Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey attitudes and emotions. While popular, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied. This paper reports on the students' use of emoji in an online course forum in which students annotate and discuss course material in the margins of the online textbook. For this study, instructors…

The Etherpad is an open source online editor providing the possibility for collaborative writing and discussions in real-time via a shared link. Previous research has shown that the use of technology in higher education can be effective and that online editors can facilitate collaborative learning. This article outlines the use of the Etherpad in…

This study aims to understand how a developing country higher education institution (HEI) attempted to digitalise teaching. The Internet has disrupted the traditional teaching environment and teaching practices leading to the migration from physical face-to-face teaching to online teaching changing the work environment of the teacher. Information…

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) have gained more prominence in education of late; however, the question of their theoretically sound implementation remains relatively understudied. The current article addresses this gap through the explanation of how a MUVE platform Second Life was used in an undergraduate course for pre-service teachers.…

It has often been found that students appreciate hands-on work, and find that they learn more with courses that include a project than those relying solely on conventional lectures and tests. This type of project driven learning is a key component of "Inquiry-based learning" (IBL), which aims at teaching methodology as well as content by…

Global software engineering (GSE) courses traditionally require cooperation between at least two universities so as to provide a distributed development environment to the students. In this study, we explore an alternative way to organize a global software engineering course where students work on open source software development (OSSD) projects…

Language interaction has been shown to positively impact second language development (Long, 1996). However, whereas research that examined interactionist approaches to second language acquisition (Gass & Mackey, 2006) has meticulously studied how different factors in the interaction (interactional context, type of task, etc) may affect L2…

COVID-19 is hastening the adoption of online learning and teaching worldwide, and across all levels of education. While many of the typical learning and teaching transactions such as lecturing and communicating are easily handled by contemporary online learning technologies, others, such as assessment of learning outcomes with closed book…

This paper presents a brief overview of LARA (Learning And Reading Assistant), an open source online tool that has been under development since summer 2018. LARA currently contains a corpus of about 25 texts in ten languages and a crowdsourcing model used to expand the corpus. The central goal is to provide support for improving second language…

The e-assessment, as an important part of any e-learning system, faces the same challenges and problems such as problems related to portability, reusability, adaptability, integration and interoperability. Therefore, we need an approach aiming to generate a general process of the e-assessment. The present study consists of the development of a…

Present-day geography is inconceivable in the absence of GIS software. The students and staff of the Faculty of Geography within the University of Bucharest use both proprietary GIS software and Open Source computer programmes. Consequently, this study aims at identifying to what extent each of them is used for various tasks and what is the…

This paper aims to identify elements that will help with the process of thinking through curriculum issues based on the concept of open architecture. We argue that this concept can be an interesting driver of practice and debate concerning curriculum development in different contexts. More generally, we seek for viable public education that is…

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials with an open license so that they can be freely copied, modified, and reused. While the rising cost of textbooks is a concern in higher education, over 50% of the surveyed educators stated that they are unaware of the OER and how they could replace the traditional textbooks. In addition,…

Studying via the Internet using information tools is a common activity for students in higher education. With students accessing their subject material via the Internet, studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the complete purpose of an assessment which leads to poor information search practices. The selection of relevant…

Textbooks are a vital component in many higher education contexts. Increasing textbook prices, coupled with general rising costs of higher education have led some instructors to experiment with substituting open educational resources (OER) for commercial textbooks as their primary class curriculum. This article synthesizes the results of 16…