Web application software uses new technologies that have novel methods for integration and state maintenance that amount to new control flow mechanisms and new variables scoping. While modern web development technologies enhance the capabilities of web applications, they introduce challenges that current testing techniques do not adequately test…

COVID-19 is hastening the adoption of online learning and teaching worldwide, and across all levels of education. While many of the typical learning and teaching transactions such as lecturing and communicating are easily handled by contemporary online learning technologies, others, such as assessment of learning outcomes with closed book…

Perceived usability affects greatly student's learning effectiveness and overall learning experience, and thus is an important requirement of educational software. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a well-researched and widely used questionnaire for perceived usability evaluation. However, surprisingly few studies have used SUS to evaluate the…

This article reports the design, development, and evaluation of an online software application for assessing students' understanding of curricular content based on concept maps. This computer-based assessment program, called the Assessment Agent System, was designed by following an agent-oriented software design method. The Assessment Agent System…

In this paper, I describe the design and evaluation of automated essay scoring (AES) models for an institution's writing placement program. Information was gathered on admitted student writing performance at a science and technology research university in the northeastern United States. Under timed conditions, first-year students (N = 879) were…

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult and different from studying computer or board games. This article builds upon the experiences of staging and studying several playful pervasive technology prototypes. It discusses the challenges and pitfalls of evaluating pervasive game prototypes and charts methods that have proven useful in…

Backups are a modern fact of life. Every organization that has any kind of computing technology (and that is all of them these days) needs to back up its data in case of technological or user errors. Traditionally, large-scale backups have been done via an internal or external tape drive that takes magnetic tapes (minicassettes, essentially) and…

With increasing demand of mobile devices and cloud computing, it becomes increasingly important to develop efficient mobile application and its secured backend, such as web applications and virtualization environment. This dissertation reports a systematic study of mobile application development and the security issues of its related backend. …

Web usability focuses on design elements and processes that make web pages easy to use. A website for college students was evaluated for underutilization. One-on-one testing, focus groups, web analytics, peer university review and marketing focus group and demographic data were utilized to conduct usability evaluation. The results indicated that…

In today's classrooms, students now turn to the Internet as their primary source of information, though the common belief in the idea that "digital natives" can easily traverse a landscape littered with misconceptions, multiple perspectives, and competing ideas has large implications in the classroom. Research into students reading multiple online…

Cognitive scientists investigate mental models (how humans organize and structure knowledge in their minds) so as to understand human understanding of and interactions with the world. Cognitive and mental model research is concerned with internal conceptual systems that are not easily or directly observable. The goal of this research was to…

This article presents KnowledgePuzzle, a browsing tool for knowledge construction from the web. It aims to adapt the structure of web content to the learner's information needs regardless of how the web content is originally delivered. Learners are provided with a meta-cognitive space (e.g., a concept mapping tool) that enables them to plan…

Purpose: Presently, searching the internet for learning material relevant to ones own interest continues to be a time-consuming task. Systems that can suggest learning material (learning objects) to a learner would reduce time spent searching for material, and enable the learner to spend more time for actual learning. The purpose of this paper is…

Recommender systems aim to support users in their decision-making process while interacting with large information spaces and recommend items of interest to users based on preferences they have expressed, either explicitly or implicitly. Recommender systems are increasingly used with product and service selection over the Internet. Although…

The semantic web brings a new opportunity for efficient information organization and search. To meet the special requirements of the educational field, this paper proposes an intelligent search engine enabled by educational semantic support service, where three kinds of searches are integrated into Educational Information Intelligent Search (EIIS)…