Online Learning Research Research Articles

Higher Education in China during the Pandemic: Analyzing Online Self-Learning Motivation Using Bayesian Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift towards online learning, compelling university students worldwide to engage in self-directed learning within remote environments. Despite the increasing importance of online education, the factors driving students’ motivation for self-directed online learning, particularly those involving economic incentives, have not been thoroughly explored. This study aims to address this gap by analyzing large-scale data collected from 19,023 university students across China during the pandemic. Using mixed Bayesian networks and multigroup structural equation modeling, the study explores the complex relationships between personal characteristics, academic characteristics, the academic environment, and students’ motivation for self-directed online learning. The results reveal significant associations between online self-directed learning motivation and personal characteristics. such as gender and age, academic characteristics, such as education level and learning incentives, and the geographic location of the school within the academic environment. Moreover, the causal relationship between school location and online self-directed learning motivation varies by gender and educational level. This research not only provides new empirical support for the theoretical framework of online learning motivation but also contributes to the broader fields of educational psychology and online learning research.

RESEARCH STATUS AND TREND OF LEARNING MOTIVATION IN ONLINE LEARNING BASED ON CITESPACE

In this study, CiteSpace software was used to visually analyze 177 literatures on online learning and learning motivation in the CNKI （China National Knowledge Infrastructure） database from 2016 to 2023. Firstly, the number of publications and subject distribution of these literatures are sorted out. Then, CiteSpace software is used to analyze the co-occurrence of high-frequency keywords and the evolution of research topics. In the process, several important trends and findings were uncovered. First, the amount of literature published on the topic of e-learning and learning motivation in China shows an inverted U-shaped growth trend, which indicates that this field still has great development potential in the future. Second, the development process of online learning and learning motivation research is divided into three stages: germination, slow growth and fluctuating growth. Third, the analysis finds that current research mainly focuses on the perspective of pedagogy, so future research can make breakthroughs in disciplines and methods, especially in exploring the influencing factors and stimulation strategies of learning motivation in online learning. The findings of this study provide an important reference and direction for future research.

Does giving students feedback on their concept maps through an on-screen avatar or a humanoid robot make a difference?

Active or engaged learning is often seen as a way to improve students’ performance concerning STEM topics. When following such a form of self-directed learning, students often need to receive feedback on their progress. Giving real-time feedback on an individual basis is usually beyond the teacher’s capacity; in digital learning environments, this opens the door for exploring automated feedback. In the current study, a posttest only design was used to investigate the effect of providing students with different forms of automated feedback while they were creating a concept map about photosynthesis in an online inquiry learning environment. Participants were high school students (N = 138), divided over two experimental groups. In one group, feedback was given by a humanoid robot and in the other group via an avatar. The effects of the different feedback forms were compared for the two groups in terms of the frequency with which students consulted the feedback, concept map quality, and students’ attitudes. Results showed that the robot group consulted feedback more often than the avatar group. Moreover, the robot group had higher scores on a scale measuring enjoyment than the avatar group. Both of these differences were statistically significant. However, the average quality of the concept maps created by both groups was similar.

Designing Holistic and Multivoiced Online Learning: Higher Education Actors’ Pedagogical Decisions and Perspectives

Higher education has witnessed continuous growth in online learning, further catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving forward, it is important to transition from remote teaching to sustainable, high-quality and mature online learning practices for impactful student learning. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative multiple case study research that investigated the pedagogical decisions and rationales of educators and digital learning professionals in deliberately designed online learning contexts. Data were collected through 31 interviews, observations and documents from seven interdisciplinary design teams across six UK universities over an extended period. Three themes were constructed to convey key research insights including: (1) embracing a multi-level view of student learning journeys, (2) embedding multiple and diverse ‘voices’ and (3) creating a complex web of social learning opportunities and ‘spaces’. The findings from this study offer a revitalised understanding of pedagogies suggesting holistic and multivoiced approaches to online learning. Findings pointed to the need for narrative-based approaches to online learning design, attention to purposeful hybrid learning spaces and an expansive view of educators’ role. The insights presented in this paper can be enlightening for educators, teaching teams, digital learning teams, academic developers, researchers and university leadership, opening up dialogue and new directions for online learning practices and research.

The evolution of teaching physical education online during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This study examined the evolution of online teaching for fourteen New England K-12 physical education teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Commencing where Foye and Grenier ([2021]. Teaching during a pandemic. Physical educators’ reflections on teaching remotely. Journal of Online Learning Research, 7, 133–151.) left off, the current study contrasts participants’ experiences in the spring of 2020 with their experiences during the 2020–2021 academic year. Participants engaged in semi-structured interviews. Interview data underwent thematic analysis, with Whittle et al.’s (2020. Emergency remote teaching environment: A conceptual framework for responsive online teaching in crises. Information and Learning Sciences, 121(5/6), 311–319.) emergency remote teaching environments framework providing contextualisation for the study. Three sizeable differences emerged from March 2020 to the 2020–2021 academic year: participants widely utilised synchronous teaching environments, which they unanimously preferred to asynchronous environments; blended learning environments allowed for face-to-face engagement; participant concerns regarding student accountability and lacking interpersonal socialisation dropped from March 2020. Participant experiences are utilised to help guide future online physical education practices.

Learning Label Correlations for Multi-Label Online Passive Aggressive Classification Algorithm

Label correlations are an essential technique for data mining that solves the possible correlation problem between different labels in multi-label classification. Although this technique is widely used in multi-label classification problems, batch learning deals with most issues, which consumes a lot of time and space resources. Unlike traditional batch learning methods, online learning represents a promising family of efficient and scalable machine learning algorithms for large-scale datasets. However, existing online learning research has done little to consider correlations between labels. On the basis of existing research, this paper proposes a multi-label online learning algorithm based on label correlations by maximizing the interval between related labels and unrelated labels in multi-label samples. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on several public datasets. Experiments show the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Meaningfulness of Online Inquiry Learning

Inquiry learning has long stood the test of time over the last hundred years to maintain value in the practice of education, more so in the 21st century. ‘Introspection’ captures best what Dewey (1910/1933) illumines on reflective thinking which is vital in the teaching-learning process (Bybee & Landes, 1990; Gibbs 1988; Farell, 2008). The current literature is rich to inform on the principles and practices of inquiry learning, but with disparate findings as to its effectiveness and design of approaches, both as framework for empirical work and as pedagogical innovation. This study reflects on the Inquiry-based Learning Project (IQBLP) designed to engage students to explore Intercultural Communication Competencies (ICC) of migrants, expats, and international students. The project was designed to be fully online. Through a comprehensive and reflective action analysis using SWOT, the study found that the IQBLP is an authentic highly motivating experience for students to achieve learning outcomes and could be moderately affected by student’s mediocre or superficial attitude towards learning. It is highly potential to promote holistic development with very minimal to negligible risk when done online. It is theoretically and philosophically sound to build ICC and uncover the hidden curriculum, targeting all prescribed general education outcomes. Its risks and threats are manageable but vital to inform future directions and application across the curriculum in hybrid or in-person modality.

A systematic review of the effectiveness of online learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic period

BackgroundThe effectiveness of online learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic period is a debated topic but a systematic review on this topic is absent.MethodsThe present study implemented a systematic review of 25 selected articles to comprehensively evaluate online learning effectiveness during the pandemic period and identify factors that influence such effectiveness.ResultsIt was concluded that past studies failed to achieve a consensus over online learning effectiveness and research results are largely by how learning effectiveness was assessed, e.g., self-reported online learning effectiveness, longitudinal comparison, and RCT. Meanwhile, a set of factors that positively or negatively influence the effectiveness of online learning were identified, including infrastructure factors, instructional factors, the lack of social interaction, negative emotions, flexibility, and convenience.DiscussionAlthough it is debated over the effectiveness of online learning during the pandemic period, it is generally believed that the pandemic brings a lot of challenges and difficulties to higher education and these challenges and difficulties are more prominent in developing countries. In addition, this review critically assesses limitations in past research, develops pedagogical implications, and proposes recommendations for future research.

Trends in Online Learning Research During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Higher Education: Bibliometric Studies

In order to break the chain of the Covid-19 virus, the government recommends schools lockdown and implementing online learning. The research problem formulation is as follows: (1). How is the trend of online learning studies during the covid-19 pandemic at universities in Indonesia? (2). What topics have developed in studying online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic at universities in Indonesia? The research was carried out as a literature review using bibliometric analysis of several sources of scientific publication data. The data in this study were obtained through literature collection techniques and their references which were obtained directly from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. The data was extracted using the Publish or Perish tool and then analyzed with the VosViewer tool. From the analysis that has been done, it can be concluded that the distribution of authors who study online learning topics during the pandemic has not yet appeared to form a polarization of authorship networks that explore these topics in depth. Meanwhile, the trends that have formed in online learning during the pandemic seem to condense into several topics.

Global trends and future directions in online learning for medical students during and after the COVID-19 pandemic: A bibliometric and visualization analysis.

This study explores the evolution of online learning research in the context of medical education during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to understand the principal focus areas, and trends that have emerged in this rapidly evolving landscape. A total of 2751 publications related to online learning were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) from 2020 to 2022. Bibliometric analysis and visualization techniques were employed to comprehensively examine the landscape of online learning research. Publications, co-cited references, and keyword co-occurrence were analyzed to identify patterns and trends in research focus and collaboration networks. The significant surge in research output reveals the academic community's response to the pandemic. Various themes have emerged in online learning research, encompassing online teaching, flipped classrooms, mental health, and blended learning. The evolution trajectory of research has traversed 3 stages, reflecting a shift in research focus from immediate pandemic responses to more refined strategies and interdisciplinary perspectives. Keyword co-occurrence analysis was also conducted to show the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the research. The study underscores the global scholarly engagement, collaborative networks, and principal themes that have shaped the field. As medical education adapts to the shifting landscape, the trajectory of online learning research points toward increased learner autonomy, integration of advanced technologies, and interdisciplinary collaboration. This transformative shift promises to reshape medical education, equipping learners and educators with the tools needed to navigate the dynamic realm of modern healthcare education.

Online Education: A Scoping Review Examining Learning and Satisfaction Outcomes in Social Work, Medicine, and Nursing

ABSTRACT Social work has a proliferation of online courses. Both nursing and medicine have been using online technology for years with noted success within a variety of subjects. The current scoping review examined empirical research of online learning and satisfaction outcomes in social work, while also comparing results with nursing and medicine. Results showed that most social work studies that examined learning outcomes between online and traditional courses found differences, whereas approximately half of the studies in nursing and medicine reported no differences. Satisfaction results were more varied in each discipline. Taken together, both learning and satisfaction outcomes remain inconclusive due to documented limitations related to study designs. Implications for social work education are discussed and recommendations are provided.

Teachers’ Perceptions of Emergency Remote Teaching During COVID-19 at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

The uncertain situation emerging from COVID-19 led to an unprecedented suspension of face-to-face classes and the adoption of emergency remote teaching (ERT) in higher education institutions (HEIs). However, ERT required specific skills on the part of the teachers. As higher education systems gradually revert to normalcy, it is vital to reflect on ERT practices. Hence, this study investigates, in retrospect, the experiences of the General Foundation Programme (GFP) teachers at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman in conducting and adapting to ERT. The exploratory study uses an online questionnaire and the analysis is based on 102 teacher responses. The results of the quantitative data were analyzed and complemented with an extensive literature review. The findings can be grouped into six themes: teachers’ awareness of ERT and online teaching, readiness to deliver ERT, course management, students’ readiness, emotions in ERT, and effectiveness and future potential of remote teaching. The study suggests ways for HEIs to adapt to emergency teaching and learning and prepare for the effective implementation of online teaching. The paper provides insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with the emerging modalities of online teaching and informs decision and policy makers to develop a framework for their implementation. These findings have important implications for crisis management and the effective implementation of online teaching and learning in tertiary education. This study fills a gap in online teaching and learning research of the understudied context of a GFP in the Arab Gulf context.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on online learning in higher education: a bibliometric analysis

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted higher education by forcing the transition to online learning, which became a mandatory teaching process during the lockdowns. Although the epidemiological situation has gradually improved since then, online learning is becoming ever more popular as it provides new learning opportunities. Therefore, the paper aims to present recent research trends concerning online learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic by using selected bibliometric approaches. The bibliometric analysis is based on 8,303 documents from the Scopus database published between January 2020 and March 2022, when repeated lockdowns meant most countries were experiencing constant disruptions to the educational process. The results show that the COVID-19 pandemic increased interest in online learning research, notably in English-speaking and Asian countries, with most research being published in open-access scientific journals. Moreover, the topics most frequently discussed in the online learning research during the COVID-19 pandemic were ICT and pedagogy, technology-enhanced education, mental health and well-being, student experience and curriculum and professional development. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged explorations of emergency remote learning approaches like e-learning, distance learning and virtual learning, which are intended to limit physical contact between teachers and students, where the specific requirements of a given field of study often guide which online learning approach is the most suitable. The findings add to the existing body of scientific knowledge and support the evidence-based policymaking needed to ensure sustainable higher education in the future.

Exploring The Influence of Online Inquiry Learning With E-scaffolding Prompting Question on Problem-Solving Skills in The Work Energy Topic for Islamic Senior High School Students

Exploring The Influence of Online Inquiry Learning With E-scaffolding Prompting Question on Problem-Solving Skills in The Work Energy Topic for Islamic Senior High School Students

The Abrupt Transition to Online Learning: Multiple Perspectives.

Transitioning to virtual learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic made the numerous obstacles faced by deaf and hard of hearing students more apparent, and created new challenges for all involved. From this experience, much knowledge was gained that can continue to be implemented and researched to provide better access and accommodations for ongoing online education. In the present article, we introduce an American Annals of the Deaf Special Issue whose contributing authors offer a response to the challenges experienced by deaf education researchers, administrators, policymakers, faculty, and other educators in areas ranging from early childhood to higher education, as well as students and families, because of the abrupt transition to virtual learning. This Special Issue provides perspectives, strategies, and scenarios that can enhance deaf education across age and grade ranges and augment the research and literature base of online learning in deaf education.

Transactional Distance and College Students' Learning Engagement in Online Learning: The Chain Mediating Role of Social Presence and Autonomous Motivation.

Transactional distance remains an important issue in online education, which is an important indicator to evaluate the quality of teaching and learning in online courses and is closely related to the success of learners' online learning. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the potential mechanism of transactional distance and its three modes of interaction on the impact of learning engagement of college students. Online Education Student Interaction Scale, Online Social Presence Questionnaire, Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Student scales were used, revised questionnaire for cluster sampling of college students, 827 valid samples. SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 24.0 were used for analysis, and Bootstrap method was used to test the significance level of the mediating effect. Transactional distance (including the three interaction modes) was significantly and positively related to college students' learning engagement. Autonomous motivation played a chain mediating role between transactional distance and learning engagement. In addition, social presence and autonomous motivation mediated the chain between student-student and student-teacher interaction on learning engagement. In addition, however, student-content interactions did not significantly impact social presence, and the chain mediating effect of social presence and autonomous motivation between student-content interaction and learning engagement was not supported. Based on transactional distance theory, this study reveals the role of transactional distance on college students' learning engagement and the mediating effect of social presence and autonomous motivation in the relationship between transactional distance (and three interaction modes of transactional distance) on college students' learning engagement. This study supports the findings of additional online learning research frameworks and empirical studies to enhance our understanding of how online learning affects college students' learning engagement and the important role of online learning in college student's academic development.

The effects of online learning on English language education during the COVID-19 pandemic: A meta-analysis

This study aims to conclude the effects of online learning on English language education during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This meta-analysis study examined the results of relevant studies conducted and published in variouscountries worldwide within the two years of the pandemic (between January 2020 to April 2022). With a database of 430 research, only eight articles met the inclusion requirements to answer the overview of the effects and four articles to answer the overall effect, benefits, and drawbacks of online learning on English language education. The data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Data in percentages and figures representing the effects of online learning were analysed using quantitative methods. The important research findings, including the advantages and disadvantages of online learning based on content analysis, were described using qualitative data analysis. The objectives of researching online learning in English language education, forms of online learning research, samples, analyses of online learning research data, and settings of online learning research were discovered from the eight research publications this meta-analysis found. The outcomes demonstrated that online learning positively impacted English language instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Comparative Study of Continual, Lifelong, and Online Supervised Learning Libraries

Machine learning has shown to be a crucial part of big data analytics; however, it lacks when the data is continuously streaming in from the system and changing too much from the original training data. Online learning is machine learning for streaming data that arrives in a sequential order where the model updates after every data point. While machine learning relies on well-established libraries such as PyTorch and Keras, the libraries for online learning are less well known, but they are here to serve similar purposes of reproducibility and reducing the time from research to production. Here, we compare different libraries for online learning research, specifically supervised learning. We compare them on the axes of developmental experience and benchmark testing as researchers. Our comparison as developers takes maintenance, documentation, and offerings of state-of-the-art algorithms into account. As this is not necessarily free of bias, we also use benchmarks known to online learning to gather power usage, RAM usage, speed, and accuracy of these libraries to get an objective view. Our findings show that Avalanche and River, including River-torch, are among the best libraries in terms of performance and applicability to the research in supervised online learning.

Pembelajaran daring materi menyimak cerita pendek pada siswa kelas IV SD menggunakan model pembelajaran inquiry

This study aims to examine the online learning of Indonesian subjects on short story listening material in grade IV elementary school during the COVID-19 pandemic using the Inquiry learning model. Examine teacher and student responses, and examine student difficulties in completing assignments. The research method used is descriptive qualitative. The subjects in this study were 20 fourth grade students of SD Negeri Pasirjambu, totaling 5 male students and 15 female students. The research instruments used were observation sheets, questionnaires or attitude scales, and written tests. The results of this study are that the first scenario and implementation of learning show findings in the field, namely students can learn to listen to short stories better by giving teachers a learning experience using audiovisual media online via whatsapp. Second, the response of teachers and students is very good, Third, the difficulties experienced by students in online learning in listening to short story material using the online inquiry learning model in general, namely the internet network that is less stable, difficult to understand the material and less free to interact with friends, quota limited and limited cellphones, because they have to take turns with other family members. as well as the obstacles experienced by researchers including the lack of stable signal and enough to drain data packets. Based on the results of research and discussion in this study, it can be concluded that online learning on short story listening material in class IV at SDN Pasirjambu is good

A Systematic Review of the Research Topics in Online Learning During COVID-19: Documenting the Sudden Shift

Since most schools and learners had no choice but to learn online during the pandemic, online learning became the mainstream learning mode rather than a substitute for traditional face-to-face learning. Given this enormous change in online learning, we conducted a systematic review of 191 of the most recent online learning studies published during the COVID-19 era. The systematic review results indicated that the themes regarding “courses and instructors” became popular during the pandemic, whereas most online learning research has focused on “learners” pre-COVID-19. Notably, the research topics “course and instructors” and “course technology” received more attention than prior to COVID-19. We found that “engagement” remained the most common research theme even after the pandemic. New research topics included parents, technology acceptance or adoption of online learning, and learners’ and instructors’ perceptions of online learning.