This article points out the importance of discussions about distance-learning quality, formats, and appropriate usage. It addresses some elementary issues, trying to bring up questions and to answer them. Particularly, this article talks how modern technologies play important roles in the design of distance education.

This is a grant proposal by the OSPI, a community of individuals and organizations dedicated to the creation of open source software for (learning) electonic portfolios. Formed in January 2003, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is a collaborative, open-source, software development project based on the University of Minnesota Enterprise System's electronic portfolio software. The University of Minnesota (U of MN), University of Delaware, and the r-smart group, founded this collaborative to open the evolution of the U of MN ePortfolio to diverse input, rapid development, and widespread use. Mission Create and sustain leading production ePortfolio software. Build a software platform to accelerate ePortfolio innovation for teaching and learning. Influence and reflect best practices in portfolio thinking. Influence the movement of open source in education. Source: http://www.theospi.org/

In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shocked the education world by announcing that it would create a Web site whereby professors could make their course materials available to the electronic world for free. Five years later the OpenCourseWare (OCW) site contains materials for 1,400 courses with nearly 20 million visitors viewing MIT OCW content since October 2003. With other institutions beginning to follow MITâ s lead, has OCW started a revolution in education, or will it always be an â MIT thingâ ? My essay explores the history of the OCW program; discusses site content, architecture, technology, and copyright policies; overall worldwide impact; and considers future directions of OCW.

This is a presentation of 21 slides at the Leadership Development session of the ASIST 2005 Annual Meeting at Charlotte, N.C. on October 30. It discusses the 2002 virtual community building experiment undertaken by the Arizona Chapter of ASIST. The chapter experimented with three different pieces of software, a wiki, a content management system, and slashcode. This presentation was also video-taped and may become available through the ASIST website, http://www.asis.org/.

From the Executive Summary of the 67 page Report: The National Science Board (NSB, the Board) recognizes the growing importance of these digital data collections for research and education, their potential for broadening participation in research at all levels, the ever increasing National Science Foundation (NSF, the Foundation) investment in creating and maintaining the collections, and the rapid multiplication of collections with a potential for decades of curation. In response the Board formed the Long-lived Data Collections Task Force. The Board and the task force undertook an analysis of the policy issues relevant to long-lived digital data collections. This report provides the findings and recommendations arising from that analysis. The primary purpose of this report is to frame the issues and to begin a broad discourse. Specifically, the NSB and NSF working together â with each fulfilling its respective responsibilities â need to take stock of the current NSF policies that lead to Foundation funding of a large number of data collections with an indeterminate lifetime and to ask what deliberate strategies will best serve the multiple research and education communities. The analysis of policy issues in Chapter IV and the specific recommendations in Chapter V of this report provide a framework within which that shared goal can be pursued over the coming months. The broader discourse would be better served by interaction, cooperation, and coordination among the relevant agencies and communities at the national and international levels. Chapters II and III of this report, describing the fundamental elements of data collections and curation, provide a useful reference upon which interagency and international discussions can be undertaken. The Board recommends that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) take the lead in initiating and coordinating these interagency and international discussions.

Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon and Gabbard (1998) Hypermedia as an educational technology: a review of the empirical literature on learner comprehension, control and style. Review of Educational Research, 68(3), 322, 349. Reprinted in P. Smith and A. Pellegrinni (eds.) (2000) The Psychology of Education: Major Themes, London: Routledge, 3, 496-531. Abstract: By virtue of its enabling rapid, non-linear access to multiple forms of information, hypermedia technology is considered a major advance in the development of educational tools to enhance learning and a massive literature on the use of hypermedia in education has emerged. The present review examines the published findings from experimental studies of hypermedia which emphasized quantitative, empirical methods to assess learning outcomes. Specifically, the review categorizes this research into three themes: studies of learner comprehension compared across hypermedia and other media; effects on learning outcome offered by increased learner control in hypermedia environments, and the individual differences that exist in learner response to hypermedia. The review concludes that to date, the benefits of hypermedia in education are limited to learning tasks reliant on repeated manipulation and searching of information, and are differentially distributed across learners depending on their ability and preferred learning style. Methodological and analytical shortcomings in this literature limit the generalizability of all findings in this domain. Suggestions for addressing these problems in future research and theory development are outlined.

Using Information Technology to Transform the Way We Learn highlights PITACâ s findings and recommendations on how the Federal government can provide the leadership needed to solve key information technology challenges and to improve the quality of, and public access to educational and training experiences. The overarching recommendation in this report calls for the Federal government to make the integration of information technology with education and training a national priority. In addition, the Federal government should: *Establish and coordinate a major research initiative for information technology in education and training *Establish focused government-industry-foundation partnerships to aggressively pursue the information technology research program *Develop programs that enable educators and related professionals to use information technology effectively *Work with industry and academia to develop technical standards for extendable component-based technologies and infrastructures that can be widely used in online education and training

Access to educational material has become an important issue for many stakeholders and the focus of many projects worldwide. Resource discovery in many educational gateways is usually based on metadata and this is the area of many important developments. Resource metadata has a central role in the management of educational material and as a result there are several important metadata standards in use in the educational domain. One of the most widely used general metadata standards for learning material is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. The application of this general purpose, metadata standard for complex and heterogeneous educational material is not straightforward. This paper will give an overview of some practical issues and necessary steps in deploying Dublin Core based on the LITC experience in EASEL (Educators Access to Services in the Electronic Landscape)project.

There is a serious lack of conceptual clarity in the definitions and uses of learning objects, resulting in design and usability problems in current e-learning systems. The paper proposes ReLOMS, prototype reusable learning objects management system, being implemented to address the problem of usability and reusability of learning objects in e-learning systems.

This article discusses the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), a National Science Foundation (NSF) project as an infrastructure or test bed for large-scale and integrated research at the intersections of digital libraries and digital learning. An aggregated evaluation service, modelled on the Text Retrieval Conferences (TREC) and an evaluation materials clearinghouse are starting points for solving the digital learning problem in digital libraries research.