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Online teaching particularly through Open Distance and e-Learning (ODeL) has become a phenomenon in the twenty-first century. ODeL and blended approaches inevitably lead to increasing dependence on electronic communication systems. The University of South Africa (Unisa), where the author teaches, enables students through its Learner Management System to interact with lecturers and e-tutors online. The responsibilities of e-tutors are of an educative and technical nature. Their roles include guiding and assisting students, encouraging active participation, responding to their queries and grading their assignments. In addition, e-tutors provide notifications and assign tasks or activities that students are expected to complete and submit. In several cases, these forms of assistance are absent, when there is a lack of follow-up within the response period which is 24 hours – missing notifications and lack of guidance – rendering these e-tutors ineffective. The chapter provides strategies that were analyzed and implemented to motivate effective tutoring and enhance student participation learning. The author draws on her analysis as a virtual ethnographer and long-term participant observer as an e-tutor and lecturer who supervised e-tutors and taught a large number of students – 2,500. The objective of the chapter is to encourage effective tutoring that can enhance students’ success.

The ultimate objective of the any e-Learning system is to meet the specific need of the online learners and provide them with various features to have efficacious learning experiences by understanding their complexities. Any e-Learning system could be much more improved by tracking students commitment and disengagement on that course, in turn, would allow system to have personalized involvements at appropriate times in order to re-engage learners. Motivations play a important role to get back the learners on the track could be done by analyzing of several attributes of the log files. This paper aims to analyze the multiple attributes which cause the learners to disengage from an online learning environment.

For this improvisation, Web based learning system is researched using data mining techniques in education. There are various attributes characterized for the disengagement prediction using web log file analysis. Though, there have been several attempts to include motivating characteristics in e-Learning systems are adapted, presently influence on cognition is acknowledged mostly.

Classification is one of the predictive data mining technique which makes prediction about values of data using known results found from different data sets. To find out the optimal solution for identifying disengaged learners in the online learning systems, Naive Bayesian (NB) classifier with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used which will classify the data set and then perform the independent analysis.

The experimental results shows that the use of unrelated variables in the class attributes will reduce the accuracy and reliability of a any classification model. However, the hybrid PSO algorithm is clearly more apt to find minor subsets of attributes than the PSO with NB classifier. The NB classifier combined with hybrid PSO feature selection method proves to be the best feature selection capability without degrading the classification accuracy. It is further proved to be an effective method for mining large structural data in much less computation time.

The purpose of this study is to describe university students’ motivations for using Facebook as an informal learning tool and explore the key barriers that may inhibit learning on the social media platform.

A case study approach was adopted in this study. Participants were 82 university students who participated in “e-Tutor” – an informal learning activity, conducted through Facebook. Focus group interviews were conducted, and students’ interactions on Facebook were also analysed to understand their motives for using the social media platform for learning. The uses and gratifications theory was used to explore student motivations for participating in the learning activity.

Results suggest that students perceived Facebook as a potential tool for learning and identified multiple motivating factors for their participation that included information seeking, convenience, connectedness, entertainment and reward seeking. Results also show that time constraints, social anxiety and cultural issues may inhibit learners’ active participation on social media platforms such as Facebook.

This study outlines an approach to use readily available and low-cost technological tools in learning design and provides some insights for teachers to design ubiquitous and personalised learning environments for students using such technologies, particularly social media. Specifically, Facebook offered a way to engage students in informal learning which can supplement students’ formal learning trajectories at university. While the uses and gratifications students sought through Facebook had an overall positive effect on their participation in e-Tutor activity, certain barriers can impede student active participation in learning environments on social media sites such as Facebook.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new kind of learning management system: proactive LMS, designed to improve the users' online (inter)actions by providing programmable, automatic and continuous intelligent analyses of the users' behaviours, augmented with appropriate actions initiated by the LMS itself.

Proactive systems adhere to two premises: working on behalf of, or pro, the user, and acting on their own initiative, without the user's explicit command. The proactive part of the LMS is implemented as a dynamic rules‐based system, and is added next to the initial LMS. They both use the same database as their source of information on the users, their activities, the available resources and the current state of the whole system.

How the proactive part of the LMS was implemented on the basis of a dynamic expert system is shown. Also how it looks like from a user's point of view is sketched. Finally, examples of intelligent analysis of users' behaviours coded into proactive rules are given.

Future work should include the design and the implementation of sets of rules (packages) dedicated to common users' needs, enabling useful proactivity on the basis of elaborated intelligent analysis.

Current learning management systems (virtual educational and/or training online environments) are fundamentally limited tools. Indeed, they are only reactive software: these tools wait for an instruction and then react to the user's request. Students using these online systems could imagine and hope for more help and assistance tools: LMS should tend to offer some personal, immediate and appropriate support as teachers offer in classrooms. The proactive LMS can, for example, automatically and continuously help and take care of e‐learners with respect to previously defined procedures rules, and even flag other users, like e‐tutors, if something wrong is detected in their behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the approach to embedding entrepreneurship within third level education in Northern Ireland by assessing the perceptions of lecturers and learners and monitoring the effectiveness of teaching methods.

Surveys and focus groups were conducted with lecturers and learners from different disciplines as part of a pilot investigation under the Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship (NICENT) with a view to establishing a longitudinal study.

Evidence suggests that NICENT has increased interest and positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship in Northern Ireland. E‐learning can meet high demand, intensive programmes are equally effective in improving the skills set. Entrepreneurship education needs sub‐sequential support.

The study provided preliminary findings for entrepreneurship teachings in different disciplines. Further dissecting of lecturer/learner analyses by course/year etc. is possible. Effectiveness could be assessed through graduate behaviours in the future in order to build longitudinal data.

The results prove that lecturers/learners are willing to embrace new subjects (entrepreneurship for scientists) and new teaching methods when blended with traditional approaches. Whilst WebCT environment can facilitate a comfortable action‐learning zone, entrepreneurship education needs personalisation and industry engagement.

The study reports from the developing face within Northern Ireland and provides insightful observations of new subject adoption, the learner's curve and changing cultural attitudes within tertiary education.

Adopting a personal knowledge management (PKM) scope, this paper aims to report the resulting experience of a four‐year qualitative research project on the dynamics of social skills development strategies in knowledge‐intensive, e‐learning workplace environments.

By adopting a grounded encased study approach, the research explored how practitioners develop strategies for adapting to emerging e‐learning spaces while developing networking skills. The encased study stemmed from research completed at the University of Manchester. The study aimed to gain perspectives and make sense of social skills development (communication, networking and collaboration skills) in the particular setting of knowledge facilitation within virtual environments in three universities of the Manchester city region.

The personal lifelong learning journey that educational and academic staff undertake in order to become skilled knowledge facilitators online is perceived and represented as a full learning cycle of multiple dimensions. Also, by identifying specific roles of knowledge facilitators according to context, the existing institutional social systems and city networks of learning were made evident in the practitioners' learning scope within their own institutions and beyond.

The paper uses a multiple‐layer, third‐generation knowledge management framework to explore the different emerging roles of knowledge workers in knowledge‐intensive communities online, and how they facilitate multiple tacit knowledge conversion into explicit scholarly knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect teaching and learning practices, to highlight an educator’s new roles in the transformation when teaching online during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The paper takes a transformative reflection approach, based on competencies and activity system analysis to connect theory and practical experience in managing the students, the teaching delivery and the assessments.

The transition to online teaching and assessments requires various considerations of the curriculum and instructional approaches and necessitates the transformation of the role of the subject-matter expert to that of designer and co-learner. Empathy and understanding of students’ conditions enable this role transformation.

The paper highlights the importance of preparedness among faculty members and universities in dealing with uncertainties and the willingness to expand traditional roles and to upgrade the required skills, knowledge and attitudes to engender sustainable teaching and learning practices in response to future disruptions.

The paper reflects on the experience of a faculty who had adopted blended learning prior to the lockdown and how the teaching practice and roles transformed when fully transitioning to online delivery during the lockdown in New Zealand.

The purpose of this paper is to present results of a four‐year qualitative research project on the dynamics of skill development strategies in e‐learning workplace environments.

A potential knowledge city, Greater Manchester relies on its human (individual and collective) capitals, put to work in knowledge engines such as its universities. Such context has become a complex and uncharted territory for research. Research analysis within knowledge‐based higher education territory clearly demands knowledge‐based tools. Therefore, the research behind this paper has adopted Carrillo's generic system of capitals, an integrative KM3 taxonomy. Such framework has been instrumental in identifying contextual aspects, drivers and rooted strategies of k‐facilitators' adaptation to emergent learning environments.

The grounded model reported here further conceptualised how Mancunian e‐learning practitioners seemingly follow an embedded process of adaptation. Practitioners actually develop strategies to adapting in emerging learning spaces while they adapt to swiftly changing conditions in their workplace environments. The skill developments facilitators undertake seemingly allow them to link and connect to learning spaces, as well as to the existing university social systems and networks of learning. Those systems and networks are integrated to the city's knowledge capitals, and beyond.

By exploring Greater Manchester (UK) universities' e‐learning strategies, this paper contributes to KM theoretical understanding of how facilitators develop their knowledge‐based skills in emergent higher education learning spaces.