The present article explores the use of smartphones by Arab Open University (AOU) students in learning the Arabic Language. The sample consisted of 275 students of those taking Arabic for primary school teachers. A questionnaire was prepared by the researcher to specify relevant uses and was divided into 4 sections: types of students' devices,…

Throughout 2020, and into 2021, national governments were forced at different times to impose 'lockdown' on traditional approaches to education to cope with the impact of COVID-19. Higher education institutions (HEI) with face-to-face models scrambled to 'pivot' to distance and online learning. Whilst originally conceived as a temporary measure,…

With the development of online learning, LMSs accumulated huge amounts of students' interaction data. Unfortunately, with the support of LMSs data, few researchers put a sight on interaction research in MPOCs. Particularly, comparing interaction activity patterns of different achievement student groups and in different course processes in MPOCs…

The adoption of open, online, flexible and technology-enhanced modes of learning (in short: of OOFAT) differs by higher education institution, despite the general cries of revolution and disruption due to digitalisation. This paper presents a new conceptual model for framing difference in three key educational processes (content, delivery and…

In response to global and local needs, the South African government increasingly enables distance education through legislation and policy, and many traditional public higher education institutions have turned to dual-mode delivery of their programmes. This decision is often based on a desire for new market growth and firmly embedded in…

This research study was conducted to discover use of ICT in Distance Education by exploring interest and preference of ICT between students of rural and urban background at Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad Pakistan. The study was aimed to establish the differences between urban and rural students' interest and preference of ICT in general…

This article reports on a study into students with disabilities and their experiences of eLearning at Curtin University in Australia. The results are compared to an earlier study of students at Open Universities Australia (OUA) (Kent 2016). The results confirm the earlier study's findings that these students are drawn to eLearning. The prevalence…

Linked Data increases the value of an organisation's data over the web by introducing explicit and machine processable links at the data level. We have adopted this new stream of data representation to produce and expose existing data within The Open University (OU) as Linked Data. We present in this paper our approach for producing the data,…

The University of South Africa (UNISA) is one of the distance education universities that is shifting from open distance learning (ODL) to open distance e-learning (ODeL). UNISA started as a correspondence institution in the 1950s and it has since evolved into an ODeL university. The aim of this research was to assess and determine the maturity…

This article reports eight distance teachers' stories about teaching at two open universities over the past two decades with a focus on their perceptions and feelings about the changes in their teaching practice. This qualitative study employed a methodological approach called the autoethnographic interview, aiming to document more realistic…

Open and Distance Learning (ODL) has a long history, one marked by the emergence of open universities, which was a critical development in the ecology of openness. Open universities have taken on significant local and global roles within the framework of meeting the needs of their respective regions of influence, and as such, their roles have…

Social networks have undoubtedly penetrated into our daily life, in such a degree that educational life could not avoid this effect, as proven by the many education-oriented social networks that have emerged. The education-oriented social network environment named HOU2LEARN, used by the Hellenic Open University, is one of these networks, providing…

People's Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni, http://peoples-uni.org) aims to contribute to improvements in the health of populations in low- to middle-income countries by building public health capacity via e-learning at affordable cost. We describe experience over nine years of the initiative, including the development and delivery of…

The purpose of the study was to find the relationship between academic self-concept and academic achievement of distance learners. The academic self-concept of distance learners was measured by the Liu and Wang (2005) academic self-concept scale which was adapted by the present researcher. The scale comprised of two sub-scales; academic effort and…

The purpose of this research was to find out the effect of communicative approach on proposal/synopsis writing skills of students at Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad as it was found from the literature that Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) had a noteworthy influence to improve proposal writing skills. The researcher used the…