South Africa requires an educated population to sustain her economic development. Higher education institutions are under pressure to produce graduates with skills and competencies to fulfil such an aspiration. Distance education is an essential avenue through which more South Africans can have the much-needed education without necessarily…

Student support is a fundamental component of any open and distance learning (ODL) system to mitigate the intrinsic challenges of student isolation, high dropout rates, and low throughput. Research interest in student support is continually growing as a panacea for enhancing student success in ODL, but relatively little research has been carried…

This pilot study explores and documents online students' and their lecturer's debut experiences of utilising VoiceThread (VT), a digital multimodal platform, as an alternative discussion space via Open Universities Australia (OUA). Feedback from the lecturer's teaching log and interview was corroborated with his OUA students' survey responses, and…

OER-enabled pedagogy, one form of open pedagogy, is gaining popularity as a method for increasing student engagement and motivation. Realising the potential of this approach, however, depends on faculty implementation and reducing resistance to change. This study explores the experience of instructors during their first and second courses when…

Partnerships are central to the awareness, implementation and development of open and distance learning (ODL). It is an attribute that is distinct in the higher education sector, where ODL has made a large footprint by dispelling the notion that university enrolment is reserved for a narrow and elite demographic. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL)…

Open licensing used in Open Educational Resources allows for teaching and learning techniques that are not possible with traditional copyright. There is a growing body of empirical research on open pedagogy. However, definitions and instantiations of open pedagogy vary in the literature. The purpose of this review was to systematically search and…

Goal setting is an important component in successful teaching and learning, but relatively little is known about its impact on course persistence and achievement in massive open online courses. Using an experimental design and employing a variety of data including student writings, content-related assignment attempts, and quantitative achievement…

Gamification, which is defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, is put forward as a solution to low motivation and is suggested for the creation of a sustainable learning ecology in open and distance learning (ODL). The overall purpose of the present study was to examine the distribution of the Hexad gamification user types…

This collaborative self-study examines how five higher education institutions in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have achieved momentum with openness and are implementing and sustaining their efforts. A goal of this research was to see whether an institutional self-assessment tool--adapted from blended learning and institutional transformation…

The rising prominence of micro-credentials started during the COVID-19 pandemic, where online resources offered competency-building opportunities for the work-from-home (WFH) human capital. During this pandemic, traditional universities faced total halt to face-to-face lectures, but ways paved for open and distance learning (ODL) universities to…

This research explores the effect of implementing educational open microcredentials on student motivation, engagement, and completion in open access online courses. Our case study reviews the impact on the Community of Learning for African PhD Fellows, a capacity-building project supporting PhD fellows in Sub-Saharan Africa. It builds on an…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe the statistical arguments produced by third-grade students (8-9 years old) and to identify the teaching support for collective argumentation in a lesson based on data comparison. A Lesson Study Group researched and planned the lesson around a problem from the official mathematics textbook.…

This dissertation investigates how collective process-oriented documentation tools, combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, can enhance knowledge construction in hands-on, open-ended learning environments, such as makerspaces. Through a three-year design-based research, the study developed and tested a collective documentation…

Information and communication technologies have been transforming the way we teach and learn. Either for facilitating teaching practices or for making learning more interesting and joyful for the learners, artificial intelligence-based applications are utilized in recent years. In this connection, this study intends to examine if automated…

This multinational authored article presents the findings and recommendations of a three-year, European-funded project 'OpenMed: Opening up education in South Mediterranean countries', which brought together five higher education partners from Europe and nine from the South Mediterranean region. This was the first cross-European initiative to…