Although inclusion has provided access to the general education classroom for students with disabilities, there are significant questions about whether these students have gained full access to the curriculum. To design curricula for diverse learners, designers must have a clear picture of the obstacles and barriers that some students encounter.…

In this invited autobiography, the author describes the impact that educational gaming and simulation has had on his professional career. He begins by reviewing his early life and education in Aberdeen and his subsequent work as a research scientist, schoolteacher, and physics lecturer. He then shows how he changed disciplines from physics to…

Java Virtual Machine (JVM) education has become essential in training embedded software engineers as well as virtual machine researchers and practitioners. However, due to the lack of suitable instructional tools, it is difficult for students to obtain any kind of hands-on experience and to attain any deep understanding of JVM design. To address…

This Facilitator's Guide is based on What Education Leaders Should Know about Virtual Education, an online course designed by the Center on Instruction and the New England Comprehensive Center. The Facilitator's Guide demonstrates step-by-step how to build the course on a learning management system (LMS) and provides instructions on all phases of…

Distance learning is appealing to small business owners, employees, municipalities, state establishments, non-governmental organizations. Distance-learning are ideal for people who have a full-time job or other commitments, who can't take time off to study full time. This might be a professional who needs to update his knowledge or skills, or a…

It seems a foregone conclusion that repositories for reusable learning objects (RLOs), based on common standards and supported by suitable search facilities, will foster a global economic market in the production of RLOs. Actual reuse will support producers of high-quality RLOs, and other producers will be unable to compete, i.e. competition…

Explores specification and design procedures, functions, and issues in the development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Topics discussed include learning objectives; the target audience; types of training materials; format; software and hardware specifications; and individual ITS modules, including administrative, user profile, database,…

This article reports on a project that explores strategies for narrowing the digital divide by providing a practicable e-learning option for the millions living outside the ambit of high performance computing and communication technology. The concept is introduced of a "learning computer," a low bandwidth tool that provides a simplified,…

Investigates the effect of activity content, its presentation, and the interactions between the two on flow experience (intrinsic motivation) in instructional activity. Results suggest that activity content has major influences on motivation; hypermedia presentations can add to motivation if used appropriately, or they can be distracting if too…

The usability of Instructional Multimedia (IMM) applications is vital for their success and for the satisfaction of their users, as the confusion resulting from using poorly designed programs can be particularly detrimental to learning performance. A number of approaches for expert-based evaluation of IMM have been proposed during the past few…

This paper reports on the development and implementation of a flexible audit trail system comprising a library of auditing functions that can be embedded into interactive courseware and customized to the requirements of researchers and developers. A series of essential criteria considered critical to the development of a robust, flexible audit…

Discussion of educational computer simulations focuses on the parallel instruction theory that was developed at the University of Twente to combine the simulation with instructional materials, including those that may be printed. The MacTHESIS design system and philosophy are discussed, and simulation and learning environments based on the…

Reports on an experiment in which a course in psychology was replaced by a mixed formula consisting of a CD-ROM complemented by seminars and workshops. The CD-ROM was conceived as a collection of documents linked together with Netscape facilities. Students searched through these documents for information to answer questions (challenges) on the…

The theory and practice of the instructional design system includes the categories of design, development, utilization, evaluation, and management; instructional designers and teachers need to determine an appropriate balance of structural knowledge and detailed knowledge acquisition. The purpose of this study was to determine what teachers'…

Quality education is often impeded by lack of instructor time and by a failure to provide instruction that is individualized and at the point of need. Integration technology into course development can alleviate these problems, but only if the technology is easy to learn and supports a systems approach. In implementing a Web-based Technical…