No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation is an important policy intervention aimed at changing school, district, and state department of education policies and practices to improve student outcomes. These efforts are compromised because NCLB does not prioritize the conditions necessary for improving academic outcomes. One such necessary condition…

Declining enrollment in MIS Departments in Colleges of Business has been the norm for many if not most universities since the dot.com bust of 2000. This has serious repercussions for the departments involved, students, and the companies that hire MIS graduates. In order to reverse this trend, an understanding of the important factors which…

This paper explains how the activity theory is used as a framework to analyze the barriers to a virtual Management Information Stream (MIS) Curriculum in Jordanian schools, from both the sociocultural and pedagogical perspectives. Taking the activity system as a unit of analysis, this study documents the processes by which activities shape and are…

Given the diminishing number of Management Information Systems (MIS) majors, an understanding of the factors which influence student choice of major is crucial. It has been noted in many previous studies that interest in a major and career significantly influences the student's choice of college major; indeed, in most studies, it is the strongest…

Remote laboratories are technologies that aim to increase the effectiveness of educational programs. European Remote Radio Laboratory (ERRL) is an e-learning project for students, teachers and technicians who will use very important devices of a radio frequency laboratory remotely. As a solution we have developed an e-learning system which aims to…

Education is universally acknowledged to benefit individuals and promote national development. Educating females and males produces similar increases in their subsequent earnings and expands future opportunities and choices for both boys and girls. However, educating girls produces many additional socio-economic gains that benefit entire…

Designed to assist with the management of e-resources, electronic resource management (ERM) systems are time- and fund-consuming to purchase and maintain. Questions of system compatibility, data population, and workflow design/redesign can be difficult to answer; sometimes those answers are not what we'd prefer to hear. The two primary functions…

In a time of constant change, sometimes it is worthwhile to ruminate on the future and how things ought to be. "Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship" wanted to capture some of these ruminations from around the field in a new column called "E-Opinions from the Field" where readers are asked to send in their thoughts on a topic and respond…

This article reports that several colleges and universities like Purdue University are mining data they have about students to try to improve retention. The institutions analyze years' worth of data on which students did well and which did poorly, and what variables--whether they be SAT scores, financial-aid status, or attendance at the dining…

The increasing amount of new scientific information made available by computers and the Internet is demonstrated by the growing number of available health sciences journals. Medical students, nursing students, those in other health science disciplines, and clinicians need to make information more manageable and accessible, especially at the point…

In this paper we present the results of research work, that forms part of the activities of the EU-funded project SLOOP: Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective, aimed at encouraging the definition, development and management of Open Educational Resources based on the Learning Object paradigm (Wiley, 2000). We present a model of Open…

The results of empirical experiments evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the learning-forgetting-relearning process in a dynamic project management simulation environment are reported. Sixty-six graduate engineering students performed repetitive simulation-runs with a break period of several weeks between the runs. The students used a…

Quality assurance for distance higher education is one of the main concerns among institutions and stakeholders today. This paper examines the experiences of Universitas Terbuka (UT), which has initiated and implemented an innovative strategy of quality assurance (QA) for continuous improvement. The credo of the UT quality assurance system is…

Course syllabuses are usually prepared by the instructors without any feedback observed and assembled from target students. More, even sometimes these syllabuses are used for many years with little alterations by the instructors. This situation affects the education negatively, because many of the students come with different backgrounds and…

This is a compilation of 12 primers on important information standards and protocols. These primers are: (1) Atom; (2) COinS; (3) MADS; (4) MARC 21/MARCXML; (5) MIX; (6) MXG; (7) OpenSearch; (8) PREMIS; (9) RESTful HTTP; (10) unAPI; (11) XMPP (aka Jabber); and (12) ZeeRex. The Atom Syndication Format defines a new XML-based syndication format for…