New Advances in Methodologies and Technologies for Enhancing Quality in Higher Education Distance Learning

Dear Colleagues,

Online universities are widespread today, but distance learning solutions are lately becoming more and more popular also in traditional universities. This increasing popularity is mainly due to the unfortunate occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic that forced traditional universities to turn to distance learning modalities. After such an experience, even after the pandemic is over, many of these courses will probably adopt a blended learning modality. Researchers and academics involved in online teaching are growing in number and research activities on the design of online courses, teaching methodologies, and the assessment in digital learning environments are undergoing a marked increase, and they will become more and more fundamental in the near future.

On one hand, online learning methodologies have reached a maturity in terms of theoretical framework and interpretation of the research field outcomes. Today, online learning presents a wide variety of implementations, from blended learning courses to MOOC, and the pedagogical research in the field covers the key aspects of learning and teaching online: design, practice, and assessment. The course design is a key topic, since it has a relevant impact on the learning experience by promoting an active and personalized learning that improves practice, while the assessment needs to be intended both as ongoing feedback and final evaluation. The three aforementioned aspects are strictly connected to the technological learning environment and to the data flow it generates, and this relationship is one of the focuses of emerging research.

On the other hand, the exploitation and analysis of educational data, even big data, are becoming a fundamental prerequisite for supporting strategic decisions in several contexts, such as predicting dropouts and improving student experience and success rate. The adoption of online learning technologies may foster the widespread exploitation of such educational data and big data streams, thus unveiling novel and unprecedented aspects in the distance learning research field.

This Special Issue is focused on all the relevant topics regarding higher distance education and online learning, such as distance learning methodologies and technologies, online assessment of distance learning outcomes, proctoring systems, online learning analytics and online educational big data mining, pedagogical framework studies in distance learning, online digital learning design, blended distance learning, online course design and e-learning curricula, digital libraries for e-learning, e-learning platforms and portals, security aspects of distance learning, standards and interoperability for distance learning, etc.

Contributors to this Special Issue will have the opportunity to present good practices and points of view about the future of methodologies and technologies regarding the online teaching-learning process. Moreover, a special focus will be addressed towards the importance of mining useful knowledge from data generated by innovative virtual learning environments and methods for improving the performance of distance learning universities.

Dr. Riccardo Pecori
Prof. Dr. Pietro Ducange
Prof. Dr. Paolo Raviolo
Prof. Dr. Pietro Picerno
Guest Editors

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• Distance Learning
• Educational data mining
• Learning analytics
• Virtual learning environments
• Online learning assessment
• Online learning design
• Online tutoring
• Mobile learning