This edited book collects papers with perspectives from scholars and practitioners in Asia, Australia, and Europe to reveal the pros and cons, chances and challenges, constraints, and potential risks that educators and learners are facing as the new paradigm for communication and learning takes place, with a view to shedding light on the global education climate in the midst of the pandemic. Since the onset of the global pandemic, education has been revolutionized in almost every aspect. The emergency precautionary measures which were once supposed to be temporary school arrangements only have now become the new normal, reshaping our understanding of learning environments, redefining the pedagogic standards in terms of teaching practices, learning designs, teacher–student interaction, feedback, and assessment. Online teaching, distanced learning, flipped classrooms, and self-paced e-learning have all played an increasingly vital role in shaping a new education culture in various education settings, affecting school management, teachers, students, and parents alike. While ICT in education, alongside new media, has provided ample benefits and convenience for educators and students, communication and virtual lessons conducted in the socially distanced classroom appear to have brought issues such as the digital divide, e-mental health, insufficient technical support, inefficient classroom management, reduced interaction between teachers and students, not to mention the growing concerns over privacy and security.

This special edition of the Educational Communications and Technology Yearbook Series bears a title of “Learning Environment and Design: Current and Future Impact”. It provides a timely forum to share theoretical and practical insights in both the local and international contexts in response to the fact that new media and technologies have infiltrated and shaped the learning environments from mere physical spaces into multifaceted possibilities, impacting the ways individuals teach and learn. Designs of learning environments to harness technologies appropriately to engage learners better, as well as the roles of learners and educators play in this changing learning environment, are examples of important global issues in the discourse of the contemporary educational developments. Having gathered a diverse collection of research papers written by scholars and practitioners in the fields of education, communication and humanities across Asia, Australasia, Europe and the United States, this book gives readers a cross-cultural background on the developments of technological designs and educational practices, investigating areas in redefining of quality education; online learning and blended learning; new media in education; gamification, AI, and innovative learning technologies. Aimed to catalyze knowledge exchanges and provide fresh views on interdisciplinary research, the book sheds light on how emerging technologies can be adapted in the fields of education and communication, so as to facilitate the current and future designs of learning environments to improve learners’ performances.

This book is an annual publication entering its 40th year. The series represents current trend and issues in the field of educational communications and technology, journals and other periodicals associated with the field, and the academic programs that prepare instructional technology professionals. Springer has been the publisher for the series, in cooperation with the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, for the past four years. Volume 39 will feature a section on Information Studies, in addition to updated information about programs and a new ranking of the top academic degree programs in the field of Learning, Design, and Technology.

This book gathers selected papers from the Hong Kong Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2019 International Conference on the theme of “Shaping the Future of Education, Communication and Technology.” It contributes to a scholarly discussion that looks beyond what future media and technology can offer for education, and reflects on best practices and lessons learned from applying new media and technology in a wide range of fields. Scholars from educational technology, communication, and higher education share their research work in various formats such as empirical research, best-practice case studies, literature reviews, etc. The topics of the papers are divided into four main areas, including curriculum, pedagogy and instructional design; teaching and learning experiences with technology; online learning and open education resources; and communication and media. The book’s unique quality is its combination of perspectives and research work on communication, education and technology. Thus, it will encourage an interdisciplinary discourse and exchange concerning communication, new media, and educational practices.

In the spring of 1983, concerned representatives from the communication technology, education, and government sectors gathered at a conference to explore possibilities for tele-education. This book presents their views and provides a wealth of information bearing on past, present, and future tele-education efforts. The authors in Part 1 describe gl

It is often the case - perhaps more often than not - that new ideas arrive long before there is the me ans to clothe and deli ver them. We can think ofLeonardo da Vinci's drawings of helicopters and submarines among many other examples. Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) is an example of an idea which has had a particularly long gestation. As I will illustrate early in the book, the principles of CAL were really first discovered by Socrates. As a formal method of teaching, the Socratic method disappeared for over two millennia until the 1950s. It was then revived in the form ofProgrammed Learning (PL) which resulted from the researches ofB. F. Skinner at Harvard University. Even then, PL was premature. In the 1950s and 60s, methods were devised, such as teaching machines and various sorts ofPL text books, and there was a mushrooming of PL publishing at that time. For a complex of reason- economic, logistical and technical-PL also largely disappeared from the mid- 60s, although it continued in a few specialized areas ofteaching and industrial training. However, during the same period, PL quietly transformed itselfinto CAL. But the computerized form was not capable of mass dissemination until recently hecause personal microcomputers did not have sufficient internal memory sizes. That situation has now changed very dramatically and 128K microcomputers are becoming cheap and widely available. Cheap memory chips of256K and 1024K cannot be far away, either.