Kohen-Vacs and Amzalag Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (2023) 18:37 © The Author(s). 2023 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Re-embracing MSL approaches in realities of emergent conditions Dan Kohen-Vacs 1 * and Meital Amzalag 2 *Correspondence: mrkohen@hit.ac.il Faculty of Instructional Technologies, Holon Institute of technology (HIT), Golomb 52, Holon, 58102201, Israel Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract In recent years, educational routines have been challenged with emergent conditions related to COVID-19. These challenges impact how teaching, learning, and evaluations are being exercised. This paper describes and suggests an alternative approach to alleviate challenges related to evaluation activities required in programming courses during days of the pandemic. In such cases, emergent conditions restrict evaluation activities, and accordingly, we suggest that an overall experience should be seamlessly conducted across contexts and settings (Hwang & Chang, 2021). Thus, an activity provides lecturers and students with a smooth transition while shifting between the formal course and the evaluation activity. This activity is examined in light of ten dimensions concerning Mobile Seamless Learning (MSL) reflecting education exercised across context and settings. Accordingly, we conducted qualitative research to examine quotations from 23 students addressing the activity. We searched for students’ insights concerning MSL dimensions, and their perceived potential to alleviate educational challenges in the realities of emergent conditions. This research indicates the potential of this alternative approach for an evaluation activity capable of coping with challenges experienced by lecturers and students during the time of COVID-19. Occasionally, and due to technical and administrative issues, MSL activities were perceived as challenging to conduct. We present the outcomes of our research efforts, as we hope to encourage lecturers to reconsider and re-embrace MSL activities as part of the practices they exercised during emergent conditions experienced in the days of the pandemic. Keywords: Higher Education, Alternative Evaluation Method, COVID-19, Mobile Seamless Learning Dimensions Introduction Over the past few decades, activities aimed at Mobile Seamless Learning (MSL) have been addressed by researchers and practitioners who were searching for new ways to refine their efforts to offer new types of educational experiences (Safiah et al., 2020). Specifically,