Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management are becoming important topics at the university level, and are increasingly receiving course-level attention in the curriculum. In fact, the Information Systems Body of Knowledge specifically identifies Enterprise Architecture as an Information Systems-specific knowledge area. The…

Cryptography libraries are inflexible and difficult for developers to integrate with their applications. These difficulties are often encountered by applications, like PGP, which are non-intuitive for end-users and are often used improperly or not at all. This thesis discusses the negative impact of the current prevailing poor usability on…

For any given Game Based Learning (GBL) project to be successful, the player must learn something. Designers may base their work on pedagogical research, but actual game design is still largely driven by intuition. People are famously poor at unsupported methodical thinking and relying so much on instinct is an obvious weak point in GBL design…

Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) are frequently used to teach children abstract concepts, in science and mathematics. TUIs offer a natural and immediate form of interaction that promotes active and hands-on engagement and allows for exploration and reflection. Tangible objects are representational artifacts in their essence, and they increase the…

Technological advances over the last decade have had a significant impact on the teaching and learning experiences students encounter today. We now take technologies such as Web 2.0, mobile devices, cloud computing, podcasts, social networking, super-fast broadband, and connectedness for granted. So what about the student use of these types of…

Given that a user interface interacts with users, a critical factor to be considered in improving the usability of an e-learning user interface is user-friendliness. Affordances enable users to more easily approach and engage in learning tasks because they strengthen positive, activating emotions. However, most studies on affordances limit…

The discrete anatomy of the eye's intricate oculomotor system is conceptually difficult for novice students to grasp. This is problematic given that this group of muscles represents one of the most common sites of clinical intervention in the treatment of ocular motility disorders and other eye disorders. This project was designed to develop a…

This article describes the crossroads between learning analytics and learner engagement. The authors do this by describing specific challenges of using analytics to support student engagement from three distinct perspectives: pedagogical considerations, technological issues, and interface design concerns. While engaging online learners presents a…

The SMILI? (Student Models that Invite the Learner In) Open Learner Model Framework was created to provide a coherent picture of the many and diverse forms of Open Learner Models (OLMs). The aim was for SMILI? to provide researchers with a systematic way to describe, compare and critique OLMs. We expected it to highlight those areas where there…

This paper describes an ongoing study related to a conceptual design model, which is specific to instructional interface design to enhance courseware usage. It was found that most of the existing courseware applications focus on the needs of certain target with most of the courseware offer too little to inclusive learners. In addition, the use of…

In this article, we describe the rationale, design and evaluation of a widget-based dashboard to support scholars' awareness of their Research Networks. We introduce the concept of a Research Network and discuss Personal Research Environments that are built of as a development parallel to Personal Learning Environments. Based on the results…

In their 1994 article, "The Politics of the Interface: Power and its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones," compositionists Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe give examples of how certain features of word processing software and other programs used in writing classrooms (including their icons, clip art, interfaces, and file structures) can…

Data-driven instruction is still a huge scope and has many shades. One promising way of adding learning analytics to traditional teaching is to offer teachers accessible, data-driven information, either in a dashboard style or with a UI with which they could perform their own analysis on student data (e.g., Ben-Naim, Bain, & Marcus, 2009;…

Designing, validating, and deploying learning analytics tools for instructors or students is a challenge that requires techniques and methods from different disciplines, such as software engineering, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, educational design, and psychology. Whilst each has established its own design methodologies, we now…

Background and Context: In spite of the decades spent developing software visualization (SV), doubts still remain regarding their effectiveness. Furthermore, student engagement plays an important role in improving SV effectiveness as it is correlated with many positive academic outcomes. It has been shown that the existing SV has failed to engage…