Rivet Education developed a Professional Learning Partner Guide (PLPG), a searchable database of learning providers with expertise in the adoption and implementation of High-Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM), in response to the lack of resources and guidance available to support districts with evaluation of professional learning (PL)…

The majority of Sub-Saharan African countries are facing a very negative teacher-learner ratio: one teacher for over 120 learners. In order to support the learner training, we propose optimizing search engines for learning contexts, to enable learners to take optimal advantage of the vast reservoir of Open Educational Resources (OER) available on…

This research investigates the instantiation of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) within a hard real-time (stringent time constraints), deterministic (maximum predictability) combat system (CS) environment. There are numerous stakeholders across the U.S. Department of the Navy who are affected by this development, and therefore the system…

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…

Today's scholars face an outstanding array of choices when choosing search tools: Google Scholar, discipline-specific abstracts and index databases, library discovery tools, and more recently, Microsoft's re-launch of their academic search tool, now dubbed Microsoft Academic Search. What are these tools' strengths for the emerging needs of…

Given the pace of innovation, not only in the gadget market but in how social media is changing society, the future isn't what it used to be, which is to say, it is not that far off, out of reach, and "gee whiz" tomorrow. The planning horizon has moved closer than ever. And far-off eventualities are here and gone before you know it. In this…

Half of servers in higher ed are virtualized. But that number's not high enough for Link Alander, interim vice chancellor and CIO at the Lone Star College System (Texas). He aspires to see 100 percent of the system's infrastructure requirements delivered as IT services from its own virtualized data centers or other cloud-based operators. Back in…

In mid-April, Amazon EC2 services had a small problem. Apparently, a large swath of its cloud computing environment had such substantial trouble that a number of customers had server issues. A number of high-profile sites, including Reddit, Evite, and Foursquare, went down when Amazon experienced issues in their US East 1a region (Justinb 2011).…

Resource discovery tops the charts as the foremost issue within the realm of library automation. As a new year commences, the author sees a more pressing need to accelerate the pace with which libraries deliver content and services in ways that users will find compelling, relevant, and convenient. The evolution of the web advances relentlessly,…

Intranets should provide quick and easy access to organizational information. The University of Alabama Libraries' intranet was only partially satisfying this basic expectation. Librarians could use it to find forms, policies, committee assignments, and meeting minutes, but navigating the libraries' intranet was neither quick nor easy, and it was…

Many organizations have evolved since their early attempts to mount digital exhibits on the Web and are experimenting with ways to increase the scale of their digitized collections by utilizing archival finding aid description rather than resource-intensive collections and exhibits. This article examines usability research to predict how such…

With the improvement of internet technologies and multimedia resources, traditional learning has been replaced by distance learning, web-based learning or others' e-learning learning styles. According to distance learning, there are many research organizations and companies who make efforts in developing the relevant systems. But they lack…

Health"Insite" is the Australian Government's Internet gateway to reliable health information online, providing access to over 15,000 information items on the websites of more than 80 approved information partners. The gateway provides a variety of searching and browsing options to assist users to find information on a wide range of…

Most UK universities can trace their current management information systems back to significant investments made in the 1990s, largely fuelled by concerns about the millenium bug and a change from character interfaces to graphical user interfaces following the introduction of the personal computer. It was during this period that institutions also…

Typical web lectures consist of two different kinds of media linked together: an audio- or video-recording and the corresponding slides or desktop recording. Both media are synchronized so that the slide or image shown corresponds to the position currently played in the time-based media stream. Web lectures are thus composite media consisting of a…