The goal of this study is to explore students' navigational behaviors in online courses in order to find the most effective course usability design. The study utilized observation and one-on-one interviews. The participants were asked to complete course-related tasks in one of the three course versions. Their interactions with the course were…

Learning games are an ideal vessel for many kinds of learning content. Playful interaction with the subject matter makes the human mind more receptive and thus learning itself more effective. Well designed games also come with an addictive game-play that makes users want to play the game over and over. This is intended in fun games but it can be…

What do instructional designers in higher education really do? With the rise in online courses and programs in higher education, this question is especially important. We interviewed eight instructional designers from across the United States using a semi-structured interview protocol. The results were analyzed using the constant comparative…

This study investigated to determine the online course design elements that are associated with student online course satisfaction. A total of 90 online courses were reviewed, using the course checklist based on the Quality Matters rubric. The results show that course structure and layout were inconsistent across courses within a program or…

Despite the central role that well organized and structured course content plays in engaging learners, the authors point to the absence of guidelines for organizing content in ways that meet course learning goals. Recognizing the need for a design solution and, perhaps, the need for a new design framework, design patterns are proposed as an…

Case studies help to reflect and to capture information about complex processes and domains and to make it reusable for future application in related contexts. In the case study reported in this article, we aim to capture and share processes and experience that we gained while designing a web-portal for supporting the specific user group of…

The interest in the role of culture and instructional design and technology (IDT) continues to grow but the research in the area remains limited. More so, the number of online courses and programs are also on the rise, as is the number of geographically dispersed and culturally diverse students. In response, this study was designed to examine…

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…

This research reports the results of a survey administered to 25 of the 30 institutions that participated in the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) large-course redesign project that took place between 1999 and 2003. According to NCAT, the benefits of these course redesign efforts included an average reduction in costs of about 40%…

This study investigated outsourcing of the development of visual, animated and interactive learning objects for mathematics education by a Norwegian university to software vendors in China. It sought to understand the challenges in this outsourcing engagement and competences needed to meet the challenges. The authors tested outsourcing strategies…

This paper describes results from a case study that focuses on the initial implementation of a new, online instructional program, the WebIT M.S. in Instructional Technology, offered at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville during 2008-2010. Survey data were collected from two groups of students: a self-selected sample of those students who…

This study investigated course design factors influencing social presence and the development of ICT self-efficacy. Instructional design factors that promoted authentic uses of threaded discussions as a vehicle to establish social presence, self-directed learning and cooperative learning resulted in 900 posts in a semester, when no posts were…

This paper describes an observational study of the introduction of Sakai's Learning Management System (LMS) into several liberal arts courses at a women's college in the Middle East. Student participation in the CLE was tracked over the course of the semester and summarized by their number of logins and average session length. These measures were…

There is a widely held belief in e-learning circles that pedagogy must come before technology. In this paper it is argued that, not only is that not true, but that it is a weak distinction as pedagogies, insofar as they represent a set of techniques and tools for learning, are as much technologies as the computers, forums, virtual classrooms and…

The potential represented by the usage of Internet-based communication technologies in parallel with e-instruction is enabling learners to cooperate and collaborate throughout the world. However, an important dimension, namely the socialization of learners through online dialogues via e-mail, discussion forums, chats, blogs, wikis and virtual…