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The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges of teaching information literacy online to graduate students and evaluate software that supports using active learning techniques.

This conceptual paper analyzes different software tools and their functionality to aid in active learning, as well as describes elements of online teaching that facilitate active learning for information literacy.

Although software serves as the delivery tool, there is not one standalone product that provides all the needed aids to conduct active learning. Many other digital tools are needed in addition to the tutorial software to create active learning activities.

This paper provides activities and ideas to incorporate into the online information literacy session that contain active learning elements.

Although there is a wealth of literature about active learning of information literacy, very little surrounds teaching it online to graduate students. This paper focuses on this specific element of teaching information literacy through active learning methods in an online environment to graduate students.

There are many success stories during Covid-19 of academics providing expertly delivered online learning experiences for tertiary students locally and around the world. This paper aims to consider how success was achieved by academics who are not specifically educated with the knowledge and skills to convert a traditional delivery model into an online format and who conventionally spend years working on single projects before they come to fruition.

This study provides, as a possible explanation for success, the willingness of academics to embrace a tertiary sector rather than discipline-specific collaborative learning approach to their own informal education in online learning practices through communities of practice. Using learning theory, both analytical and reflective methodologies are adopted through an examination of an example of a successful academic community of practice.

Engaging with a multidisciplinary community of practice can be highly beneficial for academics not specifically educated with the knowledge and skills to convert a traditional delivery model into an online format. Communities of practice provide more than online educational skills; they foster a sense of togetherness and a safe environment to share concerns and challenges on both a professional and personal level.

The benefits of communities of practice for academics during a period of profound operational disruption have yet to be documented in the literature. Specifically, this study highlights the supportive environment provided by a community of practice by examining the successful large-scale transition from face-to-face learning to an online environment during a pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge and potential of online higher and continuing education, of fostering and promoting, in a global perspective across time and space, democratic values working for a better world.

The paper presents a generalized dialogic learning architecture of networked collaborative learning and makes a plea for a theory‐informed networked collaborative learning architecture and methodology appropriate for adult learners in higher and continuing education.

Values include mutual political and intercultural understanding, collaboration, and tolerance to cultural and ethical diversity, and they are mediated through collaborative dialogue and knowledge‐building processes between learners. While embedded, empirically, in a networked distance learning context, established through synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies, the paper advocates for theory informed pedagogical designs and a teaching‐learning methodology, which assumes online collaborative dialogue as the centre of a genuine learning process.

The paper complements this plea with a description and evaluation of the implementation of the pedagogical architecture into a Danish Master Programme.

Education 4.0 is one of the major transformations in the field of education to improve the quality of teaching and learning processes and prepare students as 21st-century learners. This study aims to examine the effect of Educations 4.0 on creative and collaborative learning of students.

In this correlational research study, a quantitative data collection tool such as a questionnaire is used. This research is conducted on university students (N = 365), and purposive sampling technique is used to achieve the purpose. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 27.0 is used to analyze the data.

The findings of the study reveal that there is a strong positive relationship between education 4.0 and the two major 21st-century skills, i.e. collaboration and creativity. The value of correlation coefficient value of the variables is 0.597, which indicates positive and strong relationship; hence, null hypothesis is rejected and an alternative hypothesis is accepted.

The results of the current study are beneficial for the school managers to enhance students' two significant 21st-century skills, i.e. “Creativity” and “Collaboration.” Also, the school managers can make efforts to develop teachers' competence to adapt the technological advancements for improving students' creativity and collaboration to benefit their learning.

This is a unique study because there are only a few recent studies that show a connection between Education 4.0 and 21st-century skills. Also, there is no other study that presents the direct association of Education 4.0 and students' creativity and collaboration specifically in the context of Pakistan.

In response to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, many universities have transitioned to online instruction. With learning promising to be online, at least in part, for the near future, instructors may be thinking of providing online collaborative learning opportunities to their students who are increasingly isolated from their peers because of social distancing guidelines. This paper aims to provide design recommendations for online collaborative project-based learning exercises based on this research in a software engineering course at the university level.

Through joint work between learning scientists, course instructors and software engineering practitioners, instructional design best practices of alignment between the context of the learners, the learning objectives, the task and the assessment are actualized in the design of collaborative programming projects for supporting learning. The design, first segments a short real-time collaborative exercise into tasks, each with a problem-solving phase where students participate in collaborative programming, and a reflection phase for reflecting on what they learned in the task. Within these phases, a role-assignment paradigm scaffolds collaboration by assigning groups of four students to four complementary roles that rotate after each task.

By aligning each task with granular learning objectives, significant pre- to post-test learning from the exercise as well as each task is observed.

The roles used in the paradigm discourage divide-and-conquer tendencies often associated with collaborative projects. By requiring students to discuss conflicting ideas to arrive at a consensus implementation, their ideas are made explicit, thus providing opportunities for clarifying misconceptions through discussion and learning from the collaboration.

This paper outlines the design and development process of an online annotation system and how it is applied to the sphere of collaborative online learning. The architecture and design of the annotation system, illustrated in this paper, have been developed to enrich collaborative learning content through adding a layer of information in online learning environments. Consideration is given to the role of the collaborative annotation system in the context of formal and informal e‐learning environments.

This paper aims to highlight recent resources on information literacy (IL) and library instruction, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and IL published in 2015.

This paper provides information about each source, describes the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain either unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and IL.

This paper aims to explore student teachers’ views related to the online academic support e-tools used under the COVID-19 lockdown.

Mapping a pragmatic research approach, an explanatory mixed methods design was used for the study.

Empirical evidence revealed that student teachers were satisfied and experienced the academic support tools as being positively applied to their online learning. Furthermore, it is reported that student teachers preferred the discussion forum as the most appropriate academic support e-tool in the course under coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown.

This exploratory pragmatic study extends the knowledge of the online academic support e-tools for an open distance e-learning (ODeL) context that was used under COVID-19 lockdown. This study provides additional evidence concerning a revised academic support frame for an ODeL online learning context. Research limitations: small sample size was used, and therefore caution must be applied, as the findings might not be transferable to a similar context. The current study has only examined a teacher education course and could not be generalised to similar conditions as those under COVID-19 lockdown. This exploratory research has raised many questions that require further investigation. More research is required to determine the efficacy of the academic support e-tools with regard to student learning in other online courses and contexts.

The student teachers that participated in this study were empowered to using the academic support e-tools to support them under COVID-19 lockdown. The discussion was mostly preferred academic supportive e-tool as an engaged, participatory and communicative platform for accelerated learning in the teaching methodology of economics course.

A noteworthy contribution was made in the design and testing of the reliability of methodological tools, which could be replicated in blended and ODeL contexts.

The author redesigned a course titled “Applied Information Technology: Networking” and applied online collaborative learning (CL) with initiation and self‐regulated learning (SRL) to improve students’ involvement in this course in an environment that is full of free online games, shopping websites, and social networking websites. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential effects of online CL with initiation and SRL on students’ involvement.

This study designed an intervention of online CL with initiation and SRL to improve students’ involvement and their learning in a blended course. It is believed that this article is important to the computing field and could provide insight for teachers to design their online courses and teaching methods.

The author in this study adopted SRL in the implementation of online CL with initiation, and explored their effects on improving students’ involvement. The results of this empirical study report that the effects of online CL with initiation and SRL were positive, and led to the best involvement in the blended course among the three classes.

The effects of online CL with initiation and SRL in this study were positive; however, problems of experimental validity may result from students in the comparison group being incidentally exposed to the treatment condition, having more enthusiastic teaching, being more motivated than students in the control group, etc. (Gribbons and Herman). Besides, some other contextual factors and individual behaviours might influence students’ online learning effects. For example, students’ adaptability to the online learning environments and their readiness for self‐directed learning may result in the differences of the effects among the three groups (Shen, Lee and Tsai).

The internet has enabled a shift from contiguous learning groups to asynchronous distributed learning groups utilizing computer‐supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments (Kreijns, Kirschner and Jochems). It is expected that the interventions of online teaching methods, course design, and learning activities in this study may provide a reference for teachers, particularly for blended learning computing courses.

The results of this study report that the effects of online CL with initiation and SRL were positive, and contributed to the best involvement in the blended course among the three classes. The author further discusses the implications for schools and teachers who plan to provide online or blended learning for their students.

First, this study provides a scenario about how to help students collaborate and learn regularly, and improve their involvement in a blended course through online CL and SRL, particularly for computing courses. Second, this study specifies how teachers can provide initiation to help students climb the learning curve and overcome the bottlenecks typically encountered in the implementation of online CL. Third, this study is one of the first attempts to explore and demonstrate the effects of online CL with initiation and SRL in a blended course simultaneously.

Emergency situations call for effective means of providing quality education. Higher education institutions are therefore required to use effective and efficient online approaches for teaching and learning which necessitate students, academic practitioners and institutions to engage and interact with each other successfully. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the importance of interaction and engagement in the use of blended learning online tools during emergency situations. The theoretical lens that informs the chapter is social constructivism which argues that learning is a social endeavour. The literature findings show that the effective engagement of students contributes to the overall quality of students’ produced experiences as well as pass rates. Furthermore, the importance of student–lecturer engagement and student–content engagement cannot be taken for granted. The right balance of synchronous and asynchronous online learning tools contributes to fruitful interaction and engagement. Online engagement seems to have many benefits as compared to conventional based engagement such as the ability of students to contribute to their teaching and learning. Despite these advantages, challenges associated with online learning such as balancing life commitments, confidence, students’ approach to learning, high investment costs in resources, motivation, competences of lecturers and students, interest of lecturers and students and efficacy of lecturers and students cannot be ignored. The authors therefore recommend that effective and efficient online learning requires the correct blend of online learning tools accompanied by the correct engagement strategies.