Perhaps the most promising and understudied aspect of online education is course assessment. Course assessment is important because it has a strong impact on learning and is an indicator of the quality of learning occurring in a class. In the online environment, methods of assessment can be very different. However,...

This paper presents a case study of using course-specific rubrics combined with content analysis, together with instructor and student feedback, to assess learning via online discussion. Student feedback was gathered via Small Group Instructional Diagnosis, and instructor feedback was collected through formal interviews. Content analysis used emergent coding with different...

This paper describes an exploratory, observational study using a purposive sample selection to determine if the presence indicators of the well regarded Community of Inquiry model can be a useful tool to observe and assess learning events which use a Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) as the mode of delivery...

Thirteen students in a graduate-level course on Historical and Policy Perspectives in Higher Education held face-to-face and online discussions on five controversial topics: Diversity, Academic Freedom, Political Tolerance, Affirmative Action, and Gender. Students read materials on each topic and generated questions for discussion that were categorized by Bloom’s taxonomy so...

The case method can be classified as a type of experiential learning because students treat the problem in the case as if it were real and immediate. Until the Internet there was no practical way for cases to actually be real and immediate. The Internet makes possible instantaneous distribution of...