Given the rapid rise of open educational resources (OER) for informal learning pursuits impacting countless millions of people each day around the world, this study investigated the impact of the initiative that spearheaded this movement; namely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) open courseware (OCW). More specifically, it explored…

The marketing of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Open Courseware gives the impression that it has the potential to contribute to quality open learning and opening up higher education globally. It is from this perspective that the potential contribution of Open Educational Resources (OER) units in the MIT Open Courseware to opening…

Teaching and learning are increasingly taking advantage of the rapid growth in Internet resources, open content, mobile technologies and social media platforms. However, due to the generally unstructured nature and overwhelming quantity of learning content, effective learning remains challenging. In an effort to close this gap, the authors…

Assistive Technology (AT) revolutionized the process of learning for special needs students during the past three decades. Thanks to this technology, accessibility and educational inclusion became attainable more than any time in the history of special education. Meanwhile, assistive technology devices remain unreachable for a large number of…

Purpose: The growing use of internet-based learning (IBL) platforms in institutions of higher education is producing profound changes in the traditional teaching learning process worldwide. This paper aims to identify and understand the ways in which higher education institutions draw benefits by the use of such means, synthesizing the literature…

This descriptive study aims to investigate the instructional effectiveness of Open Educational Resources (OER). It was conducted with 1196 university students who were enrolled in a general chemistry course with an experimental laboratory section. These students voluntarily used OER for their lab activities. Data were collected via a printed,…

This paper describes accessible collaborative learning using mobile devices with mobile enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for all learners, teachers and other users. Notes taken live during lectures using…

The open courseware proposed by MIT with single streaming video has been widely accepted by most of the universities as their supplementary learning contents. In this streaming video, a digital video camera is used to capture the speaker's gesture and his/her PowerPoint presentation at the same time. However, the blurry content of PowerPoint…

A Learning Management System (LMS) can be a singularly critical platform to report on students' learning progress and to monitor students' learning engagement. At the only defence university in Malaysia, the National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM) adopts the LMS as a supplementary learning and teaching tool. Nonetheless, the aspiration of…

This paper aims at providing an objective evaluation and transformation of Higher Education in the Arab World with a focus on its contribution to knowledge and human development. It argues that despite the great expansion in the number of higher education institutions and the great increase in the number of students enrolled in them, the needs and…

What comes next in the field of academic e-learning? Which e-learning trends will dominate the discourse at universities? Answering such questions is the basis for the adaptation of service strategies and IT-infrastructures within institutions of Higher Education. The present paper therefore introduces methodology and findings of a trend study in…

The open educational resources initiative has been underway for over a decade now and higher education institutions are slowly adopting open educational resources (OER). The use and creation of OER are important aspects of adoption and both are needed for the benefits of OER to be fully realized. Based on the results of a survey developed to…

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer new approaches towards knowledge acquisition and collaboration through distance learning processes. Web-based Learning Management Systems (LMS) have transformed the way that education is conducted nowadays. At the same time, the adoption of Virtual Worlds in the educational process is of great…

The open educational resource (OER) movement has reached a critical mass due to recent technology advancements. In Taiwan, to overcome the language barrier, the Opensource Opencourse Prototype System (OOPS) plays a significant role in enabling Chinese-speaking users to benefit from this global education movement. However, our understanding about…

With thousands of materials having been produced and shared openly and freely on the Internet as Open Educational Resources (OER) or OpenCourseWare (OCW), the focus of the Open Education movement has shifted toward the need to demonstrate how such materials are being used, by whom and with what impact. This paper reports on the uses, the…