Terms such as "digital divide," normally understood to mean the gap in access between technologically disenfranchised populations and the information elite, take on a different resonance when the focus of university faculty, administrators, and an increasing number of potential students is on how education is to be conducted. This paper discusses the pedagogical, technological, and business trends that together affect the direction of innovation in virtual education. A discussion is presented on how traditional higher education (campus-based, lecture-bound, and faculty-driven) can benefit from the explosion of opportunities born of technological innovation and development by adopting changes in operational models-both administrative and pedagogical. Also addressed are the scope of services that comprise the engagement of information technology in academic environments necessary to fulfill evolving charters and missions that respond to current trends and future demands of educational innovations in the digital age where education and business-in their operational models and management styles-are moving toward complementary, even comparable strategies.

A teaching reform initiative, started in the spring semester of 1993 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), is described. The program seeks to increase student success in a freshman computer science course, and ultimately in the entire NJIT curriculum. The traditional teaching methods where the teacher presided over a lecture session supplying facts and figures, providing ideas, and presenting problems and their solutions, has been altered. The new learning environment described in this paper aims to create an all‐inclusive setting inviting the students to make the transformation from passive learners to active participants. Rather than merely listening to lectures, students formulate problems and devise their own approaches to answering questions and finding solutions. Such a teaching/learning methodology requires instructional redesign and role redefinition. The presentation of class material is reordered as the teacher and students cross each other's confines becoming a more cohesive entity.

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The increasingly widespread use of open source software (OSS) is an indication of its success. However, as a software development model OSS still has shortcomings that need to be resolved. In particular, the question of usability and its improvement in an OSS context remains a significant ongoing issue that demands further investigation. This is especially so given the unique manner in which OSS diverges from traditional software development models. Current experience with OSS does not favor the existence of a positive relation between the standard OSS development paradigm and good usability practice. We believe that addressing the inadequacy of usability expertise in the OSS community will improve the quality of its products and enhance their competitiveness. Motivated by the unique user‐driven character of the OSS model, we propose an exploratory method for inspection which is intended to assist OSS users in contributing to open source usability inspection. This method provides an effective adaptation of the ‘learning‐by‐doing’ approach to the domain of usability inspection. This is accomplished by innovatively applying usability patterns to guide usability exploration, incorporating strategies for ‘outlining knowledge’ and ‘exploration freedom’ and implementing both techniques in an integrated inspection environment. The results of an experiment involving a group of OSS users inspecting an open source project called dotproject demonstrate that this method outperforms traditional heuristics‐based inspection. The paper also considers the applicability of the usability method and tool developed to usability improvement in the context of traditional proprietary development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Open Source Software (OSS) movement has had enormous impact on how software is created and continues to attract interest from researchers, software developers and users. A factor that may be inhibiting OSS from achieving greater success is usability, a fundamental characteristic to user acceptance of software. Motivated by the uniquely user-driven nature of the open source model and the extensive user base that participates in OSS projects, the authors propose an exploratory learning method and an associated web-based inspection environment that enables non-experts to contribute to open source usability inspection. This tool uses patternbased usability guidelines to help identify usability knowledge during inspection. The method emphasizes outlining and exploration features which the authors have formally evaluated and the results of which are described. Data collected from a qualitative study indicates positive impact of the proposed method in helping end-users inspect software and achieve better results in discovering usability problems.