Effective assessment is vital in educational activities. We propose IWAS (intelligent Web-based assessment system), an intelligent, generalized and real-time system to assess both learning and teaching. IWAS provides a foundation for more efficiency in instructional activities and, ultimately, students' performances. Our contributions are…

The transition to a new architecture and design for an academic library Web site does not always proceed smoothly. In this case study, a library at a large research university hired an outside Web development contractor to create a new architecture and design for the university's Web site using dotCMS, an open-source content management system. The…

Although the quality, performance and future of public library services in the UK is a matter of debate, there is little doubt that in recent years, despite claims relating to the emergence of a cyber-society, interest in library buildings and the library as "place" has been intense, almost matching that seen during the Carnegie era of…

The design and implementation of remote laboratories present different levels of complexity according to the nature of the equipments operated by the remote laboratory, the requirements imposed on the accessing computers, the network linking the user to the laboratory, and the type of experiments the laboratory supports. This paper addresses the…

This paper presents the structure of an undergraduate course entitled "programming techniques and the use of specialised software in structural engineering" which is offered to the fifth (final) year students of the Civil Engineering Department of Aristotle University Thessaloniki in Greece. The aim of this course is to demonstrate the…

It is most surprising that Yale University is spending $126-million to renovate and add to a 1963 Modernist building that almost everyone has hated for decades. Aside from that, the project's champion is a high-society architect whose own career refutes pretty much the whole Modernist design theology. This article talks about the renovation of…

In this article, the author shares a lesson on architecture she introduced to her kindergarten students. Using wooden blocks as materials, she showed her students how to take on the role of an architect and create their own buildings. This project was beneficial to all students in that they learned to think flexibly and realized that the designs…

Purpose: Scalability is an important research topic in the context of networked virtual environments (NVEs). This paper aims to describe the ALVIC (Architecture for Large-scale Virtual Interactive Communities) approach to NVE scalability. Design/methodology/approach: The setup and results from two case studies are shown: a 3-D learning environment…

A visitor to Saint John's University and Saint John's Abbey, in north-central Minnesota, sees something of Gothic heritage while standing in front of the abbey church, designed and built around 1960. The church's 112-foot campanile--a trapezoidal slab made of 2,500 tons of steel and concrete--stands boldly in front of a huge concrete honeycomb…

In spite of the goodwill and best efforts of software engineers and usability professionals, systems continue to be built and released with glaring usability flaws that are costly and difficult to fix after the system has been built. Although user interface (UI) designers, be they usability or design experts, communicate usability requirements to…

Using a two-step approach, Van Soest et al. (2010) recently questioned the pertinence of the conclusions drawn by Bootsma and Van Wieringen (1990) with respect to the visual regulation of an exemplary rapid interceptive action: the attacking forehand drive in table tennis. In the first step, they experimentally compared the movement behaviors of…

This essay explores the interplay between educational and architectural methodologies for analysing the school environment. It historicises the affinity between architectural and educational practices and modes of knowledge pertaining to the child's body during the period of postwar reconstruction in England to argue that educational spaces were…

Professional discourse in education has been the focus of research conducted mostly with teachers and professional practitioners, but the work of students in the built environment has largely been ignored. This article presents an analysis of students' visual discourse in the final professional year of a landscape architecture course in Brisbane,…

Students in a Landscape Architecture Design 1 course (N = 25) at a research university in the southern US developed design solutions implementing geologic time for an informal education site. Those students who employed abstract metaphors for their designs (n = 8) were more successful than students who proceeded with a linear design construct.…

This paper provides an introduction to Universal Instructional Design (UID), an adaptation of the architectural concept of universal design (UD), and discusses the benefits of this model as an inclusive approach to higher education. UD originated in the field of architecture as a proactive means of responding to legislated architectural…