Twitter has over 326 million monthly active users with the number of daily users growing every year since 2016 and is increasingly used by students and academics to interact and build online learning communities. For distance language learners, Twitter offers an open, free, and accessible environment for interaction and engagement which is…

Resilience is understood to be the ability to adapt positively in the face of adversity. In relation to new students on a distance learning module, this can mean how they adapt and make sense of the demands of their chosen study to enable them to persist in their studies. This article reports a small-scale study involving semi-structured telephone…

In the field of teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), most studies investigate Chinese character learning strategies in pen-and-paper study by campus-based students. With the increase in distance-learning, and expanding popularity of smartphones and tablets and widespread availability of mobile applications for language…

The high number of non-enrolment students had decreased the retention rates in the Indonesia Open University. Prior studies revealed that student support had a pivotal role in enhancing student persistence. Therefore, this study was aimed to explore contribution of student support in increasing student persistence by employing mixed methods…

This paper is an attempt to describe the situation of higher education in Asia including the challenges it faced as well as the open and distance elearning initiatives by different countries and universities. Data gathering was done through review of online documents and websites as well as documentation of the different initiatives especially by…

This paper discusses the implementation of a university teaching module, based on Lucy Green's (2008) informal music learning model. The synergy between Green's model and Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy is addressed through explanation of the module and its practices. The module was offered six times, from 2011 to 2016, as an action research…

Developments in ICTs and knowledge societies have revolutionized the traditional paradigms of education. There is a lot of emphasis on a culture of sharing and collaboration in the education scenario of today though educators have certain inhibitions about sharing of knowledge, ideas and resources. The present study was undertaken to explore the…

Teaching object-oriented programming to students in an in-classroom environment demands well-thought didactic and pedagogical strategies in order to guarantee a good level of apprenticeship. To teach it on a completely distance learning environment (e-learning) imposes possibly other strategies, besides those that the e-learning model of Open…

The focus on Open and Distance Learning (ODL) has given people an alternative to acquiring and developing skills in areas of their choice especially those related to their jobs. While its introduction was met with different responses, it could be noted that in some cases ODL has been viewed with scepticism and in others it has been received with…

Since June 2011, research on the Open University System of Brazil's (UAB's) official evaluation processes relating to learner support facilities has been carried out by the Teachers' Training, New Information, Communication and Technologies research group, which is linked to the Laboratory of New Technologies for Teaching at Fluminense Federal…

Higher Education (HE) is experiencing disruption from technologies, demographics, the globalising world and longer life expectancy. Historically Higher Education has had a legacy of being seen as the requirement for an educated "elite", there has been a policy ambition set in various countries (including the UK) for it to become the…

Green's informal learning pedagogy was adapted for a mixed-mode distance education of music teachers in Brazil. Designed as an 8-week module within the Open University of Brazil programme and implemented three times, this research involved 20 tutors and 73 student teachers, across a period of 2 years. Taking the form of a…

The importance of self-regulation in e-learning has been well noted in research. Relevant studies have shown a consistent positive correlation between learners' self-regulation and their success rate in e-learning. Increasing attention has been paid to developing learners' self-regulated abilities in e-learning. For students, what and how to learn…

The Open University (OU) makes a proportion of all its taught modules available to the public via OpenLearn each year. This process involves the modification, of module excerpts, showcasing subject matter and teaching approach. This activity serves both the University's social and business missions through the delivery of free courses to the…

Since the publication of the IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) specification in 2003, many initiatives have been undertaken to build authoring tools that are simple enough to be used by non-technical instructors and teachers. IMS LD's technical complexity is believed to be a major burden for the adoption of the specification. We have developed a new…