The popularity of web-based learning systems has encouraged researchers to pay attention to several new issues. One of the most important issues is the development of new techniques to provide personalized teaching materials. Although several frameworks or methods have been proposed, it remains a challenging issue to design an easy-to-realize…

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…

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…

Learning object repositories and evaluation tools have the potential to serve as sites for interaction among different cultures and communities of practice. This article outlines Web-based learning object evaluation tools that we have developed, describes our current efforts to extend those tools to a wider range of user communities, and considers…

This commentary on the recent article, "Developing an Online Geology Course for Preservice and Inservice Teachers: Enhancements for Online Learning" by Veal, Brantley, and Zulli (2004) examines two issues related to the design of online courses. First, the concept of affordances is used to compare face-to-face and online classes for…

This study explores the concept of "transactional distance", a term coined by Moore (1993), which relates to the distance that exists in all learning relationships and can be more evident and potentially problematic in online learning environments. Reducing this psychologically perceived distance to help learners develop social presence…

This paper provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for building an online course based on the e-learning standards. It discusses the steps that should be followed to build a digital repository that facilitates the storage, retrieval, and reuse of the learning resources that comprise an online course in a standard way. The paper also examines…

The Internet makes scholarly electronic journals an opportune global mode of communication for scholarly exchange, where national and international borders are erased. The American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group, Communications among Researchers (AERA SIG CR) lists over one hundred electronic journals in the field of…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is discussing about the similarities between the life cycle of knowledge management and the processes in which learning objects are created, evaluated and used. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes LO and learning designs and depicts their integration into the knowledge life cycle (KLC) of the KMCI,…

This article explores the experience of a researcher who was part of a pan-European team exploring one of the currently available avatar worlds used for educational purposes. The article reports research undertaken as part of the European Union (EU)-funded project EQUEL (e-quality in e-learning) from the point of view of a single researcher. The…

Online learning, also referred to as distance education in this article, involves a variety of approaches, such as making resources available electronically and creating rich, interactive online experiences with class activities using Web tools like chat and discussion groups. Online courses offer flexibility as they may not require learners to…

This paper describes the roles of mentors to meet the need for mentors in electronic learning (eLearning) environments. The existing literature has documented factors impeding effective eLearning and the multiplicity of the faculty's roles that demands too much time on the faculty within eLearning environments. This paper argues for the need for…

People need to better understand the influence of learning management systems (LMSs) on student engagement in order to use these powerful technologies to improve campus-based education. Over the past 10 years, online learning management has been adopted by many campus-based institutions, becoming almost ubiquitous in many parts of the world. These…

This paper reports on a case study which identifies and illustrates sources of difference in agreement in relation to reliability in a context of quantitative content analysis of a transcript of an online asynchronous discussion (OAD). Transcripts of 10 students in a month-long online asynchronous discussion were coded by two coders using an…