The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of COVID-19 and its subsequent lockdowns. The time to return to face-to-face teaching has arrived, but the shadow of the disease still hangs over teachers, students, and society. Disruption in teaching can still occur for students, or even teachers, if they are either diagnosed as COVID-19 positive or…

Interfaces with good usability help their users complete more tasks in less time and with less effort, which gives them greater satisfaction. Given the vast array of options available to users today, usability is an important interface feature that may lead to the commercial success or failure of a software system. Despite its importance, few…

Making the students understand the theoretical concepts of digital logic design concepts is one of the major issues faced by the academics, therefore the teachers have tried different techniques to link the theoretical information to the practical knowledge. Use of software simulations is a technique for learning and practice that can be applied…

We present two designs in the area of the Internet of Things, utilizing the ontology-driven Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications (SOFIA) Interoperability Platform (IOP). The IOP connects domestic objects in the physical world to the information world, allowing for coaching the behaviour of, or raising awareness in, domestic energy…

This article argues that accessibility and universality are essential to good Web design. A brief review of library science literature sets the issue of Web accessibility in context. The bulk of the article explains the design philosophies of progressive enhancement and responsive Web design, and summarizes recent updates to WCAG 2.0, HTML5, CSS…

The topics of computer architecture are always taught using an Assembly dialect as an example. The most commonly used textbooks in this field use the MIPS64 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to help students in learning the fundamentals of computer architecture because of its orthogonality and its suitability for real-world applications. This…

Educational technology has attained significant importance as a mechanism for supporting experiential learning of science concepts. However, the growth of this mechanism is limited by the significant time and technical expertise needed to develop such products, particularly in specialized fields of science. We sought to test whether interactive,…

The Computer Information Systems Learning and Technology Sandbox (CIS Sandbox) opened as a collaborative learning lab during the fall 2011 semester at a New England business university. The facility employs 24 student workers, who, in addition to providing core tutoring services, are encouraged to explore new technologies and take on special…

The concept of learning objects has been applied in the e-learning field to promote the accessibility, reusability, and interoperability of learning content. Learning Object Metadata (LOM) was developed to achieve these goals by describing learning objects in order to provide meaningful metadata. Unfortunately, the conventional LOM lacks the…

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…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

A 2010 electronic resource management survey conducted by Maria Collins of North Carolina State University and Jill E. Grogg of University of Alabama Libraries found that the top six electronic resources management priorities included workflow management, communications management, license management, statistics management, administrative…

Anecdotal evidence shows that in computer programming courses plagiarism is a widespread problem. With the growing number of students in such courses, manual plagiarism detection is impractical. This requires instructors to use one of the many available plagiarism detection tools. Prior to choosing one of such tools, a metric that assures the…

This paper proposes a generic methodology and architecture for developing a novel conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Oscar that leads a tutoring conversation and dynamically predicts and adapts to a student's learning style. Oscar aims to mimic a human tutor by implicitly modelling the learning style during tutoring, and…

This paper is a mathematical (Boolean) analysis a set of cognitive maps called Thinking Maps[R], based on Albert Upton's semantic principles developed in his seminal works, Design for Thinking (1961) and Creative Analysis (1961). Albert Upton can be seen as a brilliant thinker who was before his time or after his time depending on the future of…