MOOC platforms provide a means of communication through forums, allowing learners to express their difficulties and challenges while studying various courses. Within these forums, some posts require urgent attention from instructors. Failing to respond promptly to these posts can contribute to higher dropout rates and lower course completion…

In this article, we investigate a systematic workflow that supports the learning engineering process of formulating the starting question for a conversational module based on existing learning materials, specifying the input that transformer-based language models need to function as classifiers, and specifying the adaptive dialogue structure,…

This article provides computational and rule-based approaches for detecting confusion that is expressed in students' comments in couse forums. To obtain reliable, ground truth data about which posts exhibit student confusion, we designed a decision tree that facilitates the manual labeling of forum posts by experts. However, manual labeling is…

Digital transformation in higher education, especially after COVID-19, is seen as inevitable. This research explores digital transformation's maturity and challenges within the education enterprise. The significance of this study stems from the critical role digital transformation and higher education play in today's digital economy, and digital…

Social presence theory has been a seminal part of digital pedagogies literature since the early generation of computer-mediated communication (CMC). However, despite multiple generations of the development of the theory, there is still a lack of a stable, widely accepted definition. Definitions range from those that identify social presence based…

This exploratory review brings together research that investigates computer-assisted language learning (CALL), and research in the field of learning design, paying particular attention to the theoretical frameworks and approaches of "design for learning." The attempts of connecting the two fields stem from two critical foci and…

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a course that is offered fully online and is usually open for enrollment by any individual, with no limit on the number of participants. MOOCs are a popular resource for learning worldwide with over 23 million new learners registering for MOOCs in 2017 alone. Coursera, the most popular MOOC platform, has…

For many people, the use of technology in education constitutes a de facto "innovation." Whether or not this belief is actually accurate, or useful, is a legitimate question for discussion. That said, there is no denying that many of the educational innovations celebrated (or at least touted) today are enabled by the use of such…

This article presents the development of a digital competency model of Distance Learning (DL) students in Brazil called CompDigAl_EAD. The following topics were addressed in this study: Educational Competences, Digital Competences, and Distance Learning students. The model was developed between 2015 and 2016 and is being validated in 2017. It was…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…

With the rapid advance of e-learning, the online peer help is playing increasingly important role. This paper explores the application of MAS to an online peer help system (MAPS). In the design phase, the architecture of MAPS is proposed, which consists of a set of agents including the personal agent, the course agent, the diagnosis agent, the DF…

The inclusion of online elements in learning environments is becoming commonplace in Post Compulsory Education. A variety of research into the value of such elements is available, and this study aims to add further evidence by looking specifically at the use of collaborative technologies such as online discussion forums and wikis to encourage…

This study takes a novel approach toward understanding success in a math course by examining the linguistic features and affect of students' language production within a blended (with both on-line and traditional face to face instruction) undergraduate course (n=158) on discrete mathematics. Three linear effects models were compared: (a) a…

This paper focuses on the conceptual model of an academic course inspired by complexity theory. In the proposed conceptual model, the aim of teaching is to form a learning organization: a knowledge community with emergent properties that cannot be reduced to any linear combination of the properties of its parts. In this approach, the learning of…

University programs for preparing preservice teachers of languages for teaching in schools generally involve generic pedagogy, methodology, curriculum, programming and issues foci, that provide a bridge between the study of languages (or recognition of existing language proficiency) and the teaching of languages. There is much territory to cover…