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Summary: Fosters Community Among Educators And Their Students!
Review: Growing numbers of K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and businesses have begun offering online instruction, taking advantage of computer and Internet technologies to deliver instruction once confined to the realm of physical classrooms. Indeed, the Internet, so-to-speak, has become a virtual classroom and community where all kinds of instruction can take place - anytime day or night, anywhere around the world. Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom offers readers a broad treatment of the issues involved in planning, creating, and carrying out distance education via the Internet. In a concise manner the book introduces the issues, raises many serious questions, and provides many solutions to help meet the educational goals of instructors, their learning institutions, and their students. The real beauty of the book lies in its effort to motivate instructors and learning institutions to think through the issues for themselves - to evaluate the unique circumstances they face and to encourage them to seek more effective ways of accomplishing their goals. Because each virtual learning experience will be unique, a number of important considerations should be weighed to determine course structure, content, and delivery, such as: What technologies should be used?
Who will create the course?
Who will own the course material(s)?
How will the course be delivered?
How will assignments, projects, and exams be administered?
How will instructors and students be prepared?
How will student participation be controlled?
How will student behavior be controlled?
Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom does a superb job of fostering community among educators and their students. The authors express the importance of creating learning communities were serious dialogue takes place - dialogue that enhances the learning process and leads to achieving specific educational goals. This book is must reading for online educational course development.
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Summary: A Reality Check for Distance Learning
Review: If "the devil is in the details" of online learning, Paloff and Pratt have done an excellent job exploring the promise and pitfalls of distance learning programs. Anyone in the process of designing online courses or programs in higher education should read both this book and their earlier book before they launch a new course or program. Personally, this book helped me avoid several mistakes I otherwise would have made in my first distance learning adventure. The book looks at both teacher and administrator perpsectives, and understands that both insitutional support and instructor skill are key elements for success. While the authors are genuine advocates for the medium, they understand that interactivity does not equal mouse clicks, and that building learning communities takes skill, practice, and structures. The book is full of very helpful examples, learning constructs, and realistic assessments of distance learning successes and failures.
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