Semantic Web technologies have been applied in educational settings for different purposes in recent years, with the type of application being mainly defined by the way in which knowledge is represented and exploited. The basic technology for knowledge representation in Semantic Web settings is the ontology, which represents a common, shareable…

The goal of this article is to draw a roadmap for designing an "ideal" virtual world for higher education, pointing decision-makers in a general direction for implementing virtual worlds and noting various barriers along the way. When using a roadmap, one can take many different paths to reach a desired destination. Similarly, institutions can…

Distance education course designers working alone often do not have the luxury of fully developing their instruction before releasing their courses to students. The Individual Iterative Instructional Design (I3D) model is useful for educators who both develop and present their distance learning instructional units in areas ranging from higher…

Societal changes demand educators to apply new pedagogical approaches. Many educational stakeholders feel that serious games could play a key role in fulfilling this demand, and they lick their chops when looking at the booming industry of leisure games. However, current toolkits for developing leisure games show severe shortcomings when applied…

Of the fields on which developments related to information and communication technologies are effective will keep increasing is education. That's why the methods and techniques that have been formed over the long years may change relatively. In the past years, the field of higher education has been impacted very much from the developments and…

Briefly describes the benefits of computer-assisted instruction for library applications in bibliographic instruction and staff training and notes that little quality software is available that is appropriate. Detailed guidelines are provided for librarians to design their own courseware, including planning, designing, writing, programming, and…

The infrastructure required for the implementation of computer aided instruction is described with particular reference to the distance education environment at the University of South Africa. A review of the state of the art of online distance education in the United States and Europe is followed by an outline of the proposed infrastructure for…

This report consists of three major sections. The first, a progress report for the period of 1983 to 1986 on the introduction of new information technologies into education among the member states of the Commission of European Communities, includes an overview of activities carried out in the member states and at the Community level, an appraisal…

Designed to test the premise that the production system for courseware has a strong impact on the quality of the courseware developed, a survey of 14 U.S. institutions of higher education was conducted in 1986 to investigate the production systems used by these schools. Many of the questions used and the list of institutions surveyed were…

This paper show instructors how to develop their own streaming multimedia presentations that can be loaded onto a schools' server and played by students over the Internet. Topics covered include: the use of courseware to create an online course or to complement face-to-face instruction; features of Oncourse, Indiana Universitys proprietary version…

Assesses the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whereby MIT offers free, online access to its course materials. Provides readers with a broader sense of OCW's implications for higher education. Addresses some issues raised in response to the initiative-the role of intellectual property rights, the…

This personal account of the development of computer-based learning from the 1960s to the present argues that the 1960s were a period of gestation. Instructional applications of computers at that time included efforts to simulate physics experiments and the debut of the PLATO system, which already had the ability to deliver interactive instruction…

This handbook is designed to serve the needs of colleges and universities considering the development of distance degree programs. Its objectives are to report on current practices among colleges offering degree programs primarily through telecommunications; to describe current distance degree programs that can be used as models; and to identify…

This report describes instructional uses of computers, interactive videodisks, and related technologies in undergraduate and graduate nursing education and in continuing education and faculty development. Its principal aims are to document ongoing activities, to identify factors that inhibit technological applications in nursing education, and to…

Based in part on the experience of the British Open University, this brief essay on the use of videodisc technology in the schools begins by describing the features of videodiscs and discussing potential uses of this technology at the elementary and secondary education levels. It is suggested that the availability of good interactive video…