The aim of this study was to analyze public opinion about online learning during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) pandemic. A total of 154 articles from online news and blogging websites related to online learning were extracted from Google and DuckDuckGo. The articles were extracted for 45 days, starting from the day the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic, 11 March 2020. For this research, we applied the dictionary-based approach of the lexicon-based method to perform sentiment analysis on the articles extracted through web scraping. We calculated the polarity and subjectivity scores of the extracted article using the TextBlob library. The results showed that over 90% of the articles are positive, and the remaining were mildly negative. In general, the blogs were more positive than the newspaper articles; however, the blogs were more opinionated compared to the news articles.

Currently, augmented reality (AR) is one of the emerging technologies which is being widely used in the education sector. In engineering drawing, AR has been implemented to enhance learners’ spatial ability but not their conceptual knowledge yet. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the effect of AR on engineering drawing students’ learning performance. In this study, we developed an AR-based application EDINAR to learn engineering drawing concepts for undergraduate engineering students. The study included 392 first-year students from an engineering institution. The control group (N = 196) studied engineering drawing using traditional methods, whereas the experimental group (N = 196) used an AR-based engineering drawing application (EDINAR) to learn engineering drawing. One-way ANOVA was used to analyse the performances of both groups. The findings revealed that students studying engineering drawing with the help of EDINAR outperformed those using traditional approaches. In addition, we received positive feedback about the AR application from the experimental group about their learning experience. Based on these results, it is recommended to incorporate AR in engineering education to improve the learning performance and students’ learning experience.

Augmented reality (AR) is growing in popularity in teaching and learning due in part to powerful new technologies. What has yet to be well established is when and with which learners and learning tasks AR is an effective approach. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of using AR-based formative assessment for improving elementary students’ learning achievement and motivation in a unit of instruction involving butterflies. A total of 70 students of Grade 4 were selected from an elementary school in Taiwan. The experimental group (35) underwent an AR-based intervention that involved formative assessment using iPads whereas the control group (35) followed the traditional teaching method and formative assessment. One-way Analysis of Co-variance (ANCOVA) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) were employed to analyze the data obtained. The results indicated that using the AR-based formative assessment improved not only students’ learning performance but also learning motivation effectively compared with a traditional formative assessment approach. Therefore, it is recommended to conduct further studies and to consider integrating AR in formative assessments and feedback to improve learning.