In this paper we review the contribution of our original work titled "Simulating Instructional Roles Through Pedagogical Agents" published in the "International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Education" (Baylor and Kim in "Computers and Human Behavior," 25(2), 450-457, 2005). Our original work operationalized…

Educating our future citizens in science and engineering is vitally important to ensure future advancement. Presently, in the light of environmental sustainability, it is critical that students learn concepts relating to energy, its consumption and future demands. In this article, we harness the state of the educational technology, namely…

This paper addresses the issue of effective content-delivery of Computer Science subjects taking advantage of a university intranet. The proposal described herein for teaching a subject like Combinatorics and Graph Theory (CGT) is to supplement lectures with a moderated online forum against an associated intranet portal, which is referred to as a…

In recent years, massive open online Courses (MOOCs) as an online instruction format have attracted educators' attention in higher education. While there are many news reports and blog entries about MOOCs, evidence-based research is still emerging. Research examining the learners' perspective on taking a MOOC is scarce but very much needed. This…

Educational materials of embedded systems are currently used in many educational institutions. However, they have difficulties in arousing the interest of students. One of the reasons is that a poor CPU (central processing unit), which has been loaded in the current materials, cannot execute the multimedia processing. In order to make the…

The present study examined students' first impressions of different aesthetic treatments for the same web-based lesson about the experiences of British soldiers during World War I as expressed through examples of trench poetry. Holding site content and functionality constant, the interface design's visual presentation was manipulated along two…

This research applies Socio-Cultural theory and Distributed Cognition/Activity theory to conceptualize the design of collaborative learning activities in large shared digital spaces. The paper begins by providing a summary of previous work in the creation of a technology platform for large shared digital spaces. It then details how Socio-Cultural…

This study explores the interactivity of course-management systems (CMSs). First, this study reviews the concepts of interactivity, interactivity dimension, and interaction type on the basis of related theories and studies. Second, this study analyzes the interactive functions attributable to the six major CMSs in Taiwan colleges and universities,…

Energy education has been conducted to equip learners with relevant energy conservation knowledge for many years. However, learners seldom put the knowledge into practice and even have few ideas about how to reduce energy consumption. To this end, there is a need to address this issue to improve the efficiency of energy education. One of the…

This article surveys research in the areas of aesthetics and design, usability, visual aesthetics in education, and recent statistics related to online education. The focus of the article is on defining the role of visual content and aesthetics in the user interface and exploring what importance aesthetics and visual content have to education.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usability (effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction) of e-feedback interfaces. The experiment compares a traditional visual approach with a multimodal approach in order to determine the impact of multimodal metaphors upon the user's understanding, reasoning and engagement with the…

Understanding the user and customizing the interface to augment cognition and usability are goals of human computer interaction research and design. Yet, little is known about the influence of individual visual-verbal information presentation preferences on visual navigation and screen element usage. If consistent differences in visual navigation…

With the widespread availability of Internet and computer technology, on-line web-based learning has become prevalent in the field of teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language (CSL/CFL). This study examined the concepts of usability and types of design elements that help construct an effective web-based learning environment, as well as their…

As graphically driven, animated, interactive applications offer educators new opportunities for shaping course content, new avenues for research arise as well. Along with these developments comes a need to study the effectiveness of the individual tools at our disposal as well as various methods for integrating those tools in a classroom setting.…

Over the last decade, the Intelligent Computer Tutoring Group (ICTG) has implemented many successful constraint-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) in a variety of instructional domains. Our tutors have proven their effectiveness not only in controlled lab studies but also in real classrooms, and some of them have been commercialized.…