As higher education institutions go online to reap the benefits of technology and align their programs with a world economy that is increasingly becoming digital, the multimedia learning theory warns of possible challenges. Large device screens have been used to present related information elements of a learning task simultaneously to facilitate…

Online discussion plays an increasingly significant role in asynchronous online learning environments. While previous attempts have been made to develop learning analytics dashboards to facilitate such discussions, most of these dashboards have been designed without reference to data or visualization techniques that have been proven to make online…

The objective of this design case was to describe the development of an online graph-oriented tool to support the representation of collaborative argumentation for middle school students from a faculty expert's perspective and discuss the processes that were instrumental in developing the tool. Supported by the professional staff in the Digital…

Instructional developers and others creating apps must choose from a wide variety of app development tools and technologies. Some app development tools have incorporated visual programming features, which enable some drag and drop coding and contextual programming. While those features help novices begin programming with greater ease, questions…

This design case covers a graduate course in educational software design that focuses on semester-long projects in response to client requests. The course was intended to address the need for professionals across disciplines, such as instructional design, computer science, and human-computer interaction design, to usefully collaborate on…

This paper describes an ongoing study related to a conceptual design model, which is specific to instructional interface design to enhance courseware usage. It was found that most of the existing courseware applications focus on the needs of certain target with most of the courseware offer too little to inclusive learners. In addition, the use of…

Several usability issues were encountered during the design of a blended e-learning program for a course in evidence-based medicine for general practice trainers. The program was developed in four steps. We focused in this article on step 2 and 3. Step 2 focused on which educational principles to apply, that is, which learning theories,…

The combination of modern computing power, the interactivity of web applications, and the flexibility of object-oriented programming may finally be sufficient to create computer coaches that can help students develop metacognitive problem-solving skills, an important competence in our rapidly changing technological society. However, no matter how…

The effectiveness of a video tutorial versus a paper-based tutorial for software training has yet to be established. Mixed outcomes from the empirical studies to date suggest that for a video tutorial to outperform its paper-based counterpart, the former should be crafted so that it addresses the strengths of both designs. This was attempted in…

The area of learning has a justifiable claim to be a special case in how it can be enhanced or supported by technology. In areas such as commerce and web design the aim is usually to ensure efficiency and support specific actions such as purchasing or accessing information as quickly and easily as possible. Working with technology for the purpose…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss heuristic evaluation as a method for evaluating e-learning courses and applications and more specifically to investigate the applicability and empirical use of two customized e-learning heuristic protocols. Design/methodology/approach: Two representative e-learning heuristic protocols were chosen…

This is a critical phase for Open Educational Resources (OER) movement: on one side the number of OER is increasing rapidly, and on other side debates about quality of OER-based courseware are heating up. These debates emanate from the fact that OER-based courseware are supposed to help users to follow a logical learning path and get an engaging,…

This article reviews research pertaining to the use aesthetics design, and usability in education. This article focuses on defining the role of visual elements and aesthetics in the user interface while exploring the importance of their application in a web-based learning environment. Research demonstrates that aesthetics are pivotal in…

Motion planning is a core problem in robotics concerned with finding feasible paths for a given robot. Motion planning algorithms perform a search in the high-dimensional continuous space of robot configurations and exemplify many of the core algorithmic concepts of search algorithms and associated data structures. Motion planning algorithms can…

This study explores whether learning management systems (LMSs) enable faculty course developers to use the reconfigurable characteristics of the software to implement the seven principles of effective teaching (Chickering & Gamson, 1987). If LMSs are to be considered pedagogically effective, these systems must help engage faculty in effective…