Pedagogical training is considered an efficient tool to train university teachers to understand and foster active learning. In Finland, pedagogical training courses are organized periodically at universities, and university teachers participate voluntarily to improve pedagogical knowledge and skills for teaching in higher education settings. This…

Higher education recently found itself in the unprecedented situation of being forced to rapidly switch to online education as a demand of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this article is to compare and contrast the experiences of university tutors who teach in two distance education universities with those who teach in a traditional university…

Informed by Charles Wright Mills' sociological imagination and the Technology Acceptance Model, this qualitative study was undertaken to report the emergence of Shadow Education (SE) in teacher education in Zimbabwe amid COVID-19. WhatsApp discussions and Google interviews generated data from 12 lecturers and 12 students, selected using snowball…

The use of online video lectures in universities, primarily for content delivery and learning, is on the rise. Instructors' ability to recognize and understand student learning experiences with online video lectures, identify particularly difficult or disengaging content and thereby assess overall lecture quality can inform their instructional…

The COVID-19 Pandemic, which has affected the entire world profoundly, has given rise to changes in many areas. The change in the education system appears as a compulsory transition to distance education, which raises the question as to how long the lectures in distance education should last. This study examined the emotional changes of the…

This study investigated the use and functions of metadiscourse markers in English as a foreign language (EFL) virtual classroom during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study examined which metadiscourse markers--interactive or interactional--were used more frequently and how they were employed in an EFL context. It explored two interactive metadiscourse…

Purpose: This paper aims first to describe the most prevalent teachers' and students' behaviors in synchronous online classes in emergency remote teaching; second, to discern behavior profiles and third, to investigate what features explain the observed behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: An adapted COPUS observation protocol was employed to…

The author used Periscope to broadcast live language, translation and technology lectures to her Twitter followers. The Periscope lecture analytics showed that lectures with the highest viewers, impressions and engagement were those about how to develop translation and interpreting skills and how to integrate Elluminate in teaching.…

Tertiary teaching is going through transformations as a result of web affordances, open access, and online learning platforms, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Some academics are taking advantage of MOOCs by integrating them into their teaching practice. This study investigates why some UK lecturers are blending MOOCs into their…

Currently, higher education system is characterized by the growing role of personal ability to adapt to the challenges of COVID-19 and finding opportunities for further development considering the global changes in all spheres of life. It puts pressure on the institutions in general and academic staff in particular. This paper aims at studying the…

The impacts of COVID-19 have been widespread, and the education sector has not been immune to its effects. In March 2020 Australian universities were forced into a shutdown, which prompted an unanticipated, sudden shift in education, from on-campus and face-to-face to an off-campus and online mode of teaching and learning. This paper describes the…

This article explores some key attributes of effective online tertiary educators. Using qualitative research methods, data were collected via semi-structured interviews which were conducted with a small sample of university academics in New Zealand and Australia, and analysed using an inductive approach and open and closed coding techniques. In…

We discuss a decade of initiatives to improve the teaching and learning of calculus at The Ohio State University. Calculus at OSU is taught in lecture/recitation format with large lectures and is tightly coordinated, so all innovations had to occur within that framework. We show how many smaller projects built upon one another to create a larger…

The paper suggests ways to benefit student learning online by improving staff training. The paper challenges the assumption that classroom based pedagogy applies to online teaching, with alternative ways that resolve the stress and confusion during the pandemic in the move to permanent blended teaching in the coming year. The paper is the 'front…

The spread of COVID-19 pandemic upturned higher education routines, inducing a shift to online learning which sometimes translated into a huge leap towards didactic experimentation. While exposing critical issues in existing teaching methodologies and assessment processes, such emergency distance education condition could spark meaningful…