UDOL2011

Unbundling is the process through which products previously sold together are separated into their constituent parts. In higher education, this dynamic has been driven primarily by financial motivations, and spearheaded by the for-profit sector, but also has pedagogical motivations through its emphasis on personalisation and employability.

Online educational content is becoming increasingly popular in higher education. In prior studies it has been reported that students prefer weblectures with a visible lecturer over weblectures consisting of audio and slides only. Anticipated was that the amount of attention students pay to a weblecture is relevant for this preference. A study was conducted to see whether lecturer-visibility was related to reported attention for a weblecture. Lecturer's appeal was expected to be a moderator in this relation.

The call to integrate technology into education can be used as a starting point for educators' professional growth. Looking at teacher preparation and professional development as much more than technology training, this research bridges the literature and practice of faculty development in educational technology with adult education's transformational learning theory. Research conducted in graduate education courses in educational technology reveals themes of change in their perspective of their profession and educational practice. Technology learning can sometimes be intimidating or frustrating. This article highlights the study's significance of adult learning theory for teachers' professional development and classroom practice particularly in learning to cope with new knowledge bases and incorporating them into practice.

Faculty development efforts for supporting online instructors represent a growing concern for higher education administrators. Providing online faculty with enriching experiences designed to improve practice, combat isolation, and share knowledge and resources is a challenge. This review examines the use of a community of practice (CoP) approach for online faculty support. The literature was reviewed with a focus on finding the faculty voice by extracting results from research studies on the use of professional development CoPs. Six themes of faculty perception of benefit emerged from the review and are discussed along with the pros and cons of three delivery methods for CoPs. The research supports the idea that collaborative faculty groups provide fertile ground for processing ideas and co-creating new knowledge, where productive conversations between eLearning faculty help improve teaching by identifying strengths, discussing challenges and finding solutions.

Social presence, the ability to perceive others in an online environment, has been shown to impact student motivation and participation, actual and perceived learning, course and instructor satisfaction, and retention in online courses; yet very few researchers have attempted to look across contexts, disciplinary areas, or measures of social presence.

Open online courses are becoming more prevalent at local level and for and professional development objectives. Proper instructional design combined with use of online tools can promote learner interaction in online environments. Using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, this study aimed at examining learners' interaction and their perceptions of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence in an open online course offered for professional development in three Swedish universities

Personalisation of e-learning environments is an interesting research area in which the learning experience of learners is generally believed to be improved when his or her personal learning preferences are taken into account. One such learning preference is the V-A-K instrument that classifies learners as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. In this research, the outcomes of an experiment are described after students in the second year of university were exposed to a unit that was redesigned to fit in the V-A-K learning styles.

The so-called 'hidden curriculum' (HC) is often presented as a counterproductive element in education, and many scholars argue that it should be eliminated, by being made explicit, in education in general and specifically in higher education (HE). The problem of the HC has not been solved by the transition from a teacher-centered education to a student-centered educational model that takes the student's experience as the starting point of learning. In this article we turn to several philosophers of education (Dewey, Kohlberg, Whitehead, Peters and Knowles) to propose that HC can be made explicit in HE when the teacher recognizes and lives his/her teaching as a personal issue, not merely a technical one; and that the students' experience of the learning process is not merely individual but emerges through their interpersonal relationship with the teacher. We suggest ways in which this interpersonal relationship can be strengthened despite current challenges in HE.

Anecdotal accounts from teachers have long suggested the possibility that virtual teaching experiences have a positive impact on face-to-face teaching practices, a so-called "reverse impact" phenomenon. Survey and focus group data collected as part of a statewide evaluation of a virtual school offered an opportunity to explore this impact. Findings from a study of teacher perceptions indicate that three quarters of teachers who teach in both virtual and traditional environments felt that virtual experiences improved their practice in face-to-face classrooms. The authors discuss three types of impact reflected in teacher comments and discuss tentative implications for teacher preparation programs and for bolstering the rationale for using technology in education. (

An excellent study of the hidden curriculum that still stands today

In this qualitative case study of one teacher moving from face-to-face to online teaching, I explore how such teachers' subjectivities change within online teaching spaces. I do so by contrasting identity and subjectivity and then analyzing my participant's relationships with colleagues, her teaching practice, and her descriptions of her own work and identity. I suggest that ultimately online teaching spaces may be important potential sites for the demarginalization of ciswomen, transgender, and gender queer teachers.

This paper reviews recent studies on the relationship of classroom life to larger social/political institutions. It analyzes the phenomenon which Philip Jackson has identified as the "hidden curriculum", that covert pattern of socialization which prepares students to function in the existing workplace and in other social/political spheres. The authors argue that this pattern has been largely ignored by social studies curriculum developers. By ignoring the values contained in the social processes of schooling, social studies developers failed to influence school programs in a fundamental way. To promote a more complete understanding of the dynamics of classroom life and its relationship to the larger society, the authors have identified social processes of school and classroom life which give specific meaning to the term hidden curriculum. They argue that a new set of processes will have to replace existing ones if the goals of social education are to be realized. In the latter part of the paper, a new set of social processes are described which could form the basis for a new and more progressive approach to social studies instruction.

Computer technologies and computer-mediated information and communication are increasingly parts of curriculum-making practices in education. These technologies are often taken to be simply tools to be used to enhance teaching and learning. However, in recent years, a range of cross-disciplinary studies have started to point to the work of code, algorithms and standards in selecting and shaping the information, forms of knowledge and modes of interaction available to teachers and students. Concerns have been raised about how data is selected, shaped and represented by software in ways which are not always apparent to those using computer technologies. In this sense, software can be considered as part of the hidden curriculum of education. Drawing upon the increasing research in software studies, this article explores theoretically some of the issues raised in relation to curriculum-making practices and possible lines of empirical research to be pursued.

Many higher education institutions are either offering online courses or are planning such initiatives. Critics argue that college and university administrators are forcing online courses upon students and professors as cost-saving measures, and at some universities students have expressed discontentment with online course initiatives (Jaffee, 1998; Noble, 1998). Others are wondering aloud if online courses are in fact the answer to challenges such as rapid tuition increases and a changing student body (Feenberg, 1999; Hara & Kling, 2000; Rahm & Reed, 1998).

The concept of the hidden curriculum rarely has been applied to distance education, though the related discipline of educational technology frequently has been accused of hiding a multitude of agendas.

This report sets out to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and trends towards greater openness in higher education and to think about the implications for their institutions. The phenomena of MOOCs are described, placing them in the wider context of open education, online learning and the changes that are currently taking place in higher education at a time of globalisation of education and constrained budgets

As higher education (HE) undergoes a massive expansion in demand in most countries across the globe and experiences financial pressures, the sector is evolving rapidly. Market pressures encourage the search for additional income and new forms of provision, and online programme management (OPM) companies are increasingly entering the sector as they identify market opportunities.

As a longtime faculty member at a major research institution and now an executive academic officer at an OPM, I believe faculty are the richest resource for preserving an institution's core values, especially in times of intense change.

The sense of belonging in online learning community is an important index to measure learners' degree of emotional participation. In this paper., the influencing factors on the sense of belonging in online learning community are analyzed and its model for learners' sense of belonging is constructed. Text mining., collaborative filtering., visualization and other technologies will be used to mine learning characteristics of learner in the model. Furthermore., the model will recommend learning resources., guide learning path to learner and so on.

This study addressed several outcomes, implications, and possible future directions for blended learning (BL) in higher education in a world where information communication technologies (ICTs) increasingly communicate with each other.