Australian higher education increasingly relies on flexible modes of delivery as a means of attracting and retaining students in a highly competitive global education market. While education is among those disciplines that have been most actively involved in the shift from face-to-face to online learning and teaching, the transition for many…

The attitude of instructors, students, course administrators, and course designers has a significant impact on the quality of a distance education program. The existing literature shows the factors that inhibit these groups from participating in this educational medium. This paper will attempt to review and assess the attitudes toward online…

E-learning is becoming a major component in academia today. Therefore, the success of e-learning online communities is crucial in order to ensure their permanency and effectiveness. There is a need for formalized guidelines in e-learning that instruct the designer (course instructor) on how to design, maintain, and manage a course. Some research…

Purpose: This paper proposes solutions to problems related to the maintenance and update of already existing e-learning courseware. Design/methodology/approach: A structured approach in form of a reference model for the re-engineering of existing educational material is presented. In this context, concepts already established in the area of…

The first two issues of E-Learning featured monographs by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, which they generously made available for publication. Both of these works, "Designs for Learning" and "Text-Made Text", are artifacts grounded in a larger shared project to which the two authors have been committed throughout more than two decades of sustained…

Digital or computer games have recently attracted the interest of education researchers and policy-makers for two main reasons: their interactivity, which is said to allow greater agency, and their inherent pleasures, which are linked to increased motivation to learn. However, the relationship between pleasure, agency and motivation in educational…

Currently there is considerable enthusiasm for exploring how we can apply digital gaming paradigms to learning. But these approaches are often weak in linking the game-playing activity to transferable social or conceptual processes and skills that constitute, or are related to, learning. In contrast, this article describes a "dialogue…

This article shares the results of a needs assessment conducted to guide the development of an e-learning certificate program for implementation at Texas A&M University. Participants were asked to provide input regarding the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to work as an e-learning specialist. The qualitative data was collected using…

In the communities dealing with the design and implementation of on-line teaching and training (higher education, government, industry), SCORM is a hot topic these days. The "Sharable Content Object Reference Model" is a standard for the packaging and deployment of Web-based "learning objects," defined by Bob Banks as "a relatively small, reusable…

This paper describes a final year biosciences module consisting of workshops to which web-based tools were introduced. The ability of the online tools to facilitate group work and assess the students was investigated. The online module was delivered via WebCT as the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). The initial concept was to enhance rather than…

This paper uses the Open University of the Netherlands as an instructive case for the introduction of e-learning based on the IMS Learning Design specification (IMS LD). The IMS LD specification, as approved by the IMS Global Learning Consortium in 2003, enables the specification and encoding of learning scenarios that describe any design of a…

Preparing and developing e-learning materials is a costly and time consuming enterprise. This paper highlights the elements of effective design that we consider assist in the development of high quality materials in a cost efficient way. We introduce six elements of design and discuss each in some detail. These elements focus on paying attention…

This paper describes systems dynamics, reviews the literature of uses of systems concepts in distance education (DE), presents a preliminary model, and ends in a call to researchers to contribute to the building of a standard model of DE. (Contains 4 figures.)

What makes a classroom "smart"? Presentation technologies such as projectors, document cameras, and LCD panels clearly fit the bill, but when considering other technologies for teaching, learning, and developing content, the possibilities become limited only by the boundaries of an institution's innovation. This article presents 32 best practices…

The publication of Ernest Boyer's innovative study, "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate" (1990), sparked sixteen years of academic studies, high level conferences, and campus teaching reforms in a movement that has come to be known as the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). During this same period, a rapidly…