Nursing has employed distance education for decades. In the 21st century, distance programs have often been delivered online. This became even more prevalent since the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the preponderance of online nursing courses, the delivery of courses virtually does not necessarily mean that these offerings are intentionally developed…

In higher education, international research collaboration functions as a visible mechanism of cooperation and competition, serving as a proxy for quality and academic excellence. Open universities use revolutionary education models but are not often associated with quality or academic excellence. To investigate the impact of international research…

Online higher education has been a success in part because it is less costly to students and governments than conventional education, so both students and governments receive higher returns on their investment than in conventional higher education. However, many online institutions appear to have considerably lower graduation rates than…

Increasingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having an impact on distance-based higher education, where it is revealing multiple ethical issues. However, to date, there has been limited research addressing the perspectives of key stakeholders about these developments. The study presented in this paper sought to address this gap by investigating…

This study focused on the development and validation of the Sense of Online Community Scale (SOCS), which includes 28 Likert-type scale items across six subscales: (1) program community; (2) program academic activities; (3) program social activities; (4) institutional academic activities; (5) institutional social activities; and (6) affiliation.…

This collaborative self-study examines how five higher education institutions in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have achieved momentum with openness and are implementing and sustaining their efforts. A goal of this research was to see whether an institutional self-assessment tool--adapted from blended learning and institutional transformation…

Lecture capture videos, a popular type of instructional content used by instructors to share course recordings online, play a significant role in educational settings. Compared to other educational videos, these recordings require minimal time and effort to produce, making them a preferred choice for disseminating course materials. Despite their…

The quality of didactic materials is a source of concern for teachers, users, and educational institutions that offer online education. There is a lack of indicators to help assess the quality of three key types of didactic materials commonly used in online education: didactic units (i.e., materials that contain program contents), didactic guides…

Most educators' inability to provide learning contents that suit different learning styles has caused a lot of problems in terms of performance. Thus, to cater to students' preferences in terms of access to learning contents, the distance learning regulatory body in Nigeria emphasized that course materials should be developed in mixed-media…

Grant programs that foster the use of open educational resources (OER) significantly reduce undergraduate student spending on textbooks per semester. The Zero-Cost Course Materials (ZCCM) grant program at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced), eliminated text costs and ensured access to course materials by replacing required commercial…

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in education underscores transformative prospects for open and distributed learning, encompassing distance, hybrid, and blended learning environments. This qualitative study, grounded in narrative inquiry, investigates the experiences and perceptions of 141 preservice teachers engaged with AI,…

This study explored the complex dynamics of student engagement, community of inquiry, and transactional distance in online learning environments. The study analyzed 1,281 participants' responses to identify the factors contributing to online learning outcomes. The research highlighted the crucial role that transactional distance and community of…

With the increased emphasis on the benefits of self-regulated learning (SRL), it is important to make use of the huge amounts of educational data generated from online learning environments to identify the appropriate educational data mining (EDM) techniques that can help explore and understand online learners' behavioral patterns. Understanding…

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between factors leading to student loyalty in open and distance learning universities. Specifically, this research explores the relationship between perceived service quality, perceived e-service quality, and university image as mediators of student loyalty in Open University Malaysia…

Post-COVID-19, many, if not most, college and university instructors teach both online and face-to-face, and, given that online courses historically have higher attrition rates, designing and facilitating effective online courses is key to student retention. Students need online and on-campus courses that are well designed and facilitated, but…