"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.

This volume explores new ideas about globalised virtual learning environments and in particular the implications for learners, teachers and institutions.

In 1996 the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began an Internet-based teaching program, allowing students across the United States - and the world - to earn a Master's degree from a distance. The program, known as LEEP (Library Education Experimental Project), has been an outstanding success, and as an early innovation in Internet use, provides important lessons on how to flourish in an online environment. Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education brings together significant new research on online education, using the LEEP program as a model to reveal a wealth of information about innovative online practices. Contributions by administrators, philosophers, faculty, librarians, technical staff, and researchers in the traditions of education, computer science, folklore, information science, and sociology, reveal the many perspectives to be taken into account when creating and maintaining distance learning programs. More than an analysis of the LEEP program, this book is an essential introduction to the variety of social and educational phenomena that occur within the socio-technical environments that support online learners.

Today we are seeing a new form of blended learning: not only is technology enhancing the learning environment but formal and informal learning are combining and there is self- and peer-assessment of results. Open learning cultures are challenging the old and long-practiced methods used by educators and transforming learning into a more student-driven and independent activity , which uses online tools such as blogs, wikis or podcasts to connect resources, students and teachers in a novel way. While in higher education institutions most assessments are still tied to formal learning scenarios, teachers are more and more bound to recognize their students’ informal learning processes and networks. This book will help teachers, lecturers and students to better understand how open learning landscapes work, how to define quality and create assessments in such environments, and how to apply these new measures. To this end, Ehlers first elaborates the technological background for more collaborative, distributed, informal, and self-guided learning. He covers the rise of social media for learning and shows how an architecture of participation can change learning activities. These new paradigms are then applied to learning and education to outline what open learning landscapes look like. Here he highlights the shift from knowledge transfer to competence development, the increase in lifelong learning, and the importance of informal learning, user generated content, and open educational resources. He then shows how to manage quality by presenting a step by step guide to developing customized quality concepts for open learning landscapes. Finally, several methods dealing with assessment in these new environments are presented, including guidelines, templates and use cases to exemplify the approaches. Overall, Ehlers argues for assessment as an integral part of learning processes, with quality assurance as a method of stimulating a quality culture and continuous quality development rather than as a simple controlling exercise.

Culture plays an overarching role that impacts investment, planning, design, development, delivery, and the learning outcomes of online education. This groundbreaking book remedies a dearth of empirical research on how digital cultures and teaching and learning cultures intersect, and offers grounded theory and practical guidance on how to integrate cultural needs and sensibilities with the innovative opportunities offered by online learning. This book provides a unique analysis of culture in online education from a global perspective, and offers:* An overview of the influences that culture has on teaching, online learning, and technology* Culture-sensitive instructional design strategies and teaching guidelines for online instructors and trainers * Facilitation and support strategies for online learners from different cultures * An overview on issues of design, development, communication, and support from a cross-cultural perspective* An overview of how online education is perceived, planned, implemented, and evaluated differently in various cultural contextsWritten by international experts in the field of online learning, this text constitutes with a comprehensive comparative introduction to the role of culture in online education. It offers essential guidance for practitioners, researchers, instructors, and anyone working with online students from around the world. This text is also appropriate for graduate-level Educational Technology and Comparative and International Learning programs.

Culture, Learning, and Technology: Research and Practice provides readers with an overview of the research on culture, learning, and technology (CLT) and introduces the concept of culture-related theoretical frameworks. In 13 chapters, the book explores the theoretical and philosophical views of CLT, presents research studies that examine various aspects of CLT, and showcases projects that employ best practices in CLT. Written for researchers and students in the fields of Educational Technology, Instructional Design, and the Learning Sciences, this volume represents a broad conceptualization of CLT and encompasses a variety of settings. As the first significant collection of research in this emerging field of study, Culture, Learning, and Technology overflows with new insights into the increasing role of technology use across all levels of education.

With limited empirical research available on online teaching across cultures especially with Native and Hispanic American students, this book will present the findings of a two-year, Spencer-funded study in creating an inclusive (i.e., multicultural and intergenerational) instructional design model for online learning. The book is expected to provide the readers a field guide of teaching approach (comprising pedagogical, technical, relational and other suggestions for teaching) for inclusive e-learning, with a foundation in the research on how students from different cultures and generation groups learn online. This two-year, multi-course-site study, as a first effort to examine online college teaching and learning effective across culture and age, contributed a list of important findings on the following questions: • To what extent are online learning and interaction experiences and performances consistent across varied ethnic/cultural, and age groups and in what ways do they vary? • What online instructional contexts do students and faculty, especially non-traditional and minority students, identify as supporting learning and student success? • What are the relationships between online instructional contexts, online learning performance, and learning success of students with diverse ethnicity/culture and age background? By consolidating the findings for the aforementioned research questions, the researchers of this study have developed a data-driven online instructional design model that can work as a field guide on cross-cultural and intergenerational teaching and learning for online education practitioners.