Purpose: Distance learners are expected to actively participate in online learning settings to improve their cognitive level and promote more meaningful learning. However, without specific teaching skills and competencies from the instructors together with belief and capability of the distance learners themselves, their engagement in online…

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced educational institutions to adopt online tools to remotely teach and efficiently use virtual learning situations during the emergency. However, although these environments may serve to improve teaching processes, several issues must be considered to ensure quality student learning. The purpose of our…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have lately emerged as an effective form of distance education. Computer science is one of those disciplines in which MOOCs are quite common. We conducted a survey to know the opinion of computer science instructors and undergraduate students on MOOCs in an Indian university in March 2018. Of the 26 instructors…

The reemergence of virtual reality (VR) in the past few years has led to affordable, high-quality commodity hardware that can offer new ways to teach, communicate, and engage with complex concepts. In a higher-education context, these immersive technologies make it possible to teach complex molecular topics in a way that may aid or even supersede…

This study explores the relationships between peer-to-peer interactions and (1) group formation among students, (2) choice of research, and (3) course performance in an online asynchronous ecology course at a research-intensive university. Peer-to-peer interactions have been known to enhance learning experience for students in a wide array of…

Purpose: This study investigated the usefulness of various communication means for providing university study information with prospective students before and during the pandemic for three consecutive academic years. Design/methodology/approach: Students who had recently taken undergraduate program admission indicated how useful communication…

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the education sector soon faced the unprecedented challenge of moving courses online within no time. The rapid implementation of emergency remote teaching (ERT) led to students and teachers alike being thrown into an emotional terra incognita. This paper sets out to explore if foreign language (LX) grit,…

The transition to university appears to be a complex and delicate time in students' lives, involving a sequence of changes regarding both the personal/affective and social/professional spheres, facilitating students' ability to adapt to a new life context. It represents a challenging time that requires students to use adaptive resources to face…

While the educational literature mentions several obstacles affecting the effectiveness of collaborative learning (CL), they have often been investigated through the perceptions of only one actor, either teachers or students. Therefore, some sources of obstacles that teachers and students encounter may not have been revealed. In this study, 19…

This paper seeks to add to the discussion surrounding young adults' relationship and engagement with learning technologies, exploring whether they naturally engage with these technologies when the use of them is either compulsory or optional. We discuss our findings in relation to whether young people are truly engaging with technologies or…

Previous studies (Wu 2007; Hyland 2004; Hyland & Tse 2004; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995; Crismore et al. 1993; Vande Kopple 1985) have established the use of Metadiscourse (MD) as an essential element in writing as it allows the writer to create a dialogic space with his readers. In recent years, attempts have been made to analyse MD…

In the present day open and distance education has become a significant way of the development of higher education. Bangladesh Open University (BOU), the only public institution in Bangladesh offers several formal and non-formal programs from secondary to post graduate level through distance mode. The main objectives of BOU's program is to provide…

In 1999-2000, 7.1 million adults age 24 or older constituted 43% of all undergraduates in U.S. institutions of higher education, compared to 5.73 million adult students enrolled a decade earlier (1989-1990). The growing proportion of adult undergraduates has become a significant source of enrollment and income for numerous institutions for which…

In this paper, the authors report some of the salient findings of a large-scale, four-year national study, conducted at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, entitled "Factors Influencing College Science Success" (FICSS), which surveyed college students who enrolled in first-year biology, chemistry, and physics courses…

A study investigated the extent to which forensic judges used educational comments when writing ballots. A total of 140 informative speaking ballots were collected from tournaments in Mississippi, Colorado, and Arkansas. After the ballot comments were sorted into five categories (basic comments, educational comments, descriptive comments, personal…