This is my first editorial of IRRODL as one of the two co-editors with Dianne Conrad.As she did previously, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Terry Anderson for all the work he has done in building IRRODL into a world class scholarly journal, a leader in our field. And neither of us could manage this feat without the professional assistance of Brigette McConkey, IRRODL's managing editor.The articles in this issue of IRRODL have been grouped into two sections. The first provides us with research findings of interest to educational administrators and consists of articles on capacity building and leadership as well as more technical research on computer security and modeling. The second section is concerned with teaching and learning and consists of articles on training and teaching methods followed by research studies related to interactivity and social media. lectures, service quality, and innovativeness were all significant factors affecting behavioural intention to use mobile learning.
Capacity building/leadership
Administration
Computer security and modelingOnline learning administrators need to be more aware of issues surrounding computer security and computer modeling. In their paper, Chen and He use blog mining as well as a traditional literature search to determine the awareness of security risks in online environments, noting that security is not considered to be a top priority. On the other hand, Amigud conducted a survey of five distance education programs on their learner authentication strategies, confirming that at least in this one problem area, secure identification is possible at a distance. The Yildiz et al. paper describes a fuzzy model program designed to accurately predict students' performance, concluding that the most accurate results came from the model that was based on experts' opinions.
Teaching and Interactivity
TeachingUsing a qualitative meta-ethnographic approach, Mbati explored student experiences using social media, finding that online discussion forums are ideal for the stimulation of learning in elearning programs. Shattuck and Anderson explored whether a training course had any impact on teaching practice. They recommend design principles for instructor training. Mavroudi and Hadzilacos adopted a learning needs approach to study the design of courses for elearning. They combined learner, context, and needs analyses into a coherent framework for replication.
InteractivityInter-personal interaction has been identified by many researchers as an important learning variable that can be supported online using social media. Castaño-Muñoz et al. The paper explores the interaction effects of level and agreement, finding that in classes with high levels of teaching presence, the higher the agreement about teaching presence, the higher the agreement about cognitive and social presence especially for classes reporting stronger levels of cognitive and social presence. In classes with lower levels of teaching presence, agreement has a different effect.