7. Issue

Editorial

Dear readers,

we are happy to announce a new issue and the migration to a new server, which should substantially improve access speed to our online journal.

We have used the opportunity of migrating to a new server to update the site’s appearance, and introduce some editorial changes, including new services. In the headline you will recognize a new button “Authors”, which links to a list of all authors who ever contributed to this journal and their articles and reports. Further we renovated our RSS feed, which now allows you to decide whether you want to be informed about all contributions or you want to select individual categories only, like articles, project reports, and others. You may have noticed that the journal’s search functionality was sub-optimal in the past. The search function has been improved such that it delivers more exact matches and the advanced search now offers a range of possibilities to select specific search attributes. We have also added a tag cloud on the left, which gives you an instant view of the main topics addressed in the journal. Finally we have added a summary section in the lower part of each page. Besides a login, which is currently restricted to members of the editorial team, you can find a list of services, for example, for setting your feed or accessibility preferences, and you see a list of most recent contributions. More community services will follows as we find funds and competent software developers.

The contributions of this issue share the quality that they are all based on practical work and give particular attention to the interests of practitioners, both working in the field of instructional design and e-learning technology. Two of the three scientific articles describe the state-of-the-art in educational digital repositories and learning (object) systems in two parts, touching particularly on the authors’ own distributed solution. The first part aims primarily at readers who have a decent background in instructional design and are interested in the idea of sharing educational content and methodological knowledge but have a lesser interest in technological details. It focuses on information quality issues in the context of e-learning and provides some rationale for the technical approaches discussed in the second part. The second part addresses e-learning tool developers and offers a comprehensive survey of very different technologies.

The third article by Kerstin Grundén reports on three case studies investigating challenges and opportunities in reconciling work tasks and e-learning. The studies were performed in different Swedish public organizations. The paper reveals several factors that resulted in a low integration of learning outcomes and individual work processes and concludes with suggestions to overcome such deficits.

In this issue we have also included six project reports, two book descriptions, and four dissertation abstracts. Two of the project reports present blended learning approaches in economic departments, one describes empirical research on gender issues in the integration of IT at a Saudi Arabian university, and the forth contributes decision criteria that may guide the implementation of online lecture capturing and their distribution using different technologies. Two further reports summarize the content of two workshops on e-assessment and the introduction of identity management and smart cards in German universities. The dissertation thesis “The Effects of instructor-Avatar Immediacy in Second Life, an Immersive and Interactive 3D Virtual Environment” by Sabine Lawless-Reljic is remarkable because the thesis defense took place in Second World as well. Have a look at the linked in movie clips.

Bernd Krämer
Editor-in-Chief, eleed