The marketing of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Open Courseware gives the impression that it has the potential to contribute to quality open learning and opening up higher education globally. It is from this perspective that the potential contribution of Open Educational Resources (OER) units in the MIT Open Courseware to opening…

In the last decade, e-learning has been a standard part of the educational process at all types of schools--primary, secondary, and high schools. When used, e-learning can achieve significant savings not only in terms of time as well as operating costs. However, e-learning is also often criticized. This is mainly due to direct absence of teachers…

The Open University (OU) makes a proportion of all its taught modules available to the public via OpenLearn each year. This process involves the modification, of module excerpts, showcasing subject matter and teaching approach. This activity serves both the University's social and business missions through the delivery of free courses to the…

One of the most impressive uses of information and communication technology is the advent of e-learning. The current E-learning system mainly plays a role of learning assistance such as providing learning content or learning information, and sometime it provides channels or platform in the learning environment for discussion and interaction. In…

This paper presents a description of the metadata harvester software development. This system provides access to reliable and quality educational resources, shared by Mexican Universities through their repositories, to anyone with Internet Access. We present the conceptual and contextual framework, followed by the technical basis, the results and…

This descriptive study aims to investigate the instructional effectiveness of Open Educational Resources (OER). It was conducted with 1196 university students who were enrolled in a general chemistry course with an experimental laboratory section. These students voluntarily used OER for their lab activities. Data were collected via a printed,…

This paper describes accessible collaborative learning using mobile devices with mobile enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for all learners, teachers and other users. Notes taken live during lectures using…

The open courseware proposed by MIT with single streaming video has been widely accepted by most of the universities as their supplementary learning contents. In this streaming video, a digital video camera is used to capture the speaker's gesture and his/her PowerPoint presentation at the same time. However, the blurry content of PowerPoint…

A Learning Management System (LMS) can be a singularly critical platform to report on students' learning progress and to monitor students' learning engagement. At the only defence university in Malaysia, the National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM) adopts the LMS as a supplementary learning and teaching tool. Nonetheless, the aspiration of…

In this paper, the authors identify and analyze public policy and the investment and expenditure that the governments of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Uruguay commit to make in the development and procurement of textbooks, books and digital content for primary and secondary education (K-12). The aim is to identify and propose a roadmap…

This paper reports on the ongoing international project "System architecture for ICALL" and the progress made by the Swedish partner. The Swedish team is developing a web-based exercise generator reusing available annotated corpora and lexical resources. Apart from the technical issues like implementation of the user interface and the…

This paper presents the open learning initiatives of the Science Education Institute of the Department of Science and Technology to overcome certain barriers, such as enabling access, cost of replication, timely feedback, monitoring and continuous improvement of learning modules. Using an open-education model, like MIT's (Massachusetts Institute…

This paper aims at providing an objective evaluation and transformation of Higher Education in the Arab World with a focus on its contribution to knowledge and human development. It argues that despite the great expansion in the number of higher education institutions and the great increase in the number of students enrolled in them, the needs and…

What comes next in the field of academic e-learning? Which e-learning trends will dominate the discourse at universities? Answering such questions is the basis for the adaptation of service strategies and IT-infrastructures within institutions of Higher Education. The present paper therefore introduces methodology and findings of a trend study in…

The open educational resources initiative has been underway for over a decade now and higher education institutions are slowly adopting open educational resources (OER). The use and creation of OER are important aspects of adoption and both are needed for the benefits of OER to be fully realized. Based on the results of a survey developed to…