Background and Context: Making is celebrated for bringing exciting tools and learning opportunities to non-traditional designers. However, people with disabilities may find themselves excluded from many making activities and makerspaces. This exclusion is present in making and computer science more broadly. Objective: We describe a university…

An effective learning environment interface (LEI) is a means to enable students to focus on learning and to understand content, while establishing connections and relationships among course activities. Using this fundamental premise, we propose a flexible, user-centered, and seamless LEI which is intended to remediate the fragmented interface…

In today's society, educational opportunities have evolved beyond the traditional classroom setting. Most universities have implemented virtual learning environments in an effort to provide more opportunities for potential or current students seeking alternative and more affordable learning solutions. "User-Centered Design Strategies for…

In the current object-oriented paradigm, software construction increasingly involves creating and utilizing "software components". These components can serve a variety of functions, from common algorithmic processes to database connectivity to graphical interfaces. The advantage of component architectures is that programmers can use pre-existing…

The menu has become an integrated component within nearly all professionally designed websites. This teaching tip presents a no-code way to design either a vertical or a horizontal fly-out menu by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) within Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. The approach described in this tip helps students fully understand how to…

Purpose: This paper aims to present findings of a study that was carried out to identify strategies of enabling learners in developing countries to fully exploit the potential of learning management systems (LMSs). The study set out to: identify the services of learning management systems that are most needed and desired by university learners in…

The architecture of a web-based course management tool that has been developed at IIT [Indian Institute of Technology], Kharagpur and which manages the submission of assignments is discussed. Both the distributed architecture used for data storage and the client-server architecture supporting the web interface are described. Further developments…

Researchers have suggested that up to 50 % of the effort in development of information systems is devoted to user interface development (Douglas, Tremaine, Leventhal, Wills, & Manaris, 2002; Myers & Rosson, 1992). Yet little study has been performed on the inclusion of important interface and human-computer interaction topics into a current…

Online teaching provides a new avenue for the human imagination, another way for artists and teachers to creatively participate in the predominant cultural form of our time, the Internet. Several online university courses are presented as examples of communities of learners in action. They provide an overview of what was found to be effective in…