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Research associations tend to be voluntary by nature and therefore unstable in character, and thus are subject to threat for their continuity. History has shown that the European Educational Research Association (EERA) is not an exception to this rule. Because EERA Council and the board members are volunteers with limited time, experience and expertise in running a complex international organisation, they cannot be expected to manage EERA without professional support. In this article the authors describe the ways in which EERA has tried to guarantee continuity through rearranging its administrative and financial structures. They show that introducing a business model for organising conferences, which both spreads the financial risks and provides the organisation with sufficient resources to maintain a professional office supporting not only the conference organisation but also all other EERA activities, has contributed immensely to the stability of EERA. The office is the collective memory of EERA in terms of both people and documents. Of course, this has introduced a new dependency: EERA's continuity and viability is nearly as vulnerable as its office is.

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This study investigates the effects of a competency-oriented course and the effects of feedback training on students’ reflection skills. Thirty-one nursing students enrolled in a conventional course with lectures and assignments following a traditional test. Subsequently, they enrolled in a competency-oriented course, which included more performance-oriented tasks based on competencies and a performance-based assessment. In both courses, half of the students received feedback on their assignments from tutors who were trained in feedback skills (experimental group), while the other half of the students received feedback from non-trained tutors (control group). After each course, all students wrote a reflection report. Results show that students’ reflection reports after the competency-oriented course were of a higher quality than the reports after the conventional course. Contrary to our expectations, the quality of the reflection reports of the control group (students supervised by non-trained tutors) was significantly higher than the quality of reflection reports of the experimental group (students supervised by trained tutors). This study shows that a competency-oriented design of courses enhances students’ reflection skills, but that the training in feedback skills needs to be reconsidered.

Docenten hebben een beperkte hoeveelheid tijd voor begeleiding. In dit artikel introduceren we een model dat het beantwoorden van vragen van studenten ondersteund door studenten automatisch te koppelen. De studenten worden geselecteerd met behulp van ‘Latente Semantische Analyse’ (LSA) op basis van de gestelde vraag. Na een introductie van het model bespreken we het resultaat van een experiment waarin een prototype van het model door ongeveer 100 studenten gedurende 8 weken gebruikt is. De resultaten laten zien dat studenten het model positief beoordelen en dat het mogelijk is op deze wijze een substantieel deel van hun vragen te beantwoorden.

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An important question in web-based education is how to deal with the design of the interface. What will the actual screen look like? Two main issues that are especially relevant for educational purposes are discussed, both from a Human-Computer Interaction and an Educational Psychology perspective. The first issue is the design of navigation and interaction in web-based environments. Students have to focus on the content, and do not want to be bothered with the way it works. Some of the most important guidelines for navigation in web-based environments are presented: consistency, global versus local guidance and expectation patterns. To illustrate the implications for screen design, we discuss the development of a graphical user interface for the EML-player. The second issue the chapter deals with is the cognitive architecture of the learner, which gives certain constraints on the way the educational content can be presented. The central ideas of Cognitive Load Theory are discussed, and the issues of multimedia and redundancy are further elaborated upon, resulting in guidelines for presenting educational content in web-based education. In the final discussion, an integrated set of design guidelines is given and some future developments are discussed. Furthermore, some critical remarks and reflections are given on the issue of redundancy in screen design and the plea for minimal screen design.

There is much positive research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments in asynchronous distributed learning groups (DLGs). There is also research that shows that contemporary CSCL environments do not completely fulfil expectations on supporting interactive group learning, shared understanding, social construction of knowledge, and acquisition of competencies. There appear to be two major pitfalls impeding achievement of the desired social interaction in CSCL environments: taking social interaction in groups for granted and the lack of attention paid to the social psychological dimension of social interaction outside of the task context. Current solutions offered to avoid the pitfalls placed responsibility on instructors and teachers to encourage collaborative learning and social interaction. To both free educators from this burden and be more cost effective, we propose an intelligent CSCL environment. The environment is based upon a theoretical framework that suggests embedding certain properties in the environment to act as social contextual facilitators - social affordances - to initiate and sustain learner’s social interactions. Finally, a group awareness widget (GAW) - a software tool providing the learner group awareness about the others in the task and in the non-task context - is introduced as an embodiment of this theoretical framework.

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments, particularly environments where students share external representations, are discussed as an interesting area for the application of cognitive load theory (CLT). CSCL environments share a number of characteristics that will induce considerable cognitive load. This article reflects on the characteristics of CSCL environments and external representations and the research opportunities they offer to CLT. We argue that CLT can contribute to our understanding of CSCL by pinpointing situations in which high levels of cognitive load are generated. CLT also raises a number of particular issues: from a CLT point of view studying of worked out external representations may lead to better learning outcomes than (co)-construction which is the standard mode of operation in CSCL. The ontology and specificity of the representational scheme used are crucial factors, as they define what can be expressed and how much room for interpretation is left in the representation. CLT may help identify mismatches between representational schemes and execution of (sub)tasks. CLT has lead to a number of recommendations on the integration of diagrammatic and textual information. We relate this to discussion and chat facilities in CSCL and describe how these can be more firmly anchored in the external representation.

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