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This study aims to evaluate a culture-based blended learning multilingual course created for adult learners in ten languages and the development of learners’ 21st-century skills during its implementation in six European countries – Croatia, Latvia, Slovenia, Romania, Poland and Czechia in the COVID-19 period.

A cross-sectional survey of 638 participants was conducted using a paper-based questionnaire. Data analysis was carried out applying Bereday’s four-step model comprising description, interpretation, juxtaposition and comparison to find out similarities and differences among various groups of learners.

Overall, learners have developed their 21st-century skills, but the improvement has not been the same for all target audiences. Learners with economic, social and cultural barriers were more positive in their evaluation than those with geographic and learning obstacles.

The research was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the face-to-face stage was replaced with online learning on virtual platforms, which impacted the research results. The results cannot be generalized to all adult learners as significant differences were discovered among various target groups of learners.

The course may be implemented for formal and non-formal adult education when face-to-face teaching/learning is restricted.

The findings indicate that the course is especially suitable for learners with economic, social and cultural obstacles to learning.

The article focuses on the use of blended learning in non-formal/informal adult education, which is a less widely researched area. The target course implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic shows a novel way of engaging adult learners in lifelong learning, including those with certain barriers to learning.

Suggests a particular practice should be developed when dealing with difficult adult learners. This involves changing the purpose of conventional “tutorials” to “learning clinics”. These would be one‐to‐one, in order to diagnose learning needs, and embed a learning culture designed to develop critical, independent learners. Critical practice in this forum is suggested through evaluating a number of verbatim learner/teacher exchanges including role and behaviour of teacher, use and purpose of language used, and how decisions are made. Suggests a critical framework based on adult learning theories. Includes particularly, the role of experience, as potential barrier as well as resource.

In 2001, North Lanarkshire Libraries and Information Service secured funding to deliver on‐line learning and support through a Community Learning Hub to the Motherwell North Social Inclusion Partnership area containing some of the most socially excluded communities in North Lanarkshire. The project centred on the development of an e‐learning web site offering learning information, support, and materials and included a laptop‐lending facility available to residents. The decision to develop e‐learning services was based around a number of factors prevalent in North Lanarkshire including poor educational attainment; skills gaps identified by employers in the local labour force, particularly in the areas of ICT and basic computing; high unemployment and a number of other obstacles to learning including transport difficulties, child care issues and disability. In addition, developments in new technology including the spread of the home ownership of computers, and the increased availability and uptake of broadband suggested thate‐learning facilities would attract a viable client base. The project would also fit with the People's Network initiative that has connected all UK public libraries to the internet.

The blackboard learning system is an online platform designed for e-learning employed by higher education institutes like universities that facilities students to continue learning and educational activities. This study explores the determinants that affect students' acceptance and use of Blackboard learning system (BLS) in Pakistan utilizing the modified UTAUT framework with social isolation as an additional variable.

A questionnaire survey was conducted, and the study gathered 494 university students' responses in Pakistan as participants. The collected data were interpreted applying PLS-SEM version 3.2.3 software.

The study's findings exhibited that PE, EE, FC and SI are the prime determinants influencing the intention and use of BLS in Pakistani universities. Hedonic motivation and social isolation interact differently between UTAUT variables and use intention. The results verify the suitability of the applied theory in the background of the study.

However, the findings highlight the present understanding of BLS use from the learners' aspect, but the study's limitation cannot be evaded. The study respondents belonged to a specific region of Pakistan (Karachi) that might influence the usefulness of the outcomes. Other factors categorized as the environmental, system and organizational elements were not part of the study that may also differentiate the BLS acceptance. The model was extended by including the social isolation, but the effect is insignificant yet positive; therefore, it is required to evaluate the model differently, such as the organizational aspect, for future research. Moreover, the ethnic factors that vary in emerging and developed economies may provide different explanations; therefore, they can be incorporated in future studies. Likewise, the variables such as hedonic motivation need to be emphasized more by examining and evaluating its effect on students' education performance in the future.

The outcome of the study suggests some implications. At first, being the modified framework UTAUT2 application makes the collaboration appropriate according to the current phenomena of the COVID-19 pandemic and its contribution to the higher education region to analyze the acceptance of e-learning systems. Educational institutions within Pakistan would emphasize enhancing students' accomplishment by improving the interface and the blackboard learning system workability. Hence, learners' effectiveness in learning would be escalated; they would be encouraged to accomplish study objectives using BLS, particularly when they consider it easy to use and a useful platform for e-learning during the pandemic. Furthermore, enhancing the e-learning system in the context of the effort demands to be required to utilize BLS should be the foremost objective as learners would be motivated to accept the technology if they consider it simple, convenient, and user-friendly to adopt. Thus, the benefits of using BLS during this situation when universities are not operational will make students adaptable to change in the prospect. Learners will accept the model of online education, even if the universities become operational. However, it can increase the rate of earnings and revenue for universities as they can enroll in online and regular classes. Therefore, it is suggested that higher education management should create a resilient online platform by which facilitators can communicate with learners without any obstacles.

Hence, it is recommended to introduce the online short course, qualification, certified courses and integrated coursework with international ventures and ongoing classes. Numerous learners continue their studies along with the job. Therefore, it is suggested to introduce online programs for those learners. Another benefit would be that it offers an integrated platform for sharing knowledge. BLS offers to maintain the complete information in one place, and learners can see them as per their convenience based on their availability. This reduces the burden on administration related to keeping the educational material and resource in various files. Thus, it also reduces the expense of universities. It is suggested to emphasize encouraging the use of BLS through an effective plan that can assist in execution and help learners identify the technology features rather than to face difficultly to accept the change. Moreover, the acceptance of BLS for educational purposes verifies that other learning events can occur on the online platform. Thus, it is recommended to promote the origin of the online atmosphere and the initiation of other events. Globally, dynamics are changing frequently and continuously and are moving towards artificial intelligence systems; the circumstances are suitable for promoting online educational platforms' acceptance by incorporating it with the current educational arrangement.

The study provides recommendations for the research to be conducted to explore the modified framework in different regions and boundaries to evaluate the effect of other factors on adopting e-learning platforms.

This article explores some of the meanings and implications of learning for both the learner and the learning adviser in a mental health setting. It discusses the relationship of learning and employment, aspects of the lived reality of learning while experiencing fluctuating levels of distress and what kinds of support can help. It identifies barriers that need to be overcome on both individual and societal levels, and the benefits of supportive staff with an enthusiasm and awareness of learning needs.

Programming education is being rapidly transformed by generative AI tools and educators must determine how best to support students in this context. This study aims to explore the experiences of programming educators and students to inform future education provision.

Twelve students and six members of faculty in a small technology-focused university were interviewed. Thematic analysis of the interview data was combined with data collected from a survey of 44 students at the same university. Self-determination theory was applied as an analytical framework.

Three themes were identified – bespoke learning, affect and support – that significantly impact motivation and learning outcomes in programming education. It was also found that students are already making extensive use of large language models (LLMs). LLMs can significantly improve learner autonomy and sense of competence by improving the options for bespoke learning; fostering emotions that are conducive to engendering and maintaining motivation; and inhibiting the negative affective states that discourage learning. However, current LLMs cannot adequately provide or replace social support, which is still a key factor in learner motivation.

Integrating the use of LLMs into curricula can improve learning motivation and outcomes. It can also free educators from certain tasks, leaving them with more time and capacity to focus their attention on developing social learning opportunities to further enhance learner motivation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore the relationship between motivation and LLM use in programming education.

This case study explores student learning outcomes from a student-led eService-learning (SLESL) course. The researchers interviewed 12 participants in addition to evaluating final reflection papers. Data analysis yielded three general categories including leadership insights, personal growth and development, and overcoming community obstacles. Leadership insights were comprised of five emergent themes such as leadership lessons learned, collaboration, communication, influence, and other leadership theories. Personal growth and development included seven themes such as personal challenge, personal awareness, practical application, personal affect, personal self-efficacy, self-efficacy toward future involvement, and service-learning insights. The final category, overcoming community obstacles, was encompassed by three themes including community challenge, insights about others, and innovation. Transferability of the findings along with implications for practice are discussed.

This work aims to combine the cloud robotics technologies with deep reinforcement learning to build a distributed training architecture and accelerate the learning procedure of autonomous systems. Especially, a distributed training architecture for navigating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complicated dynamic environments is proposed.

This study proposes a distributed training architecture named experience-sharing learner-worker (ESLW) for deep reinforcement learning to navigate UAVs in dynamic environments, which is inspired by cloud-based techniques. With the ESLW architecture, multiple worker nodes operating in different environments can generate training data in parallel, and then the learner node trains a policy through the training data collected by the worker nodes. Besides, this study proposes an extended experience replay (EER) strategy to ensure the method can be applied to experience sequences to improve training efficiency. To learn more about dynamic environments, convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) modules are adopted to extract spatiotemporal information from training sequences.

Experimental results demonstrate that the ESLW architecture and the EER strategy accelerate the convergence speed and the ConvLSTM modules specialize in extract sequential information when navigating UAVs in dynamic environments.

Inspired by the cloud robotics technologies, this study proposes a distributed ESLW architecture for navigating UAVs in dynamic environments. Besides, the EER strategy is proposed to speed up training processes of experience sequences, and the ConvLSTM modules are added to networks to make full use of the sequential experiences.

The current literature examining the design of effective online learning opportunities recommends an array of best practices but no agreed upon and unifying model. The purpose of this paper is to survey the existing research of effective design models for online learning in an attempt to identify best practices and present a new model.

Through a comprehensive review of the literature, the paper identifies obstacles to developing an effective course design model for asynchronous distance education. Based upon this review, best practices are identified and a design model is recommended.

The research identifies the key components of successful course design methods and ultimately recommends a process that has eight steps which occur in three phases. The first phase, the identification phase, encourages the instructor and/or course design team to identify strategies, objectives, assessments and resources. In the second phase, design, instructors select, organize, adapt and reflect. The final phase is implementation, during which the course is taught.

The recommended design model has implications for practice by providing a clear structure for design activities which are aligned with the best practices identified in the research. Instructors and/or instructional designers creating online learning opportunities now have a coherent model supported by a review of the literature.

While a number of online course design models exist, no one model has emerged as pre‐eminent or most effective and efficient. The model recommended by this paper offers a unified model of courses design that synthesizes the most effective aspects of the extant models.

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.