Technology advancements promote a redefinition of traditional instructional methodologies, as well as the roles of teachers and learners towards an efficient e-learning ecosystem. To date, all existing solutions are combined with the conventional face-to-face learning process. However, the latter can be unexpectedly hindered in some emergency cases, like the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. To handle such unexpected scenarios, this paper presents NOTA, a novel online teaching and assessment scheme that takes advantage of Blockchain technology to maintain the expected teaching quality and assessment fairness while respecting the courses’ and examinations’ schedule. Besides, NOTA also motivates both learners and teachers to persist in their endeavours, even from home, through Blockchain’s incentive strategies. The preliminary results taken during the CoronaVirus period showed a very high satisfaction ratio, exceeding the 90%. This made us feel very optimistic about the potential of our proposal when deployed at a larger scale.

In recent pandemic events and lockdown, most of education institutions have moved into online and distance learning. Certain institutions have been more ready than others to shift into full online learning and teaching mode. However, many technical and security challenges and issues related to the Learning Management System (LMS) have been encountered. In this paper, we investigate the technical benefits of Blockchain, and we propose a secured and trusted online-leaning framework based on blockchain. Our proposal takes advantage of Blockchain technology to ensure the expected standard of teaching and fairness of assessment while respecting the schedule of courses and exams. Besides, through Blockchain's reward methods, it also motivates both students and teachers to persist in their efforts, even from home.

Journal publications written in English are a sina qua non condition for national and international recognition. Recent literature in applied linguistics and other fields has denounced the existence of some conventions and "rules" that govern a given research writing. That is, using a concise, clear and error-free language is demanded in order to increase accessibility and ease of understanding. With the aid of textual descriptive analysis, this paper attempts to review the most common linguistic reasons behind papers' rejection. Eight papers of Ph.D. computer science students were collected and analyzed qualitatively in order to diagnose the main problems and challenges Ph.D. students face while writing for scholarly publication. Other than other linguistic lacunes, it is found out that the authors had problems mainly with using the right tone, choosing the correct words and the adequate tense use. Indeed, the results of this study are supposed to be of some use to writers who want to know what writing conventions, if there are any, are adequate for paper publication. Finally, some recommendations related to students' problems in writing for scholarly publication are made.