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Higher education recently found itself in the unprecedented situation of being forced to rapidly switch to online education as a demand of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this article is to compare and contrast the experiences of university tutors who teach in two distance education universities with those who teach in a traditional university concerning their online lessons during lockdown. Forty university tutors participated in a survey to capture their teaching experiences. The survey was based on the transactional distance theory. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from both groups. Analysis of the quantitative data indicates no significant differences between the two groups in scores regarding course structure flexibility and the degree of student autonomy; however, significant difference with a high effect size was found regarding instructional dialogue, in favor of the distance tutors' group. Thematically analyzing the qualitative data allowed the researchers to group the data into three main themes focused on how the instructional dialogue was manifested in the classes of both groups: (a) the learning design approach adopted, (b) the tutor-led interaction for student support, and (b) learner-to-learner communication and the sense of an online community. Ensuing recommendations involve adopting social-constructivist approaches that can sustain high-quality instructional dialogue in online learning settings and creating distance education faculty development programs in traditional universities that will help tutors support dialogical forms of online pedagogy.

Learning Design (LD) research accounts for several design support tools, or LD tools, employing representations for learning designs to facilitate the "teachers as designers" thinking while preparing learning experiences. In contrast to existing studies having followed mainly a specialist/researcher (as opposed to a teacher) perspective, our quest to develop an LD tool follows a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach involving practitioners. Specifically, in this paper, we attempt to give voice to teachers as designers and investigate how they prefer having their learning designs represented by LD tools. Aiming to create a principled account of how to represent learning designs in an LD tool, we first conducted an integrative literature review to formulate a representational framework that drove our research. Subsequently, we addressed the following LD representational dimensions: (1} format, (2) organisation, (3) guidance and support, and (4) contextualisation. We are reporting on a case study conducted with 16 participants in a teacher education context. Although previous research typically reported findings based on a single LD tool's evaluation over a short period, we have opted for eliciting feedback based on a rich LD experience. To this end, we acquainted participants in LD projects with two LD tools (Learning Designer and WebCollage) during an academic semester. Furthermore, we followed a mixed-method explanatory sequential design applied through a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to achieve a more profound consideration of the teachers' preferences for LD representations. Our findings indicate that the teachers strongly endorse an LD tool supporting a visual format and a global organisation in the form of a table that provides a global overview of a learning design while focusing on its specific elements. Teachers seem to prefer an LD tool that balances providing guidance and flexibility, as they opt for (1) a non-restrictive taxonomy for articulating learning objectives, (2) some form of standardisation for formatting learning units, along with allowing free formation, (3) a flexible pedagogical framework for modelling the learning activities' pedagogy so that it can be adjusted to particular designers' needs, and (4) a typology of technologies that can be utilised or not. In addition, they seemed to favour an LD tool supporting high contextualisation, as they prefer to describe contextual details for a learning design's units and activities. These findings constitute design principles for our ongoing DBR and may stimulate momentum for researchers developing LD tools.

Harnessing the potential of wikis in teacher education is a significantly challenging task. Researchers suggest that incorporating wikis in the educational process requires a proper design rationale. This paper extends the previous research scope by proposing a wiki-based framework for organising collaborative Learning Design (LD) activities in teacher education. Aiming to exploit wiki's functionalities to foster collaborative LD tasks, cultivate LD knowledge and promote collaborative learning behaviour, the innovation of the particular framework stands in two elements. The first one is setting a blended learning context organised around five stages by adapting Salmon's model to gradually familiarise student teachers with wiki functionality, collaboration, and the LD process. The second one involves balancing individual and collaborative tasks through the five stages to cultivate trust and promote work-sharing among groups of student teachers. The proposed framework's effectiveness has been explored in an empirical study conducted in a professional graduate diploma in education offered by a Greek Higher Education Institution. Following a convergent mixed-method research design, we collected quantitative and qualitative data such as the preservice teachers' perceptions gathered through a survey questionnaire, the wiki logs and the wiki pages developed. Initial evidence is promising for the proposed framework's potential to effectively utilise a wiki for collaborative LD and LD knowledge development. Also, a quite welcome finding regarding the potential of the proposed framework is the well-accepted collaborative writing among preservice teachers showing their commitment to author their learning designs and revise the content created by their peers.

This paper reports on a study carried out with pre-service teachers who first developed a course by designing it in a Learning Design (LD) tool and then implemented it as a course in Moodle. The research explores the potential of "the Learning Designer," the LD tool utilized in the study, by addressing three aspects of the LD tool's added value for teachers as designers: a) the development of a learning design, b) the reflection on a design and c) the usefulness of the LD process using an LD tool towards the implementation of a design in a Learning Management System (LMS). The findings suggest that the graphical representation of a learning design provided by the LD tool supports designers to structure learning activities. The components of a learning design incorporated in the LD tool such as the learning outcomes, the type of a learning activity according to a typology and how learners are organized scaffold the articulation of the pedagogy of a learning design. Moreover, the pre-service teachers requested more components e.g. for organizing technology-enhanced learning and more customizable features e.g. for defining and combining activity types. All means of design analysis, especially the graphical ones trigger the designers' reflection on the nature of the activities included in a learning design and provoke them to improve it. The pre-service teachers perceived as beneficial the LD process in "the Learning Designer" towards considering components of the learning design which are applicable in its implementation as a course in an LMS. Nevertheless, difficulties were reported concerning non-matching and missing components leading to the reconsideration of aspects of the original design during the implementation. The conclusions drawn from the study's findings reveal the potential of "the Learning Designer" to support teachers as designers and are of value both to researchers involved with developing LD tools and to practitioners interested in harnessing an LD tool to promote LD practices.

Although previous research highlights the complementary relationship of learning design with TPACK, this is not the case for TPACK informing the development of digital learning design tools. In this paper, we present PeerLAND (Peer Evaluation of LeArNingDesigns). This learning design tool interweaves design and peer evaluation in an integrated process based on TPACK, promoting teachers' roles as designers and reviewers. It adopts a modular design approach to support teachers as designers explicitly represent their design ideas starting from pedadogical content knowledge and gradually cultivating all the TPACK knowledge domains. The learning design process ends with peer evaluation where teachers use TPACK-based criteria to provide constructive feedback to peers. We report on a study conducted in a teacher education context to evaluate PeerLAND. Specifically, we investigate: (1) how student teachers' knowledge develops through the learning design process supported by PeerLAND, and (2) how they value peer evaluation through PeerLAND. Our findings suggest that putting TPACK into action through PeerLAND developed student teachers' knowledge in every TPACK domain, except for content knowledge. Furthermore, peer evaluation is considered advantageous to student teachers for getting timely constructive feedback and refining their designs, and several ideas for improving the peer evaluation mechanism are proposed.

As e-learning is evolving into a mainstream, widespread practice, adopted by higher education institutions worldwide, much effort is geared towards the articulation of models and strategies for implementing e-learning in formal education settings. In the field of pre-service teacher education, a rising challenge is to equip the "21st century teacher" with the necessary toolset of skills and competencies to grapple with the idiosyncrasies of the new generation of "millenials". To this purpose, what still remains an open issue is the degree of innovation afforded by specific e-learning designs, in a field where traditional teacher training pedagogies co-exist with e-learning-specific ones. This article proposes a synthesis of two models, the Community of Inquiry (COI) model, based on the Practical Inquiry model introduced by Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (2000) and the Learning by Design framework (LbyD), based on the conceptualization of 'New Learning', articulated by Kalantzis & Cope (2012). Both models were invented with new learning styles and circumstances in mind. The proposed synthesis guided the design of the six-month introductory course in Technology Enhanced Learning by the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE) research team (located in Athens) and implemented with 18 pre service student-teachers at the Higher Education Technological Institute (TEI) of Lamia, located in another geographical area of Greece. In this context, elements of the COI framework were employed as tools both for designing and for evaluating the contents, structure and activities of the e-learning course. Two elements of the framework, teaching and cognitive presence were the axes supporting the course structure, whilst the kinds of activities most promoted were discussion, collaboration and reflection. The LbyD framework functioned as an awareness enhancement mechanism for trainee teachers to formulate, collaboratively negotiate and finally articulate and support pedagogical scenarios integrating the meaningful use of technology. The discussion of this experience is supported by a dataset including students' answers to a COI-based survey, free-text student feedback and asynchronous discussion transcripts, providing evidence about the potential of the approach and pointing out issues that need to be improved.

In this paper we investigate the value of collaboration scripts for promoting metacognitive knowledge in a project-based e-learning context. In an empirical study, 82 students worked individually and in groups on a project using the e-learning environment MyProject, in which the life cycle of a project is inherent. Students followed a particular collaboration script that combines individual and collaborative activities, aiming to promote individual and socially shared reflective thinking during the planning and evaluation phases of the project. We analysed group discussions and evaluation questionnaires, and the results provide evidence about the importance of the design variables considered in the collaboration script for cultivating metacognitive knowledge, such as project phase, roles undertaken by students, degree and type of interaction, type of activities and products, and activity sequencing. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

In this paper, we discuss how externalizing learners' interaction behavior may support learners' explorations in an adaptive educational hypermedia environment that provides activity-oriented content. In particular, we propose a model for producing interpretative views of learners' interaction behavior and we further apply this model to INSPIRE"us" for visualizing specific indicators. In the proposed approach, we collect raw data from learners' interaction at various grains, model the state of interaction using a set of indicators that combine temporal, navigational and performance data with semantic data of content and available tools, and visualize this information alongside with comparative information coming from the instructor or peers. In this way, we provide users (learners, tutors, peers) with a mirror of learners' behavior and a point of reference such as the instructor's proposal or peers' behavior, in order to enable monitoring and reflection. An empirical study with students is also described investigating how they interpret the visualizations of their interaction data provided by INSPIRE"us", the metacognitive skills they cultivate, and the personal data of peers they value for selecting collaborators. Preliminary results provide evidence about the understandability and expressiveness of the indicators of effort, progress, working style, and the visualizations used.

In this article we investigate the design of educational hypermedia based on constructivist learning theories. According to the principles of project and case-based learning we present the design rational of an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia system prototype named MyProject; learners working with MyProject undertake a project and the system offers a variety of learning aids to support them accomplish the project. MyProject proposes learners a set of learning activities (at different stages of a learning cycle) that contribute to the overall understanding of the problems posed or their ability to complete the project, and stimulate learners to reflect on and monitor their own learning. Moreover, MyProject allows the learners to undertake varying levels of initiative and control, offers hypermedia content in the form of realistic cases and adaptive navigation advice through the content. An expert review has been performed to evaluate the design rational, determine conformance with a list of design principles for project-based curricula, and provide appropriate feedback for further improvement. The way this review was organized as well as the report of this study including positive aspects of the design, and recommendations for possible modifications or extensions, are presented. Finally, a pilot study that aimed at investigating how understandable and manageable the learning cycle is by students, is also described. Preliminary results provide encouraging indications about the potential of the proposed approach in enhancing learner control, and promoting active and reflective learning. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

Discussion of the development of educational hypermedia systems for the Web builds on theories from instructional design and learning styles to develop a design rationale and guidelines for adaptive Web-based learning systems that use individual differences as a basis of system adaptation. Considers content adaptation and adaptive navigation support. (Author/LRW)

Describes adaptive educational hypermedia systems which aim to increase the functionality of hypermedia by making it personalized to individual learners and considering individual learning styles. Presents a prototype hypermedia system and reports results of a pilot study that investigated the system's educational effectiveness. (Author/LRW)

Project-based learning (PBL) is rooted in the idea that a problem or question drives learning activities toward the construction of a concrete artifact in an authentic context. In this process, […], In this paper we investigate the value of collaboration scripts for promoting metacognitive knowledge in a project-based e-learning context. In an empirical study, 82 students worked individually and in groups on a project using the e-learning environment MyProject, in which the life cycle of a project is inherent. Students followed a particular collaboration script that combines individual and collaborative activities, aiming to promote individual and socially shared reflective thinking during the planning and evaluation phases of the project. We analysed group discussions and evaluation questionnaires, and the results provide evidence about the importance of the design variables considered in the collaboration script for cultivating metacognitive knowledge, such as project phase, roles undertaken by students, degree and type of interaction, type of activities and products, and activity sequencing. (Keywords: Project-based learning, e-learning, collaboration, peer interaction, metacognitive knowledge, asynchronous discussions)