Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in online education, both massive open online courses (MOOCs) and small private online courses (SPOCs). This significant interest in online education has raised many challenges related to student engagement, performance, and retention assessments. With the increased demands and challenges in online education, several researchers have investigated ways to predict student outcomes, such as performance and dropout in online courses. This paper presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art studies that examine online learners’ data to predict their outcomes using machine and deep learning techniques. The contribution of this study is to identify and categorize the features of online courses used for learners’ outcome prediction, determine the prediction outputs, determine the strategies and feature extraction methodologies used to predict the outcomes, describe the metrics used for evaluation, provide a taxonomy to analyze related studies, and provide a summary of the challenges and limitations in the field.

Why Is the Grammar-translation Method Still Alive in the Arab World? Teachers’ Beliefs and Its implications for EFL Teacher Education

This paper aims to provide a concise introduction about the philosophical underpinnings of educational research. Whilst the philosophies of educational research have been extensively researched, a concise guide is hoped to uncover research underpinnings for beginners’ postgraduate research students. It overviews the philosophies, paradigms, basic terminologies and related methodologies of educational research. Moreover, the paper provides insights into how researchers’ philosophical stance can inform their research undertaking and transform the educational landscape.

This study investigates English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' perceptions of the causal relationships among teaching, social, and cognitive presences, indicative of a community of inquiry in online EFL course. Their relationships to demographic variables are also explored. There has been a growing interest in using the community of inquiry framework to explore the existence of teaching, social, and cognitive presences as indicative of the quality of online educational experience. The causal relationships among the three presences and whether demographic variables such as gender and program of study predict these presences have not received considerable attention. To examine the relationships among the three presences, the Community of Inquiry (COI) survey instrument was administered to 737 learners of EFL. Factor analysis was performed, and the findings confirmed the factor structure of the COI. In addition, structural equation modelling and Chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) analyses confirmed the hypothesized causal relationships among the three presences. Results revealed that teaching presence was the core factor in sustaining an online community of inquiry and gender significantly predicted perceptions of teaching presence. Implications for research on online language teaching, policy, and practice are discussed.

The centrality of teachers’ views about curriculum change have long been established to exert a powerful influence in implementing educational reforms. Whilst abundant research has evidenced this, the perceptions of teachers of English as a foreign language about curricular change in Saudi Arabia is an under-researched topic in a country undergoing continuous but failing reforms. This small-scale qualitative study aimed to bridge this gap and contribute more broadly to our understanding of how teachers’ voices of the agendas of curriculum change reflect the complexity of the implementation of the intended reforms especially in an EFL contexts. The study utilised semi-structured interviews and employed qualitative data analysis. The findings showed that teachers denounced the change due to its confined scope on compliance to word-for-word implementation of ‘textbooks’. Consequently, teachers faced a number of challenges, developed negative images about themselves and as a result resisted the change. Recommendations pertained to curriculum research methodology and curriculum change stakeholders.