Developmentally appropriate courseware can play a crucial role in enhancing children's learning and development. Research studies have demonstrated that early childhood educators face major challenges in selecting and updating developmental courseware that supports young children's development. The primary purpose of this study was to assess…

The topic of this paper is to describe the development of an interactive application that can be used in teaching English as a second language using children's stories in mobile devices. The aim of this experimental study has been to find out the potential of using the developed interactive mobile application in improving the learning skills such…

In the age of "publish or perish," publishing academic journal articles is a must, not only for professors but also for graduate students in Taiwan. Increasingly, Taiwanese research universities are requiring masters and PhD students to write theses and dissertations in English, with an added caveat for PhD students to publish two or…

Most boys and girls interact differently with educational software and have different preferences for the design of educational software. The question is whether the usage of educational software has the same consequences for both genders. This paper investigates the characteristics of drill-and-practice programmes or drills that are efficient for…

E-learning in corporate training has been growing rapidly because of the pursuit of time and budget efficiency in course development and delivery. However, according to previous studies, efficiency does not always guarantee training effectiveness, which is the major concern of human resource development. It is therefore necessary to identify the…

The Chinese National Quality Course Plan is a large-scale project by the Ministry of Education, which has led to the production of more than 12,000 courses from some 700 universities since 2003. This paper describes in detail the purpose of the project and how it is organized at all levels, including how individual courses get selected at…

In the digital age, instructional designers must possess both a sound instructional design knowledge base and solid project management skills that will enable them to complete courseware projects on time, on budget and in conformance with client expectations. Project management skills include the ability to apply repeatable processes, along with…

Activity theory (AT) is a powerful tool for investigating "artefacts in use", ie, the ways technologies interrelate with their local context. AT reveals the interfaces between e-learning at the macro- (strategy, policy, "campus-wide" solutions) and the micro-organisational levels (everyday working practice, iterative change, individual…

Despite the proliferation of online education, concerns remain about the quality of online programmes. Quality assurance (QA) has become a prominent issue, not only for educational institutions and accreditors, but also for students and employers alike. This paper describes some of the rather unique QA processes used at Universitas 21 Global…

The professoriate is increasingly expected to infuse computer technology in teaching. However, there is dearth of qualitative data to either support or disprove this belief. This study thus aims to describe the experiences of a select group of college teachers as they develop, implement and evaluate their courseware materials. Ten tenured faculty…

A review is undertaken of what different commentators have written about the evaluation of educational courseware in higher education. Speculation is made on the reasons for the lack of such evaluations. The role of checklists for evaluating online courseware is discussed despite the acknowledged limitations. Checklists have been developed at…

Presents a group of semiotic principles for software design and uses them to show how they explain different educational possibilities. Discusses interface design and describes Theater in the Computer, a software environment for children, to illustrate semiotic-based principle of interface design. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the effects of individual differences and cognitive styles on student learning in hypermedia programs and presents a cognitive model to illustrate how students with different cognitive styles react to non-linear learning in hypermedia by analyzing the findings of previous studies. Suggests implications for the design of hypermedia…

Provides a summary of research on the effectiveness of animation in computer-assisted learning, suggests guidelines and strategies for implementing animation for specific materials in both educational and training environments to assist instructional designers and developers, and includes examples for the strategies. (Contains 17 references.) (LRW)

Describes a prototype process for the development of educational multimedia materials, based on the ARKive project in the United Kingdom, which can help educational multimedia software developers produce more coherent and effective learning resources by making explicit the value/belief system on which the project is founded. (Author/LRW)