Discusses the inherent benefits and difficulties when a university information technology department decides to build customized portals for students, faculty, and staff and alumni. (GR)

Discussion of online help for performance support systems focuses on how online help has expanded to allow the design of more effective support systems. Explains embedded help, interactive help, intelligent agents, bubble help (tool tips), "What's This?" help, and expanded help content. (LRW)

Using Excel, an interactive program is designed to simulate the Solow and endogenous growth models to facilitate the understanding of these models for students of growth theory and macroeconomics.

Serious games open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education. The inherent complexity of such games, though, requires large efforts for their development. This paper presents a framework for serious game design, which aims to reduce the design complexity at conceptual, technical and practical levels. The approach…

The goal of this article is to draw a roadmap for designing an "ideal" virtual world for higher education, pointing decision-makers in a general direction for implementing virtual worlds and noting various barriers along the way. When using a roadmap, one can take many different paths to reach a desired destination. Similarly, institutions can…

The use of design patterns is now well established as an approach within the field of software systems as well as within the field of architecture. An initial effort was made to harness patterns as a tool for elaborating the design of the elements of personal learning environments as part of the University of Bolton's Personal Learning Environment…

In this paper, we propose a conceptual and operational framework for process reengineering (PR) in higher education (HE) institutions. Using a case study aimed at streamlining exam scheduling and distribution in a distance learning (DL) unit, we outline a sequential and non-linear four-step framework designed to reengineer processes. The first two…

Researchers increasingly suggest that accessibility remains a prominent issue across the World Wide Web (www). This study raises awareness about issues of access in higher education. This qualitative research design utilized a listserv that invited university based webmasters to use freeware to evaluate the overall accessibility of their…

Design patterns have become a widely acknowledged software engineering practice and therefore have been incorporated in the curricula of most computer science departments. This paper presents an observational study on students' ability to understand and apply design patterns. Within the context of a postgraduate software engineering course,…

In this paper the authors analyse the design and implementation of a course about learning management systems (LMS). The course was first given in Cuba and then in Guatemala and Peru, within the project USo+I: "Universidad, Sociedad e Innovacion, Mejora de la pertinencia de la educacion en las ingenierias de Latinoamerica" financed by…

This paper discusses modalities of meaningful use of multimedia sources in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) theory and the design of CSCL software tools. A discussion about main similarities and differences between the concepts of networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration is presented at the beginning. These concepts…

For Americans to engage in a global information society, it is critical that they have access to high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet, meaning broadband. Network connectivity opens up a wealth of possibilities to K-12 educators. While it has the potential to result in fundamental changes in teaching methods, it can definitely be used to enhance…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

Training individuals from diverse backgrounds and in changing environments requires customized training approaches that align with the individual learning styles and ever-evolving organizational needs. Scaffolding is a well-established instructional approach that facilitates learning by incrementally removing training aids as the learner…

With the development of e-learning technology, many specifications of instructional design have been proposed to make learning activity sharable and reusable. With the specifications and sufficient learning resources, the researches further focus on how to provide learners more appropriate learning activities to improve their learning performance.…