A study was conducted to investigate the views of 40 Australian service providers on the support and service needs of parents with intellectual disabilities and to discover key issues faced by the providers. The special needs of the parents, desirable service characteristics, and constraints on service delivery are identified. (CR)

This article provides an overview of Telementoring Orchestrator[TM] (TMO), a new web-based software tool designed to aid small or large organizations in supporting telementoring programs (also called online mentoring or e-mentoring programs). In this report, we review the research that inspired the design of the software, and survey the major…

This paper presents an empirical study involving initiatives that encouraged students to log onto online courses in entrepreneurship delivered by the University of Glamorgan. The aim of the research was to explore items of interest to the online students that may increase participation in the forums and hence potentially enhanced engagement with…

This paper describes how the authors use a mixture of World Wide Web (WWW)-based functionalities and new didactics to teach educational technology students at the University of Twente (Netherlands) about the design of WWW-based learning environments. Topics discussed include: (1) the content of courses about the design of educational WWW…

This paper proposes a user-centered framework for intranet design that is based on an understanding of people, their typical problems, information behaviors, and situated contexts. It is argued that by adopting such an approach, intranets can be designed which facilitate organizational information access and use. The first section of the paper…

Despite the fact that e-Learning exists for a relatively long time, it is still in its infancy. Current e-Learning systems on the market are limited to technical gadgets and organizational aspects of teaching, instead of supporting the learning. As a result the learner has become deindividualized and demoted to a noncritical homogenous user. One…

This survey examined the home pages of 36 Australian university library World Wide Web sites. Reports were run on these pages, using a service that checks the HTML for validity and reports errors, a service that checks usability by the visually disabled, and a program that checks the HTML, corrects and reports errors, and improves efficiency style…

This paper describes the concept of online knowledge communities. The concept is defined, and six qualities of online communities are identified: members (user roles are clearly defined); mission (generally accepted goal-statement, ideas, beliefs, etc.); commitment (members give their loyalty to the mission); social interaction (frequent…

This document was produced to provide architects, planners, and builders with an educational design brief for Dorset, England school grounds. The County Education Planning and Development Department will use it as an educational and curriculum statement to complement their more detailed and specific building briefs. The brief uses many of the…

While electronic learning environments provide exciting possibilities for supporting learners, the design of the user interface is as yet little understood. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of specific usability attributes for online learning courses. A review of related papers on usability methods and learning theories…

Today we are confronted with a new challenge in product development: "Diversity" needs to be implemented in the engineering design and development teams. Such diversity means to "mirror" within the teams the characteristics of different customer groups: the two genders, the different age groups, and the different cultural…

School classes can be conceptualized as bounded communities of practice made up of teachers and students working together to build knowledge. Teachers make design decisions about physical and virtual spaces supported by information and communications technologies, and about curriculum. Design influences how students go about their work, and their…

Traces the development of an online unit for Indigenous Australian learners, and accounts for cultural issues that impacted on the design of learning tasks and the associated avenues for communication provided to learners. In this context, culturally responsive design was ensured by the adoption of Lave's (1991) community of practice model. (AEF)

Discusses issues in training students to be culturally literate and the process for creating, designing, and developing cross-cultural (globalized) instructional materials. Defines terms associated with globalizing instructional materials and the process of adapting these materials to other cultures. Outlines cultural and technical considerations…

This paper examines how values education is taught in Chinese and American elementary schools and what values are advocated in Chinese and American elementary textbooks. Differences in attitude, content, method, and outcome are analyzed in the context of social and cultural backgrounds. It is concluded that American textbooks tend to emphasize…