While the use of Twitter for communication and assessment activities in online courses is not new, it has not been without its challenges. This is increasingly true of high enrolment courses. The use of a Twitter Evaluation application which leverages a Learning Management System's (LMS's) application programming interface (API) provides a…

This paper explores the design of "service-learning" experiences to engage college students in the real-world application of course subject matter. Service learning is an educational approach that combines community service, academic coursework, and work-based applied learning. Based on data gathered during a series of recent interviews…

The present study examined students' first impressions of different aesthetic treatments for the same web-based lesson about the experiences of British soldiers during World War I as expressed through examples of trench poetry. Holding site content and functionality constant, the interface design's visual presentation was manipulated along two…

Three experiments examined whether the design of virtual learning environments influences undergraduates' enrollment intentions and anticipated success in introductory computer science courses. Changing the design of a virtual classroom--from one that conveys current computer science stereotypes to one that does not--significantly increased…

This study investigates and compares the relative importance of Web module design dimensions and their attributes as perceived by student participants in a research study and those defined by a selected group of researchers in the literature. We aim to understand whether the dimensions of clarity, organization, structure, visual/aesthetical…

This article surveys research in the areas of aesthetics and design, usability, visual aesthetics in education, and recent statistics related to online education. The focus of the article is on defining the role of visual content and aesthetics in the user interface and exploring what importance aesthetics and visual content have to education.…

The study investigated the preferences of instructors and students for design and pedagogy features of online instruction at the post-secondary level. Features were identified through a comprehensive literature review combined with focus groups. Each feature was subjected to review by subject matter experts to validate the differentiation between…

This paper reports on a study that observed students creating structured hypertext documents, and how they try to convey structural information, in order to formulate tentative guidelines/principles for the design of concept mapping tools or hypertext systems with an emphasis on the representation of structural knowledge, and to formulated…