"This book's purpose is to inform educators and instructional designers of issues and cultural misunderstandings that could hinder the effective transfer of knowledge when e-learning is exported to other cultures. Addressing these cultural challenges will enhance the effectiveness of e-learning, thereby supporting the societal benefits of increased access to education at a global level"--Provided by publisher.

Using practical examples from librarians in the field, this book lays out current issues in online learning and teaches librarians how to adapt a variety of library services—including instruction, reference, and collection development—to online education. Recent studies highlighting the challenges faced by online learners show that skills librarians are uniquely qualified to teach, such as information and digital literacy and source evaluation, can improve academic performance in online courses and enhance the online learning experience. Just as embedded librarianship was developed to answer the needs of online courses when they emerged in the early 2000s, online learning librarian Christina Mune now teaches "online librarianship" as a set of realistic strategies for serving a variety of online education models. Each chapter of Libraries Supporting Online Learning addresses a different strategy for supporting online students and/or faculty, with all strategies derived from real-world practices. Librarians will find information on best practices for creating digital literacy tutorials and dynamic content, providing patrons with open access and open educational resources, helping patrons to avoid copyright issues, promoting peer-to-peer learning and resource sharing, posting to social media, and developing scalable reference services. The tools and practical examples in this book will be useful for all educators interested in increasing the efficacy of online learning.

This book familiarizes health sciences faculty with key conceptual issues in online education and presents appropriate strategies and development, implementation, and evaluation tools to use in designing and delivering online courses and programs. The text offers curricularly sound guidelines that specifically address the unique aspects of online education in the health sciences, including clinical and laboratory course development and management and continuing education courses. The authors provide practical tools and resources such as guides for structuring course components and templates for online and proctored exams.

While online learning has become pervasive in many fields in higher education, it has been adopted somewhat slower in teacher education. In addition, more research is needed to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of online education in teacher preparation. Teacher Education Programs and Online Learning Tools: Innovations in Teacher Preparation presents information about current online practices and research in teacher education programs, and explores the opportunities, methods, and issues surrounding technologically innovative opportunities in teacher preparation. It presents empirical evidence of teacher candidate learning and assessment in the context of various online aspects of teacher licensure.

Online Learning and Its Users: Lessons for Higher Education re-examines the impact of learning technologies in higher education. The book focuses particularly on the introduction and mainstreaming of one of the most widely used, the virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS). The book presents an activity theoretic analysis of the VLE's adoption, drawing on research into this process at a range of higher education institutions. Through analysis and discussion of the activities of managers, lecturers, and learners using the VLE, lessons are identified to inform future initiatives including the implementation of massive open online courses (MOOCs). A replicable research design is included and explained to support evaluation and analysis of the use of online learning in other settings. The book questions accepted views of the place of technologies in higher education, arguing that there has been a repeated cycle of hype and disappointment accompanying the development of online learning. While much research has documented this cycle, finding new strategies to break it has proved to be a more difficult challenge. Why has technology not made more impact? Are lecturers going to be left behind by their own students in the use of digital technologies? Why have we seen costly and time-consuming failures? This book argues that we can answer these questions by heeding the lessons from previous experiences with the VLE and early iterations of the MOOC. More importantly, we can begin to ask new and different questions for the future to ensure better outcomes for our institutions and ultimately our learners. - Presents institution-wide analysis of the adoption of a key educational technology for higher education, validated across multiple sites, to support deeper understanding of the use of learning technologies in context - Describes Activity Theory and presents a replicable model to operationalise it for investigations of the use of online learning in higher education and other settings - Provides a unique perspective on the historical experience of VLE adoption and mainstreaming to identify important insights and essential lessons for the future