This research has three goals: first, to find out how prevalent online deception is within a sample of Israeli users, second, to explore the underlying motivations to deceive online, and third, to discover the emotions that accompany online deception. A web-based survey was distributed in 14 discussion groups, and the answers of 257 respondents were analyzed. It was found that, while most of the respondents believe that online deception is very widespread, only about one-third of them reported engaging in online deception. Frequent users deceive online more than infrequent users, young users more than old, and competent users more than non-competent. The most common motivations to deceive online were "play" on the one hand and privacy concerns on the other. Most people felt a sense of enjoyment while engaging in online deception. The results are discussed in light of a possible mechanism for changing personal moral standards.

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This paper presents a theoretical framework for viewing elements that comprise distance education instructional systems in terms of dialogue. It is assumed that learning is mediated by intrapersonal dialogue and facilitated by interpersonal dialogue. Every resource in a distance education instructional system (eg, instructor availability, asynchronous communication networks, self-instruction texts, etc) is analysed in terms of the dialogue mode it supports. The framework offers three advantages: (1) a unified, simple, and coherent description of the mechanisms at play in distance education systems, (2) clearcut operational definitions, and (3) hypotheses that may be investigated empirically.

Upon completion of a graduate level course at the Open University of Israel, one instructor received very high student ratings while the other received very low ratings. We utilized this exceptional situation to perform ad hoc analyses of their course forums. The objective of this study was to map the dialogic behavior that occurred and to create suggestions for best practice and for worst practice in terms of active and passive participation, instructor response time, and the extent of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence.

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Abstract. This research examined how students at the Open University of Israel studied from video recordings of lectures. At the semester's end, seven history students were interviewed in order to trace their experiences, learning strategies and preferences. It was found that (1) reading comprehension strategies are inappropriate for viewing comprehension, (2) presumed theoretical advantages associated with instructional video may in fact be disadvantages, (3) the medium does indeed influence the message, (4) mismatching medium and message may have deleterious results on students' cognitive and affective outcomes and (5) surface-level orientations to study may be hindered by video.

On completing middle-school (ninth grade), Israeli students must choose which discipline(s) to major in upon entering high school. This study, grounded in Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT), identified and modeled the factors that contributed to students' academic choices from their own subjective perspectives. We collected qualitative and quantitative data from ninth graders in two urban middle-schools (n=295) at the school year's end. We found that (a) most students cited interest and utility value as their main motivations for choosing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major, expectancies were mentioned less; (b) students who chose a STEM major had statistically significant higher scores for EVT's key predictor variables (personal attributes, "subjective task value," "expectation of success," perceived effects of environmental factors) than their counterparts who majored in non-STEM disciplines; (c) the positive perceptions of their peers' interest and ability in science contributed significantly to students' choice to major in STEM disciplines; and (d) no significant gender differences re academic choice were found. One highly unexpected finding emerged: Science Education. 2019;103:1176-1205. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sce 1176 |

The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between disciplinary difference (exact and natural sciences versus humanities) and the dialogic behavior that occurred in Open University course forums. Dialogic behavior was measured in terms of students' and instructors' active participation in the forum (posting a message) as well as amounts and proportions of "teaching presence," "cognitive presence," and "social presence." We found that active participation in the science forums was much higher than in the humanities forums. We also found a ratio among the three presences that was constant across different academic disciplines, as well as across different group sizes and course types.