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…

Online resources for education offer opportunities for those with disabilities but also raise challenges on how to best adjust resources to accommodate accessibility. Automated reconfiguration could in principle remove the need for expensive and time-consuming discussions about adaptation. On the other hand, human-based systems provide much needed…

The release of free resources by the education sector has led to reconsideration of how the open approach implied by Open Educational Resources (OER) impacts on the educator and the learner. However this work has tended to consider the replication of standard campus based approaches and the characteristics of content that will encourage other…

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and…

Open educational resources (OER) raise many similar issues for education to those that have surrounded Learning Objects (LO). However the greater use and availability of digital technologies and open licensing seems to be enabling OER to have wider acceptance into individual and institutional teaching practice. While the need for appropriate…

The process of developing innovative mobile approaches to informal and formal learning is challenging, not least in needing to satisfy stakeholders with diverse interests in the technology, the pedagogy and the overall system. Some approaches to evaluation may focus on examining the nature and quality of learning that occurs, while other methods…

This paper describes how digital talking books (DTBs) with embedded functionality for learners can be generated from content structured according to the OU OpenLearn schema. It includes examples showing how a software transformation developed from open source components can be used to remix OpenLearn content, and discusses issues concerning the…

Two small studies, one an "eye-tracking" study and the other a "remote observation" study, have been conducted to investigate ways to identify two kinds of online learner interactions: users flicking through the web pages in "browsing" action, and users engaging with the content of a page in "learning"…

This paper examines the contention that learning environments which use IMS Learning Designs can be created by plugging in different components, using generic service descriptions to create the interface between the Learning Design (LD) and the specific tools. There is an alternative viewpoint which claims that generic service descriptions cannot…

This paper looks at how the concept of reusability has gained currency in e-learning. Initial attention was focused on reuse of content, but recently attention has focused on reusable software tools and reusable activity structures. The former has led to the proposal of service-oriented architectures, and the latter has seen the development of the…