In the past, the term e-learning referred to any method of learning that used electronic delivery methods. With the advent of the Internet however, e-learning has evolved and the term is now most commonly used to refer to online courses. A multitude of systems are now available to manage and deliver learning content online. While these have proved…

Educational institutions have rushed to put their academic resources and services online, beginning the global community onto a common platform and awakening the interest of investors. Despite continuing technical challenges, online education shows great promise. Open source software offers one approach to addressing the technical problems in…

Traditional hypermedia applications present the same content and provide identical navigational support to all users. Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) make it possible to construct personalized presentations to each user, according to preferences and needs identified. We present in this paper an alternative approach to educational AHS where a…

The online participatory exam transforms the traditional exam into a constructivist, cooperative and engaging learning experience. Students learn from designing and answering exam questions, from evaluating their peers' performance, and from reading questions, answers and evaluations. This paper, aimed at faculty who teach online and at…

Many students now are receiving instruction in online environments created by universities, museums, corporations, and even students. What features of a given online course contribute to its effectiveness? This paper addresses that query by proposing and applying an analytic framework to five online introductory chemistry courses. Introductory…

Virtual worlds are engaging, stimulating spaces where students can meet online for normal class activities, including lectures, discussions, case studies, projects, papers, exams, and labs. Classes are a mix of synchronous and asynchronous activity. A virtual world class differs from a traditional course management system, such as Blackboard or…

The goal of this article is to draw a roadmap for designing an "ideal" virtual world for higher education, pointing decision-makers in a general direction for implementing virtual worlds and noting various barriers along the way. When using a roadmap, one can take many different paths to reach a desired destination. Similarly, institutions can…

Web is a globally distributed, still highly personalized media for cost-effective delivery of multimedia information and services. Web is expected to have a strong impact on almost every aspect of how we learn. "Total Quality" is the totality of features, as perceived by the customers of the product or service. Totality of features…

The paper reports the theoretical underpinnings for the pedagogical role and rationale for adopting 3D virtual worlds for socialisation and knowledge creation in distance education. Socialisation or "knowing one another" in remote distributed environments can be achieved through synchronous technologies such as instant messaging, audio and…

Virtual Worlds have become an attractive platform for work, play, and learning. Businesses, including the public sector and academia, are increasingly investing their time, money, and attention to understanding the value of virtual worlds as a productivity tool. For example, educators are leading the way with research in Second Life, one of the…

In order to examine current online course delivery systems, the authors created and conducted a survey that examined both face-to-face (FTF) and online education (OE) classes offered at 46 universities and some community colleges in the United States, as well as at some foreign universities. Students were asked whether they preferred FTF or OE…

The design of virtual learning environments for post-secondary instruction is rapidly increasing among public and private universities. While the quantity of online courses over the past 10 years has exponentially increased, the quality of these courses has not. As universities increase their online teaching activities, real concern about the best…

One-size-fits-all educational innovations do not work because they ignore contextual factors that determine an intervention's efficacy in a particular local situation. This paper presents a framework on how to design educational innovations for scalability through enhancing their adaptability for effective usage in a wide variety of settings. The…

This paper presents the design and assesses the results of an international collaborative course of American and Canadian undergraduates on the topic of postconflict peacebuilding. Using online discussions, a web-based role-play simulation, and videoconferencing this collaborative course sought to enhance student engagement with the material by…

This paper presents a novel instructional model for e-learning and an evaluation study to determine the effectiveness of this model for teaching Java language programming to information technology specialists working for the Spanish Public Administration. This is a general-purpose model that combines objectivist and constructivist learning…