The ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have considerably transformed the higher educational landscape and are now providing an increasing number of novel and dynamic pathways for education delivery. The steady growth of flexible and affordable ICTs is impacting upon the higher education domain resulting in a departure…

At the Open University, where students learn online and at a distance, the School of Mathematics and Statistics has for many years provided innovative ways of supporting students outside the 'classroom' environment so was well prepared to support students during the COVID-19 pandemic. These forms of support include online forums to help students…

This paper is based on a study that examined authorship and collaborative research among scholars in Open and Distance Learning (ODL) institutions with a focus on prospects for Africa. The study involved intensive documentary desk review of conference book of abstracts and conference proceedings to examine authorship and collaborative research.…

There has been a growing interest in how teaching might be informed by "learning design" (LD), with a promising method for investigating LD being offered by the emerging field of "learning analytics" (LA). In this study, we used a novel LA for LD methodology to investigate the implementation of LD in an online distance learning…

Distance education (DE) is a constantly evolving and advancing field, and as such, its intellectual network and dynamics need to be investigated and explored. In this regard, this study reviewed a total of 1685 articles and 51,940 references through social network analysis for a bibliometric examination of the DE field. The findings indicate that…

This report puts forward practical actions to address economic and social disparities across the United Kingdom (UK). It sets out the evidence of the impact universities are making across three main themes, outlines the potential to go further, and makes recommendations for how the government can work with universities to maximise their…

Open educational practices (OEP) as a research field is relatively new. One aspect that has received limited attention is the impact of using open educational resources (OER) on the development of OEP. This article, based on a doctoral study (Pulker, 2019), considers teachers' activities when reusing and adapting OER, with a view to providing…

This study explored the perceptions of 51 graduates of a distance learning health and social care programme, identifying what factors contributed to students continuing for the duration of their distance learning studies and completing their degree. An appreciative inquiry approach was used to identify the positive aspects of the students'…

The study investigated the relationship between Canvas learning management system, Google Classroom, Zoom for online teaching and quality of distance education. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 750 lecturers in 75 centres of Open University of Nigeria. Data was collected using Access Management and Quality of Distance Education…

This study aims to investigate the reasons for learners to drop-out of Open Education System of Anadolu University, Turkey, between 2012-2015. This study uses an exploratory sequential mixed method. The general structure is divided into two phases. In the first phase, the data is collected by semi-structured face-to-face interviews. The results of…

Blackboard Collaborate (BC), a synchronous, multimodal platform, has been incorporated into Open University Australia (OUA) students' online learning experiences. This study sought to investigate the perspectives of 134 interdisciplinary OUA students via an online survey and follow-up interviews. Findings revealed students' positive perceptions…

This essay focuses on the role of humanities faculty in the modern university and the impact of technology on that role.

This paper describes the functionality, scalability, and cost of implementing and maintaining a suite of open source technologies, which have supported hundreds of thousands of learners in the past year, on an information technology infrastructure budget of less than US$10,000 per year. In addition, it reviews pedagogical opportunities offered by…

Studies have claimed that use of multimedia technologies motivate and stimulate the learning of students as compared to using traditional teaching methods alone. Multimedia aids are therefore significant in effective teaching learning process. It is even more significant in open and distance learning where the learners are separated from their…

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are currently in favour as a mechanism for 'delivering education' on a massive scale, including language education. However, when viewed as a new educational 'technology', they have arguably not yet reached the stage of normalisation (Bax, 2003) at which they might be most productive. This paper examines the…