Drawing upon cultural-historical activity theory, this research analyzed the structural contradictions existing in a variety of educational activities among a group of alienated adult students in Korea National Open University (KNOU). Despite KNOU's quantitative development in student enrollment, the contradictions shed light on how the…

Student success and retention is a primary goal of higher education institutions across the world. The cost of student failure and dropout in higher education is multifaceted including, amongst other things, the loss of revenue, prestige, and stakeholder trust for both institutions and students. Interventions to address this are complex and…

A joint course, created as a result of a project under the auspices of the "Stability Pact of South-Eastern Europe" and DAAD, has been conducted in several Balkan countries: in Novi Sad, Serbia, for the last six years in several different forms, in Skopje, FYR of Macedonia, for two years, for several types of students, and in Tirana,…

This exploratory research project investigated graduate students' satisfaction levels with online learning associated with human (professor/instructor and instructional associate) and design factors (course structure and technical aspects) using a survey study. A total of 81 graduate students (master's students who majored in math and…

The past two years have seen rapid development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) with the rise of a number of MOOC platforms. The scale of enrolment and participation in the earliest mainstream MOOC courses has garnered a good deal of media attention. However, data about how the enrolment and completion figures have changed since the early…

This paper reports research on the implementation of a web-based videoconferencing tool (Interwise) for synchronous learning sessions on an industrial technology course offered through a university in northern Taiwan. The participants included undergraduate students from the same course offered in two different semesters. We investigated…

Introduction: Online distance learning (e-learning) is now an established method for providing higher education, in the UK and across the world. The focus has largely been on developing the technology, and less attention has been given to developing evidence-informed course provision. Thus the effectiveness of this teaching approach, and its…

In the traditional instructional method used in international trade, teachers provide knowledge to learners by lecturing using slides and setting assignments; however, these methods merely deliver international trade knowledge rather than facilitating student development of relevant skills. To solve these problems, we proposed a simulation-based…

This project ascertains how well students taking online, distance education courses at a Canadian university recognize plagiarised material and how well they paraphrase. It also assesses the types of errors made. Slightly more than half of 420 psychology students correctly selected plagiarised phrases from four multiple choice questions. Only a…

Higher education in Tanzania like in many other Sub-Saharan countries suffers from unavailability of quality teaching and learning resources due to lack of tradition, competence, and experience to develop such resources. Nevertheless, there are thousands of open educational resources (OER) freely available in the public domain that can potentially…

Learning management systems (LMS) have been proven to encourage a constructive approach to knowledge acquisition and support active learning. One of the keys to successful and efficient use of LMS is how the stakeholders adopt and perceive this learning tool. The present research is therefore motivated by the importance of understanding…

In recent years, several studies have been carried out into the reasons why students drop out of online higher education, following the rise in the relative weight of this form of education. However, more effort has gone into analyzing the causes of this phenomenon than into trying to characterize students who drop out, that is defining what a…

The purpose of this paper is to build on the insights of educators regarding the relationship between culture and online learning. More specifically, this paper aims to explore the ways in which students' culture of learning is changing as a result of the introduction of various modes of online learning. It also aims to explore the ways in…

We investigated how high school students taking a university preparatory economics course would engage with the learning and assessment components of a Behavioural Economics MOOC that was integrated into their school-based course. Students were divided into two groups, MOOC-only, with no teacher support, and blended-mode, with weekly tutorials.…

There is concern that online education may widen the achievement gap between students from different socioeconomic classes. The recent discussion of integrating massive open online courses (MOOCs) into formal higher education has added fuel to this debate. In this study, factors influencing enrollment and completion in a pre-college preparatory…