This article describes practical issues related to the design and the development of a Web-Based Learning Environment (Web-LE) for high school students. The purpose of the Fossilization Web-LE was to help students understand the process of fossilization, which is a complex phenomenon and is affected by many factors. The instructional design team…

Observing young children learning is an indispensable part of teaching in the early years and this is clearly acknowledged in the "Curriculum guidance for the foundation stage." It is through observing and assessing learning that one can find out what children know and what skills and concepts they appear to have acquired. In this…

Many people believe that educational games are effective because they motivate children to actively engage in a learning activity as part of playing the game. However, seminal work by Malone, exploring the motivational aspects of digital games, concluded that the educational effectiveness of a digital game depends on the way in which learning…

Business school law courses should promote understanding of legal processes affecting business, help students learn to recognize legal issues and manage legal risks, increase ethical sensitivity, and help students to develop critical thinking skills. To this end, business law and legal environment textbooks tend to focus on ethical and legal…

First year students perceive their transition to college in a variety of ways. They may look at their first year as a new beginning or chapter in their lives; as either gaining or losing status; as confusing, challenging, or enlightening; or as a pleasant or unpleasant experience. Because these students are "simultaneously trying to adapt to…

In this study we investigated the lives and academic histories of eight students enrolled in an alternative-school program in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Through the triangulation of interviews, fieldnotes, local newspaper articles, artifacts such as student work and information provided in cumulative folders, and a battery of measures of…

Members of the Department of Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Melbourne have developed a range of multimedia resources for undergraduate education students, that allow the students to participate in authentic tasks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to arrange for large numbers of students. The multimedia…

This paper describes some of the pedagogical and technical issues involved in adopting a hybrid approach to CALL materials development. It illustrates some of these issues with reference to a vocational CALL project, LANCAM, which took such a hybrid approach. It describes some of the benefits and considerations involved in hybrid development and…

Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Applications (EAHA) provide personalized views on the learning content to individual learners. They also offer adaptive sequencing (navigation) over the learning content based on rules that stem from the user model requirements and the instructional strategies. EAHA are gaining the focus of the research community as…

Purpose: To describe an approach to course redesign that may provide others in the field with a "template" to follow or modify when course redesign is necessary. Design/methodology/approach: Action research implies making a change and then observing and responding to the consequences of that change. Making the change in this course involved:…

Purpose--To outline the themes, topics and material used in a new course, Global business and sustainability, for business educators interested in integrating this emerging paradigm into their courses. Design/methodology/approach--The structure, design and reference materials for the Global business and sustainability course are reviewed. Specific…

This article is based on the author's own strategies to foster community among educators. As a new, young, female junior faculty member in the School of Education at a major research university, the author has struggled to build a strong sense of community in her school. She has also encountered ambivalence about openly expressing…

This paper reports the results of a study into the conditions that facilitate the implementation of instructional innovations. One hundred seventy-nine participants completed an online instrument designed to determine the relative importance of eight conditions shown to facilitate implementation. This paper describes the construction and testing…

This paper centres on the sense of isolation that online study may engender among learners, a factor often ignored by many educators, but one that may make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful online learning environment for many students. The importance of a proper appreciation of the learners' social context is stressed, as is…

In the summer of 2003, members of Purdue University's School of Technology decided to produce 90 hours of HDTV-quality instructional video as part of a distance-learning initiative. To fully exploit the power of the video medium and the added resolution of high-definition television, the team used virtual-set and advanced computer-graphics…