Education in the United States is becoming increasingly standardized, with the standards being initiated at the national level and then trickling down to the state level and finally the local level. Yet, this top-down approach to educational standards carries with it significant limitations, such as loss of local autonomy and restrictions on the creativity of educational software designers. Thi...

Many recent studies have shown that educational games are effective tools for learning [1]. Despite the recent popularity of game-based learning and some first general guidelines for the creation of such educational games [2], there is a lack of useful practical guidelines for specific game types that address all relevant aspects of design, implementation and testing. This might be explained wi...

This paper argues that an emphasis on training-for-the-job approaches has distracted designers from thinking about the meaning of their profession and the grand purpose of practising instructional design. Drawing from literature in the fields of sociology and educational technology, this paper synthesises discourses on civic professionalism in instructional design and technology, and proposes a...

The pervasiveness of cell phones among young people has made them an ideal platform to cater educational content informally (anywhere, anytime). Although there are a large number of mobile learning tools, educational games provide an adequate compromise between educational content and games that makes the informal educational exploration more enjoyable and engaging. However, most educational ga...

To choose suitable resources for personal competence development in the vast amount of open educational resources is a challenging task for a learner. Starting with a needs analysis of lifelong learners and learning designers we introduce two wayfinding services that are currently researched and developed in the framework of the Integrated Project TENCompetence. Then we discuss the role of thes...

The SEPIA system allows creating assistance systems that meet technical assistance needs. In this paper, we aim at the exploitation of SEPIA in the educational context by confronting it to pedagogical assistance needs. This exploitation shows the limitations in the SEPIA system: complex description of rules by pedagogical designers, lack of domain knowledge. Therefore, we present our patterns t...

The rising interest in repositories for educational material consolidates efforts of the diversified educational community. Developers, teachers, and designers have recognized the need for collaboration in order to create the best-possible learning objects, and, moreover, to preserve and reuse them. Developing learning objects in the field of Computer Graphics is archetypical in several aspects...