Online Education

Online education or instruction--any form of learning/teaching via a computer network, i.e. Internet, WWW, or LAN-is rapidly becoming a major mode of educational delivery used by schools, colleges, and corporations. ONLINE EDUCATION is a comprehensive introduction to and overview of learning and teaching in "cyberspace." Kearsley, an author of Wadsworth's DISTANCE EDUCATION: A SYSTEMS VIEW, provides pre-service and in-service teachers, college faculty, and staff with a formal survey of this new and growing educational paradigm.

What's it really like to learn online?Learning Online: The Student Experience Online learning is ubiquitous for millions of students worldwide, yet our understanding of student experiences in online learning settings is limited. The geographic distance that separates faculty from students in an online environment is its signature feature, but it is also one that risks widening the gulf between teachers and learners. In Learning Online, George Veletsianos argues that in order to critique, understand, and improve online learning, we must examine it through the lens of student experience. Approaching the topic with stories that elicit empathy, compassion, and care, Veletsianos relays the diverse day-to-day experiences of online learners. Each in-depth chapter follows a single learner's experience while focusing on an important or noteworthy aspect of online learning, tackling everything from demographics, attrition, motivation, and loneliness to cheating, openness, flexibility, social media, and digital divides. Veletsianos also draws on these case studies to offer recommendations for the future and lessons learned. The elusive nature of online learners' experiences, the book reveals, is a problem because it prevents us from doing better: from designing more effective online courses, from making evidence-informed decisions about online education, and from coming to our work with the full sense of empathy that our students deserve. Writing in an evocative, accessible, and concise manner, Veletsianos concretely demonstrates why it is so important to pay closer attention to the stories of students—who may have instructive and insightful ideas about the future of education.

In Going Online, one of our most respected online learning leaders offers insights into virtual education—what it is, how it works, where it came from, and where it may be headed. Robert Ubell reaches back to the days when distance learning was practiced by mail in correspondence schools and then leads us on a tour behind the screen, touching on a wide array of topics along the way, including what it takes to teach online and the virtual student experience. You’ll learn about: how to build a sustainable online program; how to create an active learning online course; why so many faculty resist teaching online; how virtual teamwork enhances digital instruction; how to manage online course ownership; how learning analytics improves online instruction. Ubell says that it is not technology alone, but rather unconventional pedagogies, supported by technological innovations, that truly activate today's classrooms. He argues that innovations introduced online—principally peer-to-peer and collaborative learning—offer significantly increased creative learning options across all age groups and educational sectors. This impressive collection, drawn from Ubell's decades of experience as a digital education pioneer, presents a powerful case for embracing online learning for its transformational potential.

This work explores and explicates learner motivation in online learning environments. More specifically, it uses a case-study approach to examine undergraduate students’ motivation within two formal and separate online learning contexts. In doing so, it recognizes the mutually constitutive relationship of the learner and the learning environment in relation to motivation. This is distinctive from other approaches that tend to focus on designing and creating motivating environments or, alternatively, concentrate on motivation as a stable learner characteristic. In particular, this book identifies a range of factors that can support or undermine learner motivation and discusses each in detail. By unraveling the complexity of learner motivation in such environments, it provides useful guidelines for teachers, instructional designers and academic advisors tasked with building and teaching within online educational contexts.

This is an essential resource for anyone designing or facilitating online learning. It introduces an easy, practical model (R2D2: read, reflect, display, and do) that will show online educators how to deliver content in ways that benefit all types of learners (visual, auditory, observational, and kinesthetic) from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill levels. With a solid theoretical foundation and concrete guidance and examples, this book can be used as a handy reference, a professional guidebook, or a course text. The authors intend for it to help online instructors and instructional designers as well as those contemplating such positions design, develop, and deliver learner-centered online instruction. Empowering Online Learning has 25 unique activities for each phase of the R2D2 model as well as summary tables helping you pick and choose what to use whenever you need it. Each activity lists a description, skills addressed, advice, variations, cost, risk, and time index, and much more. This title is loaded with current information about emerging technologies (e.g., simulations, podcasts, wikis, blogs) and the Web 2.0. With a useful model, more than 100 online activities, the latest information on emerging technologies, hundreds of quickly accessible Web resources, and relevance to all types and ages of learners--Empowering Online Learning is a book whose time has come.

The use of e-learning strategies in teaching is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in higher education. Online Learning and Assessment in Higher Education recognises the key decisions that need to be made by lecturers in order to introduce e-learning into their teaching. An overview of the tools for e-learning is provided, including the use of Web 2.0 and the issues surrounding the use of e-learning tools such as resources and support and institutional policy. The second part of the book focuses on e-assessment; design principles, different forms of online assessment and the benefits and limitations of e-assessment. Provides an accessible introduction to teaching with technology Addresses the basic aspects of decision-making for successful introduction of e-learning, drawing on relevant pedagogical principles from contemporary learning theories Crosses boundaries between the fields of higher education and educational technology (within the discipline of education), drawing on discourse from both areas

This volume offers the first comprehensive guide to how high-impact practices (HIPs) are being implemented in online environments and how they can be adjusted to meet the needs of online learners. This multi-disciplinary approach will assist faculty and administrators to effectively implement HIPs in distance education courses and online programs.With a chapter devoted to each of the eleven HIPs, this collection offers guidance that takes into account the differences between e-learners and traditional on-campus students.A primary goal of High-Impact Practices Online is to share the ways in which HIPs may need to be amended to meet the needs of online learners. Through specific examples and practical suggestions in each chapter, readers are introduced to concrete strategies for transitioning HIPs to the online environment that can be utilized across a range of disciplines and institution types. Each chapter of High-Impact Practices Online also references the most recent and relevant literature on each HIP so that readers are brought up to date on what makes online HIPs successful.The book provides guidance on how best to implement HIPs to increase retention and completion for online learners.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many educational institutions implemented social distancing interventions such as initiating closure, developing plans for employees to work remotely, and transitioning teaching and learning from face-to-face classrooms to online environments. The abrupt switch to online teaching and learning, for the most part, has been a massive change for administration, faculty, and students at traditional brick-and-mortar universities and colleges as concerns regarding the pedagogical soundness of this mode of delivery remain among some stakeholders. Not only that, but the switch has also revealed the inequities in the system when it comes to the types of students universities serve. It is important as institutions move forward with online instruction that consideration be made about all students and what policies and strategies need to be put into place to help support and meet the needs of all constituents now or when unprecedented situations arise. The only way this can be done is by documenting the experiences through the eyes of faculty who were at the frontline of providing instruction and advising services to students. The Handbook of Research on Inequities in Online Education During Global Crises brings to light the struggles faculty and students faced as they were required to switch to online education during the global COVID-19 health crisis. This crisis has revealed inequities in the educational system as well as the specific effects of inequities when it comes to learning online, and the chapters in this book provide information to help institutions be better prepared for online education or remote learning in the future. While highlighting topics such as new educational trends, remote instruction, diversity in education, and teaching and learning in a pandemic, this book is ideal for in-service and preservice teachers, administrators, teacher educators, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the inequalities within the educational systems and the new policies and strategies put in place with online education to combat these issues and support the needs of all diverse student populations.

Joanne Jung's Character Formation in Online Education provides both sound guidance and helpful, proven tools for developing online learning communities that bring about genuine student learning and change.

An update to a provocative manifesto intended to serve as a platform for debate and as a resource and inspiration for those teaching in online environments. In 2011, a group of scholars associated with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh released “The Manifesto for Teaching Online,” a series of provocative statements intended to articulate their pedagogical philosophy. In the original manifesto and a 2016 update, the authors counter both the “impoverished” vision of education being advanced by corporate and governmental edtech and higher education’s traditional view of online students and teachers as second-class citizens. The two versions of the manifesto were much discussed, shared, and debated. In this book, Siân Bayne, Peter Evans, Rory Ewins, Jeremy Knox, James Lamb, Hamish Macleod, Clara O'Shea, Jen Ross, Philippa Sheail and Christine Sinclair have expanded the text of the 2016 manifesto, revealing the sources and larger arguments behind the abbreviated provocations. The book groups the twenty-one statements (“Openness is neither neutral nor natural: it creates and depends on closures”; “Don’t succumb to campus envy: we are the campus”) into five thematic sections examining place and identity, politics and instrumentality, the primacy of text and the ethics of remixing, the way algorithms and analytics “recode” educational intent, and how surveillance culture can be resisted. Much like the original manifestos, this book is intended as a platform for debate, as a resource and inspiration for those teaching in online environments, and as a challenge to the techno-instrumentalism of current edtech approaches. In a teaching environment shaped by COVID-19, individuals and institutions will need to do some bold thinking in relation to resilience, access, teaching quality, and inclusion.