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INTRODUCTION: Women's empowerment has been introduced as a mechanism to improve the quality of women's work and personal life, one of the basic principles of protecting human rights and eradicating poverty. This study aimed to investigate the effect of social capital, social support, and Internet use on the empowerment of working women with a mediating role in socioeconomic status. METHODS: In this descriptive survey study, 4,000 women were studied working in the RCS of Tehran province, Iran. About 384 samples were selected due to Cochran's formula by a simple random method. The required data were collected using some questionnaires, namely the Social Capital (Hoff and Heisman, 2009), subjective assessment of the socioeconomic status (Nabavi et al., 2007), Social Support (Sherburne and Stewart, 1991), the researcher-made questionnaire of Internet Use and Women’s Empowerment. FINDINGS: The results showed that social capital, social support, and the use of the Internet had a direct impact on the empowerment of women, and socioeconomic status played a mediating role in the relationship between social capital and empowerment. It was also found that socioeconomic status played a mediating role in the relationship between social support and the empowerment of working women. CONCLUSION: According to the results, attention to the components of social capital, social support, and the use of the Internet and cyberspace provided the basis for the empowerment of working women, while in this process the key role of women's socioeconomic status should not be overlooked. However, managers' attention to strengthening organizational trust and women's participation in decision-making, providing conditions for good communication, training, and promoting women's media literacy, would increase the socioeconomic status proportionately and improve women's empowerment.

Recently, Massive Open Online Courses have become sensational in the field of distance learning. There is a plethora of advantages being listed in learning through MOOCs but this pedagogy lacks in few areas when compared with traditional classes. One of those inabilities of MOOC is its support to prepare the students for laboratory-based courses. The authors of this study chose a MOOC course that teaches Digital Photography and created an Augmented Reality (AR) experience for a module that explains the different parts of a digital camera. The 2 nd year Multimedia students of Vellore Institute of Technology have been asked to experience the MOOC video followed by the AR experience. Their feedbacks before and after the AR experience has been statistically tested and reported. The results revealed that the students feel more confident and concentrate more when the instructional video was given as an AR experience. This study suggests that AR integrated MOOC modules might help in training students better for practice-based courses.