Background: Feedback is one of the most significant factors for students' development of writing skills. For feedback to be successful, however, students and teachers need a common language--a meta-language--for discussing texts. Not least because in science education such a meta-language might contribute to improve writing training and…

Why do over 90% of the learners in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) never finish the course? There is a need for further studies focusing on the learners' experiences of participating in MOOCs and factors that influence the decision to complete or drop out of the course. To deepen our understanding of why learners complete or drop out of MOOCs,…

This paper is a commentary to a paper by Anne Solli, Frank Bach and Björn Åkerman on how students at a technical university learn to argue as biotechnologists. Solli and her colleagues report from an ethnographic study performed during the first semester of a 5-year program in biotechnology at a technical university in Sweden. Their study…

Due to societal changes there is a growing need for distant and adult learning. The reason to participate in education and the choices that students make may differ. In this study the factors age, gender, rate of studies and parenthood have been analysed in order to see how these relate to different motivational factors for choosing a web-based…