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The present study investigated the effect of online collaborative project-based learning on the language performance and attitudes of intermediate level students at the College of Applied Sciences in Oman. The study is a quasi-experimental study and the sample consisted of four classes (93 students in total) in Nizwa College of Applied Sciences. These participants were in their foundation year and were taking the Academic English Course during the time of the research experiment. Two classes were assigned to the experimental group (46 students) and they were directed to collaborate online in doing their research projects. The other two classes were assigned to the control group (47 students) and did their projects individually. A language test containing reading and writing questions, an attitude questionnaire, students' project scores and transcripts of focused group discussions were used to collect the data needed to answer the research questions. The study revealed that the main positive effect of online collaborative project-based learning was clear on students' writing skill in the post test (i.e. students in the experimental group outperformed students in the control group).

Higher education institutions (HEIs) frequently overlook the importance of encouraging creative thinking in students. A review of the prevailing practices in a fully online tertiary distance education (DE) institution revealed a lack of learning activities that foster creativity. The study aims to find out whether the creative collaborative group project is a feasible, effective and acceptable learning activity for fostering creativity in students of a fully online graduate-level DE course.

Seven groups of five to six graduate students each had five weeks to conceptualize, prepare and deliver a creative collaborative group project on lifelong learning using key concepts learned from the course.

All groups submitted well-crafted creative projects within the given time frame. Reflections on their experience positively correlated with known outcomes associated with creative skills. Students valued the experience and had a better understanding of the concepts. These support the feasibility, effectiveness and acceptability of the project for fostering creativity in a fully online DE institution.

The feasibility, effectiveness and acceptability may vary in different contexts; future iterations in the same and/or other courses are recommended.

The creative collaborative group project is a feasible, effective and acceptable strategy for fostering creativity in online distance education.

Creativity can be enhanced through appropriate online collaborative learning activities.

The study adds to the body of literature on the use of creative collaborative group projects to foster creativity in HEIs.

This paper aimed to determine the self- and co-regulation influences on the community of inquiry (CoI) for collaborative online learning.

A quantitative survey was used on a sample of (N = 626) enrolled postgraduate students in a South African Open Distance and e-Learning (ODeL) university. The measuring instruments were the CoI and the shared metacognitive surveys. Correlation and multiple regression analyses were used to determine the association and influence of self- and co-regulation on the CoI.

The results indicated that self- and co-regulation related to the CoI (teaching, cognitive and social) presences. In addition, the results revealed that self- and co-regulation influence the CoI presences. Self-regulation had the highest influence on teaching and cognitive presence, while co-regulation influenced social presence.

The study’s convenience sampling method from a single university limited the applicability of the findings to other online learning environments.

Higher educational teachers who encourage student self- and co-regulation may enhance their online teaching, cognitive and social presence when studying online. The research’s findings may be valuable to teachers to enable them to provide a more collaborative and interactive online learning environment and promote productive online communities.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge about the relationship between teaching, social and cognitive presence and self- and co-regulation within the CoI framework. Furthermore, there has also been limited research focussing on the dynamics of shared metacognition within the CoI framework in an ODeL context.

Online course delivery is rapidly growing among educational institutions all over the world, especially in Open and Distance Learning institutions. The frequent criticisms on distance education for having only limited interactions between teachers and students as opposed to traditional face to face teaching can be significantly minimized with the increased use of online methods, due to its unique instructional capabilities. Online learning provides ample opportunities for students learning at a distance to constantly interact with their teachers as well as peers, sharing experiences and working collaboratively. The creation of a sense of social presence is essential to establish a collaborative online learning environment, as it is a most important factor that helps people actively collaborate, thus increasing a sense of belonging to the learning community. The Faculty of Education of the Open University of Sri Lanka offered the online course, "Teacher Educator as an Educational Technologist" in December 2007, using the learning management system Moodle. The course was designed using a collaborative learning model, allowing adequate opportunities for the distant learners to actively engage in their learning process, engaging in a number of learning and assessment tasks with the support of learning resources and instructor guidance, while collaborating and sharing experiences among each other, mainly through discussion forums. Using the case study approach, an investigation was carried out to find out the specific strategies and techniques adopted by designers, instructors and students in enhancing community building among the participants in the online learning environment. It further explored the impact of community building on the distant learners, who were also novices to online learning. This paper discusses the development process in the building of an online learning community and emphasizes on the roles of designers, teachers, and learners.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an online faculty development pilot course on how to engage students online. A framework was used, referred to as the Trifecta of Student Engagement, for the design of the course. The Trifecta of Student Engagement proposes that students, in order to be fully engaged in a course, need to be engaged with their course content, with their peers and with their instructor. The course has three units of content that each correspond to the Trifecta of Student Engagement. This course has gone through one pilot with faculty and has impacted students and faculty positively.

An online faculty development course was piloted with eight faculty members across a range of disciplines who participated in the program. After taking the course, they had to apply the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework to a course they taught and share what they did via written report, webinar, or web presentation. This study summarized the faculty participants’ written reports and presentations as well as provided a qualitative evaluation on the impact this course had on students and faculty.

After faculty applied the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework to courses taught, faculty saw an improvement in student engagement, satisfaction, learning and achievement. Three faculty surveyed students to determine their engagement and satisfaction and found students to respond positively to the use of tools and activities for student-to-content engagement, student-to-student engagement and student-to-instructor engagement. Two faculty examined student grades to determine if there were changes in student outcomes. One professor saw average grades increase by 11 percent. Another professor saw grades improve by 8 percent. She also found that student assessment of learning increased by 0.57. Both faculty attributed the improvement to the effectiveness of the teaching strategies employed.

This research is limited to the eight faculty who participated in the pilot. Some faculty used methods to attempt to measure the impacts of their teaching practices by surveying students and looking at student performance data. A second pilot is needed for additional faculty to take the course and apply the Trifecta of Engagement framework to generate more data for impact.

Institutions looking to create an online teaching professional development course for faculty can utilize the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework for their course design. Additionally, faculty can read about tools and strategies that they can immediately apply to create more student-to-content engagement, student-to-student engagement and student-to-instructor engagement.

Faculty can be more intentional in how they engage students in their online course experience.

This paper adds to the literature on faculty development regarding student-centered teaching practices. Other institutions looking to create a faculty development course or program that utilizes a student-centered framework may find aspects of this paper useful for their own online teaching professional development initiatives.

Online collaboration allows the learners to exchange ideas and views beyond time and space constraints and can improve the richness and quality of learning experiences. It promotes co-construction of knowledge, offers authentic learning contexts, and also enables learners to become more cognitively and affectively engaged. However, there is also evidence that online collaboration presents psychological difficulties or stress for learners. Even though a certain level of stress can stimulate a learner's physical and mental functions and enhance learning performance, it is generally agreed that persistent or excessive stress leads to negative beliefs, and results in poor learning performance. This paper will explore instructional design strategies that help learners mitigate stress in an online collaborative learning environment in the Asian context, based on the results of a study that identified important factors influencing learners' stress in online collaboration where English was used as a medium of communication. Four stress factors in English-based online collaboration in a high context culture in Asia are: Self-efficacy, instructional design, technology use, and collaborative process. Instructional strategies to promote self-efficacy, especially language self-efficacy, match Asian learners' learning styles to online collaboration, reduce fear of using online technologies in interactions, and scaffold and facilitate collaborative process will be offered in the paper. The paper will highlight the importance of considering both individual features of learners and socio-cultural aspects of learning environments in instructional design.

Group reporting, a form of cooperative learning, is a learning tool often employed in residential teaching to facilitate quality learning. Like other cooperative learning methods, it enhances learning in classrooms by allowing students work on activities in small groups to receive rewards based on their group’s performance. However, though group reporting is often done in face-to-face settings, few up-to-date literature has shown its application in online learning. Moreover, the question as to whether online cooperative learning through group reports yields positive or negative response from students has to be studied further. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study focuses on the students’ response to the group reporting activity carried throughout one semester. A course offered by the University of the Philippines Open University on database management systems made use of group reporting to add to the students’ learning experience. Group meetings along with regular online lectures were carried out during the first half of the semester. The output group reports were then presented during the second half and served as the main resource for those weeks’ study modules. An online survey with Likert scales drawing out the student reactions on the learning activity impact was administered to volunteer respondents at the end of classes.

In total, 71.9 percent of 32 respondents observed changes in their behavior after using peer and cooperative learning technologies. The respondents also indicated that they enjoyed the group reporting activity (14 agreeing strongly, 14 agreeing moderately). They also indicated that they were motivated to learn the course through the group reports (8 agreeing strongly, 14 agreeing moderately). However, when asked if they preferred to have all the modules in group report format 9 agreed moderately, 8 disagreed moderately, 7 disagreed strongly, 4 agreed strongly, and 4 neither agreed nor disagreed. Still, overall, online cooperative learning facilitated quality learning based on this study’s results.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by showing how group reporting can be applied online and how students have responded to it. The study also provides recommendations on how to conduct online cooperative learning in order to enhance the quality of courses, with implications for further research to look into variations with respect to the technology used for reporting and its suitability to a given course.

Considering the potential of Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) for cross-boundaries interacting and collaborating effectively, this study aims to explore the intercultural awareness of pre-service language teachers after participating in a COIL project.

Following a quantitative research approach and an exploratory cross-sectional method, the authors administered a 13-item questionnaire to unveil the perceptions of 64 future language teachers from Spain after their online experience with counterparts from the USA.

Participants consider that COIL may have enhanced their intercultural and global awareness and equipped them with valuable skills and knowledge for the future, being women more positive than men. Moreover, the results also suggest that those participants who have not traveled abroad consider COIL to be a good opportunity to compensate for the lack of knowledge or experience with other cultures resulting from not having had the opportunity to visit other countries.

COIL needs to be seen as a powerful tool to promote global learning, intercultural understanding and the development of skills among students that will be vital for success in today’s interconnected world. Nevertheless, universities and teacher training centers need to rethink the preparation of future teachers for the increasing demands to prepare students for the requirements of the global world, and to do so, they need to consider that COIL may offer them significant benefits.

This work offers an interesting exploration of teachers’ attitudes toward COIL, providing insights into the potential of online collaboration for developing intercultural awareness.

As online teaching/learning is a new phenomenon with reference to regular degree programs in institutions of higher education in India (the situation having being thrust upon both students and faculty due to COVID-19 pandemic), an exploratory-descriptive study was carried out to find out how public university students in India perceive online teaching/learning (OTL) during the present pandemic, the methods of OTL being used by faculty and the challenges being faced by the students.

Online interviews with 40 students of three public universities in Delhi/NCR were conducted using open-ended and close-ended questions. The questionnaire was emailed to 82 university students of Commerce and Management specialisation out of which 40 responded. We analysed each participants interview responses using content analysis technique and categorised the themes/factors that emerged under suitable headings using the coding method. The frequencies of the occurrence of the themes/factors were thus determined and documented, and percentages were calculated. The questionnaire also had Likert-scale questions as they are useful to measure latent constructs.

Inadequate bandwidth and poor network connectivity were found to be major hindrances during OT/L. The other challenges were unsuitable home environment for attending online classes, feeling of isolation and demotivation due to lack of face-to-face interaction and excessive screen-time causing fatigue. Active online methods such as live lectures by faculty and article/case study/discussions facilitated live by faculty were most preferred while the passive method of learning such as online certification courses through education portals such as Swayam/ Coursera/Udemy, etc were least preferred. The level of satisfaction from student–faculty interaction was more than that from student–student interaction.

The study covered three public universities in India and the sample size was small because of limitations created by COVID-19 pandemic situation as campuses were closed and it was not possible to meet students personally to get responses.

Universities should provide data cards or access to university computer labs to those students who are from economically weaker sections of society so that online teaching may be effective. This will also help students who live in very small houses and do not have a quiet corner to study online. Other solution would be to reduce online teaching duration. This issue needs the attention of educational institution leaders as most universities have scheduled classes from morning till evening, as it was during real classroom teaching. Eight hours of online classes every day may not be feasible when Internet access is a critical problem. Teachers should encourage interaction between students so that the feeling of isolation may be reduced and students may be motivated to learn and take more interest in virtual classes.

50% of the Indian population does not have access to the Internet, while a large section that does have, cannot afford the cost of high-speed data that is needed for long-duration online classes spanning over months. Those who can afford it, do not have the privacy to engage effectively in classes on video conferencing portals. Both students and teachers suffer due to poor audio and video quality caused by poor infrastructure. COVID-19 has brought to focus, the severe inequality in some societies. Societies need to take serious cognizance of this issue and take appropriate measures.

This study is very unique as the radical change from real classroom to online teaching in Indian public universities is a very unique phenomenon. The disruption was forced due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and students along with their teachers learned the process “on-the-job”. As the issues and challenges faced by students were unexplored, this study aims to contribute knowledge to this existing research gap.

This research aims to study the students' perspectives on synchronous and asynchronous learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Both synchronous and asynchronous learning approaches used in online education have positive and negative outcomes. Hence, the aim is to study online education's positive and negative consequences, reflecting sync and async approaches. This research followed a mixed research approach. The key stakeholders of this research are the Indian educational institutions and students.

This research collected data from the students undergoing synchronous and asynchronous learning amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic. The data were collected (N = 655) from various students taking online classes during the pandemic. A questionnaire survey was distributed to the students through online platforms to collect the data. In this research, the authors have collected data using simple random sampling, and the same has been used for data analysis using SPSS version 26. The collected data were exposed to a factor analysis using a principal component analysis technique to reduce the vast dimensions.

The study findings show that synchronous learning is sometimes stressful, placing more responsibility on students mainly because of the increased screen time. At the same time, asynchronous learning allows the students to self-explore and research the topics assigned to them. Students also felt that asynchronous activities create a burden because of many written assignments to be submitted within a short period. Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging for the students and the teachers. However, teachers have helped students to learn through digital platforms. The majority of the respondents opined that technological disruptions and death in the family circle had been significant reasons for not concentrating during online classes. However, the combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning has led to a balanced education.

Higher education has undergone multiple transformations in a short period (from March 2020, 2021 and beyond). Educational institutions underwent a rapid transition in remote teaching and learning in the initial stages. As time progressed, educational institutions did course navigation where they relooked into their course plans, syllabus and brought a structural change to match the pandemic requirements. Meanwhile, educational institutions slowly equipped themselves with infrastructure facilities to bring academic integrity. At present, educational institutions are ready to face the new normality without disrupting services to society.

Educational institutions create intellectual capital, which is important for the development of the economy. In the light of COVID-19, there are new methods and approaches newly introduced or old methods and approaches, which are reimplemented, and these approaches always work for the benefit of the student community.

The authors collected data during the COVID-19 pandemic; it helped capture the students' experience about synchronous and asynchronous learning. Students and faculty members are newly exposed to synchronous and asynchronous learning, and hence, it is essential to determine the outcome that will help many stakeholders.