The article focuses on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for strengthening and transforming university practice in line with the social and technological conditions of the new ideas for "interactive" universities. The purpose is to use ICT as a change-agent in order to establish new practices--new pedagogical…

Possessing communication-related skills is vital to student success within and beyond college. The utilization of these skills, or being considered socially competent, has been linked to personal, relational, and occupational success. But how do we teach the necessary social skills to today's students? Building on research from education and…

Discusses research on different types of computer-based learning environments that indirectly foster self-explanations, and discusses ways of leveraging new computer and video technologies to enhance these environments by representing problem situations and their concepts dynamically. Concludes by suggesting that these learning environments can…

This paper provides a review of the rhetoric behind the component movement in educational software, and a critical analysis and synthesis of issues underlying the movement. We draw on case studies of several significant recent component projects in order to assess claims and to uncover and examine issues that are less often considered. While our…

This article presents a Web 2.0 approach for the arrangement of peer tutoring in online learning. In online learning environments, the learners' expectations of obtaining frequent, one-to-one support from their teachers tend to increase the teachers' workloads to unacceptably high levels. To address this problem of workload a self-organised peer…

The establishment of an online community is widely held as the most important prerequisite for successful course completion and depends on an interaction between a peer group and a facilitator. Beaudoin reasoned that online students sometimes engage and learn even when not taking part in online discussions. The context of this study was an online…

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments…

The present study focuses on the use of thinking types as a possible way to structure university students' discourse in asynchronous discussion groups and consequently promote their learning. More specifically, the aim of the study is to determine how requiring students to label their contributions by means of De Bono's (1991) thinking hats…

For a long time on-the-job training has been considered as the single point of contact of technical education with the real world job market. Indeed, traditional on-the-job training activities are of great educational value and complement uniquely any classroom-based learning activity. However, it has been observed that several obstacles arise…

The provision of lifelong learning facilities is considered to be a major new direction for higher and distance teaching educational institutes catering for the demands of industry and society. ICT networks will in future support seamless, ubiquitous access to lifelong learning facilities at home, at work, in schools and universities. This implies…

In this article a new approach to calculate the return-on-investment (ROI) when introducing technology in education or training is introduced. After an identification of major aspects that are of significance when talking about traditional ROI an alternative method called Simplified ROI is introduced. The main function of Simplified ROI is less to…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a powerful instructional approach. By working through assessable complex problem-solving tasks learners can be encouraged to actively engage in investigation and inquiry and to use high level cognitive thought processes to solve real-life problems in professional contexts. A critical element of a successful PBL…

This article focuses on how the teachers' pedagogical awareness is displayed and shaped while they learn to use information and communication technology (ICT) in their teaching and the aim here is to increase our understanding of university teachers as learners and as developers of their pedagogical awareness. The pedagogical awareness of teachers…

This paper describes a narrative-based interactive learning environment which aims to elucidate reasoning using interactive scenarios that may be used in training novices in decision-making. Its design is based on an approach to generating narrative from knowledge that has been modelled in specific decision/reasoning domains. The approach uses a…

In this paper we discuss how the Brigham Young University Technology Assisted Language Learning Group (BYU TALL Group) develops video-based dramatic narratives to increase the amount of context we provide to English as a second language (ESL) learners. First, we discuss the problem of decontextualization in education, the contextualism…