As the popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continues to grow, studies are emerging to investigate various topics in this area. Most have focused on the learners’ perspective, leaving a gap in the literature about MOOC instructors. The current research—conducted in the field of tourism and hospitality—explored early experiences of MOOC instructors as they progressed through three stages of the innovation-decision process: decision, implementation, and confirmation. More...

Prior to undertaking a descriptive study on attrition and retention of students in two online undergraduate health administration and human service programs, a pilot test was conducted to assess the procedures for participant recruitment, usability of the survey questionnaire, and data collection processes. More...

Since the first offering of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2008, the body of literature on this new phenomenon of open learning has grown tremendously. In this regard, this article intends to identify and map patterns in research on MOOCs by reviewing 362 empirical articles published in peer-reviewed journals from 2008 to 2015. More...

Mobile devices are increasingly coming to penetrate people's daily lives. Mobile learning (m-learning) is viewed as key to the coming era of electronic learning (e-learning). In the meantime, the use of mobile devices for learning has made a significant contribution to delivering education among higher education students worldwide. However, while m-learning is being widely adopted in developed countries, the adoption of such an approach in developing countries is still immature and underdeveloped. More...

In Saudi Arabia, gender-segregation is a known issue within higher education that often deprives female tutors from providing online learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). As well, students may not be getting the benefit of their experience and teaching. The purpose of this study is to develop an Avatar tool to represent a female tutor in a MOOC course with the aim of alleviating the issues of a gender-segregated society in online learning. This project will undertake and analyse a case study concerning the experience of females teaching a MOOC course on “Rwaq” the first Saudi Arabian platform, which was launched in September 2013. More...

Traditional school districts do not have a lot of experience with virtual schools and have lost students to state and charter virtual schools. To retain students and offer alternative learning opportunities, more public districts are starting their own virtual schools. This study was an examination of foundational processes at three California virtual schools in traditional school districts. More...

This paper discusses the influence of cultural dimensions on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) introductory videos. The study examined the introductory videos produced by three universities on Coursera platforms using communication theory and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The results show that introductory videos in MOOCs are influenced by the national culture of the country in which the university is based. More...

The aim of the study was to examine the determining factors of students' video usage and their learning satisfaction relating to the supplementary application of educational videos, accessible in a Moodle environment in a Business Mathematics Course. The research model is based on the extension of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), in which the core TAM constructs – perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude – and internet self-efficacy were included as the explanatory factors of video usage. More...

There is a substantial increase in the use of learning management systems (LMSs) to support e-learning in higher education institutions, particularly in developing countries. This has been done with some measures of success and failure as well. There is evidence from literature that the provision of e-learning faces several quality issues relating to course design, content support, social support, administrative support, course  assessment, learner characteristics, instructor  characteristics, and institutional factors. It is clear that developing countries still remain behind in the great revolution of e-learning in Higher Education. Accordingly, further investigation into e-learning use in Kenya is required in order to fill in this gap of research, and extend the body of existing literature by highlighting major quality determinants in the application of e-learning for teaching and learning in developing countries. More...

Inspired by open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open source software, the openness movement in education has different meanings for different people. In this study, we use Twitter data to examine the discourses surrounding openness as well as the people who participate in discourse around openness. By targeting hashtags related to open education, we gathered the most extensive dataset of historical open education tweets to date (n = 178,304 tweets and 23,061 users) and conducted a mixed methods analysis of openness from 2009 to 2016. More...