Today's hyper-connected students live in a world of instant interpersonal communications and virtually infinite access to information and educational resources. But this networked world, and the powerful learning tools it offers, has yet to penetrate the typical classroom. In many ways educational institutions are spinning their curricular wheels,…

Published papers on the area of online assessment have mainly focused on instructors' assessment of online discussion forums or computer-assisted testing in a highly structured environment with a narrow focus on multiple choice or true-false types of questions. With the exponential growth of online courses and many educational institutions looking…

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…

Special classes of asynchronous e-learning systems are the intelligent tutoring systems which represent an advanced learning and teaching environment adaptable to individual student's characteristics. Authoring shells have an environment that enables development of the intelligent tutoring systems. In this paper we present, in entirety, for the…

Web 2.0 communication tools have considerable promise for supporting collaborative learning. But there is a need for research examining learners' and teachers' experiences of the newer communication tools, such as wikis, in comparison with well-established tools, such as discussion forums. This paper reports on an initiative where distance…

This article proposes a mathematical model of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), based on observations of the behaviour of these systems. One of the most important problems of pedagogical software is to establish a common language between the knowledge areas involved in their development, basically pedagogical, computing and domain areas. A…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to describe a project to provide an online web portal that can be used as a front-end for all university users--students, teachers, staff--and services, library, administration, e-learning, and e-mail. Design/methodology/approach: The profile model proposed is mainly inheritable, defined by profile components with…

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…

Using Vygotsky's notion of double stimulation as an analytical tool, we discuss the complex relationship between tasks, tools, and agency in CSCL environments. Empirically we examine how learners in a Norwegian senior high school class learning English as a foreign language approach and respond to an open-ended and collectively oriented task using…

Making educational materials freely available on the web can be seen as a noble enterprise in itself but as a way to address the call for people to become lifelong learners. The world is rapidly changing, requiring us to continuously update our knowledge and skills. A problem with this approach to lifelong learning is that the free materials that…

Introduction: Virtual communities play an important role in innovation. The paper focuses on the particular form of collective action in virtual communities underlying as Open Source software development projects. Method: Building on resource mobilization theory and private-collective innovation, we propose a theory of collective action in…

Innovations in network and information technology have transformed traditional classroom lectures into new approaches that have given universities the opportunity to create a virtual laboratory. However, there is no systematic framework in existing approaches for the development of virtual laboratories. Further, developing a virtual laboratory…

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…

The ability to apply existing knowledge in new situations and settings is clearly a vital skill that all students need to develop. Nowhere is this truer than in the rapidly developing world of Web-based learning, which is characterized by non-sequential courses and the absence of an effective cross-subject guidance system. As a result, questions…

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,…