scholarly journals International Students’ Perspectives on e-Learning During COVID-19 in Higher Education in Australia: A Study of an Asian Student

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. pp241-251
Author(s):  
Yuqi Lin ◽  
Ha Nguyen

Given that online higher education shows no sign of abating during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, understanding the nature of e-learning and e-learners in this particular setting is much needed. However, little is known about the e-learning approaches that international students apply, or about how they experience the process of e-learning. This article is a critical reflection on the misalignment between an international student’s (Author 1) e-learning behaviours and the expectation of online education. It outlines the autoethnographic method and employs self-study to explore why Author 1  behaves in a certain way with particular reference made to the Biggs’ 3P model. In so doing, the study attempts to shed light on the values and interests of international students that have been silenced in the discourse of e-learning design in Australian universities. With the aim of obtaining a profound insight into the effectiveness of e-learning, the present study challenges the notion that the virtual university is a means of achieving educational equality; it suggests the potential of online education in undermining the social inclusion agenda of internationalised universities. The findings show that while the participant could engage with the curriculum to some extent, there are signs of disconnection, isolation and emotional instability associated with the establishment and development of the e-learning environment. Illustrations of these emerging issues could help educators better understand the downside of e-learning and e-practice by identifying various influential elements, including individuals’ socioeconomic status, cultural heritage and environmental learning settings. The study points out that international students’ education outcomes could be compromised, and expectations could be unfulfilled via e-learning. Thus, there is a further need to prepare learners for e-learning environments. 

Author(s):  
Shelley Kinash ◽  
Susan Crichton

This case depiction addresses the contentious issue of providing culturally and globally accessible teaching and learning to international students in universities in the Commonwealth nations of Australia and Canada. The chapter describes the university systems and cultures, the barriers to authentic higher education internationalization, and the problems frequently experienced by international students. Two university cases are presented and analysed to depict and detail blended learning approaches (face-to-face combined with e-learning) as exemplars of culturally and globally accessible higher education and thereby ideologically grounded internationalization. Lessons learned are presented at the systems level and as teaching and learning solutions designed to address pedagogical problems frequently experienced by international students in the areas of communication, academic skills, teaching and learning conceptualization, and moving from rote learning to critical thinking. The blended learning solutions are analysed through the lens of critical theory.


Author(s):  
Shelley Kinash ◽  
Susan Crichton

This case depiction addresses the contentious issue of providing culturally and globally accessible teaching and learning to international students in universities in the Commonwealth nations of Australia and Canada. The chapter describes the university systems and cultures, the barriers to authentic higher education internationalization, and the problems frequently experienced by international students. Two university cases are presented and analysed to depict and detail blended learning approaches (face-to-face combined with e-learning) as exemplars of culturally and globally accessible higher education and thereby ideologically grounded internationalization. Lessons learned are presented at the systems level and as teaching and learning solutions designed to address pedagogical problems frequently experienced by international students in the areas of communication, academic skills, teaching and learning conceptualization, and moving from rote learning to critical thinking. The blended learning solutions are analysed through the lens of critical theory.


Author(s):  
Victor X. Wang ◽  
Valerie A. Storey

To serve a significant portion of the student population, adult learners, in the academy in the 21st century, this chapter argues that online education (e-learning) has the potential to open wider the door to greater access and advancement for learners across their life spans than the traditional four walled classroom. Some of the major issues revolving around online education and adult learners, such as policy, access, completion, and equity, are addressed in this chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to identify future technology trends, and then show how we can rely on practice and research to harness the great yet untapped potential of online education to promote online education programs, especially among adult learners. Policy, access, completion, and equity must be well addressed if online adult education is to be employed effectively and efficiently.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 85-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chia-Wen Tsai ◽  
Pei-Di Shen ◽  
Yi-Chun Chiang

In this paper, the authors reviewed the empirical mobile technology (MT) studies, and those focused on adopting and designing MT for students’ learning, published in SSCI journals from 2003 to 2012. It is found that the number of articles has significantly increased, particularly after 2008. Among the 74 published papers, most of them were conducted in higher education, as well as on computing domain. Furthermore, the quantitative research method was used more in MT and e-learning research. The findings in this study may provide potential direction and help policymakers in governments and researchers in professional organizations to allocate the necessary resources and prepare for supporting future research and applications of MT.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 8438
Author(s):  
Muhammad Mujahid ◽  
Ernesto Lee ◽  
Furqan Rustam ◽  
Patrick Bernard Washington ◽  
Saleem Ullah ◽  
...  

Amid the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the closure of educational institutes leads to an unprecedented rise in online learning. For limiting the impact of COVID-19 and obstructing its widespread, educational institutions closed their campuses immediately and academic activities are moved to e-learning platforms. The effectiveness of e-learning is a critical concern for both students and parents, specifically in terms of its suitability to students and teachers and its technical feasibility with respect to different social scenarios. Such concerns must be reviewed from several aspects before e-learning can be adopted at such a larger scale. This study endeavors to investigate the effectiveness of e-learning by analyzing the sentiments of people about e-learning. Due to the rise of social media as an important mode of communication recently, people’s views can be found on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. This study uses a Twitter dataset containing 17,155 tweets about e-learning. Machine learning and deep learning approaches have shown their suitability, capability, and potential for image processing, object detection, and natural language processing tasks and text analysis is no exception. Machine learning approaches have been largely used both for annotation and text and sentiment analysis. Keeping in view the adequacy and efficacy of machine learning models, this study adopts TextBlob, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning), and SentiWordNet to analyze the polarity and subjectivity score of tweets’ text. Furthermore, bearing in mind the fact that machine learning models display high classification accuracy, various machine learning models have been used for sentiment classification. Two feature extraction techniques, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and BoW (Bag of Words) have been used to effectively build and evaluate the models. All the models have been evaluated in terms of various important performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The results reveal that the random forest and support vector machine classifier achieve the highest accuracy of 0.95 when used with Bow features. Performance comparison is carried out for results of TextBlob, VADER, and SentiWordNet, as well as classification results of machine learning models and deep learning models such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short Term Memory), CNN-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM (Bidirectional-LSTM). Additionally, topic modeling is performed to find the problems associated with e-learning which indicates that uncertainty of campus opening date, children’s disabilities to grasp online education, and lagging efficient networks for online education are the top three problems.


Author(s):  
Nguyen Huu Cuong ◽  
Le My Phong

Distance and online education are popular training modes in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and open education. Accreditation is one of the approaches that many countries across the world have implemented to assure the quality of higher education, including distance learning programs. This study investigates the rationale and future directions for quality assurance and accreditation of distance education programs in Vietnam. First, the paper presents concepts of distance education, and quality assurance and accreditation of distance education. Second, the research reviews experiences of implementing quality assurance and accreditation for distance education from several countries in the world. Next, the paper analyses the rationale for conducting accreditation of distance education programs in our country. Finally, the study proposes three groups of recommendations for the national quality assurance organization, accreditation agencies and higher education institutions to be able to implement the quality assurance and accreditation of distance education in Vietnam successfully. Keywords Quality assurance; Accreditation; Distance education; Online learning; Higher education References [1] UNESCO, Distance education in Asia and the Pacific: country papers, Volume III (Singapore - Vietnam), 2009. www.unesco.org/education/pdf/53-23c.pdf.[2] UNESCO, Open and distance learning: trends, policy and strategy considerations, 2002. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001284/128463e.pdf.[3] Owusu-Boampong, A. & Holmberg, C., Distance education in European higher education – the potential, UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, International Council for Open and Distance Education and Study Portals B.V, 2015.[4] Australian University, Distance learning Australia, 2018. http://www.australianuniversities.com.au/distance-learning/.[5] Darojat, O., Nilson, M. & Kaufman, D., Quality assurance in Asian open and distance learning: policies and implementation, Journal of Learning for Development, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2015) 1. [6] Jung, I. & Latchem, C., Quality assurance and accreditation in distance education and e-learning: models, policies and research, Routledge, London, 2012.[7] Wang, Qi., Quality assurance - best practices for assessing online programs, International Journal on Elearning, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2006) 265. [8] Friedman, J., 10 facts about accreditation in online degree programs, U.S.News & World Report, February 9, 2017. https://www.usnews.com.[9] U.S. Department of Education., Accrediting agencies recognized for distance education and correspondence education, 2018. https://www2.ed.gov. [10] The Australasian Council on Open, Distance and e-learning (ACODE), Benchmarks for technology enhanced learning, ACODE, Canberra, 2014.[11] Bollaert, L., NVAO’s accreditation of online education in a nutshell, 2015. https://www.nvao.net.[12] Henderikx, P. & Ubachs, G., Quality assurance and accreditation of online and distance higher education, 2017. https://www.unic.ac.cy.[13] Stella A. & Gnanam, A., Quality assurance in distance education: The challenges to be addressed, Higher Education, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2004) 143.[14] Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA), Code of practices for open and distance learning, MQA, Kuala Lumpur, 2013.[15] COL, DEMP & UNESCO, Quality assurance toolkit for distance higher education institutions and programmes, COL, Vancouver, 2009.[16] Vietnamnet, Mở đào tạo từ xa sẽ không cần cấp phép, 2017. http://vietnamnet.vn. [17] Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), Quality assurance of online learning: discussion paper, TEQSA, Melbourne, 2017. [18] Nhân dân Điện tử, Phát triển đào tạo từ xa đúng hướng, 2017. http://www.nhandan.com.vn.[19] Nguyễn Hữu Cương, Một số kết quả đạt được của kiểm định chất lượng giáo dục đại học Việt Nam và hướng triển khai trong tương lai, Tạp chí Quản lý giáo dục, Tập 9 Số 8 (2017) 7.[20] Cục QLCL - Bộ GD-ĐT, Danh sách các CSGD đại học; các trường cao đẳng, trung cấp sư phạm, đã hoàn thành báo cáo tự đánh giá, được kiểm định, 2018 (dữ liệu cập nhật đến ngày 31/8/2018).[21] Cục QLCL - Bộ GD-ĐT, Danh sách các chương trình đào tạo được đánh giá/công nhận, 2018 (dữ liệu cập nhật đến ngày 31/8/2018).


Author(s):  
Jane Lund ◽  
Carolyn Snell

Research into the design, delivery, support, and administration of Online Distance Learning (ODL) programmes in higher education is developing but still nascent with theories and discourses from many areas of traditional education being examined and developed to address the particular affordances of online education. Whilst debate continues about the procurement of and best application of educational technologies and systems, one aspect of the debate seems clear, that the technology and content alone is not “e-learning.” Directing someone to an online repository does not mean learning will necessarily take place. Whilst the technology and the content are essential, both are important only insofar as the affordances they provide for learning to take place. Using empirical evidence, this chapter argues that the actions of the tutor are therefore pivotal in an educational environment where the learning process is directed at more than simply accessing information.


Author(s):  
Irja Leppisaari ◽  
Riina Kleimola ◽  
Markus Maunula ◽  
Tuula Hohenthal

Working life should be more actively integrated in higher education as a partner in education design. The e-Learning of the Future project (2009–2012, ERDF) meets work-oriented online education development challenges through working life mentoring that utilizes social media. In the project’s operational model, educational technology experts design and develop teaching in online courses collaboratively with higher education instructors and working life experts. This chapter examines how development of the model was initiated and what problems and challenges emerged. The study will help to establish directions on including working life in online education development through a virtual media laboratory. The model’s use in updating online courses to produce authentic content appears promising. The following critical factors, however, can be found when implementing the model: 1) structuring of the modernization process, 2) supervision of an online interaction process between modernizers/actors, and 3) finding a meaningful role in the process for the working life mentors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.K. Kassymova ◽  
◽  
F.R. Vafazov ◽  
F.D. Pertiwi ◽  
A.I. Akhmetova ◽  
...  

This article studies different ways of learning. Behavioral, cognitive, constructivist learning, multiple learning styles, e-learning, and brain-based learning are interrelated with each other and teachers should ensure that all students should be involved in all types of learning styles to get learning outcomes. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments around the world to implement policies to limit face-to-face meetings with community activities. This makes community activities carried out virtually. It also happens in the education system, teaching and learning activities which are usually carried out in classes face to face, this time has to use the internet as a learning medium. E-learning environments create lessons interactive. Knowledge is integrated from many different sources when students are learning something. The result of this study by analyzed ways of learning is five learning approaches. The stages of learning approaches are student to be active, engaged in the learning process, increase previous knowledge, explore the situation, and be motivated. Nevertheless, the use of the internet for learning or e-learning also cannot be separated from various deficiency and emerging issues within the higher education context.


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