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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Online learning critically relies upon good communication between engaged parties in order to convey ideas, meanings, and values. Emerging technologies in collaborative virtual environments are providing new affordances in establishing greater online presence and, in turn, greater abilities to communicate and learn. This study examines how…

This study explores the use of the virtual classroom which has been created in "myVLE", a learning management system used by the Open University Malaysia (OUM). The virtual classroom in "myVLE" is an asynchronous-based online learning environment that delivers course materials to learners and provides collaboration and…

This paper analyses Gen Y pre-service primary school teachers' conceptualisations of lifelong learning. It is situated within a context of improving the provision and delivery of pre-service teacher education. This paper argues that Gen Y's understanding of lifelong learning has been influenced by their engagements with digital technologies and…

This paper reports on a collaborative staff development activity run across two Australian universities, for academic staff integrating Web 2.0 technologies into their teaching. It describes a three-week long virtual workshop on teaching with wikis, where participants in two groups developed a group project as students and then assessed the work…

It would be difficult to argue that the use of online technology to support teaching and learning has not undergone significant change in the last two decades. Recently, with the promotion of social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and virtual classrooms, we have seen the emergence of the idea of e-learning 2.0. That is, the…

This paper explores a relatively new area in the design and development of assessment procedures for the evaluation of coursework and student performance on computer and video games degrees. Emphasis is placed on an assessment which involves the development of and interaction in a virtual world, where lecturers and students are represented as…

The use of information technology in higher education has increased significantly over the years. There is a paucity of controlled research which examines differences in electronic learning (EL) and face to face (F2F) learning. This study examined student (n = 1401) performance (final grade) in nine units offered in both F2F and EL mode over the…