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Online education has been growing rapidly, but has not had the benefit of the extensive teaching pedagogy development of traditional face‐to‐face teaching. This paper aims to provide a review of the current literature and present the results of a survey, conducted to determine the effectiveness of a graduate online subject.

The literature was reviewed to identify measures of success and quality in online education delivery. These measures were then considered in relation to their application in practice via a case study based around a survey conducted at Deakin University in Australia.

A total of 16 relevant measures of teaching quality were identified in the literature. Most measures had elements of bias and some were more generally applicable to online learning. The case study suggested that the value of computer mediated learning in an online environment was limited and that a combination of print and computer mediated conferencing performed better in more of the identified quality matrices.

Online learning does not save teaching resources if standards of quality are maintained. It can be used to provide a remote teaching facility, provided it is backed up by resources such as printed study guides. For the subject evaluated, online mediated learning did not the provide the same quality of education.

Whilst some research has been conducted in this area, no substantive grounded theory has been applied to postgraduate or fee‐paying online education regimes. As a result, case studies of such applications can be very helpful in the design of future teaching systems.

Changes in teaching and learning in higher education, combined with rapid developments in electronic communications and resources, point to a new role for the information intermediary. This can be identified as a new professional practice which is termed ‘networked learner support’ by the authors of the paper and which is closely associated with the support of learning through computer‐mediated communication. The paper examines the background to this emergent practice, and offers a preliminary model for its development. The model involves practitioners' participation in collaborative networked learning, as a means of exploring and developing relevant resource knowledge and support strategies. Fundamental to the model is the view that the new practice needs to be defined from within the profession, and must be capable of taking into account and responding to the specific demands of local circumstances.

The purpose of this paper was to identify pertinent studies on the important issue of student engagement strategies in online courses and to establish from empirical studies student engagement strategies that work.

The paper adopted the literature review approach. The authors conducted a thorough and systematic search of the literature to find empirical studies focusing on online engagement strategies within the field of education and distance learning. To generate as many relevant publications as possible, both manual and electronic searches were conducted. The databases used included; Academic Search Complete (Ebsco), Social Sciences Full Text (Wilson), ProQuest Education Journals, ProQuest Dissertation and Thesis, ProQuest Central, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCIISI), ERIC, (Ebsco), SAGE Full-Text Collection (CSA), Google Scholar and Emerald.

The results of this paper revealed the several factors that can create engaging learning experiences for the online learners. The primary factors are as follows: creating and maintaining positive learning environment; building learning community; giving consistent feedback in timely manner; and using the right technology to deliver the right content.

The paper is limited, as it is based on a review of literature. Empirical studies need to be conducted to support the ideas generated in this paper. For example, it is proposed that individual and institutional characteristics play an important role in promoting learner satisfaction in online courses. Additional studies that can explore this aspect in detail are needed.

The paper has both professional and educational implications. The findings of this paper can help identify areas where the instructors and designers of online classes need to focus. The student engagement strategies for online courses identified should assist both experienced and beginning online instructors in the design and successful delivery of online courses. Students taking online courses should find the results of this study invaluable.

The purpose of this research is to discuss a variety of empirical findings suggesting that surprise is positively related with enhanced memory recall. This opens the door for the assumption that surprising stimuli can be used in a controlled way to enhance learning.

A predictive model based on a Darwinian interpretation of this phenomenon is proposed. The model is coined CLEBS, which stands for “computer‐based learning enhanced by surprise”.

A discussion on how the model can be tested is provided in the context of a finance‐oriented Web‐based learning task, where subjects learn about investment instruments such as stocks and bonds.

Important implications are discussed, including possible applications in a variety of areas of interest to organizations in general.

This paper aims to provide evidence that online well-designed educational tasks can provide more relevant and richer active learning environment for business English learners. The benefits of online tasks, as an education tool, became more apparent and gained more importance during the events related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The task design is based on task-based interactions and in a sequence of tasks with the support of an online learning management system (LMS). The findings suggest that online task-based learning (and would-be blended learning in the future) enables meaningful and authentic activities promoting interactions and communicative competences to prepare for learners of business English to enter the workplace.

The overarching aim of the study is to explore how task-design-utilizing online LMS could contribute to enhancing the learning process and to the development of the learner's communicative competences. The study included two aspects, namely: (1) the design of online tasks and (2) pilot evaluation. The task design involved tasks that required interactions between the learners. The pilot evaluation relied on data collection via questionnaires.

Two aspects relating to the findings: (1) a description of the teaching initiatives which was designed to see how blended learning and online tasks can enhance learning and develop the skills of the learners: with questioning techniques targeting communication skills, simulated workplace situations and timely feedback and peer influence; (2) the findings of the pilot study evaluation to see the actual implementation of online tasks. The students' responses corroborate the teachers' comments. The findings of this research showed that LMS tasks, which were designed for this study, helped the learners to enhance their competence in business English. Such competences included communicative skills needed for learners to enter the workplace such as interpersonal skills, presentation skills and negotiation skills in contexts. These findings lead to significant recommendations regarding the way forward for developing active blended learning.

Firstly, teachers need to be trained and involved in designing such online tasks and materials to be used in active blended learning. More training in language teaching methodologies should be investigated to adapt the transition from a traditional to a computer-assisted language learning teacher. This helps teachers to design and implement online simulated workplace tasks. Secondly, time for the use of online tasks should be allocated satisfactorily. This can be achieved by building online learning sessions into class schedule or developing active blended courses. The time for the use of online simulated tasks should be allocated satisfactorily with lab or simulation room, in which students would be shown how to access the online tasks designed on the university LMS and the way to practice with different kinds of tasks.

In this study context, the online tasks design can initiate at activity-level blending to support face-to-face (F2F) activities, for example, online activities to support tasks for the topic Make a request or Offer for help. This can be extended to course-level blending when more online activities are designed to use with F2F activities such as online comparing and contrasting tasks to develop skills in connections with the awareness of cultures. The findings of the research suggest to develop and to implement online tasks alongside with classroom learning and teaching to enable the objectives of business English programme at university for preparing learners to enter the workplace. The recent pandemic highlighted the need for effective methodologies for active blended learning. It is now required that professionals in higher education to collect evidence base to inform future practice of such methodologies. Further significant research efforts should be directed towards collecting such evidence of the effectiveness and improvements of such methods. The support of higher education management professionals in securing funding for such research will be essential.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of user’s learning style (including accommodators, divergers, convergers, and assimilators) on user’s satisfaction on the web-based learning system and their learning effectiveness.

This experimental research used the college students from a technology institute in Taiwan as the subject sources. By using the Kolb’s learning style model, the students are classified as four types of learners: convergers, divergers, assimilators, and accommodators. The authors analyzed the relationships among the different learning styles with their effectiveness of learning and satisfaction of using the web-based learning system. The mediation effect of gender is also presented.

This research indicates that: first, the satisfaction of the web-based learning system has significant influence on the learning performance of learners; second, different learning styles learners have no significant effect to the satisfaction on using the web-based learning system; third, learning effectiveness has significant difference among different learning style learners on the web-based learning system; the learning effectiveness of accommodators and divergers was significantly higher than the assimilators; fourth, different learning styles learners show significant difference in gender proportion. In addition to accommodators, whose proportion of women is higher than men, the other three learning styles’ proportions in men are higher than women.

This study was grounded in the Kolb’s learning style theory. The authors provide implications for academic studies in e-learning research stream that aimed at understanding the role of learning style as well as gender differences in the asynchronous web-based learning system.

Results from this study provided the implications for students, educators, and e-learning system designers. The design of teaching materials as well as functions of e-learning systems should take learners’ learning style into consideration to ensure the best learning outcome.

This study examined the students’ learning style as well as gender differences in the asynchronous web-based learning system. An experiment was conducted to ensure the data were collected in a controlled environment, thus, offer the value that most of the prior study lacks.

This study intends to add to the existing body of literature and provides a strong advocacy for the use of the computer-mediated corrective feedback by university lecturers in Nigeria and elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions and experiences of lecturers toward students' research project supervision using the computer-mediated corrective feedback, factors that facilitate its use, the most preferred computer-mediated corrective feedback types and the extent of its usage in project supervision.

This research relies on both the Dialectical Theory and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. This study adopted the interpretivist philosophical paradigm. The case study approach of the qualitative design was used in this investigation. The research participants were selected using the multi-stage sampling procedure. In all, twenty-four (24) lecturers (four from each university, comprising 16 males and 8 females and their ages ranged from 37 years to 61 years) made up the study sample. In-depth interviews were held with these lecturers. The collected data were transcribed and coded and themes were generated based on the responses of research participants using inductive-thematic analysis (ATLAS.ti version 22).

The results indicated that lecturers' perceptions towards the computer-mediated corrective feedback in students’ research project supervision are positive, as they considered it flexible, speedy and economical. Users' personal and device-related factors affect the deployment of computer-mediated corrective feedback for students' research project supervision. E-mail, WhatsApp and Zoom are the three themes that emerged as computer-mediated corrective feedback types that lecturers adopt while supervising students’ research projects. Therefore, the study recommends that lecturers should take full advantage of computer-mediated corrective feedback in supervising students' research projects in lieu of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Universities should also provide an enabling environment that facilitates computer-mediated corrective feedback.

Studies (outside Nigeria) have been conducted on CMCF using predominantly the experimental and the quantitative research designs in ascertaining the impact of this mode of feedback on students' writing performances. Other studies examined students' perceptions toward CMCF. However, little or no attention has been given to the use of CMCF in the supervision of students' research project writing, especially in Nigeria. Moreover, calls for more qualitative research into lecturer-student interactions and the assessment of educational issues have emerged in recent times. It is against this backdrop that this study explored university lecturers' perceptions and experiences of CMCF on students' research project supervision in Nigerian universities.

The purpose of this study is to chart the development in computer-assisted language learning (CALL), by building a map of existing research work in the field. Based on a corpus of 163 manuscripts, published between January 2009 and September 2010 in four major journals devoted to CALL, it sets out to describe the range of topics covered under the umbrella of CALL and provide a holistic view of the field.

The approach adopted in this research includes: development of the 2009-2010 CALL corpus; literature overview and initial coding scheme development; refinement of the initial coding scheme with the help of a focus group and construction of the CALL map version 1.0; refinement of the CALL map version 1.0 following a systematic approach of content analysis and development of the CALL map version 2.0; evaluation of the proposed structure and inclusiveness of all categories in the CALL map version 2.0 using card sorting technique; and finally development of the CALL map version 3.0.

The research trends in the categories of the CALL map are discussed, as well as possible future directions in the field.

This paper provides a holistic view of the field of CALL guiding both junior CALL researchers to place themselves in the field, and policy and decision makers who attempt to evaluate the current and future scholar activity in the field. Finally, it caters for more experienced researchers to focus on certain underinvestigated domains.

Social presence (SP), which refers to individuals’ perception of others being engaged as “real people” in the same situation, is a crucial component in technology-rich learning environments (TREs). This study aims to identify major learning design, antecedents and outcomes of SP within TREs, and identify common findings from the past two decades.

Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses review principles and a qualitative analysis of selected articles, a final review of 72 studies that met inclusion criteria was obtained. Key information, including education level, discipline, sample size, study type and measurements, was extracted and studies were further analyzed and synthesized based on design features and learning modes.

The study identifies five crucial factors for instructional design to foster SP in TREs: technology affordances, multimedia features, social factors, instructional principles, learner characteristics and learning management systems. The authors compare two learning modes across three dimensions and identify popular technologies used in studies related to SP over the past two decades. Practical recommendations are provided for educators and educational technology developers to enhance SP within technology-rich learning environments.

This research contributes to the discourse on online learning and computer-supported communication, particularly in the post-COVID-19 era. By examining factors influencing SP and providing implications for instruction and educational technology development, this study offers evidence-based support to educators for engaging learners and fostering authentic learning experiences through adaptive selection of educational technologies.

Blended learning (BL) has been increasing in popularity and demand and has developed as a common practice in institutions of higher learning. Therefore, this study develops a model to evaluate the critical predictors that determine students' acceptance and deployment of BL in institutions of higher education based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

The empirical analysis entails data collected from 1,811 responses from an online survey questionnaire from students in Malaysian universities, colleges and polytechnics. Partial least square–structural equation modeling (PLS–SEM) was employed for data analysis.

The results reveal that the attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy were found to influence students' intention to accept BL. Moreover, results suggest that the intention of students to accept BL approach is significantly influenced by actual BL deployment.

Data were collected from students in universities, colleges and polytechnics only. Besides, this research is one of the limited studies that explored BL deployment in a Malaysian perspective.

Findings from this research not only add scientific evidence to BL literature but also provide a better understanding of the predictors that may motivate or discourage learners to deploy BL in institutions of higher learning.

Respectively, findings from this study aid students to acquire and apply knowledge on how to effectively improve BL initiatives in learning activities.

This study is one of the fewer studies that investigate students' behavioral intentions toward BL deployment in Malaysia. Additionally, this study contributes to the understanding of the predictors that influence students' intention to accept and deploy BL in their respective institutions.