Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 4

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
thousand one hundred sixty students currently taking an online college-level course
completed a survey that asked them to rate the importance of each QM standard restated
from the student perspective. Students’ ratings of each item were compared to the ranking
of each item received by QM (3-Essential, 2-Very Important, or 1-Important).
Our third article, Faculty Training and Student Perceptions: Does Quality Matter? authors
Jun Sun and Ramiro de la Rosa, from the University of Texas – Pan American, explores the
relationship between faculty training in Quality Matters standards and the online course
quality as perceived by students. Interestingly, whether a faculty member has participated in
Quality Matters training before teaching an online course was surveyed and furthered served
as the independent variable in the study.
Next, authors João C. R. Caetano, of the University of Alberta, Lisbon Portugal, and Nicolas
Lori, Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal present Digital
Information Networks and the Future of Online Learning whereby they reflect on the
development possibilities for universities that offer online teaching opportunities in Europe.
The authors specifically focus on the extent to which European universities address the
developmental needs established by governmental and non-governmental agencies,
international economic agencies (e.g. European Union (EU), Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD)), and by European associations that are invested in
education and skills-training (e.g., European Association of Distance Teaching Universities
(EADTU)).
Next, we debut our new, recurring section, 3 Questions for an Online Learning Leader. This
regular section will showcase the responses from an online leader addressing current hot
topics in the field of online teaching, learning and scholarship. In this issue, we feature
President and CEO of American Public University System, Dr. Wally Boston.
Our Featured Article, Assessing the Degree of Homogenenous Online Teaching Textbook
Infancy from 1999 to 2007 Using the Immediacy Principle, by Erik Bean is a quantitative
content analysis study aimed toward examining whether independently authored online
education textbooks published in the infancy of online teaching development from 1999 to
2007 including scholarly studies including a teaching technique dubbed immediacy. Taking
into account the burgeoning field of online education and its efficacy, a secondary purpose
of the study was to examine the effective transformation of scholarly knowledge to practice.
Our final article written by Carmen Elena Cirnu, The Shifting Paradigm: Learning to
Unlearn, poses important questions around data and the valuable knowledge we can gain if
we choose to use it wisely. Cirnu poignantly asks, “in order to be able to fully benefit from
the enormous amount of data openly available and also of the competitive advantages that
new learning may provide, do we need to learn to unlearn in order to bypass the biases
already acquired? Do we need to free our minds first to be able to go further? Cirnu further
2 !