VIRTUAL TECHNOLOGIES

The increased usage of online platforms is one of the significant effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as institutions all over the world have had to rely on digital means to carry out their functions. Though the effectiveness with which digitalisation has taken place is highly uneven because of the marked structural inequalities in access, constraints such as limited cables, slow band widths, and the unreliability of electrical supplies that continuously frustrate the best creative and intellectual endeavours have not prevented a generation of Africans from pushing at the frontiers of digitalisation. Adopting perspectives drawn from transnational and transformational feminism and Pan-Africanism, and using online ethnographic observation and secondary data, we provide an analysis of the implications of embracing virtual technologies during the pandemic through spotlighting selected continental digital initiatives such as: festivals, seminars, conferences, book launches and webinars. We argue that African intellectuals have responded proactively to the unforeseen, traumatic and disruptive impact of the pandemic by creating new and inclusive digital spaces in which counterhegemonic political aspirations, visions, discourses, and strategies for the future are enunciated and put into circulation.

The article is devoted to the relevant problems of educational migration flows both in the real and virtual environment. The article discusses the positive and negative experience with virtual platforms in Russia and abroad. Particular attention is paid to the cultural and cognitive characteristics of the students belonging to the Generation Z, which requires the creation of entirely different instruments for implementing the educational process. The authors propose the method of creation, control and evaluation of feedback in the process of virtual educational migration using the latest IT-technologies that are utilized to create ultra-fast feedback and allow to bring new technologies into the learning process. In this scheme, the student is no longer a passive listener, but an active creator of new knowledge. The methodical research toolkit includes the mathematical, engineering, information methods of processing the results, including computer simulation. The testing of methodological tools was held at the University of Economics in Bratislava (Slovakia). These results confirm the possibility of the new method of providing feedback.This enable to improve the training quality of students, who are the members of the educational migration flows. Moreover, the training and examining may start at courses on adaptation, enabling to predetermine the necessary competencies. In addition, it is cost-effective to limit the real presence of foreign lecturers at the host university to a certain minimum, followed by the support for virtual feedback. However, the use of IT-technologies is not a sufficient factor in improving the quality of education and the level of progress achieved by the trainees, but it can be a good helper in the course of the examination, automation of the selected methods of control, as it is a more individualized approach to learning.

The fields of dance and architecture initially seem in direct opposition-one dedicated to movement and the other to stasis. In many ways dance appears to hold the many qualities ever beyond architecture; the opportunity of flight, of 'liveness', of the ephemeral. Importing ways of thinking as well as doing from dance into architectural practice is conditioned through the shared focus on the encounters between bodies and spaces. In grappling with the impact of new technologies on the design process, new kinds of movement and spaces are being produced. A key tactic that has emerged within both fields is that of chance. This is arguably the most radical shift that has occurred in the architectural design process. As well as the growing explorations of interactive, multi-media and virtual technologies in dance performances, has been the expansion of notational and choreographic programs that utilize unpredictability. The move toward abstracted systems in these programs endeavours to incorporate energy, force, direction and intent, opening up choreographies to undetermined movements. In this context what dance may provide for architecture, are methods that respond to the difficulty in retaining the animate body in the virtual acrobatics generated by new, generative, architectural programs. In this paper I will be examining the transformation of the architecture drawing through generative modelling programs based in indeterminacy. The implications of these new methodologies in terms of the design process and the animate body, are viewed in relation to dance experimentation in this area. By specifically looking at the digitised body geometries of choreographer William Forsythe, I hope to open both fields to new encounters between bodies and buildings.

The fields of dance and architecture initially seem in direct opposition-one dedicated to movement and the other to stasis. In many ways dance appears to hold the many qualities ever beyond architecture; the opportunity of flight, of 'liveness', of the ephemeral. Importing ways of thinking as well as doing from dance into architectural practice is conditioned through the shared focus on the encounters between bodies and spaces. In grappling with the impact of new technologies on the design process, new kinds of movement and spaces are being produced. A key tactic that has emerged within both fields is that of chance. This is arguably the most radical shift that has occurred in the architectural design process. As well as the growing explorations of interactive, multi-media and virtual technologies in dance performances, has been the expansion of notational and choreographic programs that utilize unpredictability. The move toward abstracted systems in these programs endeavours to incorporate energy, force, direction and intent, opening up choreographies to undetermined movements. In this context what dance may provide for architecture, are methods that respond to the difficulty in retaining the animate body in the virtual acrobatics generated by new, generative, architectural programs. In this paper I will be examining the transformation of the architecture drawing through generative modelling programs based in indeterminacy. The implications of these new methodologies in terms of the design process and the animate body, are viewed in relation to dance experimentation in this area. By specifically looking at the digitised body geometries of choreographer William Forsythe, I hope to open both fields to new encounters between bodies and buildings.

An overview of a virtual design environment (virtual platform) developed as part of the European Commission funded VRShips-ROPAX (VRS) project is presented. The main objectives for the development of the virtual platform are described, followed by the discussion of the techniques chosen to address the objectives, and finally a description of a use-case for the platform. Whilst the focus of the VRS virtual platform was to facilitate the design of ROPAX (roll-on passengers and cargo) vessels, the components within the platform are entirely generic and may be applied to the distributed design of any type of vessel, or other complex made-to-order products.

This chapter introduces communities of practice as a means to explore human computer interaction in online collaborative environments. Through a wide review of the literature on communities of practice and their virtual counterparts, it argues that the focus for successful interaction design in these communities lies on those sociability and usability aspects that allow greater participation in social learning. It also argues that the facilitator assumes a fundamental role in guiding a virtual community of practice to accomplish work-related informal learning activities in a climate of trust and collaboration. The author hopes that understanding the special opportunities provided by virtual communities of practice will advocate for their widespread routine use.

The chapter presents a study made in order to find out how the e-learning experience enhances the social presence in the community of practice. The study was carried out for the online master degree programme in project management, delivered by the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest. The main research method was a survey and the research instrument was a questionnaire. Statistics and data mining were applied. Statistics was applied to check hypothesis and quantify the correlation significance. Due to the large number of the variables and the indirect relationships, the analysis paths become very complex and it would be extremely difficult to manage the analysis workflow. So, the data mining approach was chosen. As a theoretical framework and analytical perspective for this research, Wenger’s theories of learning in Community of practice (CoP), and the social presence model of Garisson et al., are applied. The study revealed that the characteristics of the online social presence ...

Threaded discussions are one of the central tools of online education. These tools enhance student learning and compensate for the lack of social interaction. This study examines whether these social interactions are affected by some typical gender related conversational behaviors, despite the fact that these threaded discussion are designed to operate in a seemingly gender neutral online environment. That men and women communicate differently in open conversation due to their different respective social objectives in communication is at the core of sociolinguistic theory. A direct result of these differences is a tendency toward same-gender oral conversations. To some extent, according to sociolinguists, cross-gender communication resembles cross cultural conversations. This study analyzes threaded discussions in online courses through the lens of sociolinguistic theory, and conjectures that these gender differences should be reflected in mild gender segregation in the threaded dis...

This chapter provides a classification of virtual communities of practice according to methods and tools offered to virtual community members for the knowledge management and the interaction process. It underlines how these methods and tools support users during the exchange of knowledge, enable learning, and increase the user ability to achieve individual and collective goals. In this chapter virtual communities are classified in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice and virtual learning communities of practice according to the collaboration strategy. A further classification defines three kinds of virtual communities according to the knowledge structure: ontology-based VCoP; digital library-based VCoP; and knowledge map-based VCoP. This chapter also describes strategies of interaction used to improve the knowledge sharing and learning in groups and organizations. It shows how agent-based method supports interaction among community members, improves the achievement of knowledge, and encourages the level of user participation. Finally, this chapter presents the system's functionalities that support browsing and searching processes in collaborative knowledge environments.

Global forces—economic, political and technological — threaten communities in many ways. On the one hand, citizens may feel like they’re part of an undifferentiated crowd with no personal identity. On the other hand, they may feel isolated and alone, disconnected from the human community. In either case, people—especially those with fewer economic resources—feel that they have little control over their future. The consequences of powerlessness, real or perceived, transcend the individual; society as a whole suffers, for it is deprived of social intelligence and energy which could be tapped for the amelioration of social and other problems. As a matter of fact, many of this century’s most pressing issues—the environment, women’s issues, sexual identity, and others—have been brought to the fore through the efforts of citizens (Habermas, 1996). Disempowering the individual and the community was probably not part of a master plan any more than degrading the environment was. Yet in many ...

This paper proposes a linear model for optimizing domestic energy consumption in Romania. The particularity of the model is that it is putting in competition both tangible technologies and thermal insulation projects with different financing modes. The model is optimizing the energy system by minimizing the global discounted cost in household sector, by integrating residential lighting, space heating, hot water, combined space heating – hot water, as well as space cooling, in a monolithic model. Another demand sector included is the passenger transport. This paper focuses on space heating part, analyzing technical and economic issues related to investment decisions to envelope and insulate buildings, in order to minimize energy consumption.

Career and vocational educators (CTE) need to find ways to foster online communities of practice (CoP) in order to optimize learning and application of knowledge to real workplaces. Not only do students engage more actively in their learning, but they gain from multiple perspectives, and can develop more complex projects with the help of others. Instruction needs to be designed to help students get to know each other, and collaborate. Technological tools can facilitate such interaction, overcoming time and space issues. Particularly as WebWeb 2.0 tools facilitate collaboration, online CoPs can thrive. Nevertheless, equity issues of physical and intellectual access need to be considered when creating such online learning environments.

The article is devoted to the relevant problems of educational migration flows both in the real and virtual environment. The article discusses the positive and negative experience with virtual platforms in Russia and abroad. Particular attention is paid to the cultural and cognitive characteristics of the students belonging to the Generation Z, which requires the creation of entirely different instruments for implementing the educational process. The authors propose the method of creation, control and evaluation of feedback in the process of virtual educational migration using the latest IT-technologies that are utilized to create ultra-fast feedback and allow to bring new technologies into the learning process. In this scheme, the student is no longer a passive listener, but an active creator of new knowledge. The methodical research toolkit includes the mathematical, engineering, information methods of processing the results, including computer simulation. The testing of methodological tools was held at the University of Economics in Bratislava (Slovakia). These results confirm the possibility of the new method of providing feedback.This enable to improve the training quality of students, who are the members of the educational migration flows. Moreover, the training and examining may start at courses on adaptation, enabling to predetermine the necessary competencies. In addition, it is cost-effective to limit the real presence of foreign lecturers at the host university to a certain minimum, followed by the support for virtual feedback. However, the use of IT-technologies is not a sufficient factor in improving the quality of education and the level of progress achieved by the trainees, but it can be a good helper in the course of the examination, automation of the selected methods of control, as it is a more individualized approach to learning.

Agile development methods are widely utilized in software development. There is a growing interest and effort to introduce them to other areas of technology, such as development of space systems. Space systems are typically safety- and mission-critical and therefore their development is strongly regulated and standardized. European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) has created a collection of standards which are extensively followed mainly in European space projects. In this paper, a review and discussion are presented to find out the conflicts between the agile development and the ECSS standards. The presented analysis and discussion show that the ECSS standards do not fully prevent the utilization of agile methods. However, there are aspects to be taken into account in the development methods, contracts and tailoring of standards.

In the context of distributed collaborative learning, it is usually difficult for students to be aware of others’ activities and for instructors to overview the process and regulate the collaboration. In order to facilitate collaborative learning, intelligent agents were developed to support the awareness and regulation of the collaboration. This chapter discusses the facilitation role of intelligent agents and how they support students and instructors in distributed collaborative-learning environments. By monitoring the collaboration, the agents compute statistics, detect possible problems, and give advice synchronously and asynchronously to the students and instructor based on their activities and requests. In so doing, the agents not only help students to self-regulate their activities but also help instructors to maintain an overview of the collaboration so that they can intervene when necessary.

Escalation is a serious management problem, and sunk costs are believed to be a key factor in promoting escalation behavior. While many laboratory experiments have been conducted to examine the effect of sunk costs on escalation, there has been no effort to examine these studies as a group in order to determine the effect size associated with the so-called “sunk cost effect.” Using meta-analysis, we analyzed the results of 20 sunk cost experiments and found: (1) a large effect size associated with sunk costs, and (2) stronger effects in experiments involving information technology (IT) projects as opposed to non-IT projects. Implications of the results and future research directions are discussed.

This chapter argues that diffusion theory models like the technology acceptance model (TAM) need to be rethought of in light of contextual factors that are becoming increasingly important in modern inter-organisational settings. This is due to the growing complexity of organizations with respect to different organisational types, contexts, and political structures that have been shown in research literature to hinder information systems acceptance. The chapter looks at possible contextual factors that are ignored by TAM by critiquing its parent diffusion theory (diffusion of innovations). This approach was considered best as there are many variations of TAM, but the diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory underlies all these variations. The chapter also recommends a way forward for research into inter-organisational information systems by examining an example situation of Feral Information Systems (FIS) to illustrate the problem. The chapter concludes with a discussion about future re...

The history and development of guidelines on the ethics of providing online counselling and guidance are considered. Some issues the authors have found to be of particular importance are highlighted with reference to particular publications as exemplars of the ongoing development of ethical practice in this field. Changes in ethical guidelines produced by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) are examined to elucidate the evolution in ethical thinking and practice that has been necessitated by the continual rapid development of technological applications relevant to mental health care that have typified the field. The chapter ends with a look to the advent of Web 2.0 philosophies and the need for practitioners to remain constantly vigilant with regard to their work.

Virtual communities that allow many users to interact in a virtual world, often called multi-user virtual worlds (MUVWs), allow users to explore and navigate the virtual world as well as interact with other users. The communicative interaction within these virtual worlds is often text-based using Internet relay chat (IRC) and related systems. IRC has posed a difficulty for researchers looking to evaluate the interaction by analyzing and interpreting the communication since data is stored in the form of chatlogs. The current chapter explicates methodological procedures for the measurement and visualization of chat-based communicative interaction in MUVWs as social networks. A case study on an educational MUVW, the SciCentr programs sponsored by Cornell University, is used to elaborate methods and related findings.

Community of practice (CoP) encompasses shared approaches for carrying out tasks with a view to facilitating intellectual neighborliness among learners, educators and practicing professionals. Despite the popularity of the CoP approach within industries and the medical education, the practice of using it in engineering education is not widespread as most educators have limited knowledge of how to implement CoP into their classrooms. Moreover, it is not clear from the engineering education literature how the implementation of CoP has enhanced conceptual understanding and imparted employable skills to learners. To address these concerns, available literature detailing the implementation of CoP across professional disciplines and education sector over the past one and half decades were evaluated with a view to identifying and documenting evidences of current practices of CoP, and subsequently developed into a framework for re-designing an important aspect of engineering curricula: work...

Collaborative learning is used as a key principle in several approaches for designing virtual learning environments (e.g. CTGV, 2000). This is due to the fact that collaboration seems to foster individual knowledge acquisition (Lou, Abrami, Spence, Poulsen, Chambers, & d’Apollonia, 1996), improve knowledge application (De Corte, 2003), and increase social competencies. But collaborative learning is not always successful (Salomon & Globerson, 1989). Virtual learning places great and varied demands on collaboration, which means that learners often do not know how to collaborate adequately. In such cases, it is necessary to provide support. This chapter focuses specifically on two structuring methods, namely collaboration scripts and content schemes. To gain further insight into the topic, the authors will first describe the technical aspects of virtual collaborative learning. In the second section, the authors will depict the learning processes and outcomes of collaboration. Thirdly, ...

Developing software that meets the customers or stakeholders' needs and expectation is the ultimate goal of the software development methodology. To meet their need we have to perform requirement engineering which helps to identify and structure requirements. In traditional software development methods end users or stakeholders predefined their requirements and sent to the development team to analysis and negotiation to produce requirement specification. In many cases it is risky or very difficult and not economical to produce a complete, verifiable set of requirements. Traditional software development has a problem to deal with requirement change after careful analysis and negotiation. This problem is well tackled by the Agile Practices as it's recommends an on-site customer to represents their requirements through user stories on story cards. Generally customers have rarely a general picture of the requirements or system in their mind which leads problems related to requirements like requirements conflicts, missing requirements, and ambiguous requirements etc, and does not address non-functional requirements from exploration phase. This chapter introduces best knowledge based guidelines for agile requirements engineering to enhance the quality of requirements (story cards).

This chapter presents a case study of virtual collaboration that focuses on a research and production team's approach to making choices about the most appropriate technologies to support the team's interactions. The study highlights the importance of establishing clear, well-defined roles ...

This chapter attempts to consolidate concepts, ideas and results reported in this volume in an effort to synthesize an agenda and sketch a roadmap for future research and development on virtual community practices facilitated by synergistic combination of social interactive media. In this endeavor, the author revisits the notions of new media, communities and social practice, in the light of the preceding chapters and with the intention to pickup seemingly heterogeneous concepts and sketch the puzzle of social interactive media and virtual community practice. The ultimate target is to make inroads towards a reference model for understanding and framing online social practice under the different regimes constituted by new media and social computing.

This chapter provides a classification of virtual communities of practice according to methods and tools offered to virtual community members for the knowledge management and the interaction process. It underlines how these methods and tools support users during the exchange of knowledge, enable learning, and increase the user ability to achieve individual and collective goals. In this chapter virtual communities are classified in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice and virtual learning communities of practice according to the collaboration strategy. A further classification defines three kinds of virtual communities according to the knowledge structure: ontology-based VCoP; digital library-based VCoP; and knowledge map-based VCoP. This chapter also describes strategies of interaction used to improve the knowledge sharing and learning in groups and organizations. It shows how agent-based method supports interaction among community members, improves the achievement of knowledge, and encourages the level of user participation. Finally, this chapter presents the system's functionalities that support browsing and searching processes in collaborative knowledge environments.

QQ has been a leading force of China's social media revolution both in terms of its user reach and its socio-cultural impact. This chapter offers an analysis of QQ groups based on semi-structured in-depth interviews of 33 users with a particular emphasis on participants' rationales, motivations, and communicative behaviors as displayed in different types of groups. This is accomplished through interrogating a multiple set of individual, collective, social, and contextual factors that shape group dynamics and individual participation. It also discusses the implications of the findings for the scholarship on online communities in general, and the understanding of Chinese online groups in particular.

The objective of this chapter is twofold. On one hand, it tries to introduce and present various components of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), if HCI is modeled as a process of cognition; on the other hand, it tries to underline those representations and mechanisms which are required to develop a general framework for a collaborative HCI. One must try to separate the specific problem solving skills and specific problem related knowledge from the general skills and knowledge acquired in interactive agents for future use. This separation leads to a distributed deep interaction layer consisting of many cognitive processes. A three layer architecture has been suggested for designing collaborative HCI with multiple human and computational agents.

This chapter will present a new approach to designing learning interactions and experiences that reconciles relatively stable learning processes with relatively new digital practices in the context of social software and Web 2.0. It will begin with a brief position on current educational articulations of social software before offering some theoretical pointers and methodological perspectives for research and development in this area. The authors will then explain how an ongoing initiative in advanced learning design has developed notions of “ambient learning design” and “experience design” to address these issues and describe a new methodology for developing digital tools that incorporate these concepts. This approach is exemplified through ongoing work within an initiative in Digital Dialogue Games and the InterLoc tool that realises them. Finally, the implications this work has for future trends in designing for inclusive, highly communicative and engaging learning interactions a...

This chapter will present a new approach to designing learning interactions and experiences that reconciles relatively stable learning processes with relatively new digital practices in the context of social software and Web 2.0. It will begin with a brief position on current ...

Interaction among members in Virtual Learning Communities influences the communities' evolution. Starting from this consideration, this chapter provides a discussion on the more widely used software systems that support interaction between virtual communities' members ...

Augmented reality (AR) brings flexibility and openness to learning. It also strengthens connections between learners in multiple contexts by adding a new dimension to mobile learning. As well, AR facilitates the learning process of the learners by bringing different disciplines together with education. This chapter focuses on technologies, tools, programs, operating systems, a number of standards as well as some parts of web infrastructure standards for use in mobile AR applications and then discusses the current state, issues, and direction of the development and the use of these apps. The purpose of this chapter is to provide information on that can be used by developers of mobile AR applications for learning and to assist educators and instructional designers in developing mobile augmented reality apps for learning by using AR development tools that provide them to create custom mobile AR applications without programming skills.

The dynamic nature of group process is a long-standing challenge for research and practice, and particularly so in virtual teams, which are increasingly a regular part of organizational life today. Virtual teams act in fluid environments, as they strive to make sense of how best to incorporate appropriate technology choices during on-going interaction. Interventions in group process have potential to help teams make those choices. However, one set of critical factors that has received very little attention is the timing of interventions and their presentation style and content. These factors are particularly important in virtual teams, whose members rely on information and communication technologies and where technology interplay with group processes needs particular attention. Based on empirical findings, the authors present a new perspective on the longstanding topic of team process and the use of interventions, specifically in a virtual environment. The authors use the analyses o...

This chapter provides a classification of virtual communities of practice according to methods and tools offered to virtual community members for the knowledge management and the interaction process. It underlines how these methods and tools support users during the exchange of knowledge, enable learning, and increase the user ability to achieve individual and collective goals. In this chapter virtual communities are classified in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice and virtual learning communities of practice according to the collaboration strategy. A further classification defines three kinds of virtual communities according to the knowledge structure: ontology-based VCoP; digital library-based VCoP; and knowledge map-based VCoP. This chapter also describes strategies of interaction used to improve the knowledge sharing and learning in groups and organizations. It shows how agent-based method supports interaction among community members, improves the achievement of knowledge, and encourages the level of user participation. Finally, this chapter presents the system's functionalities that support browsing and searching processes in collaborative knowledge environments.

Community of practice (CoP) encompasses shared approaches for carrying out tasks with a view to facilitating intellectual neighborliness among learners, educators and practicing professionals. Despite the popularity of the CoP approach within industries and the medical education, the practice of using it in engineering education is not widespread as most educators have limited knowledge of how to implement CoP into their classrooms. Moreover, it is not clear from the engineering education literature how the implementation of CoP has enhanced conceptual understanding and imparted employable skills to learners. To address these concerns, available literature detailing the implementation of CoP across professional disciplines and education sector over the past one and half decades were evaluated with a view to identifying and documenting evidences of current practices of CoP, and subsequently developed into a framework for redesigning an important aspect of engineering curricula: work integrated learning (WIL). This will have an objective to successfully enhance conceptual understanding and impart employable skills to learners.

One aspect of writing in government, business, and academia that always has been collaborative is the document review process. In this process, all persons with a stake in the final writing product are invited to help shape the piece in terms of content, style, or structure. Their review work has primarily been both serial and parallel. However, problems and perils of document review can strike at any stage in the review process: from the reviewer not knowing how to give useful comments to the writer not knowing how to interpret and use comments constructively. In today's Web 2.0 world, what once was a more closed and controlled collaboration review process becomes open and organic because digital and online information is accessible to intended and unintended audiences alike for commenting, ranking, and reviewing. Response to this new openness in review has been mixed among and within institutions. And yet, the momentum for open and even unsolicited reviews is not only impossible to stop but also difficult to manage. While computer-mediated communication (CMC) and content management system (CMS) tools have automated the writing process, the review process has lagged in terms of being efficiently collaborative. This chapter explores collaborative review in a user-empowered Web 2.0 world, including how CMC tools can facilitate the review process. Finally, this chapter exemplifies Principles 1, 2, and 4 that ground this book.

Virtual interactions play an important role in distance electronic learning. This chapter suggests an evaluation tool of virtual interactions in electronic forums and reports two case studies carried out using this tool. The first case study involves two issues: examining the differences, regarding feedback types, between high and low participating preservice teachers in an electronic forum, and examining correlations between the different characteristics of the electronic forum exchanges. The second case study involves examining the strategies of a successful distance learning instructor in interacting with students. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to analyze the collected data. It was found that the two groups of preservice teachers were different regarding their use of some types of feedback and similar regarding the use of other types. Significant correlations were found between some characteristics of the forum exchanges. The successful instructor used different interaction strategies that depended on the educational situation described by the participants.

Augmented reality (AR) brings flexibility and openness to learning. It also strengthens connections between learners in multiple contexts by adding a new dimension to mobile learning. As well, AR facilitates the learning process of the learners by bringing different disciplines together with education. This chapter focuses on technologies, tools, programs, operating systems, a number of standards as well as some parts of web infrastructure standards for use in mobile AR applications and then discusses the current state, issues, and direction of the development and the use of these apps. The purpose of this chapter is to provide information on that can be used by developers of mobile AR applications for learning and to assist educators and instructional designers in developing mobile augmented reality apps for learning by using AR development tools that provide them to create custom mobile AR applications without programming skills.