This article presents a study on using the PAIR-up model to evaluate active learning spaces. The PAIR-up model takes advantage of interdisciplinary partnerships, assessment, innovation, and reevaluation of current views to support learning space design. Using PAIR-up, the University of Minnesota designed, constructed, and assessed two pilot Active…

A "humanitarian market" for off-grid renewable energy technologies for displaced populations in remote areas has emerged. Within this market, there are multiple stakeholder agendas. End-user needs and sustainable development goals are currently not considered through the customer-enterprise relationship and the applied product and…

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…

The subject of urban quality of life and the promotion of its concept in particular, has always been the central focus of urban designers. This term is a multi-conceptual and dimensions. However most of the scholars have agreed that the concept consisted from two main dimensions; objective and subjective which these two approaches are used for its…

With the rise of Web pages providing interactive support for problem-solving or providing large amounts of information on which a person is expected to act, designers and writers need to consider how a person interacts with increasingly complex information-rich environments and how they intend to use the information. This article examines some of…

Instructional systems design (ISD) has been frequently criticised as taking too long to implement, calling for a reduction in cycle time--the time that elapses between project initiation and delivery. While instructional design research has historically focused on increasing "learner" efficiencies, the study of what instructional designers do to…

This paper is a case study of a Master of Library and Information Studies degree program online option that has been unusually successful in retaining and graduating students. Design characteristics of this program that has maintained a retention rate of over 90 percent over five years are described and mapped to the literature on distance…

University-district partnerships for preparing school leaders typically have well-defined organizational structures, established practices and procedures, and parity among partners--all of which can take considerable time and effort to achieve. Thus, is it realistic to expect that university-district partnerships will emerge simply through…

Multiuser immersive learning scenarios hold strong potential for lifelong learning as they can support the acquisition of higher order skills in an effective, efficient, and attractive way. Existing virtual worlds, game development platforms, and game engines only partly cater for the proliferation of such learning scenarios as they are often…

The serious games community is moving toward research focusing on direct comparisons between learning outcomes of serious games and those of more traditional training methods. Such comparisons are difficult, however, due to the lack of a consistent taxonomy of game attributes for serious games. Without a clear understanding of what truly…

After speculation in literature about the nature of Personal Learning Environments, research in the design and development of PLEs is now in progress. This paper reports on the first phase of the authors' research on PLE, the identification process of what potential users would consider important components, applications, and tools in a PLE. The…

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…

Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) are known to possess great potential in supporting learning because of their ability to simulate a real classroom learning environment. But research in this area has produced mixed results. The reason for this remains puzzling. This paper is written with two purposes: (1) to examine some recent research and…

According to the Internet World Stats (2010), the growth rate of internet usage in the world is 444.8 % from 2000 to 2010. Since the number of internet users is rapidly increasing with each passed year, e-learning is often identified with web-based learning. The institutions, which deliver e-learning service via the use of computer and internet,…

In these troubled economic times, members of college and university communities must provide effective learning environments to support ever-changing curricula while reducing budgets. At the same time, a growing body of literature points to shifting needs of the variously named digital natives, Millennials or the Net Generation. This article…