Much research has shown that discussion boards (DBs) in online learning can be as useful as any physical discussion (Prenksy, 2003; Ransdell, 2013). Prenksy was one of the first researchers to emphasize that online learning had to be motivating, just like any other type of learning. Students will only do what they believe will help them learn.…

The COVID-19 confinement has represented both opportunities and losses for education. Rarely before has any other period moved the human spirit into such discipline or submission--depending on one's personal and emotional points of view. Both extremes have been widely influenced by external factors on each individual's life path. Education in the…

The sudden shift to online learning thrust upon universities worldwide by the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis created unique challenges related to effective online education. Challenges were most acute for highly interactive classes that were forced to move to asynchronous online learning environments. In response to these challenges,…

Turino's ([2008]. "Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation." Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) distinctions between live and recorded fields can act as an effective framework for furthering academic understandings of how music teaching and learning has been impacted by the shift to online musical practice due to COVID-19…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore student teachers' views related to the online academic support e-tools used under the COVID-19 lockdown. Design/methodology/approach: Mapping a pragmatic research approach, an explanatory mixed methods design was used for the study. Findings: Empirical evidence revealed that student teachers were satisfied and…

This paper is a report of a cross-cultural online collaboration between two cohorts of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong, China and an American university in St. Paul, Minnesota. It explicates the pedagogical design and implementation of online tools for group collaboration and students' perceptions of the benefits and challenges. Multiple…

This study reports on how the affordances of the WebEx platform were used as multimodality resources during the negotiation of meaning by participants engaged in an English/Spanish eTandem video-conferencing exchange. The exchange involved five dyads of university students with an intermediate level of language proficiency. A total of seven tasks…

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, teacher colleges across the country suddenly shifted to online. In many cases, faculty, wary of shortchanging students of a meaningful learning experience, leveraged synchronous meetings as a way of compensating for the abrupt removal of face-to-face (F2F) interactions. This mixed-methods…

Nowadays, distance education programs are increasing with the COVID-19 outbreak. Due to the number of options based on distance education, it is aimed to provide a higher quality to service users. One of the important methods to increase the quality of distance education services is SWOT analysis. SWOT Analysis enables organizations to see their…

Massive open online courses are increasingly popular. One characteristic of most massive open online courses is that they are offering educational contents to masses of different individual learners. At the same time, a particular challenge for the individual learner could be the massiveness of such courses, that is, that one is part of a large…

The present study tried to investigate EFL teachers' and learners' facilities regarding smartphone-assisted language learning (SALL) in the Faculty of Languages and Translation, King Khalid University (KKU), Saudi Arabia, including their attitudes, perceptions, levels of proficiency, and the challenges they experienced. The study also pursued to…

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented educational challenges. In order to ensure the continuity of formal education and to compensate for interruptions, emergency remote teaching practices were initiated worldwide. Like all other courses, foreign language teaching applied internet technologies as a teaching-learning media during the…

Connecting informal and formal language teaching and learning has gained prominence as a way to understand language development among teenagers, but questions remain regarding its application in L2 contexts. This study investigates the significance of such connections in two L2 English classes taught by the same teacher, where students were…

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the higher education sector significantly. It forced the stakeholders to do new things and brought many innovations to educational activities. As the pandemic hit the shores of many countries, among other things and sectors, education activities were disrupted. Many, not well-advanced universities in terms of…

COVID-19 pandemic has profound global impact not only as a health crisis, but also as a time period that gave birth to radical social changes. Following the suggested measure of social distancing, responses of US educational system--shifting the mode of instruction to online only--present the significance of technology towards the contemporary…