Advances in technology offer a vast array of opportunities for facilitating elearning. However, difficulties may arise if elearning research and design, including the use of emerging technologies, are based primarily on past practices, fads, or political agendas. This article describes refinements made to a framework for designing and sequencing…

ICUE (Interactivity Centered Usability Evaluation) is an enhanced usability testing protocol created by the researcher. ICUE augments the facilitator's role for usability testing, and offers strategies in developing and presenting usability tasks during a testing session. ICUE was designed to address weaknesses found in the usability evaluation of…

Prior research has highlighted the educational benefit of enabling students to participate in collaborative learning activities. Developing technology that extends the physical boundaries of the classroom and enables students to engage in meaningful collaborative learning activities outside class time can be of significant value. For any…

A research project identified and prototyped critical elements of an automated development system for interactive courseware (ICW) for job training. The prototype system incorporated a multimedia database that contained all completed, planned, and partially completed media elements. A web-based approach was taken to overcome the problems of…

Investigates the effect of activity content, its presentation, and the interactions between the two on flow experience (intrinsic motivation) in instructional activity. Results suggest that activity content has major influences on motivation; hypermedia presentations can add to motivation if used appropriately, or they can be distracting if too…

This paper presents aspects of modeling, authoring, and presenting structured documents corresponding to teaching material presented in the World Wide Web. In this context, the importance of providing the formalization of the structure of the documents using Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is discussed. Next, specifications for…

This paper describes the features of the 1996 version of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) called CALAT. The architecture of CALAT is an extension of conventional World Wide Web systems, consisting of an ITS kernel on the server side and a multimedia viewer on the client side. The viewer control system is designed to achieve both educationally…

As the need for distance education grows, requirements for the development of high-speed network-based real-time distance learning systems increases. MHEG-5 is the fifth part of the MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Experts Group) standard, and it defines a final-form representation for application interchange. This paper…

This paper describes IRI (Interactive Remote Instruction), a computer-based system built at Old Dominion University (Virginia) in order to support distance education. The system is based on the concept of a virtual classroom where students at different locations have the same synchronous class experience, using networked computers to communicate…

This paper describes the design and features of LEA (Learning Environment with Agent), an educational system which has the features of both synchronous and asynchronous group learning environments. The first section discusses group learning environments, including differences between individual learning and group learning, and the classification…

Engaging learners on the World Wide Web is more than sending Web pages to the user. However, for many course delivery software programs, the smallest unit of delivery is a Web page. How content experts can create engaging Web pages has largely been ignored or taken for granted. This paper reports on an authoring model for creating pedagogically…

A difficult task in creating rich, exploratory interactive learning environments is building an environment that is truly engaging. Engagement can be defined as the nexus of intrinsic knowledge and/or interest and external stimuli that promote the initial interest in, and continued use of a computer-based learning environment. Complete and total…