The online learning has broadened the teaching spectrum from Face-to-Face to virtual environment, and this move has brought traditional teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered instruction. This paradigm shift appears to place demands on faculty to modify faculty's instruction roles that are different from those encountered in Face-to-Face…

The effective communication between the learners and the tutor-counsellor has been proved to significantly promote the positive emotions, reduce the negative ones and reinforce the learners' participation in a distance learning program. The main purpose of our research is to investigate the emotions experienced by the learners of the Hellenic Open…

Awarding badges to recognise achievement is not a new development. Digital badging now offers new ways to recognise learning and motivate learners, providing evidence of skills and achievements in a variety of formal and informal settings. Badged open courses (BOCs) were piloted in various forms by the Open University (OU) in 2013 to provide a…

The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes of students, instructors, and educational principals to electronic administration of final-semester examinations at undergraduate and post- graduate levels in Payame Noor University in Khuzestan. The statistical population of this study consisted of all educational principals, instructors, of…

Much research has been done on blended learning and the design of tasks most appropriate for online environments and computer-mediated communication. Increasingly, language teachers and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) practitioners recognise the different nature of communications in online settings and in face-to-face settings; teachers do not…

This article reports an investigation into undergraduate student experiences and views of a visual or "blocks" based programming language and its environment. An additional and central aspect of this enquiry is to substantiate the perceived degree of transferability of programming skills learnt within the visual environment to a typical…

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…

In this article, the authors examine the fourth stage of their research into diversity in the languages classroom, focusing specifically on the teacher perspective in planning for and managing diversity in adult student groups. The article discusses findings from a day with experienced Open University language teachers working together on lesson…

The Pygmalion Effect is the positive form of self-fulfilling prophecy and shows how teacher expectations influence student performance. According to this phenomenon, higher expectations can lead to an increase in performance. In this research qualitative methodology was adopted both in data collection, and in analysis, in order to investigate the…

Teacher feedback is critically related to student learning. This study sought to determine the relationships between distance education (DE) student level of self-regulated learning (SRL) and their preference for audio-recorded vs. written feedback from tutors. DE students (n = 102) enrolled in a first-year university course completed an online…

A key concern for most institutions and instructors is whether students are satisfied with their learning experience. However, relatively few studies have unpacked what the key drivers for learner satisfaction are in blended and online courses. Using logistical regression modelling, learner satisfaction data of 62,986 learners in 401 undergraduate…

Internet is well known nowadays, however higher distance education students who live in remote rural areas still have not been able to take advantages of this medium optimally for their learning process. For accessing the internet the students have to be available with the minimum prerequisites: the existence of adequate devices and the sufficient…

Social media platforms such as Facebook are commonplace throughout society. However, within higher education institutions such networking environments are still in the developmental stage. This paper describes and discusses case study data from the Open University's Faculty of Social Science Facebook page. It starts by giving an overview of the…

"Mobile Learning" (m-Learning) has emerged as a trend in the field of Open and Distance Learning (ODL). It is removing the time and geographical barriers for learning by placing learning opportunities at the fingertips of learners. ODL institutes in India are also adopting m-learning in different forms; however, it is not fully…

This study investigated the relationship between self-directedness (as measured by the Adult Learner Self-Directedness Scale) and biographical factors such as age, race, and gender of adult learners enrolled at a South African open distance learning (ODL) higher education institution. Correlational and inferential statistical analyses were used. A…