Research on the nature and impact of book apps or e-reading in general is still limited and informed by diverse assumptions about the nature of these new "texts," the varied forms of engagement and meaning-making associated with them, and their implications for understanding literacy and learning in the digital age. The purpose of this…

Requiring savvy, online courses can present a perceived barrier to adult learners for a variety of reasons, but ease of access due to inadequate navigability should not be one of those barriers. Re-tooling online courses to standards of Quality Matters (QM) can lessen that barrier to access, making adult learners more participatory. Internal…

PowerPoint is roundly reviled and ridiculed, yet this technology enjoys universal popularity. This article reviews the criticisms of PowerPoint and its peer technologies, describes its affordances and advantages, and suggests innovative PowerPoint applications in instruction. Beyond garden-variety applications of PowerPoint, it may also be used to…

The iPad takeover of public education is not just confined to the mainstream classroom: Special needs educators, too, are finding that iPads can be a vital tool to support independence. What sets the iPad apart from other devices is the simple and visually robust user interface that can be used by almost everyone. It is also a highly customizable…

There has been a significant gap between the tools used for the design of a building's architectural form and those that evaluate the structural physics of that form. Seeking to bring the perspectives of visual design and structural engineering closer together, we developed and evaluated a design tool for students and practitioners to explore the…

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,…

"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" by Edward Tufte (2006) condemns the software for failing to help users achieve many of the goals of an effective presentation and instead offers a low resolution platform with a deeply hierarchical single-path structure capable of convening a trivial amount of information even over…

Motion planning is a core problem in robotics concerned with finding feasible paths for a given robot. Motion planning algorithms perform a search in the high-dimensional continuous space of robot configurations and exemplify many of the core algorithmic concepts of search algorithms and associated data structures. Motion planning algorithms can…

In this article, we set out to assess QuADEM (Quality Assessment of Digital Educational Material), one of the latest methods for evaluating online language learning courseware. What is special about QuADEM is that the evaluation is based on observing the actual usage of the online courseware and that, from a checklist of 12 different components,…

It is postulated that one of the main problems with e-learning environments is their lack of personalisation. This article presents a comprehensive review of the current work in the field and proposes a framework for research in promoting personalisation in Web-based learning environments. The concepts of adaptability, adaptivity and the…

Changing your Learning Management System (LMS) presents challenges not only to instructional faculty, but also to the students who depend on these systems to completely deliver or support their courses. In assessing the transition for students experiencing an upgrade in the campus LMS, a number of findings have real implications for developing a…