Online Education 2.0

Abstract

Online Education 2.0: Evolving, Adapting, and Reinventing Online Technical Communication continues the work of Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie's first collection, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers, which won the 2006 National Council of Teachers of English award for Best Collection of Essays in Technical or Scientific Communication. Online Education 2.0 addresses a changing virtual landscape in which online education is expanding to include more schools, more levels of education, and a more diverse population of students, including international students. The collection asks how faculty, courses, and programs have responded and adapted to changes in students' needs and abilities, to economic constraints, to new course management systems, and to Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, virtual worlds, and mobile communication devices. Addressing these questions, Online Education 2.0 includes contributing voices from a wide variety of post-secondary institutions from large state universities and from private and for-profit universities; from urban and rural institutions; and from technological and career colleges. Several chapters address the challenges of sustaining online programs, achieving consistency between courses, and training new faculty in the face of high personnel turnover, changing technology, and cutbacks in funding. Other chapters discuss such topics as multimodal course material design; library services for online students; issues of privacy and intellectual property; and strategies for creating and maintaining online communities of practice. This edited collection explores the current state of higher education online (distance) technical communication instruction. Chapters examine how instructors and program administrators have innovated computer-assisted internet instruction to respond to changing post-secondary student needs and abilities, economic constraints, and new technologies. Intended Audience: A variety of scholarly audiences, including instructors and graduate students interested in teaching online from a distance. Primarily, professional, business, and/or technical communication instructors who are moving courses online, teaching online courses, or teaching students about online instruction, including faculty at the 22 colleges and universities currently teaching online courses and/or offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in technical communication, as well as faculty from institutions planning to develop online courses. At these same institutions, professional, business, and/or technical communication graduate students taking courses in teaching technical communication or interested in providing online instruction and training.