Journal of Iranian Distance Education
Volume:3 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2021

The purpose of this case study was to measure satisfaction of some postgraduate engineering students at Shiraz University about virtual and remote laboratories. The participants were 18 electrical engineering students selected from Shiraz University through purposeful samples. The studied variables in order to measure the satisfaction of remote laboratories included students' focused attention during the use of the virtual laboratory (FA), perceived usefulness of virtual lab (PU), virtual lab approval by students (Confirm), students' satisfaction with the virtual laboratory(Satisfaction), fun and enjoyable virtual lab (Play), easily perceived by students in using a virtual lab (PEU), Attitude to the virtual laboratory (Attitude), tendency to use the virtual lab continuously (ICU), quality of virtual laboratory design (QD). Results revealed that students' satisfaction with the virtual laboratory was above the middle standard rating. Furthermore, from the students' point of view, the quality of the virtual laboratory had a significant effect on their "Satisfaction" with the virtual laboratory (Sig. 0.000, B = 0.885), and from the perspective of the students, the QD had a significant effect on ICU (Sig. 0.000, B = 0.937). Finally, the regression analysis showed that the QD had a significant effect on students' attitudes toward the virtual laboratory (Sig. 0.000, B = 0.885).

The present study aimed to identify the challenges of online- only system in the era of COVID-19. The qualitative research approach and the research synthesis method were adopted. The statistical population of the study included the research studies conducted during the COVID-19 in the field of e-learning system challenges which were collected from Scopus, Science direct, Eric, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar databases via using specific keywords. A total of 120 studies were selected and reviewed. After several screening stages among these studies, 47 study units were selected and reviewed based on their title, abstract, and research content, respectively. Research data were collected from qualitative analysis of the studied documents. Content analysis method was employed to analyze the research data. Analysis of the data revealed that the e-learning system in the COVID-19 era has challenges in twelve factors related to students, teachers, and managers which include ICT access and usage, studying and teaching from home, e-learning skills, content quality, teaching method, research activities, psychological factors, learning activities, evaluation, programs and policies, macro-social factors, and support.

Online learning platforms have become commonplace in modern society today, but high dropout rates and decrement students’ performance still require more attention in such online learning environments. The purpose of this research is to accelerate the identification of students at risk of academic failure in order to take appropriate corrective action. Therefore, we have proposed model to achieve this goal and ultimately improve the performance of students and faculty. Then, for early prediction of students at risk of academic failure, the short-term memory neural network (LSTM) and the widely used support vector algorithm have been used to analyze students’ time based behaviors using data from the University of Tehran e-learning system. To demonstrate the optimal performance of the predictive algorithm, we compared the LSTM network with the support vector algorithm with different evaluation criteria. The results show that the use of LSTM network for early prediction of students at risk provides higher predictive accuracy compared to the support vector machine algorithm. In this research, our method in predicting students’ performance with LSTM network has achieved 94% accuracy and with support vector machine algorithm has achieved 88% accuracy. In addition, the Area Under the Curve (AUC) was 0.936 and 0.882, respectively, using the LSTM algorithm and the support vector machine. Therefore, according to the obtained results, it can be seen that our proposed algorithm has an important and effective contribution to improving the final performance of teachers and students during the course.

This study is practical in terms of its objectives, and this study aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the online teaching-learning process in Iranian service organizations (non-educational). This research methodology applied a quantitative approach in its data collection method. In the first part, using a systematic approach and documentary study, 870 related research about e-learning at non-academic organizations were identified. Then, formerly after being studied and analyzed based on the criteria such as the research title and abstract, finally, 32 cases were selected and analyzed. In order to determine the research validity have been used the instrument of the Basic Critical Appraisal Skills Program of Glyn et al. (2006) and to examine the reliability, the method of agreement between the two coders was used and confirmed at a kappa value of 731%. The results indicate that the most critical issues regarding the online teaching and learning system in non-academic organizations are the feasibility study and implementation of this method at the mentioned institutions. Furthermore, the systematic review findings also identified five critical challenges of the e-learning system. Therefore, the research results indicate that for implementing the online teaching-learning system, first, it is necessary to identify the challenges such as; challenges related to critical stakeholders, organization, pedagogy, technology, and support system.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have recently becoming a popular means of education. They generally give the students large-scale options. However, the diversity of MOOC courses available and their rapid updates make it more difficult for students to find fresh material relevant to them. A recommendation system (RS) connects the learner with the best learning resources to meet students' interests. The majority of recommender system research is based on the existence of explicit feedback, which is often impossible or inaccessible in MOOCs. As a result, in this paper, we model user positive and negative preferences using implicit feedback acquired passively by watching various types of students' behavior. This paper proposes a novel course recommendation, which employs Siamese Neural Networks (SNNs) to extract latent representations of students and courses using a loss function that favors observed over unobserved courses. The similarity of users and courses is then determined using a novel representation mechansim. Furthermore, recommending those courses with limited interaction data is a major challenge in MOOC recommenders. To tackle this issue, the courses profiles are used as side information which helps us create more accurate representations. To evaluate the performance of the propsoed method, we performed the experiments on a real dataset gathered from XuetangX—one of China's largest MOOCs. The results of the experiments show that the proposed method outperforms a number of baseline nad state-of-the-art MOOC recommenders.

From an ecolinguistic perspective, affordance and technology might be issues of great concern in recent decades in computer assisted language learning (CALL). The present study was conducted to investigate Iranian novice and experienced EFL teachers’ perspectives on challenges and affordance of mobile assisted language learning (MALL) in an EFL context. To this end, a total of 80 EFL teachers at different universities in Iran were randomly sampled. The data were collected through a validated 4-point Likert-scale questionnaire including two sections, each section of which focused on a particular aspect of MALL, including items evaluating EFL teachers’ attitudes toward the implementation of mobile phones and items exploring EFL teachers’ perspectives on the challenges to the use of MALL instruction. The results revealed that the novice EFL teachers significantly agreed more than experienced teachers with the idea that MALL based instruction should be used in Iranian EFL context. The results also indicated that the experienced EFL teachers significantly “strongly agreed” more than novice teachers concerning the idea that MALL based education created challenges in Iranian EFL. In general, the findings suggest that both novice and experienced teachers had positive attitudes towards MALL instruction. However, there are some challenges which make teaching and learning less efficient and these obstacles need to be tackled by authorities. Implications have also been introduced in the paper.

The aim of this study was to determine the capabilities of the electronic platform of webinars in digital media education in the educational system. The present study is a quasi-experimental study and the sampling method was census. The statistical population includes 60 associate degree students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Khorramabad Boys and Girls Technical and Vocational University, who participated in a digital media training seminar in the second semester of the academic year 2020-2021. The duration of the seminar was 240 minutes. In this online seminar, 30 students had a personal computer system. All students were fully acquainted with the method of e-learning. Students who had a personal computer system installed InDesign software at the same time as the instructor. Then, they learned the complete InDesign software training according to the InDesign software training topics, and then the instructor taught digital media. At the end of the seminar, the instructor gave the same task to all the students and the students who had a personal computer system at the time of the seminar were asked to send the homework to the instructor's e-mail. According to the review of assignments sent by students to the teacher, among students who had a personal computer system, the level of access to educational objectives in 80% of cases was complete, 15% moderate and 5% poor. The content adequacy of educational materials was mentioned in 85% of cases as complete, 10% as moderate and 5% as poor.

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of conversational style education through multimedia on increasing communication skills of female students. The research method was quasi-experimental and the statistical population included female students in sixth grade of District 2 of school system in Tehran(Iran), of whom 60 were selected by cluster sampling and placed in two groups of control and experiment. Data collection tools included Attar's standard communication skills questionnaire (2007) whose face validity was confirmed by eleven teachers using Delphi technique and its reliability through Cronbach's alpha coefficient for subscales, emotion management, others perception and assertiveness. It was equal to 0.92, 0.89 and 0.88, respectively. Research data were analyzed using SPSS.22 software. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the control and experimental groups regarding students' communication skills at the level of 95%. Students' communication skills in conversational style through multimedia were better than students trained in the traditional way. The results of this study indicate the positive role of interactive teaching through multimedia in increasing the communication skills of primary school students, and this emphasizes that schools and educational institutions need more multimedia tools to deepen Learn and enhance learners' communication skills.

Years after the first coinage of the term blended or hybrid learning, this mode of learning and its related courses and programs are still widely underexplored in the context of CALL teacher education. In an attempt to shed more light into this research base, the present case study focuses on the potentials of collaborative learning experiences in a blended teacher education course for developing English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ pedagogical knowledge of CALL. Five female Iranian EFL teachers participated in the study and were engaged in different types of classroom collaborative discussions and tasks. An analysis of in-class collaborative tasks reveled that collaboration in online and face-to-face learning contexts significantly contributed to the development of different aspects of teachers’ knowledge of CALL integration into their instruction.

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between worry about university reopening and negative behavioral reactions in students in the current Covid-19 pandemic. The study is based on cross-sectional survey research method and the data collection tool is a researcher-made questionnaire (total Chronbach’s alpha: 0.84). . To ensure the content validity of the questionnaire, a number of psychologists and experts in the field of student counseling examined the content of the questionnaire. The study population included all students in the country, from which 1865 people were selected by convenience sampling. Survey findings show that 56% of students at different levels of education agree with the reopening of universities and 44% disagree. The results of univariate chi-square test show a significant difference between these two frequencies (X2 = 10.54, P = 0.001). Also, the results of two-variable chi-square test indicate the relationship between students' worries about their health with the reopening of universities and dealing with violators of health protocols (X2 = 60.61, P = 0.001). There was no relationship between the probability of dealing with violators of health protocols and the level of education (X2 = 5.04, P = 0.53). It is suggested that special policies be considered in order to prevent any behavioral disturbances caused by students' disagreement about the level of compliance with health protocols in the university environment.