Bangladesh Open University (BOU), the sole distributor of distance education (DE) in Bangladesh, is regarded as one of the mega universities in the world. Nonetheless, the institution faces numerous issues and challenges that revolve around not only its administrative and academic operations, but also the lack of acknowledgement of its…

Aim/Purpose: As online video lectures rapidly gain popularity in formal and informal learning environments, one of their main challenges is student retention. This study investigates the influence of adding interactivity to online video lectures on students' attention span. Background: Interactivity is perceived as increasing the attention span of…

This paper presents a study conducted by Inegbedion, Adu and Ofulue from the National Open University of Nigeria. The study focused on the quality of access (admission and registration) at NOUN from a student perspective. A survey design was used for the study while a multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the sample size. All the…

Digital badging as a trend in education is now recognised. It offers a way to reward and motivate, providing evidence of skills and achievements. Badged Open Courses (BOCs) were piloted by The Open University (OU) in 2013. The project built on research into the motivations and profiles of learners using free educational resources which the OU…

With changes in the global economic landscape, universities are employing adjunct staff to instruct their online courses in new and expanding programs. Concomitantly, the growth of information and communication technology worldwide has facilitated the creation of classrooms without walls and universities without borders. The challenge for…

The Open University (OU) is the UK's largest distance education provider and has a large and growing disabled student population. Disabled user support presents particular challenges for an online library service in the distance learning environment. The OU introduced guidelines for working with non-OU--authored content (external content) in 2011…

This paper looks back at the last 10 years of the use of podcasting as a language teaching and learning tool. It considers the potential that was identified at the early stages, to the work that has been carried out to evaluate whether this potential has actually been realised. It presents a taxonomy of podcasts that can be used for language…

This paper introduces a blended learning context that creates a community of practice. This community of practice presents a combination of face-to-face facilitated learning, e-learning, and self-study. A set of in-class and online linguistic activities was used in the implementation of this experiment to investigate the efficacy of performing…

The academic support system that is available online for distance students can prove quite beneficial to them before and especially during their course/programme of study. Potter posited that the goal of a programme's academic learner support services for distance learners must be to meet their needs by linking them with fellow students, faculty…

Language education has a rich history of research and scholarship focusing on the effectiveness of learning activities and the impact these have on student behaviour and outcomes. One of the basic assumptions in foreign language pedagogy and CALL in particular is that learners want to be able to communicate effectively with native speakers of…

Two concerns served the impetus for this study. Limited literature has created a research gap exploring why Latinas earn baccalaureate degrees from extended universities, and the community central to the study has been lagging behind state and national baccalaureate degree attainment. The researcher employed mixed-methods to describe motivating…

Academic institutions such as the University of South Africa (Unisa) are using information and communication technology (ICT) in order to conduct their daily primary operations, which are teaching and learning. Unisa is the only distance learning university in South Africa and also in Africa. Unisa currently has the highest number of students on…

Towards the end of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007 -2012), India catered to about 20 per cent of those in the age group 17 to 24 years. However, to achieve the threshold level of about 30 per cent by 2020, and address concerns that perpetuate inequalities in opportunities to higher education, the Government of India (GoI) formulated positive…

Distance students are time poor and some drop out of their studies because they fall behind with coursework. This raises the issue of how course teams decide upon how many study hours should be included in a course. This article presents a number of Open University projects that have addressed student workload management and relates how learning…

Marketing specialists have recently redefined the roles customers and enterprises play in the economy. Modern customers are connected, informed, mobile, educated and internationally oriented. They seek enterprises that empower them to co-construct personalised experiences. This view of the customer-enterprise relationship has a great impact on the…