The success of MOOC (massive open online courses) is rapidly increasing. Most educational institutions are highly interested in these online platforms, which embrace intellectual and educational objectives and provide various opportunities for lifelong learning. However, many limitations, such as learners' diversity, lack of motivation, affected…

In the Fall of 2014, several universities came together to offer a unique "dual-layer" open online course. This course was designed with two complete layers from two different course design modalities (instructivism and connectivism). Learners were granted the freedom to create an individualized pathway through the course involving…

Purpose: We describe a series of more than a dozen studies on self-directed online learning spanning over a decade. Design/Approach/Methods: We incorporated surveys, interviews, focus groups, and content analyses into these research studies, which initially targeted the goals, motivations, and challenges of learners using open educational…

In spite of its increasing popularity, distance education faces challenges -- levels of digital literacy, access to technology, workload and time management, students' feelings of isolation and disconnection -- that can have a significant impact on the experience of the learners. In addressing these issues, we propose a pedagogical model for…

The objective of the research is to determine e-learning solutions for the implementation of the spaced learning in university students' sustainable education. In the spaced e-learning method, the course content includes few-minute pauses between repetitions, during which students let their brain "rest" with different content and then…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) pose a challenge for instructors when trying to provide personalised support to learners, due to large numbers of registered participants. Conversational agents can be of help to support learners when working with MOOCs. This article presents an adaptive learning module for JavaPAL, a conversational agent that…

Open Education (OE), a generic term for a collection of practices that seek to broaden the access to education through digital means, has gained increasing traction and popularity over the last years and from various corners, both globally and in European circles. Rather than taking the technologies OE makes use of at face value, this article…

Open learning represents a new form of online learning where courses are provided freely online for large numbers of learners. MOOCs are examples of this form of learning. The authors see an opportunity for personalising open learning environments by adapting to learners' learning styles and providing adaptive support to meet individual learner…

Learning analytics focuses on extracting meaning from large amounts of data. One of the largest datasets in education comes from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that typically feature enrollments in the tens of thousands. Analyzing MOOC discussion forums presents logistical issues, resulting chiefly from the size of the dataset, which can…

Little research has examined the critical components of successful K-12 online schools, due in part to the theoretical focus of current frameworks on higher education rather than characteristics of K-12 online learners and environments. Using K-12 online research, this paper examined "teaching presence" as explained by the Community of…