use of technology; clarification of assignments; strategies for learning online; understanding, assessing, and teaching literacy concepts; and understanding general concepts in education. Online scaffolding processes included modeling, supplying information, clarifying, assisting, questioning, prompting, focusing attention, encouraging self-monitoring, and labeling/affirming.

Instructional scaffolding of course content in online conversations. Instructional scaffolding took place in the highly individualized and elaborative e-mail feedback given by the instructor for all course assignments. An analysis of all such correspondence between the instructor and the members of the focus group revealed the following four categories related to scaffolding: Affirming Probing Providing explicit instruction Clarifying