With changes to higher education being significantly impacted by the rapid pace of technological evolution in the new millennium, there is a need to find greater humanity in the course development process. As traditional mediators and creative collaborators in the process of course design, educational designers are well positioned to bring spirit and soul to their work with academic staff. This...

The research presented in this paper takes as its starting point a review of the knowledge modeling capabilities of Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs)and in particular of the EML-OU from the Open University of the Netherlands. We explain how educational designers need modeling languages addressing cognitive, structural and social aspects of education. For each of these three aspects, we make...

The new challenge for designers and Human Computer Interaction researchers is to develop software tools and applications for effective e-learning. Usability is one of the most important aspects of software applications. However, in practice, not much attention is given to this issue during testing. Evaluators often do not have the knowledge, instruments and/or time available to handle usability...

The Virtual Usability Laboratory (VUL) is a software tool developed to remotely capture and analyze a wide variety of usage data on Web-based educational games and simulations. The VUL allows for automated remote collection and integration of such data as user activity logs, on-line demographic questionnaire responses, and data from automatically triggered pop up questions at critical points in...

A dilemma faced by teachers, and increasingly by designers of educational software, is the trade-off between teaching new material and reviewing what has already been taught. Complicating matters, review is useful only if it is neither too soon nor too late. Moreover, different students need to review at different rates. We present a mathematical model that captures these issues in idealized fo...

Design principles are universal and may be translated onto the newest trends and emergent technologies. In this research study we combined the perspectives provided by two sources to create a set of recommended design principles for technology-enhanced learning environments. One source was the How People Learn framework (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). The second source was a series of inte...

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. AQ2 The learning design studio is a collaborative, blended, project-based framework for training teachers in effective and evidence-based use of educationa...

This paper presents a research started in 2010 with the aim of fostering the creativity of teachers through the design of Game-Based Learning scenarios. The research has been carried out involving teachers and trainers in the co-design and implementation of digital games as educational resources. Based on the results grained from the research, this paper highlights successful factors of GBL, as...

Over the past years, a number of international initiatives that recognize the importance of sharing and reusing digital educational resources among educational communities through the use of Learning Object Repositories (LORs) have emerged. Typically, these initiatives focus on collecting digital educational resources that are offered by their creators for open access and potential reuse. Never...