Consistent user interface standards are necessary with the development of e-learning courseware, as they are the glue that binds the users' experience with their expectations. For example, the user controls for video playback were standardized many years ago, and we all benefit knowing a right-facing triangle signifies a play function, while dual…

Several usability issues were encountered during the design of a blended e-learning program for a course in evidence-based medicine for general practice trainers. The program was developed in four steps. We focused in this article on step 2 and 3. Step 2 focused on which educational principles to apply, that is, which learning theories,…

A "user interface" is the part of an interactive system that bridges the user and the underlying functionality of the system. But people sometimes forget that the best interfaces will provide a platform to optimize the users' interactions so that they support and extend the users' activities in effective, useful, and usable ways. To look at it…

Given the pace of innovation, not only in the gadget market but in how social media is changing society, the future isn't what it used to be, which is to say, it is not that far off, out of reach, and "gee whiz" tomorrow. The planning horizon has moved closer than ever. And far-off eventualities are here and gone before you know it. In this…

Knowledge exchange between employees is an essential feature of recent commercial organisations on the competitive market. Based on the data gathered by various information technology (IT) systems, social links can be extracted and exploited in knowledge exchange systems of a new kind. Users of such a system ask their queries and the system…

In mid-April, Amazon EC2 services had a small problem. Apparently, a large swath of its cloud computing environment had such substantial trouble that a number of customers had server issues. A number of high-profile sites, including Reddit, Evite, and Foursquare, went down when Amazon experienced issues in their US East 1a region (Justinb 2011).…

Enterprise architecture (EA) implementation refers to a set of activities ultimately aiming to align business objectives with information technology infrastructure in an organization. EA implementation is a multidisciplinary, complicated and endless process, hence, calls for adequate education and training programs that will build highly skilled…

The author recently created a presentation using HTML5 based on a tutorial put together by Marcin Wichary. The example presentation is part proof-of-concept, part instructional piece, and it is part of a larger site on HTML5 and how one can use it to create rich Web-based applications. The more he delved into HTML5, the more he found that it was…

Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in…

The majority of current web-based learning systems are closed learning environments where courses and learning materials are fixed, and the only dynamic aspect is the organization of the material that can be adapted to allow a relatively individualized learning environment. In this paper, we propose an evolving web-based learning system which can…

E-Learning standards began to come on the scene in the late 1990s. SCORM is the most widely known and practiced example, but some would say that it has failed to yield the hoped-for results. The authors have been engaged in projects to determine the impact that SCORM has had, and this article presents the results of interviews with individuals who…

Cloud computing is definitely a thing now, but it's not new and it's not even novel. Back when people were first learning about the Internet in the 1990s, every diagram that one saw showing how the Internet worked had a big cloud in the middle. That cloud represented the diverse links, routers, gateways, and protocols that passed traffic around in…

Automated scoring of constructed responses is already operational in several testing programmes. However, as the methodology matures and the demand for the utilisation of constructed responses increases, the volume of automated scoring is likely to increase at a fast pace. Quality assurance and control of the scoring process will likely be more…

With fancy new software developments and growth in both the richness of content and delivery options for information resources, the Database Marketplace 2010 is a feast for buyers. Unfortunately, institutional budget cuts may force more of a famine mentality--with belt-tightening for most, and only purchases that are life-sustaining being served…

In a year when a difficult economy presented fewer opportunities for immediate gains, the major industry players have defined their business strategies with fundamentally different concepts of library automation. This is no longer an industry where companies compete on the basis of the best or the most features in similar products but one where…