In 2018, New America partnered with uAspire, a nonprofit focused on college access and affordability, to review thousands of financial aid offers from over 500 colleges and universities. The resulting report, "Decoding the Cost of College: The Case for Transparent Financial Aid Award Letters," recommended several minimum bars financial…

Recognising the usability challenges that are linked to tools like the Blackboard learning management system are significant. This paper presents the outcome of an assessment of adherence to design principles on Blackboard from the learner-user perspective at Botho University, Botswana. As the university is shifting from a conventional teaching…

This article focuses on applying the ethics of the product features during the students' design education. Good/Bad design term is a conventional approach to discuss the ethical/unethical design values of the products. It is noted that different aspects of the product design such as visual information design, interface design, and appearance…

There is now a preponderance of evidence suggesting that the types of online course management software (OCMS) used in purely online undergraduate college courses, do not meet the needs of younger immature students. These students often lack the learning skills necessary to succeed in such courses, nor do the popular OCMS include the vigilance…

Despite the dynamic and interactive features of digital text, the visual design guidelines for digital text are similar to those for printed text. The purpose of this study was to develop visual design guidelines for improving learning from dynamic and interactive digital text and to validate them by controlled testing. Two structure design…

Collaborative learning technologies (tools that are used for facilitating or mediating collaborative learning) have been widely incorporated in distance education as well as broadly adopted in higher education. While a range of collaborative technologies has been incorporated, their implementation has often failed to align with well-established…

In countless discussions over the past ten years with educators considering the adoption of the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric™, the most common question asked is, "Can you prove that applying the QM Rubric to an online course improves outcomes--retention, grades, learner satisfaction?" This question seems necessary, reasonable, and even…

Gamification is an increasingly acceptable alternative to traditional classroom structures and practices that is based on the notion that games can be engaging to students. Gamification consists of applying game concepts such as challenges, rewards, and leaderboards to educational materials and courses. While gamification in the classroom is not…

This paper describes accessible collaborative learning using mobile devices with mobile enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for all learners, teachers and other users. Notes taken live during lectures using…

When a website has become a virtual storage closet rather than a place where useful, usable content is created, published, and organized, there is a problem. If audiences cannot quickly and easily find what they are looking for when they visit a website--and are not interested in what they find when they get there--they will get frustrated and…

This article describes a recently introduced module at University College Dublin School of Information and Library Studies (SILS), entitled "Information Architecture: Designing the Web." The module provides students with a realistic experience of how information architects apply their skills to produce usable web sites, via a project to…

With the changing face of higher education comes a demand to include new technological tools. Universities need to build their capacity to respond to new technology-related challenges. The introduction of ePortfolios is a significant strategy in this response. A number of organizational change management models are used to analyze the…

This article presents the design and development of i*CATch, a construction kit for physical and wearable computing that was designed to be scalable, plug-and-play, and to provide support for iterative and exploratory learning. It consists of a standardized construction interface that can be adapted for a wide range of soft textiles or electronic…

Although the influence of colour on size perception has been known for a century, there is only limited research on interventions that can reduce this effect. This study was therefore undertaken in order to identify appropriate interventions and propose design guidelines for information visualisation, especially in applications where size…

The learner-centered paradigm of instruction differs in such fundamental ways from the teacher-centered paradigm that it requires technology to serve very different functions. In 2006, a research team at Indiana University began to work on identifying those functions and published their results in 2008. Subsequently, the team elaborated and…