As we talked with school teachers about the use of physical computing systems in class, one major drawback of these systems became obvious: almost nobody--next to enthusiastic autodidacts--has been able to tell us on an abstract basis for which educational purposes a certain physical computing system can be used, i.e. in a goal-oriented way. This…

The genre of educational adventure games is a common and successful choice in game-based learning. The games combine captivating narratives that motivate players to continue playing with game mechanics that are conductive to learning: the gameplay is slow-paced, allowing players to learn at their own pace, and focused on puzzles that can be…

Purpose: In the process of the implementation of the eBologna program and the recent change of the university system, curricula at German universities have been redesigned; courses have been condensed and learning content has been re-structured into modules, each of which requires an evaluation. Simultaneously, skills required for working in…

For the forty-third time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented online during the annual AECT Convention. Volume 1 contains 37 papers dealing primarily with research and development topics. Papers dealing with the…

Reconfigurable computing is an established field in computer science. Teaching this field to computer science students demands special attention due to limited student experience in electronics and digital system design. This article presents a compact course on reconfigurable processors, which was offered at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt,…

University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

These proceedings contain the papers and posters of the International Conference on e-Learning (EL) 2019, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society and co-organised by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, in Porto, Portugal, July 17-19, 2019. The EL 2019 conference aims to address the…

At schools special learning and programming environments are often used in the field of algorithms. Particularly with regard to computer science lessons in secondary education, they are supposed to help novices to learn the basics of programming. In several parts of Germany (e.g., Bavaria) these fundamentals are taught as early as in the seventh…

Many current (online) help systems fail because users refuse to use them or, even if they do so, they do not perceive them as helpful. There is an obvious gap between the intentions of the help content authors and the achievement of objectives concerning the perceived usefulness by help users. Problems may be divided into psychological and…

Purpose: The content, provided in learning management systems (LMS), is often text oriented as in a usual textbook, extended by some animations and links. Hands on activities and experiments are not possible. The paper aims to give an overview about the concept to couple smart simulation and assessment tools with an LMS to provide a more…

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…

The 11th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2018) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Templeton Landing in Buffalo, New York. This year's EDM conference was highly competitive, with 145 long and short paper submissions. Of these, 23 were accepted as full papers and 37…

With the expansion of e-learning, the understanding and evaluation of already created e-learning environments is becoming an extremely important issue. One way to dealing with the problem is analysis of case studies, i.e. already created environments, from the reuse perspective. The paper presents a general framework and model to assess UNITE, the…

The importance of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology family in the field of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) can not be denied. The Instructional Management Systems Project (IMS), for example, provides a learning resource XML binding specification. Considering this specification and other implementations using XML to represent…

The DIN Didactical Object Model extends the approaches of existing Educational Modeling Languages introducing specifications for contexts and experiences. In this paper, we show how the Didactical Object Model can be used for sharing didactical expertise. Educational Modeling Languages change the design paradigm from content orientation towards…