Portals are taking off on campuses nationwide. According to "Campus Computing 2006," the Campus Computing Project's survey of 540 two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities across the US, portal deployment for four-year public residential universities jumped from 28 to 74 percent of responding institutions between the…

The Java Intelligent Tutoring System (JITS) was designed and developed to support the growing trend of Java programming around the world. JITS is an advanced web-based personalized tutoring system that is unique in several ways. Most programming Intelligent Tutoring Systems require the teacher to author problems with corresponding solutions. JITS,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce some new functions achieved in a web-based multimedia courseware, which is developed by Flash software and used by part-time graduate students. Design/methodology/approach: The courseware uses Adobe Flash CS3 as its development software, which supports Actionscript language, FMS and FLV technology…

E-Learning is a vast and complex research topic that poses many challenges in every aspect: educational and pedagogical strategies and techniques and the tools for achieving them; usability, accessibility and user interface design; knowledge sharing and collaborative environments; technologies, architectures, and protocols; user activity…

Purpose: Social navigation is an emerging trend for navigation in hypermedia. With social navigation, users can be guided through large volumes of learning content by cues which integrate the browsing history of past users. Earlier papers have shown that social navigation is suitable for navigation not only in classic hypermedia but also in…

Humans draw on their stereotypic beliefs to make assumptions about others. Even though prior research has shown that individuals respond socially to media, there is little evidence with regards to learners stereotyping and categorizing pedagogical agents. This study investigated whether learners stereotype a pedagogical agent as being…

A multipoint, multimedia conferencing system called FocusShare is described that uses IPv6/IPv4 multicasting for real-time collaboration, enabling video, audio, and group awareness information to be shared. Multiple telepointers provide group awareness information and make it easy to share attention and intention. In addition to pointing with the…

Program animation systems have not been as widely adopted by computer science educators as we might expect from the firm belief that they can help in enhancing computer science education. One of the most notable obstacles to their adoption is the considerable effort that the production of program animations represents for the instructor. We…

As certain areas of practice in higher education shift online, the work of learners and teachers increasingly takes place within the domain of the image. The "digital turn" we are experiencing, both in higher education and in the wider culture, accompanies an "iconic turn" in which the logic of the image as it emerges on our screens has a growing…

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are pervasive elements of most modern technical software and represent a convenient tool for student instruction. For example, GUIs are used for [chemical] process design software (e.g., CHEMCAD, PRO/II and ASPEN) typically encountered in the senior capstone course. Drag and drop aspects of GUIs are challenging for…

The Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) support creation of a novel type of tutors called example-tracing tutors. Unlike other types of ITSs (e.g., model-tracing tutors, constraint-based tutors), example-tracing tutors evaluate student behavior by flexibly comparing it against generalized examples of problem-solving behavior. Example-tracing…

Software for text processing and presentation design is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a good solution for collaborative writing of technical course material, allowing the creation of high quality lecture notes and presentation slides from a single source. This article presents a new editing framework…

This article will review educational literature relevant to the design and implementation of a learning technology interface (LTI) into an undergraduate music technology curriculum. It also explores through empirical enquiry some of the advantages and disadvantages of using learning technology. This case study adopted a social-constructivist…

This study evaluates the usability of the Journal Finder integrated search interface, developed at the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This interface provides electronic access to publications including journals, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. This study was conducted to determine how intuitive and…

Educational software games aim at increasing the students' motivation and engagement while they learn. However, if software games are targeted to school classrooms they have to be usable and likeable by all students. Usability of virtual reality games may be a problem because these games tend to have complex user interfaces so that they are more…