Designing Meaningful Learning Environments in a Work-Integrated-Learning Course Using a DOCC Design

As Higher Education increasingly moving towards a plethora of blended and fully online learning, questions are raised around the space and place of Work-Integrated Learning (WIL). This chapter reports on one institution's efforts to design and deliver a WIL course in a Teacher Education program adopting an open and distributed framework. The redesigned course, Orientation to Teaching, was a first year course in a Bachelor of Education (Primary) program at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. The redesign of the course was underpinned by a Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) design and as the workplace also became the site of learning, the theory of effective WIL curriculum (Orrell, 2011) also informed the design. This chapter examines the complexity of DOCC design in WIL contexts and uses Khan's 8 dimensions to frame the discussion.

Massive Open Program Evaluation

Given the complexity of developing programs, services, policies, and support for e-learning, leaders may find it challenging to regularly evaluate programs to improve quality. Are there new opportunities to expand user and stakeholder input, or involve others in e-learning program evaluation? This chapter asks researchers and practitioners to rethink existing paradigms and methods for program evaluation. Crowdsourced input may help leaders and stakeholders address persistent evaluation challenges and improve e-learning quality, especially in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). After reviewing selected evaluation paradigms, models, and methods, this chapter offers a possible role for crowdsourced input. This chapter examines the topics of crowd definition, affordances, and problems, to begin a taxonomical framework with possible applications for e-learning. The goal is to provide a reference for advancing the discussion and examination of crowdsourced input.

The Medium, the Content, and the Performance

This chapter focuses on aspects of the technological and interface dimensions of Badrul Khan's model, arguing that a correlation exists between the medium of instruction, students' performance, and the instructional content. Media-based learning is not necessarily more effective, simply because it uses a medium. Several variables exist that influence its success: the medium itself, its properties, production and consumption restraints; the content, and the way it can be presented in the context of a specific medium, and learners' cognitive styles. All these variables and more have to be taken into consideration, alone and interacting, in order to decide whether and where media-based learning is to be used, and where it might be counterproductive.

E-Learning and Faculty Development in Higher Education

Growth of online higher education and advances in technology justify and encourage new models of faculty development related to e-learning. This chapter describes a multi-campus faculty development program using distance technology, a Community Of Practice (COP) model, and an e-learning framework. The Flexible Framework for E-Learning by Khan (2005) guided planning and implementation of the faculty development program. A variety of strategies were used to deliver the faculty development program including use of campus-based site leaders, participating scholars, monthly videoconferences, a faculty development handbook, hands-on use of new e-learning technologies, and a year-end conference. The program also included an evaluation of the interface design of courses used in a collaborative online nursing program with findings reported to faculty. Along with strategies used, barriers and evaluation of the multi-campus faculty development model are presented so that the faculty development model can be replicated across other universities and disciplines.

Learning without Boundaries MOOCs in Malaysia

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been the focus of mainstream media which promises to change the entire world education and create a meaningful impact for all. This book chapter reports on the design and implementation of Malaysian MOOC. Malaysia is the first country in the world to implement the MOOCs initiative for public universities. This new platform of learning is also in line with the National Higher Education Strategic Plan that includes life-long learning, e-Learning, internationalization, and knowledge transfer.

Guidelines for Design and Implementation of Mobile Learning

As technology evolves, there is a shift towards the use of mobile technology to deliver education both on-campus in a blended format and online delivery. This shift is moving at a very fast pace which is a major challenge for educational organizations which has to train staff and build the infrastructure for mobile delivery. Educators have to be trained on how to develop quality mobile learning materials, how to use the technology for the delivery, and how to provide quality support to students so that they are successful when using mobile technology to learn. This chapter provides guidelines for designing and implementing mobile learning.

Hispanic LEP, MOOCs, and Meetups

The 21st Century demands the transformation of education into a more collaborative system. School stakeholders should strengthen the sharing of educational resources to make them more attainable for students. Hispanic LEP Meetups as MOOC communities of practice hubs explores the challenges of one of the minority groups living in the United States that has been affected by school segregation practices: the Hispanic Limited English Proficient (HLEP) community—and proposes an alternative for them to continue their education by using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and by taking advantage of meetups to develop local communities of practice.

Building Sustainable Capacity in Health Research through e-Learning in Resource Constrained Countries

Social determinants like income level, nutrition, education, occupation, gender, and poverty influence the health status of individual, resulting in wide disparities in the health status of different socio-economic groups. Efforts to reduce health inequities can be strengthened by incorporating a Social Determinants of Health approach in creating Health Care policy. This will require an increase in the number of scientists in low and middle-income countries, with the necessary skills. This chapter focuses on a novel capacity building approach, adopted by a European Union funded project, entitled “Asian Regional Capacity Development for Research on Social Determinants of Health”. The project uses innovative educational technologies to deliver education and training that would be helpful in building new research training capacity on social determinants of health, in low and middle-income countries. The capacity building approach adopted by the project, will reduce brain drain, is more climate friendly and also encourage gender equity within low and middle-income country-based training.

Semantic Modelling for E-Learning Coordination

This chapter reports a metadata model for e-learning coordination based on content semantics grounded on Semantic Web concepts. To start with, e-learning models are surveyed identifying process content, such as phases, activities, data schema, rules and relations, so on, as relevant for a coordination model. The study looks into the mechanism of e-learning environment and how e-learning processes can be classified for purposes of activity coordination. A metadata model for coordination of e-learning is being sought as expressed in Semantic Web concepts and transcribed using the related languages like OWL, RDF, SPARQL and others. A learner centric proposal is advanced which augments the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee's industry leader Learning Technology System Architecture. Examples are worked out and future research directions are identified. This is a continuing research project on application of Semantic Web initiative in e-learning; i.e., design and development of markup and annotation tools, relevant ontologies and intelligent agents in meeting learner needs.

To MOOC or Not to MOOC, That Is the Problem

MOOCs are found to be next disruption for online education. It provides many avenues to students to who could not be access to world class education. xMOOCs have been experiencing by students since 2012 and courses keep adding every day in many MOOC platforms. However, it was found that not all the courses in MOOC platforms provide student satisfactions and quality. In other words, effectiveness of the courses in MOOCs varies significantly. Many MOOCs fail to meet the user goals. This concerns the MOOC consumers that there is no quality standard followed by the MOOC producers. In this chapter, authors evaluate 20 courses in MOOC platforms by actively participating and experiencing the behaviors. Evaluation is processed using 8 dimensional eLearning framework to explore the quality and readiness on the technology for future. Results expressed that MOOCs need thorough attention in designing so that it meets user goals and be effective to continue keeping the users interest.