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Online teaching particularly through Open Distance and e-Learning (ODeL) has become a phenomenon in the twenty-first century. ODeL and blended approaches inevitably lead to increasing dependence on electronic communication systems. The University of South Africa (Unisa), where the author teaches, enables students through its Learner Management System to interact with lecturers and e-tutors online. The responsibilities of e-tutors are of an educative and technical nature. Their roles include guiding and assisting students, encouraging active participation, responding to their queries and grading their assignments. In addition, e-tutors provide notifications and assign tasks or activities that students are expected to complete and submit. In several cases, these forms of assistance are absent, when there is a lack of follow-up within the response period which is 24 hours – missing notifications and lack of guidance – rendering these e-tutors ineffective. The chapter provides strategies that were analyzed and implemented to motivate effective tutoring and enhance student participation learning. The author draws on her analysis as a virtual ethnographer and long-term participant observer as an e-tutor and lecturer who supervised e-tutors and taught a large number of students – 2,500. The objective of the chapter is to encourage effective tutoring that can enhance students’ success.

The purpose of this study is to describe university students’ motivations for using Facebook as an informal learning tool and explore the key barriers that may inhibit learning on the social media platform.

A case study approach was adopted in this study. Participants were 82 university students who participated in “e-Tutor” – an informal learning activity, conducted through Facebook. Focus group interviews were conducted, and students’ interactions on Facebook were also analysed to understand their motives for using the social media platform for learning. The uses and gratifications theory was used to explore student motivations for participating in the learning activity.

Results suggest that students perceived Facebook as a potential tool for learning and identified multiple motivating factors for their participation that included information seeking, convenience, connectedness, entertainment and reward seeking. Results also show that time constraints, social anxiety and cultural issues may inhibit learners’ active participation on social media platforms such as Facebook.

This study outlines an approach to use readily available and low-cost technological tools in learning design and provides some insights for teachers to design ubiquitous and personalised learning environments for students using such technologies, particularly social media. Specifically, Facebook offered a way to engage students in informal learning which can supplement students’ formal learning trajectories at university. While the uses and gratifications students sought through Facebook had an overall positive effect on their participation in e-Tutor activity, certain barriers can impede student active participation in learning environments on social media sites such as Facebook.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new kind of learning management system: proactive LMS, designed to improve the users' online (inter)actions by providing programmable, automatic and continuous intelligent analyses of the users' behaviours, augmented with appropriate actions initiated by the LMS itself.

Proactive systems adhere to two premises: working on behalf of, or pro, the user, and acting on their own initiative, without the user's explicit command. The proactive part of the LMS is implemented as a dynamic rules‐based system, and is added next to the initial LMS. They both use the same database as their source of information on the users, their activities, the available resources and the current state of the whole system.

How the proactive part of the LMS was implemented on the basis of a dynamic expert system is shown. Also how it looks like from a user's point of view is sketched. Finally, examples of intelligent analysis of users' behaviours coded into proactive rules are given.

Future work should include the design and the implementation of sets of rules (packages) dedicated to common users' needs, enabling useful proactivity on the basis of elaborated intelligent analysis.

Current learning management systems (virtual educational and/or training online environments) are fundamentally limited tools. Indeed, they are only reactive software: these tools wait for an instruction and then react to the user's request. Students using these online systems could imagine and hope for more help and assistance tools: LMS should tend to offer some personal, immediate and appropriate support as teachers offer in classrooms. The proactive LMS can, for example, automatically and continuously help and take care of e‐learners with respect to previously defined procedures rules, and even flag other users, like e‐tutors, if something wrong is detected in their behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the approach to embedding entrepreneurship within third level education in Northern Ireland by assessing the perceptions of lecturers and learners and monitoring the effectiveness of teaching methods.

Surveys and focus groups were conducted with lecturers and learners from different disciplines as part of a pilot investigation under the Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship (NICENT) with a view to establishing a longitudinal study.

Evidence suggests that NICENT has increased interest and positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship in Northern Ireland. E‐learning can meet high demand, intensive programmes are equally effective in improving the skills set. Entrepreneurship education needs sub‐sequential support.

The study provided preliminary findings for entrepreneurship teachings in different disciplines. Further dissecting of lecturer/learner analyses by course/year etc. is possible. Effectiveness could be assessed through graduate behaviours in the future in order to build longitudinal data.

The results prove that lecturers/learners are willing to embrace new subjects (entrepreneurship for scientists) and new teaching methods when blended with traditional approaches. Whilst WebCT environment can facilitate a comfortable action‐learning zone, entrepreneurship education needs personalisation and industry engagement.

The study reports from the developing face within Northern Ireland and provides insightful observations of new subject adoption, the learner's curve and changing cultural attitudes within tertiary education.

To investigate sixth-grade students with learning disabilities and their use of Google Docs to facilitate peer revision for informational writing.

A qualitative case study is used to examine how students used Google Docs to support peer revision. Constant comparative analysis with a separate deductive revision and overall writing quality analysis was used.

The findings indicate that students used key features in Google Docs to foster collaboration during revision, they made improvements in overall writing quality, their revisions focused on adding informational elements to support organization of their writing and revisions were mostly made at the sentence level, and students were engaged while using the technology.

We postulate that the use of peer revision coupled with Google Docs technology can be a powerful tool for improving student writing quality and for changing the role of the writing teacher during revision. The use of peer revision should be accompanied with strong explicit instruction using the gradual release of responsibility model so that peer tutors are well-trained. Writing teachers can use Google Docs to monitor and assess writing and peer collaboration and then use this knowledge to guide whole and small-group instruction or individual conferences.