In this work, we examine online authenticated encryption with variable expansion. We follow a notion where both encryption and decryption are online, and security is ensured in the RUP (Release of Unverified Plaintext) setting. Then we propose a generic way of obtaining an online authenticated encryption mode from a tweakable online encryption mode based on the encode-then-encipher paradigm (Bellare and Rogaway, Asiacrypt 2000). To instantiate our generic scheme, we start with proposing a provably-secure tweakable online encryption mode called \(\textsf{t}\text {-}\textsf{OleF}\) , a tweakable version of \(\textsf{OleF}\) (Bhaumik and Nandi, ToSC 2016(2)), and then plug it into our generic scheme to obtain , a provably-secure online authenticated encryption mode. As an application, we propose a primitive we call a bidirectional online channel suited for communication between lightweight devices.