The number of games, simulations, and multi-user virtual environments designed to promote learning, engagement with subject matter, or intended to contextualize learning has been steadily increasing over the past decade. While the use of these digital designs in educational settings has begun to show promise for improving learning, motivation, and engagement as noted in studies of MIT Media Lab's Supercharged, Harvard University's River City, and Indiana University's Quest Atlantis, research reports have been unable to capture the design processes required to develop these complex instructional spaces. With the intention of illuminating one particular design process that met with some success, this article details the process of design and development that supported the creation of the language arts-focused Anytown multi-user virtual environment. The objective is to illustrate the complexity of taking an interactive digital learning environment from the planning phases through to the 3-D development of the environmental interactions and provide an example of how designers may match the media affordances present in games with instructional goals and principles that are intended to guide learning.

Soft systems methodology (SSM), an analytic method commonly employed in engineering and business research, produces models focused on human activities and relevant structures used to explain complex, engineered systems. The original version of SSM involves seven stages; five address real-world aspects and observable data, while two stages leverage a systems thinking viewpoint. This approach allows the development of a simplified depiction of complex systems representative of the multi-perspective lenses used to comprehend the systemic complexity of a problem and provide a clearer picture to analysts and decision makers. This bibliometric meta-analysis of 286 relevant publications in engineering, business, and other social sciences fields explores the historic impacts of SSM on academic research and systems thinking in relevant publications that described or employed SSM for research from 1980–2018. This study produced descriptive narrative outcomes and data visualizations including information about top SSM authors, author citation impacts, common dissemination outlets for SSM work, and other relevant metrics commonly used to measure academic impact. The goal of this piece is to depict who, what, why, when, and where SSM had the greatest impact on research, systems thinking, and methodology after nearly 40 years of use, as we look towards its future as a methodological approach used to comprehend complex problem situations.

Our paper examines the design of a course that utilized the real-time information network Twitter to spark reflective thinking and communication based on classroom topics. A major goal was to increase discourse amongst students and enhance learning through encouraging student time on task. The innovation followed guidelines set forth in the Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions theory to augment student learning experience via more active communication and increased content sharing among students, towards a goal of building a social learning community. In this mixed methods study, we found diverse student perceptions of the use of Twitter; both very positive views of the tool as a means of supporting discourse and those views of the tool having little benefit to student’s own learning. The female students in this study, perceived the tool to significantly more support the social learning community in the interactive environment than did male students.

Distance learning technology continues to grow and undergo significant changes in higher education settings. Applying strategic planning methods from organizational behavior and operations management can act as a useful guide for the implementation of a sustainable distance learning program. Strong planning can help ensure the distance learning program system’s operational readiness, effectiveness, and sustainability. Distance learning operations planning requires a defined strategy that examines organizational human and technical structures We discuss a distance education planning approach applied to three higher education cases with a goal of improving their distance education efforts. The research contexts were in the United States of America: a small Midwestern university seeking to grow online programs in support of its competitive strategy, a large western university with established distance programs, and a regional community college. This article will illustrate the use of business-oriented, systems thinking models for evaluation and distance education program improvement.