The attitude of instructors, students, course administrators, and course designers has a significant impact on the quality of a distance education program. The existing literature shows the factors that inhibit these groups from participating in this educational medium. This paper will attempt to review and assess the attitudes toward online…

E-learning is becoming a major component in academia today. Therefore, the success of e-learning online communities is crucial in order to ensure their permanency and effectiveness. There is a need for formalized guidelines in e-learning that instruct the designer (course instructor) on how to design, maintain, and manage a course. Some research…

Purpose: This paper proposes solutions to problems related to the maintenance and update of already existing e-learning courseware. Design/methodology/approach: A structured approach in form of a reference model for the re-engineering of existing educational material is presented. In this context, concepts already established in the area of…

The first two issues of E-Learning featured monographs by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, which they generously made available for publication. Both of these works, "Designs for Learning" and "Text-Made Text", are artifacts grounded in a larger shared project to which the two authors have been committed throughout more than two decades of sustained…

Digital or computer games have recently attracted the interest of education researchers and policy-makers for two main reasons: their interactivity, which is said to allow greater agency, and their inherent pleasures, which are linked to increased motivation to learn. However, the relationship between pleasure, agency and motivation in educational…

In the communities dealing with the design and implementation of on-line teaching and training (higher education, government, industry), SCORM is a hot topic these days. The "Sharable Content Object Reference Model" is a standard for the packaging and deployment of Web-based "learning objects," defined by Bob Banks as "a relatively small, reusable…

This paper describes a final year biosciences module consisting of workshops to which web-based tools were introduced. The ability of the online tools to facilitate group work and assess the students was investigated. The online module was delivered via WebCT as the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). The initial concept was to enhance rather than…

This paper uses the Open University of the Netherlands as an instructive case for the introduction of e-learning based on the IMS Learning Design specification (IMS LD). The IMS LD specification, as approved by the IMS Global Learning Consortium in 2003, enables the specification and encoding of learning scenarios that describe any design of a…

Preparing and developing e-learning materials is a costly and time consuming enterprise. This paper highlights the elements of effective design that we consider assist in the development of high quality materials in a cost efficient way. We introduce six elements of design and discuss each in some detail. These elements focus on paying attention…

This paper describes systems dynamics, reviews the literature of uses of systems concepts in distance education (DE), presents a preliminary model, and ends in a call to researchers to contribute to the building of a standard model of DE. (Contains 4 figures.)

As higher education and universities become a more mainstream interest in society, pressures mount to invent new curricula and new and more appropriate ways to support the curriculum invention process. This article offers an account of the experiences of one such double-barrelled invention process associated with a Graduate Diploma in Legal…

"Instructional Design: Case Studies in Communities of Practice" documents real-world experiences of instructional designers and staff developers who work in communities of practice. "Instructional Design: Case Studies in Communities of Practice" explains the strategies and heuristics used by instructional designers when working…

Higher Education is a vibrant, changing field of study. With roots in multiple disciplines, these degree programs prepare the administrators, faculty, and policy makers who direct the current and future higher education enterprise. At a time when higher education is changing rapidly, these programs are poised to frame the future of an educated…

Through case study research critical leadership and management tasks are identified regarding the integration of educational technology in teaching at research universities. The institutions studied, regardless their different characteristics and approaches, face common difficulties in engaging "second-wave" faculty. Furthermore, the coordination…

Across the globe, progressive universities are embracing any number of MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments), 3D environments, and "immersive" virtual reality tools. And within the next few months, several universities are expected to test so-called "telepresence" videoconferencing systems from Cisco Systems and other leading…