In order to help assist all students, with or without disabilities, SUNY Corning Community College (CCC), located in the Southern Tier of New York, chose to purchase a new software embedded directly into its LMS platform, Blackboard, called Blackboard Ally. This software is designed to automatically calculate the compliance of a document, video,…

This paper describes the development of a software program that supports argumentative reading and writing, especially for novice students. The software helps readers create a graphic organizer from the text as a knowledge map while they are reading and use their prior knowledge to build their own opinion as new information while they think about…

Contextualised mobile assisted language learning (MALL) has been known for its potential in language learning rooted in social constructivism theories. However, a consistent approach to constituents of contextualised MALL, in addition to a quantitative tool to evaluate it, is missing in reported case studies. The present research, drawing upon…

With the exception of a plague of locusts, it seems as if the past five years have thrown every imaginable challenge at IT--from the incredible shrinking budget to BYOD and now the MOOC monster. For those of a superstitious bent, these were probably just appetizers to the crises that will inevitably accompany a year featuring the number 13 (cue…

This article presents the case for a theory-informed approach to designing and evaluating representations for implementation in digital tools to support Learning Design, using the framework of epistemic efficacy as an example. This framework, which is rooted in the literature of cognitive psychology, is operationalised through dimensions of fit…

For colleges and universities today, the question is no longer whether to develop a campus app or not. Instead, the debate has shifted to the best--and most cost-efficient--way to make campus applications accessible to the myriad devices and operating systems out there. Schools have a few options: They can develop multiple native app versions;…

This article discusses the accessibility of two content management systems, Berkeley Electronic Press's Digital Commons and OCLC's CONTENTdm, widely used in libraries to host institutional repository and digital collections content. Based on observations by a visually impaired student who used the JAWS screen reader to view the design and display…

The rise of technology gives individuals new options when it comes to viewing and managing their collection of reading materials. Where there used to be wooden bookshelves filled to the brim with bound volumes of paper, there now sits a small, handheld, battery-powered device that, when one thinks about it, does so much more than simply show one…

Competition in the virtual reference market got really hot this past summer. Recent developments in virtual reference offerings suggest the market is much more dynamic than most people would have imagined a short time ago. With Google's acquisition of Meebo and its subsequent decision to shut down the chat widget service, many libraries scrambled…

Backups are a modern fact of life. Every organization that has any kind of computing technology (and that is all of them these days) needs to back up its data in case of technological or user errors. Traditionally, large-scale backups have been done via an internal or external tape drive that takes magnetic tapes (minicassettes, essentially) and…

In 2011 the University of Wollongong Library undertook a significant review of its Resource Sharing services. This was prompted by constraints in the systems supporting this service, changes to the Library's key suppliers, Infotrieve Australia and the British Library Document Supply Service, and the need to deliver effective library services…

A number of free Web-based tools are available for distance librarians to create presentations and online assignments. The relative merits of presentation tools like Dabbleboard, Jing, Prezi, Tildee, 280 Slides, and Glogster, and classroom tools like Make Beliefs Comix, Picviewer, Photopeach, and Wordle are assessed for ease of use by distance…

In today's classrooms, students now turn to the Internet as their primary source of information, though the common belief in the idea that "digital natives" can easily traverse a landscape littered with misconceptions, multiple perspectives, and competing ideas has large implications in the classroom. Research into students reading multiple online…

Software allowing real-time online video connectivity is rapidly evolving. The ability to connect students, staff, and guest speakers instantaneously carries great benefits for the online distance education classroom. This evaluation report compares four software applications at opposite ends of the cost spectrum: "DimDim", "Elluminate VCS",…

The paper proposes a contingent, learner-centred usability evaluation method and a prototype tool of such systems. This is a new usability evaluation method for web-based learning systems using a set of empirically-supported usability factors and can be done effectively with limited resources. During the evaluation process, the method allows for…