Historical Review of Distance and Online Education from 1700s to 2021 in the United States: Instructional Design and Pivotal Pedagogy in Higher Education

In March 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted education worldwide. In the United States, the pandemic forced colleges and universities across the nation to adopt quickly emergency remote teaching and learning. The ability to pivot instruction seamlessly and effectively across learning formats (e.g., face-to-face, hybrid, online) while supporting student engagement, learning, and completion in an authentic and high-quality manner challenged higher education leaders. This historical review of the literature examines distance and online education from the 1700s to 2021 to identify how external and internal pressures and opportunities have impacted and influenced the evolution of educational formats pre-COVID-19, and how they will continue to evolve post pandemic. This historical review also explores how instructional design and pedagogy have been and continue to be influenced by technological advancements, emerging research from the Learning Sciences and Mind (psychology), Brain (neuroscience), and Education (pedagogy) science.

3 Questions for an Online Learning Leader

Dr. Jill Drake is both Professor in the College of Education and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of West Georgia. In the latter role, she currently oversees academic programming and assessment, transfer agreements, and internal curriculum approval processes. Jill has experience teaching face-to-face and online courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels in educational foundations, early childhood, and elementary education. Her research focuses on assessment in K-5 mathematics education, problem posing, and teaching mathematics to diverse populations. Internationally recognized for her research on problem posing, Dr. Drake has published two mathematics activity books for high school and middle school students. Prior to her appointment at the University of West Georgia, Jill was an educator at the early childhood, elementary, and middle school levels. She completed a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education, a Master of Education in K-12 School Counseling, and a Specialist in Health and Rehabilitative Services at Florida State University. She holds a Doctorate of Education in Curriculum and Supervision from the University of Georgia and completed a postdoctoral program in math education at the University of West Georgia.

A Review of eLearning Design and the Right Brain

This article reviews an e-book that outlines ways to improve student engagement online and in-person. Planning instructional elements that elicit positive emotional response is the emphasis.

An Agile Approach to LMS Migration

Principles of the Agile Manifesto may guide academic and technology teams to lead learning management system (LMS) migration projects with inclusiveness, flexibility, and speed. Agile teams follow an iterative, rapid-cycle path to design, develop, evaluate, revise, and improve the LMS from project inception to completion. An agile approach values individuals and interaction, delivering working courses, collaboration, and responsiveness to changing environments. With attention to each of these values in LMS migration, the project runs with full stakeholder engagement, responsiveness, and speed.

Editor's Preface

Within this issue, you will find book and media reviews, perspectives from the field, and a long-awaited historical piece about distance and online education. There is a theme of evolving applications in online education with a thread of approaches, tools, and frameworks for teaching, assessing, selecting digital tools, and migrating learning management systems.