This paper makes the strong claim that for multimedia to have any significant effect on education, the educational multimedia applications must be designed by the teachers of those classes. The arguments supporting this claim are presented in the headlines: curriculum, software, hardware and evaluation. The paper begins with an introduction which…

Financial issues regarding the sustainable production, dissemination, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education are reviewed and proposed solutions critiqued. Use of OER produce demonstrable cost savings for students. Yet OER development continues to rely almost completely on government and philanthropic funding. This…

This is a critical phase for Open Educational Resources (OER) movement: on one side the number of OER is increasing rapidly, and on other side debates about quality of OER-based courseware are heating up. These debates emanate from the fact that OER-based courseware are supposed to help users to follow a logical learning path and get an engaging,…

This paper describes the framework for the development of OER-based learning materials "TCC121/05 Programming Fundamentals with Java" for ODL learners in Wawasan Open University (WOU) using three main development phases mainly: creation, evaluation and production phases. The proposed framework has further been tested on ODL learners to…

In collaboration with preservice elementary teachers and in-service kindergarten teachers, the authors engaged in small-scale, demand-side production of educational software focused on numeracy skills. That is, the authors built applications designed to address children's specific learning needs as they surfaced in the classroom and were…

While researchers are examining the role of playing games to learn, others are looking at using game design as an instructional tool. However, game-design software may require additional time to train both teachers and students. In this article, the authors discuss the use of Microsoft PowerPoint as a tool for game-design instruction and the…

Java Virtual Machine (JVM) education has become essential in training embedded software engineers as well as virtual machine researchers and practitioners. However, due to the lack of suitable instructional tools, it is difficult for students to obtain any kind of hands-on experience and to attain any deep understanding of JVM design. To address…

The Universal eLearner is an online integrated learning module, under development, that incorporates accessible technology, universal design for learning, and best practices for online education. The American Foundation for the Blind and Bridge Multimedia have just completed a three-year grant through the National Institute on Disability and…

A distributed online curriculum and courseware development model (DONC[superscript 2]) is developed and tested in this study. Courseware development teams which may work in different institutions who need to develop high quality, reduced cost, on time products will be the users of DONC[superscript 2]. The related features from the disciplines of…

Most e-learning environments are applications in which the teacher uploads study materials that students download. This approach to e-learning discards the fact that didactic principles should be part of a broader instruction strategy aimed at achieving certain goals. It is possible for e-learning tools to support and improve didactical…

In the Singapore primary school Mathematics curriculum, students are taught the model method that uses bar diagrams to visualize the problem structure in a given word problem. When these students progress to secondary school, they learn the algebraic way of solving word problems. Studies (e.g. Ng et al.) have shown that poor bridging of students…

Outlines how the National Education Association's Educational Computer Service program for evaluation of educational software is run, and responds to critics of the program. (MD)

The relative worth of any evaluation instrument depends on user needs and the material being evaluated. Potential users of a good computer assisted instruction (CAI) instrument include purchasers, authors, reviewers, and publishers of CAI materials. Although each user has unique needs, a good instrument will serve both to educate and discriminate,…

The need to include an audio component in computer-assisted instruction in French is discussed and an attempted solution is described in terms of a suite of programs designed to facilitate the creation and use of dictation practice materials. (Author/SED)

This paper addresses the difficult issues of balancing faculty and university rights and responsibilities regarding courseware and courseware modules developed as both commissioned and non-commissioned works. The ways in which this debate affects those who are engaged in building their own online courses for their universities, courseware…