This paper presents how virtual containers enhance the implementation of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) subjects as Open Educational Resources (OER). The publication initially summarizes the limitations of delivering open rich learning contents and corresponding assignments to students in college level STEAM areas. The…

This article describes a small-scale study that explored the relationship between the pedagogical practices characterised as "open" and the existing model of undergraduate teaching and learning at a large research-intensive university (RIU). The aim was to determine the factors that might enable (conversely impede) the greater uptake of…

This paper reports the findings of a project "Digital Futures in Teacher Education" (DeFT) undertaken as part of the third phase of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) UK Open Educational Resources (OER) programme. It builds on previous work (Gruszczynska and Pountney, 2012, 2013) that has addressed attempts to embed OER…

The main research object of the paper is investigation and proposal of the comprehensive Learning Object Repositories (LORs) quality evaluation tool suitable for their multiple criteria decision analysis, evaluation and optimisation. Both LORs "internal quality" and "quality in use" evaluation (decision making) criteria are analysed in the paper.…

This paper explores the impact that SCORM conformance has had on workplace e-learning. The author describes a project in which she was requested to "repurpose" some materials that had originally been designed for the face-to-face teaching of English as a Foreign Language, into SCORM conformant e-learning materials. The rationale for this request…

Web-enabled technology is now being applied on a large scale. In this paper we look at open access provision of teaching and learning leading to many users with varying patterns and motivations for use. This has provided us with a research challenge to find methods that help us understand and explain such initiatives. We describe ways to model the…

Ideally, learning resources should be built over a shared pool of fine reusable granular learning objects. However, in order to avoid contextual lacks, dynamic creation of such resources would mostly rely on the conceptual relationships among learning objects inside a repository. These conceptual relationships, as well as the learning objects…

Although our health professional students have some experience of simple charts, such as pie and bar, and some intuition of histograms, they do not appear to have much knowledge or understanding about box and whisker plots and their relation to the data they are describing or compared to histograms. The boxplot is a versatile charting tool, useful…

Teaching programming to novices has proved challenging for both learner and lecturer due to the abstraction and complexity of the subject matter. The work described in this paper is part of an EU funded Minerva project called TUPULO (Teaching Undergraduate Programming Using Learning Objects) which aims to address the challenges faced by novice…

This paper is about one of the central dilemmas of e-Learning: can we separate content and context, and how should we manage the relationship between the two? Or to put it another way, are Learning Objects just commoditised learning? With the growth of e-Learning over the past few years, learning objects have come into their own. They are the…

"Web services" enable partners to exploit applications via the Internet. Individual services can be composed to build new and more complex ones with additional and more comprehensive functionality. In this paper, we apply the Web service paradigm to electronic learning, and show how to exchange and maintain learning objects is a…

Customer-Driven Development is a technique from the software development method called extreme Programming (XP) where customers (most importantly including end users of all levels) are closely involved in the software design and redesign process. This method of producing software suitable for customers has been adapted to help in the production of…