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<p>Despite the rapid use of e-Learning in higher education, the beliefs of instructors about and their practices during online instruction have been seldom addressed. This study explores the role perceptions of e-instructors in higher education. In total, 106 instructors from 20 Taiwanese universities filled out a questionnaire. Analytical results indicate that “content expertise” and “instructional designer” are perceived by university faculty as the key components in e-instruction in higher education. A gap exists between ideal and practical roles of e-instructors in higher education. Role perceptions and role-based practices of e-instructors in higher education differ significantly in terms of gender and teaching experience. This study also provides suggestions for e-instructor training.</p>

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In this study, LEGO robotics and cooperative learning were integrated into the design of a course. In the course, preservice teachers had to complete their assignments by cooperating, solving problems, and conducting team discussions. After the course, questionnaires were used to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the design of the robotics course, student satisfaction with the course, and changes of the preservice teachers' confidence in learning LEGO robotics. The satisfaction questionnaire covered three dimensions: teaching environment, teaching content, and teaching method. Results showed that by the end of the semester, students' satisfaction with the cooperative robotics course had improved. Furthermore, the results showed positive effects on preservice teachers' perceived selfefficacy when learning LEGO robotics.

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IntroductionThe learning process can be transformed from in-class teaching into learning outside the classroom due to the emergence of new networking tools. In this study, peer feedback was used to enhance elementary students' writing through employing a brand new networking environment: the blog Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005). Without teachers' guidance on the out-of-class writing, students were brought to the blog environment in which they posted their articles, made corrections or gave suggestions and shared their work with others. Thus, students could have greater inspiration to write and gain more practice in writing. Richardson (2006) also pointed out some advantages of using blogs in education, such as how blogs can erase the limitation of classroom walls and offers students more possibilities to connect with others outside of the classroom. Teachers and students can manage and reflect upon their learning outcomes through the archived data on the blogs (Chuang, 2008;Liu & Chang, 2010). Blogs encourage students to be more actively engaged in knowledge creation, sharing their ideas and viewpoints in writing with others and publishing their works (Krishnamurthy, 2002;Richardson, 2006). According to Flower and Hayes (1981), the act of writing involves three major elements. These include: the writer's long-term memory, task environment and the actual writing process. These written documents on the blogs have a vast audience in the blogosphere because they can be easily shared with others on the Internet. Such learning experiences vastly differ from those in the past.From the literature review, many studies show the possible relationship between blogging and writing (Liu & Chang, 2010) and peer feedback and performance (Liu & Lin, 2007). However, there are insufficient studies investigating the effectiveness of using peer feedback to improve elementary students' writing through blogging; this study aimed to remedy that issue. MethodThis research adopted a single-group with pre-and post-tests design to investigate the effectiveness of using peer feedback to enhance elementary students' writing through blogging. The experiment was conducted for 2 hours per week over a period of 15 weeks. An online platform of blogging, named 'uSchool', was provided to the participants for posting their written works. A series of quantitative and qualitative techniques were employed to analyse the data, including interrater reliability, content analysis, t-test, analysis of covariance, observations and interviews. ParticipantsA total of 33 fifth graders were selected as participants in the study. The students were assumed to possess Internet skills and the ability to input Chinese characters, as well as to write a descriptive essay, edit articles and share their thoughts on writing, with their peers. Research designEach of the 33 subjects was required to compose one article each for the pretest and posttest. All of the articles were evaluated by the same three experts. Meanwhile, students were encouraged to provide feedback on the most i...

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Both asynchronous and synchronous discussions have advantages and limitations for online learning. This study conducts an empirical analysis of these discussion activities while applying the proposed Seamless Online Learning Integrated Discussion (SOLID) system, which can instantly integrate Facebook's asynchronous discussion function with the MSN Messenger's synchronous discussion function. This study examines two teaching activities (a problem-solving-based activity and a project-based discussion activity) within the SOLID system and compares their differences in knowledge construction phases and cognitive dimensions via a quantitative content analysis and lag sequential analysis. The results show that both cognitive and knowledge construction dimensions exhibit a higher diversity of interaction in the project-based activity than in the problem-solving-based activity. In addition, based on the results of the research, this study offers, as reference, recommendations to instructors and researchers for the implementation of online discussion activities.