Curb cuts and automatic doors are a commonplace in the physical world as they provide access to our buildings for persons with disabilities. In the world of the web, millions of individuals have the legal right to rely on electronic curb cuts so they too can access the web. To this end, a new generation of information systems graduates must…

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…

Following the increasing calls for a more skeptical analysis of web 2.0 and the empowerment of learners' voices in formulating upcoming technologies, this paper elaborates on the participatory design of a web learning environment. A total of 117 undergraduate students from two Greek Informatics Departments participated in 25 participatory design…

Online learning space design becomes a significant issue with the proliferation of online learning in higher education. Never before has the instructor been given such a privilege in building and molding the learning space to fulfill his/her instructional aspirations. However, enormous challenges are present to the instructor in taking advantage…

Institutions of higher education have invested heavily in learning management systems (LMS) for creating course websites. Yet, how to assess LMS effectiveness is not fully agreed upon. Based on institutional theory, this article considers student satisfaction as indicative of LMS success and proposes a lens of critical success factors (CSF) as a…

Bearing in mind the widespread use of multimedia resources in education, mainly due to the wide range of possibilities available on the Internet, teacher training must propel quality use of technology and foster updated knowledge and skills related to the Web 2.0, video production and publication, blog construction, wiki-based collaboration,…

Many efforts to improve the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both of these approaches depend on a complete division of work between…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of reflective thinking effects in the process of designing software on students' learning performances. The study contends that reflective thinking is a useful teaching strategy to improve learning performance among lower achieving students. Participants were students from two groups: Higher…

The explosive growth of the Internet has made the knowledge and skills for creating Web pages into general subjects that all students should learn. It is now common to teach the technical side of the production of Web pages and many teaching materials have been developed. However teaching the aesthetic side of Web page design has been neglected,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate proper website and courseware for e-learning in higher education. Methods used in this study included the data collection, the analysis surveys, the experts' in-depth interview, and the experts' focus group. Results indicated that there were 16 components for website, as well as 16 components for…

Universal design (UD), a concept that grew from the field of architecture, has recently emerged as a paradigm for designing instructional methods, curriculum, and assessments that are welcoming and accessible to students with a wide range of characteristics, including those related to race, ethnicity, native language, gender, age, and disability.…

Game-based learning has been a popular development and recommended as an effective pedagogy in educating new generations of learners. Few studies, however, have demonstrated the efficacy of game-based learning on learners' academic performance with empirical data. The described learning outcomes of game-based pedagogy within the limited available…

Researchers increasingly suggest that accessibility remains a prominent issue across the World Wide Web (www). This study raises awareness about issues of access in higher education. This qualitative research design utilized a listserv that invited university based webmasters to use freeware to evaluate the overall accessibility of their…

In this paper, data obtained from a university website accessibility and usability validation process are analyzed and used to demonstrate how the design process can affect the online experience for users with disabilities. Interviews, observations, and use data (e.g. where users clicked on a page or what path taken through a site) were collected.…