Summary

`I found the book excellent and read every one of the 450 pages.... Many of the chapters reflect the Fielding Institute′s focus on human and organizational behaviour, educational leadership, and organizational management. The book will be particularly appropriate for readers from a corporate, training or business school background, though there is much for academics and online educators at all levels and subject areas to learn from this well crafted book. There are many books and articles about online learning. This is one of the better ones!′ - Robin Mason, Computers and Education

Technology-mediated instruction has taken the university and the corporate sector by storm. As more instructors teach online for a dispersed learning community in both academic and business environments, there′s a need for resources that will help them adapt to this new teaching method.

Educators who come out of traditional academic institutions tend to use traditional methods when offering courses online (e.g. lectures, textbooks and readings, examinations) rather than attend to small-group processes and principles of what the editors of this volume call "andragogy." This Handbook goes beyond the mechanics of how to create and direct an online learning experience to consider such a new approach to pedagogy in doing so. The editors primary purpose is to clarify the conceptual issues that underlie effective online teaching and to offer practical guidance to educators and corporate trainers who plan to teach in a virtual environment. Their central tenet is: the adoption of computer networks as the teaching vehicle of the future demands a re-examination of our core beliefs about pedagogy and how students learn.

The transfer of a classroom curriculum into cyberspace is deceptively simple, but doing so without an appreciation of the nuances and implications of learning online ignores not only the potential of this medium but the inevitable realities of entering it. Rather than fear the challenges that new technology brings to systems of learning, the editors hope to help instructors embrace it by re-thinking how knowledge is acquired and how educational processes may be optimally designed in a new age of teaching and learning.

Features/Benefits

- Part I provides an overview and includes discussion of the unique structural aspects of the electronic learning environment, pedagogical issues, curriculum design, psychological and group dynamics, and ethical issues.

- Part II examines practical issues associated with implementing courses online, both in the traditional university setting and in professionalrporate training environments.

- The book draws heavily on personal case examples, many from The Fielding Graduate Institute′s 26+ years of teaching in nontraditional distributed learning environments.