Emerging E-Learning Technologies

E-learning offers a tremendous amount of new features, including time and location independent studying, consolidation of a bundle of learning resources over the Internet, and presentation of e-learning content in various media types. These benefits significantly improve the effectiveness of learning for e-learning users. Hence, many institutions or organizations have already adopted or had a trial of different kinds of e-learning systems to enhance both the teaching process and the way of communication among e-learning users. However, there still exists some substantial problems to solve before e-learning systems can be made ideal for serving the community. Particularly, we need a way to formulate e-learning content such that one may effectively retrieve relevant pieces of learning material from an e-learning system. In addition, the e-learning content should also be presented in an elegant way to provide a good perception and understanding to elearning users. The Fourth International Conference on Web-Based Learning 2005 (ICWL’05) was held at City University of Hong Kong (China) in July 2005. It was part of our continuous effort to address many of the aforementioned issues. The conference received about 100 submissions. This special issue collects the extended version of some of the best papers presented at the conference.