Under this "new normal" world scenario, online teaching has been essential rather than a choice in continuing learning activities. During the COVID-19 period, virtual teaching platforms played an important role in the success of online teaching in various higher educational institutions. Thus, the current study attempted to predict…

This literature review aimed to examine the status, trends and tendencies in publications about virtual classrooms, instructional design in the virtual classroom and instructional effectiveness in the virtual classroom, as indexed in the ERIC database. For this review, we examined 2680 publications indexed in ERIC between 1994 and 2018. We…

Online learning environments have become a contemporary component of global tertiary education due to their affordances. These environments are hinged on internet-based learning management systems and one such tool is Google Classroom. However, empirical studies have indicated that gaps exist in determining how Google Classroom influences…

Virtual education faces tremendous challenges such as lack of motivation and high dropout rates. However, one solution to this problem is the incorporation of digital pedagogical strategies based on gamification, which promote interest, facilitate the learning process, and contribute to reducing dropout. In this sense, we evaluated the student's…

Learning is facilitated by participation and interaction and can be synchronously or asynchronously in online education. This study investigated the relationship between students' academic success and online interaction and participation and explored their class attendance (synchronous virtual classes and/or watching the recorded virtual classes)…

The higher education market space has become increasingly competitive during the past few years. For instance, there are now hundreds of fully online master's programs in educational technology. Given this increased competition, it is more important than ever for those working in graduate education to understand what students, and specifically…

This article presents the design and pilot of an open online course, based on the principle of universal design for learning (Center for Applied Special Technology, 2011), to promote inclusive virtual education as an improvement transferable to other contexts. The course constitutes the first massive open online course (MOOC) training proposal of…

There is growing demand for online learning activities that offer flexibility for students to study anywhere, anytime, as online students fit study around work and family commitments. We designed a series of online activities and evaluated how, where, and with what devices students used the activities, as well as their levels of engagement and…

The purpose of this research was to explore the relationships between design, learning, and translanguaging in a 3D collaborative virtual learning environment for adolescent learners of Chinese and English. We designed an open-ended space congruent with ecological and dialogical perspectives on second language acquisition. In such a space,…

This paper was designed to investigate the application of an online inquiry-based program to European tourism from an epistemological perspective. Fifty tourism students (n = 50) participated in this study and their epistemological beliefs were measured with the Epistemological Belief Scale. A set of pre-, post-, and delayed tests were utilised to…

Although problem-based learning (PBL) has many advantages, it often fails to connect to the real world outside the classroom. The integration with the laboratory setting and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been proposed to address this deficiency. Multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) like Second Life (SL) are…

While students do learn real-world knowledge and skills in virtual worlds, educators have yet to adequately theorise how students' virtual world experiences bring about this learning. This paper critically reviewed theories currently used to underpin empirical work in virtual worlds for education. In particular, it evaluated how applicable these…

There is a growing body of evidence that feeling present in virtual environments contributes to effective learning. Presence is a psychological state of the user; hence, it is generally agreed that individual differences in user characteristics can lead to different experiences of presence. Despite the fact that user characteristics can play a…

In this article, the successful implementation of a development cycle for a physics teaching package based on game-like virtual reality software is reported. The cycle involved several iterations of evaluating students' use of the package followed by instructional and software development. The evaluation used a variety of techniques, including…

For the second-language learner, the affordances of a virtual world have the potential to confer benefits conventionally aligned with real world experiences. However, little is known about the pedagogical benefits linked to the specific characteristics of the virtual world, let alone the issues arising for staff hoping to assess students'…