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The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of emerging technologies in e-learning on university librarians and libraries. The study also intended to identify emerging technologies in e-learning and challenges being faced to implement e-learning technologies.

The preferred reporting items for the systematic review and meta-analysis method was applied as the research methodology for conducting the study. A total of 25 core studies published in peer-reviewed journals were selected to conduct a systematic literature review. The data were analysed through a thematic approach.

The results of the study revealed that e-learning technologies assist library professionals to strengthen their expertise and support them in initiating smart library services to deliver customer-focused services. A shortage of skilled manpower, the unavailability of adequate IT infrastructure, a lack of technical support, copyright issues, poor planning and ineffective library leadership are major challenges to implementing emerging technologies in e-learning.

The study offers theoretical implications by adding valuable literature to the existing body of knowledge. It has a societal impact as it has offered recommendations and practical solutions for the successful adoption of emerging technologies in e-learning. The study also offers managerial implications to develop fruitful policies for implementing e-learning technologies for the innovative sustainable competence development of library manpower and implementation of smart library services.

The purpose of this study is to explore the perception of the users concerning the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in enhancing personal learning profile (PLP), personal learning network (PLN) and personal learning environment (PLE) and their effect on the perceived ease of use, perceived effectiveness and perceived usefulness for enhancing the overall attitude and satisfaction of the e-learning.

The data were collected from students and professionals who have ever used the e-learning module, and smart partial least square-structural equational modeling (PLS-SEM) is used to see relations between the different variables.

It was seen that the PLE is affecting both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. The research has shown that perceived ease of use showed a mediating effect between PLE and attitude and satisfaction. Further satisfaction mediates between perceived ease of use and intention. PLP has come out to significantly impacting perceived effectiveness. The multigroup analysis also showed that the attitude and satisfaction level affecting intention to use the e-learning module differ across the two groups of learners, i.e. gender and type of learners.

The data are collected from students and professionals who have ever used the e-learning module and wholly based on their perceptions, leading to self-perception bias.

The current research is trying to integrate the user perception of PLP, PLN, PLE into the framework of the technology acceptance model and see how they impact the overall attitude and satisfaction of the learners. AI can be used to improve them and make e-learning more adherent to the users. AI can play an essential role in generating the right environment by matching the profile of the learner.

The use of cutting-edge technology in education has the potential to transform the learning experience and greatly contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in emerging economies. With the increased accessibility of technology and online resources, digital literacy has become an essential skill in today's world. Smart e-learning platforms have emerged as a new tool for offering education and training in emerging economies, while also boosting digital literacy.

This chapter will attempt to investigate the impact of new-age technologies on the educational system and how they can help emerging economies achieve the SDGs. This study looks at case studies from various emerging economies, analyzing how innovative technologies like digital learning, smart teaching and learning, mobile learning, online learning, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and gamification are used to improve education quality and promote SDGs. This chapter emphasizes the impact of technological integration on access to education, reducing inequality, and improving educational quality and relevance. This study also looks into how education may help promote environmental sustainability and economic growth. According to the findings, integrating new-age technologies into the education system can be a game changer in achieving SDGs in emerging nations.

Learning Chinese is unquestionably very important and popular worldwide with the fast economic growth of China. To most foreigners and also local students, one of the major challenges in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences that are considered as significant in the Chinese culture. However, due to the potentially complicated structures of Chinese characters together with their stroke sequences, there are very few character recognition techniques that can effectively tackle the involved training task in an efficient and flexible manner. The purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent and flexible e‐learning software based on learning objects to facilitate the learning of writing Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences.

The paper adopts an incremental approach in designing the overall system architecture to emphasize on extendibility of the system. The basic features of the system including the evolution and pronunciation of each Chinese character can be embedded as a part of the learning object metadata to enhance students' understanding of Chinese characters. To demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal, a prototype of the proposed e‐learning software was built on smartphones such that students can learn anytime and anywhere.

From the empirical evaluation of the e‐learning prototype for learning to write correct Chinese characters on mobile devices, it was found that foreign students can learn and practise the writing more effectively anytime and anywhere on their mobile devices after classes. Some initial positive feedback was collected. Furthermore, a more careful and thorough evaluation is planned to be conducted in relevant courses for foreign students in the upcoming Fall semester.

This proposal represents the first attempt to reduce the complexity while increasing the extendibility of the e‐learning software to learn Chinese through learning objects running on smartphones or mobile devices in general. More importantly, it opens up numerous opportunities for further investigations including possible integrations with other existing Chinese e‐learning systems.

This paper aims to present a comprehensive review of the present state and trends of smart education research. It addresses the need to have a systematic review of smart education to depict its research landscape in view of the growing volume of related publications.

A bibliometric analysis of publications on smart education published in 2011 to 2020 was conducted, covering their patterns and trends in terms of collaboration, key publications, major topics and trends. A total of 1,317 publications with 29,317 cited references were collected from the Web of Science and Scopus for the bibliometric analysis.

Research on smart education has been widely published in various sources. The most frequently cited references are all theoretical or discussion articles. Researchers in the USA, China, South Korea, India and Russia have been most active in research collaborations. However, international collaborations have remained infrequent except for those involving the USA. The research on smart education broadly covered smart technologies as well as teaching and learning. The emerging topics have addressed areas such as the Internet of Things, big data, flipped learning and gamification.

This study depicts the intellectual landscape of smart education research, and illustrated the evolution and emerging trends in the field. The results highlight its latest developments and research needs, and suggest future work related to research collaborations on a larger scale and more studies on smart pedagogies.

Despite the importance of investigating the impact of cloud computing on the e-learning process, the relationship development between the two is not examined well. Thus, the main goal of this research is to assess how to improve the e-learning process by using cloud services. This paper aims to attempt to investigate the impact of cloud computing on e-learning development.

The paper is based on both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. For review-related work and statistical analysis of questionnaires, the SPSS 22 and SMART-PLS 3.2 software package are used.

The results from the study show that e-learning development is significantly influenced by the quality of services, cloud features, university readiness and users’ readiness.

The adoption of cloud technology within an instructional environment has the capacity of offering new opportunities for improvement and innovation for gaining knowledge of the process.

The potentialities of information technology, together with economic concerns, have been forcing various organizations to go electronic in order to reposition themselves toward a sustainable future. This has also happened to libraries, whose primary value lies not only in their collections but also in their contribution to education through smart organization and management of collected information, which they make easily usable and accessible to users. The paper addresses these issues and discusses such aspects as what is meant by “learning”, how can it be pursued and managed in the library environment, what is the functionality of the e‐learning library, and how the e‐learning resources are included and organized in the e‐learning library.

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e‐learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E‐learning is data‐intensive, user‐driven, and has increasing needs for multiculturalism, efficiency, adaptivity and competiveness. Although the complexity of such systems has increased exponentially, the design process still lacks a systematic quality control procedure. In this work we address the increasing need for new methods that maximize usability, and thus end‐user satisfaction. We analyse the technological, managerial and economic factors that affect the design and deployment of a large e‐learning platform with advanced services and propose a set of new metrics for assessing its quality. The metrics are based on the four external quality characteristics (functionality, usability, efficiency and reliability) of the ISO9126 standard for software systems.

Technological improvements in broadband and distributed computing are making it possible to distribute live media content cost‐effectively. Because of this, organizations are looking into cost‐effective approaches to implement e‐Learning initiatives. Indeed, computing resources are not enough by themselves to promote better e‐Learning experiences. Hence, our goal is to share preliminary results on testing a holistic evaluation method for e‐Learning environments. To this end, we have built an experience within class dynamics using an open source Learning Virtual Environment integrated with webcast and video archive features. Our proposed evaluation method capyures user feedback by classifying it according to motivation to e‐learn in groups, since we have found this approach simpler than using classic behavioural methods. This helped us to define practical design guidelines to yield faster and more efficient e‐Learning development processes. Our results show that consistent communication both online and offline, translates into efficiency. It also dampens negative perceptions during the transition from traditional to online learning environments. These results will contribute in designing intervention strategies to optimize organizational investments in e‐Learning across user groups and contexts.

This article presents an insight into one of the e–learning pilot projects that were selected by the Educational Technology Unit (EduTech) of the Centre for Academic Development (CAD), University of Botswana (UB). This e‐learning package was designed and delivered to meet the needs of the course “Issues and trends in early childhood education” (EPI‐642), a three‐credit course required for the Year One, Master’s Programme, in the department of Primary Education, University of Botswana. A flexi‐time, gradual, phase‐wise transition from traditional face‐to‐face teaching, teaching with electronic medium and to a SMART classroom (e‐learning lab) approach was followed to deliver this course. It resulted in a flexi‐time, student‐centred, e‐learning package that retained the learning qualities of traditional teaching and personal guidance and mentoring and enabled enhancement of research skills and certain computing skills in students.