Advances in web based learning

This year, we received a record high of about 180 submissions to ICWL 2007. From these, a total of 55 full papers plus one keynote paper were accepted for this LNCS proceedings volume, representing an acceptance rate of about 30%. The authors of these accepted papers were of a remarkable international diversity. We would like to thank all the reviewers for spending their precious time reviewing the papers and for providing valuable comments that aided significantly in the paper selection process. Authors of the best papers presented at this conference will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for possible publication in 1) a special issue of IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering, for those papers relevant to knowledge and data engineering; and 2) a special issue of the International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (JDET), for papers of other areas. This was the first time that the ICWL conference was organized in Europe and 27 papers were from European researchers. We would like to thank our Organization Chair Dr. Taku Komura for spending an enormous amount of energy in coordinating the local arrangements. In fact, we would like to thank the entire conference organization committee for their hard work in putting together the conference. In particular, we would like to express our appreciation to our Registration Chair Dr.