In past years, higher education's financial management side has been riddled with manual processes and aging mainframe applications. This article discusses schools which had taken advantage of an array of technologies that automate billing, payment processing, and refund processing in the case of overpayment. The investments are well worth it:…

Today's post-secondary students are technologically savvy and they expect faculty to use myriad web technologies for course delivery. This includes taking advantage of email, course web sites, and online learning communities. However, expectations now also include RSS, blogs, web- and pod-casting, extending the classroom experience to provide…

In teacher education, electronic portfolios provide an authentic form of assessment documenting students' personal and professional growth. Using the engineered-based system, College LiveText, and an off-the-shelf general tool, HyperStudio, pre-service teachers constructed e-portfolios as part of their teacher preparation requirements. This case…

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…

Explores how one private liberal arts university fulfilled its commitment to extend computing power to every student, faculty member, and staff person. Stresses the importance of planning for hardware and software standardization and creating a broad range of support mechanisms. (GR)

This paper offers a review of the origins, design strategy and implementation plans of the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) research and development programme. The programme is working to develop new models of teacher education, particularly school based training, including the creation of a programme webspace and an extensive bank…

This study focuses on how to support students who have to work together in small groups, and who do not know each other, in performing grounding discussion. It compares two different implementations of a script, one using a structured interface, one using a textual instruction, on students' discussion behavior. The experiment involved two…

This paper describes the achievements of an innovative eight-year research program first introduced in Mizoguchi and Bourdeau (2000), which was aimed at building a theory-aware authoring system by using ontological engineering. To date, we have proposed OMNIBUS, an ontology that comprehensively covers different learning/instructional theories and…

Running multimedia on a network, often difficult because of the memory and processing power required, is becoming easier thanks to new protocols and products. Those developing network design criteria may wish to consider making use of Fast Ethernet, Asynchronous Transfer Method (ATM), switches, "fat pipes", additional network…

Data integration is one of the single most challenging tasks any district can face. Fortunately for school districts throughout the country with data scattered in disparate systems, an open specification known as the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) is mitigating that challenge. SIF has emerged as a cornerstone of K-12 data warehousing,…

This article details the preparation of a software package tailored specifically for use in a university school counselor education program. The current implementation includes capability for text-based chat enhanced with video for use with clients, advisees, and off-campus supervisors. Examples and links to freeware programs and tutorials are…

Examines metaphor's limitations as a visual-rhetorical framework for designing, evaluating, and critiquing user interfaces. Outlines an alternate framework for visual rhetoric, that of genre ecologies, and discusses how it avoids some of the limitations of metaphor. Uses an empirical study of computer users to illustrate the genre-ecology…

This paper describes how digital talking books (DTBs) with embedded functionality for learners can be generated from content structured according to the OU OpenLearn schema. It includes examples showing how a software transformation developed from open source components can be used to remix OpenLearn content, and discusses issues concerning the…

The need to support users of the Internet with the selection of information is becoming more important. Learners in complex, self-organising Learning Networks have similar problems and need guidance to find and select most suitable learning activities, in order to attain their lifelong learning goals in the most efficient way. Several research…

This paper discusses a university-wide pilot designed to encourage academics to creatively explore learner-centred applications for digital audio. Participation in the pilot was diverse in terms of technical competence, confidence and contextual requirements and there was little prior experience of working with digital audio. Many innovative…