This paper focuses on the ways educators can work within the guidelines of copyright while using digital media to develop educational content in legal and ethical ways by exploring several key contemporary trends in digital content creation. Educators need not create learning materials from scratch, as the pool of resources available via the…

The term "open pedagogy" has been used in a variety of different ways over the past several decades. In recent years, its use has also become associated with Open Educational Resources (OER). The wide range of competing definitions of open pedagogy, together with its semantic overlap with another underspecified term, open educational…

This project report describes the workflow model used at the University of Hertfordshire to develop and test a suite of new digital information skills materials for students. The approach taken was informed by findings from the Jisc Student Digital Experience Tracker and good practice from Jisc's NUS Benchmarking tool. Content was mapped against…

Open Educational Resources (OER) and OpenCourseWare (OCW) target barriers of education and learning by sharing knowledge for free to benefit self-learners, educators, and students. This study aims to investigate the use of OER both as a supplementary resource for a traditional course and as a resource for self-learners. First, the attitudes and…

Nigeria has joined the global race of teaching and learning in a changing educational environment by adopting open and distance learning (ODL). Although it is a global trend, ODL poses some challenges at local levels, one of which is the untimely production of teaching materials currently affecting instructional delivery in Nigeria. The modern…

The Ministry of Education in Guyana has prioritised increasing the number of qualified teachers by providing opportunities to both pre- and in-service teachers to gain relevant qualifications. This paper describes the process used to redesign the teacher training curriculum in Guyana to achieve the goals of a newly-developed ICT Professional…

Much is said about the importance of reflective practice especially in the professions. Yet much of what happens as part of reflective practice in the professions such as teaching is most of the time left to chance. Reflective practice allows practitioners to see the link between theory and practice by thoughtfully considering their own…

2008 marked the 10-year Anniversary of the Open Source movement, which has had a substantial impact on not only software production and adoption, but also on the sharing and distribution of information. Technical communication as a discipline has taken some advantage of the movement or its derivative software, but this article argues not as much…

Purpose: This paper aims to report on an externally-funded project and forms part of its dissemination. Design/methodology/approach: The objectives are achieved through a theoretical framing of the project and an alignment of these with the contexts for the project--namely the Professional Standards Framework of the HEA, its use in postgraduate…

Computers in education have come a long way from the abacus of 5,000 years ago to the desktop and laptop computers of today. Computers have transformed the educational environment, and with each new iteration of smaller and more powerful machines come additional advantages for teaching practices. The Tablet PC is one. Tablet PCs are fully…

Like many universities worldwide, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement, making a selection of teaching and learning materials available through its OER directory, UCT OpenContent. However, persuading and then supporting busy academics to share their teaching materials as OER…

This study investigated criteria that 91 pre-service teachers used to evaluate award-winning virtual museum exhibits for future use in teaching. Individual differences affected ratings, including teaching experience, age and gender. A categorization of participants' reasons for selection included audience level, site design and information…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

Owing to the emergence and flourishing of the Internet, traditional teaching and educational activities are increasingly relying on the convenient and global-reaching networking technology. To boost up the development of e-learning technology and the interoperability of learning materials, the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative defined a…

Recognizing the pedagogical value of gaming, academics along with game designers and educational content developers have begun producing resources to improve educational game design and make instructional games more accessible to teachers wanting to incorporate them into their classes. However, the rapid growth of such resources has made it…