Background: Video conferencing technology has moved online education into a new stage of real-time video interaction. However, shortcomings such as students' lack of concentration and substantive engagement during video conferencing greatly limit the improvement of online learning effectiveness. According to social presence theory and the…

Instructor participation plays a crucial role in asynchronous online discussions, as the approach taken can potentially impact student performance. This study compared two instructor participation approaches: replying to student posts on public discussion boards and commenting on student posts on private grade pages. It examined the impact on both…

Many universities implemented blended and hybrid delivery for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as such, the use of terms that relate to various manifestations and implementations of blended learning has increased significantly by all higher education stakeholders. However, the meaning ascribed to these terms is often inconsistent…

The world's nations are faced with an exceptional situation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). In fact, this virus has changed our life and it has limited the number of people congregating in public places. Therefore, many institutions (states, establishments and private institutions) have taken all possible measures to effectively…

Isolation of online doctoral students intensifies when they transition from coursework to the dissertation/capstone phase, limiting them to interacting with their mentors. A three-round modified Delphi study was conducted to examine mentoring preferences of online doctoral students and faculty. The first round provided qualitative data regarding…

Abrupt switches to online learning without face-to-face contact between facilitators and students can cause distress and have a negative impact on student success. As students use instant messaging applications (IMAs) to communicate with one another, we have integrated WhatsApp-based mobile learning environments (MLEs) in two disparate higher…

In recent years, the world of education has become increasingly hybrid (online/on location) and flexible (synchronous/asynchronous), frequently referred to as HyFlex. One of the risks of these mixed environments is the distance between teacher and students that can make interaction, a crucial component of the teaching/learning process, more…

Despite the potential of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers' everyday practice, its adoption has not been fully embraced due to the limited involvement of teachers as co-designers of LA systems and interventions. This is the focus of the study described in this paper. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach and guided by concepts…

The current COVID-19 pandemic forces the educational field to adapt to e-learning to continue teaching and learning. This study aimed to analyze the use of e-learning platforms during the COVID-19 crisis, especially in the biology education program. This study used a quantitative survey design. Through purposive sampling, 100 lecturers from 43…

Online discussion forums are crucial educational tools that facilitate interaction between students and teachers. We created an online discussion forum, with the teacher serving as the moderator. 58 posts and 1,955 comments were collected. We analysed these data through Latent Dirichlet Allocation to determine word cooccurrence and extract key…

The "community of inquiry" framework examines the interplay between four kinds of presence (teaching, cognitive, social, and learner) to promote effective learning in online education. This paper investigates the impact of "instructor participation" ("IP"), a key component of "teaching presence," on student…

Purpose: This qualitative study sought to explore how Iranian English language professors used social media network Telegram in their classes and what possibilities and constraints they experienced with regard to classroom interactions and university education, and how they rethought the use of social media network Telegram.…

The extensive and intensive online teaching and learning during the pandemic has provided good opportunities for academic staff and students to experiment with learning and teaching using synchronous communication technology and learning platforms. This experience is highly valuable for helping higher education institutions move learning and…

The advent of new technology is breaking the boundaries of traditional teaching and learning patterns with virtual worlds (VW) creating new frontiers in education. Previous research has explored the use of VW within educational settings. However, limited studies have investigated the transition processes that educators experience by adopting VW…

Social Annotation (SA) is a learning technology that allows people to read, highlight, and comment on specific parts of text. SA tools like Hypothes.is enable users to highlight and annotate texts and documents online and respond to others' annotations via text, sharing links of documents, audio, or video. Research on SA in higher education online…