This paper reports on the process of developing a blended online engineering course at the Faculty of Engineering and Technology of the University of Botswana. It presents the actual development process in terms of its management, the University's preferred pedagogical approach to student-centred learning and the consequent technological choices…

The growth of the Internet has greatly increased the demand for server-side programming courses at colleges and universities. Students enrolled in such courses must be provided with server-based accounts that support the technologies that they are learning. The process of creating, managing and removing large numbers of student server accounts is…

Central Queensland University (CQU) has used paper based distance education materials, such as course profiles, study guides and resource materials since 1971. The purpose of this exploratory study was to review three different approaches to online delivery and assessment currently being used in the Faculty of Business and Law, CQU, and to analyse…

With the ever-increasing impact of information technology (IT) on society, universities are pushed to deliver the courses through the Internet by the format of Web course or online study. There are relatively few studies of how students construe this new mode of delivery and study. This study aimed to better understanding of how students construe…

With the infusion of the multimedia technology into the education arena, traditional educational materials can be translated into interactive electronic form through the use of multimedia authoring tools. This has allowed teachers to design and incorporate multimedia elements into the content to convey the message in a multi-sensory learning…

Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, as one of the major medical universities in Iran, is an academic organization which is also responsible for all health-related services in Isfahan province. By development of IT infrastructures in the university, top management decided to utilize the capabilities of the growing IT infrastructures in order to…

This paper outlines the design and development process of an online annotation system and how it is applied to the sphere of collaborative online learning. The architecture and design of the annotation system, illustrated in this paper, have been developed to enrich collaborative learning content through adding a layer of information in online…

This paper briefly introduces the trends towards e-learning and amplifies some examples of state of the art systems, pointing out that all of these are, to date, limited by adaptability and shareability of content and that it is necessary for industry to develop and use an inter-operability standard. Uses SCORM specifications to specify the…

Higher education (HE) is becoming a big business, with huge investments in IT technology supporting online learning. With the awareness of the knowledge economy has come a growing consciousness that HE constitutes a large industry or economic sector in its own right. In a marketing fashion, we understand that some customers present much greater…

An original concept for a Web-based role play "SurfingGlobalChange" is proposed on the basis of multi-year interdisciplinary teaching experience and constructivist pedagogy. Underlying didactic orientation is towards self-guided learning, acquiring socially compatible "competence to act" in a globalised world, self-optimising social procedures…

The authors have developed the "Ethernet Speaker" (ES), a network-enabled single board computer embedded into a conventional audio speaker. Audio streams are transmitted in the local area network using multicast packets, and the ES can select any one of them and play it back. A key requirement for the ES is that it must be capable of playing any…

The evaluation of virtual community usage and user behaviour has its roots in social science approaches such as interview, document analysis and survey. Little evaluation is carried out using traffic or protocol analysis. Business approaches to evaluating customer/business web site usage are more advanced, in particular using advanced web…

Although many universities require courses in management information systems for their business majors, little information exists as to what objectives should be included in the course, and the course topics vary greatly across institutions. Differences in course objectives even exist within schools if multiple sections of the course are taught by…

It is often stated that mobile wireless computing is going to be the next big technology revolution that will grip the world in the same way mobile telephones did in the 1990s. However, while the technology is rapidly improving, the rate of uptake has been lower than expected. This paper describes some of the reasons for this, and discusses some…

Argues that understanding the psychological drivers behind SMS uptake among key user groups could open the door to a range of user-centred applications capable of transforming handset usability--and hence operator revenues--for this inexpensive form of text messaging. Combines the findings of our own web-based survey of SMS users with…