Online and Distance Education for a Connected World
Edited by Linda Amrane-Cooper, David Baume, Stephen Brown, Stylianos Hatzipanagos, Philip Powell, Sarah Sherman, Alan Tait
Publication date:
27 March 2023Publisher
UCL PressDimensions:
234x156mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781800084810
Learning at a distance and learning online are growing in scale and importance in higher education, presenting opportunities for large scale, inclusive, flexible and engaging learning. These modes of learning swept the world in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The many challenges of providing effective education online and remotely have been acknowledged, particularly by those who rapidly jumped into online and distance education during the crisis.
This volume, edited by the University of London’s Centre for Online and Distance Education, addresses the practice and theory of online and distance education, building on knowledge and expertise developed in the University over some 150 years. The University is currently providing distance transnational education to around 50,000 students in more than 180 countries around the world. Throughout the book, contributors explore important principles and highlight successful practices in areas including course design and pedagogy, online assessment, open education, inclusive practice, and enabling student voice. Case studies illustrate prominent issues and approaches. Together, the chapters offer current and future leaders and practitioners a practical, productive, practice- and theory-informed account of the present and likely future state of online and distance higher education worldwide.
'In an era when interest and participation in digital education continues to grow, Online and Distance Education is affording each university a competitive edge. This may seem surprising because Online and Distance Education normally is associated with Open Universities or Continuing Education Programmes, where online, distance teaching methods have been pioneered. This situation changed during the years of the Covid pandemic, when students and teachers from all kinds of universities experienced the benefits and limitations of online teaching and learning. Now every kind of university has to consider strategically ways of capitalising on the benefits of Online and Distance Education.
This timely book examines the student benefits of Online and Distance Education and how these can be fostered for students at all types of universities, questioning whether and how benefits can be planned, sustained and researched. The arguments move beyond conventional debates around the flexibility online education offers students in terms of place, space and time to study to consider and question novel ways of interacting afforded by the digital, new ways of knowing, as well as future forms of assessment. Although these focal areas do not always fit neatly together, the topics are organised in three broad sections exploring planning, doing and researching and evaluating distance learning where authors raise questions of equity, access and stability against a backdrop of continual socio-economic and geo-political uncertainty.
Chapter authors are experts in Digital Education who associate with the University of London Centre for Online and Distance Education. This Centre has become a hub for experts who value the role education plays in contemporary society and who want to make a tangible difference for students. The book is a must-read for policy-makers, university leaders and practitioners is all kinds of universities, even those who are not considering distance learning, because it points towards new possibilities for higher education providers who wish to engender a compassionate, competitive edge.'
Professor Allison Littlejohn, Director of the UCL Knowledge Lab, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society