Higher education's interest in digital content, especially e-books, has gone off the charts. With the rapid acceptance of e-books for pleasure reading, attention has now shifted to e-textbooks and their promise of significant cost savings and cutting-edge features. But getting a good grasp on the fast-moving realm of digital content for higher…

Rough set theory (RST) is an emerging technique used to deal with problems in data mining and knowledge acquisition. However, the RST approach has not been widely explored in the field of academic achievement. This investigation developed an improved RST (IMRST) model, which employs linear discriminant analysis to determine a reduct of RST, and…

Self-explaining, which asks students to generate explanations while reading a text, is a self-constructive activity and is helpful for students' learning. Studies have revealed that prompts by a human tutor promote students' self-explanations. However, most studies on self-explaining focus on spoken self-explanations. This study investigates the…

This article discusses the growing demand of using touchscreen interface. Consumers are now seeing touchscreens in a wide variety of electronics, not only in competitors to the iPhone from Sony, Samsung, Motorola, LG and T-Mobile, but also in desktop PCs, printers and copiers, televisions, and MP3 players. Teens, if they don't have a touch-enabled…

From a theoretical viewpoint, educational interfaces that facilitate communicative actions involving representations central to a domain can maximize students' effort associated with constructing new schemas. In addition, interfaces that minimize working memory demands due to the interface per se, for example by mimicking existing non-digital work…

Digital library is commonly seen as a type of information retrieval system which stores and accesses digital content remotely via computer networks. However, the vision of digital libraries is not limited to technology or management, but user experience. This book is an attempt to share the practical experiences of solutions to the operation of…

Game-based learning harnesses the advantages of computer games technology to create a fun, motivating and interactive virtual learning environment that promotes problem-based experiential learning. Such an approach is advocated by many commentators to provide an enhanced learning experience than those based on traditional didactic methods.…

Navigation issues and disorientation have been of interest to many researchers with different scientific and theoretical questions. However, previous work on this type of comparative and experimentation has been limited. In particular, little is known about the relationship among ease of use, disorientation, and interface windowing modes in a…

The need to educate a competitive workforce is a global problem. In the US, for example, despite billions of dollars spent to improve the educational system, approximately 35% of students never finish high school. The drop rate among some demographic groups is as high as 50-60%. At the college level in the US only 30% of students graduate from…

Lewis structures are important for learning chemistry as they serve as an essential link between the structure of chemical compounds and their function. Unfortunately, the creation of valid Lewis structures remains an elusive goal for many students. In recent years, several web-based programs have been created that allow students to receive…

This dissertation makes the claim that electronic scholarly editions have the potential to produce more reliable scholarly texts than their print-based antecedents. It consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a brief conclusion. It originated in my work creating the Elwood Viewer, a sophisticated software browser written to display TEI…

Video-heavy distance learning programs can put a strain on the campus network. This article describes how three institutions are managing bandwidth to ensure high-quality service for eLearning students.

Purpose: Playing back recorded lectures on handheld devices offers interesting perspectives for learning, but suffers from small screen sizes. The purpose of this paper is to propose several semi-automatic post-processing steps in order to improve usability by providing a better readability and additional navigation functionality.…

This thesis is about a design process for creating "educationally relevant" tools. I submit that the key to creating tools that are educationally relevant is to focus on ensuring a high degree of alignment between the designed tool and the broader educational context into which the tool will be integrated. The thesis presents methods and processes…

As part of the research carried out at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), the Paper Authentication and Integrity Research (PAIR) project was launched. We began by investigating how one recent technology affected student learning outcomes. One aspect of this research was to study the…