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Information and communication technologies have been transforming the way we teach and learn. Either for facilitating teaching practices or for making learning more interesting and joyful for the learners, artificial intelligence-based applications are utilized in recent years. In this connection, this study intends to examine if automated feedback and teacher feedback contribute to academic writing achievement and whether they differ in their effect on achievement in learning English as a foreign language in an open and distant learning context. The participants of the study were open education faculty students in a higher education institution in Turkey. In this quasi-experimental quantitative study repeated measures design was adopted. the participants were given writing tasks each week in a nine-week writing activity and they received feedback from their English language teachers for the first three tasks, and they received feedback from the software for the last three tasks. All participants wrote an English text as a diagnostic test at the beginning of the process. At the end of the teacher and software feedback phases, they took post-tests. All grades were statistically analyzed in order to find any effect of regular feedback either from a language teacher or from an online software on academic writing achievement. Results revealed significant differences between the diagnostic test and two achievement tests. Participants tended to improve their academic writing skills by taking regular feedback, and it was observed that the writing scores increased slightly more when receiving feedback from teachers compared to automated feedback software.

This study offers an explanatory case study research that reflects on how the motivational design based supplementary activities are used in a social network site, namely Facebook, affect online EFL learners' process of learning. The participants consisted of 105 online EFL learners who contributed to the study on a voluntary basis. The data was gathered over a three-week period through a web-based open-ended questionnaire compiled by the researchers. The findings of the study indicate that using supplementary activities given on Facebook has a significant contribution to online distance EFL learners' course interest, motivation, volition, and academic performance. Besides, the supplementary activities sway the learners to persist in and make an effort to reach the learning goals. Based on the findings collected in this study, the authors posit that Facebook, as a powerful social network site, could be used as a supportive milieu for open and distance learning courses conducted for English Language Learning. In addition to the findings mentioned above, suggestions for future research directions and implications for practice are discussed.