This study aimed to systematically compile the activities and applications to be used by instructors to conduct synchronous virtual classrooms effectively. Using specific keywords in various databases we examined the literature to discover the activities and applications associated with effective synchronous virtual classrooms. A total of 70…

Learners' emotional engagement in synchronous online learning (SOL) is critical for improving learning persistence and performance. Nevertheless, there is currently a lack of comprehensive and systematic reviews of emotional engagement in SOL. This review synthesizes the strategies to promote emotional engagement in SOL found in published…

Within its 20 years of development, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework has become the most widely used theoretical framework in e-learning. It is considered in much of the distance education literature to be a robust collaborative-constructivist process model that uses three essential elements to interpret educational experience: cognitive…

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…

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…

While adaptive learning is emerging as a promising technology to promote access and quality at a large scale in higher education (Becker et al., 2018), the implementation of adaptive learning in teaching and learning is still sporadic, and it is unclear how to best design and teach an adaptive learning course in a higher education context. As…

This article covers a topic related to increases in the existing heterogeneity of the university student population, specifically in virtual learning environments. There is a growing concern for offering training alternatives that include all students. As the first step in a line of research related to quality, equity, and inclusion in e-learning,…

Flexibility is typical of open universities and their e-learning designs. While this constitutes their main attraction, promising learners will be able to study "anytime, anyplace," this also demands more self-regulation and engagement, a cause for student dropout. This case study explores professors' experiences of flexibility in…

Online professional development (OPD) programs have become increasingly popular. However, participating in professional development does not always lead to profound professional learning. Previous research endeavours have often focussed on measuring user acceptance or on comparing the effectiveness of OPD with a face-to-face delivery, but there is…

This study investigates and fully identifies the challenges of the Iranian e-learning system. The approach was qualitative and the method was research synthesis. The statistical population consisted of studies from 2006 to 2019 in the field of challenges of the e-learning system of Iran collected with specific keywords from the country's…

A course design question for self-paced courses includes whether or not technological measures should be used in course design to force students to follow the sequence intended by the course author. This study examined learner behavior to understand whether the sequence of student assignment submissions in a self-paced distance course is related…

In recent years, a number of models concerning problem solving systems have been put forward. However, many of them stress on technology and neglect the research of problem solving itself, especially the learning mechanism related to problem solving. In this paper, we analyze the learning mechanism of problem solving, and propose that when…

A total of 2,338 students at German universities participated in a survey, which investigated media usage patterns of so-called traditional and non-traditional students (Schuetze & Wolter, 2003). The students provided information on the digital devices that they own or have access to, and on their usage of media and e-learning tools and…

With the emergence of social software and the advance of web-based technologies, online learning networks provide invaluable opportunities for learning, whether formal or informal. Unlike top-down, instructor-centered, and carefully planned formal learning settings, informal learning networks offer more bottom-up, student-centered participatory…

Online educational videos disseminated content for a university pre-service teacher internship program. Placed within an online course management system, the videos were accessed by 202 interns located in several Western U.S. states. To ascertain the interns' subjective experiences of the online course and videos to assist in the evaluation of the…