Designing Globally Networked Learning Environments brings together 25 educators from four continents, who share their richly diverse visions for teaching and learning in a globally networked world. What unites these visions is that they break with traditional models of repackaging traditional institutionally bounded courses for online delivery in global markets.

As colleges and universities in North America increasingly identify "internationalization" as a key component of the institution’s mission and strategic plans, faculty and administrators are charged with finding innovative and cost-effective approaches to meet those goals. This volume provides an overview and concrete examples of globally-networked learning environments across the humanities from the perspective of all of their stakeholders: teachers, instructional designers, administrators and students. By addressing logistical, technical, pedagogical and intercultural aspects of globally-networked teaching, this volume offers a unique perspective on this form of curricular innovation through internationalization. It speaks directly to the ways in which new technologies and pedagogies can promote humanities-based learning for the future and with it the broader essential skills of intercultural sensitivity, communication and collaboration, and critical thinking.

This volume is of interest to researchers and students, designers, educators, and industrial trainers in such disciplines as education, cognitive, social and educational psychology, didactics, computer science, linguistics and semiotics, speech communication, anthropology, sociology and design. It includes discussions on knowledge building, designing and analyzing group interaction, design of collaborative multimedia and 3D environments, computational modeling and analysis, and software agents.

Designing for Learning in a Networked World provides answers to the following questions: what skills are required for living in a networked world; how can educators design for learning these skills and what role can and should networked learning play in a networked world? It discusses central theoretical concepts and draws on current debates about competences necessary to thrive in contemporary society. The book presents detailed analyses of skills needed and investigates the question of how one can design for learning in specific empirical cases, ranging in academic level from preschool to university teaching. The book clarifies the different conceptions of design within the educational field and offers a framework for thinking critically about instances of networked learning. It analyses digital and Computational Literacy and discusses participatory skills for learning in a networked world. Examples of specific empirical cases include teaching programming to students not necessarily intrinsically motivated to learn; facilitation of a participatory public in the library and designs for children’s transition from day-care to primary school, discussed as a matter of networked contexts. Engaging thoughtfully with the question of ‘21st century skills’, this book will be vital reading to scholars, researchers and students within the fields of education, networked learning, learning technology and the learning sciences, digital literacy, design for learning, and library studies.

Although institutions of higher education have recognized the need for preparing their graduates for a digitalized, global workplace, these efforts have been sporadic, individualized, and varied from discipline to discipline. Nevertheless, over the past 10 years, trends such as “double classrooms,” “inverted classrooms,” and “collaborative online international learning” (COIL) have gained traction at universities across the globe. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, efforts to engage students in the use of digital tools and virtual collaborative teamwork increased tenfold. Creative and innovative virtual learning environments (VLEs) have emerged, and instructors have used them to connect with their students much more frequently. The holistic nature of virtual learning, its impact on employability, and the development of global citizenry have become prime areas of research amongst the digital education landscape. Now more than ever, it is essential to look at virtual learning environments and how they can be used to prepare students and employees for the opportunities and challenges of a global, digital workplace. Developments in Virtual Learning Environments and the Global Workplace provides readers with a rationale and tool kit for facilitating virtual learning in a wide variety of contexts in response to the opportunities and challenges presented by the digital global workplace. This book covers virtual learning practices, the value of virtual learning for professionals and employers, and the best practices in online learning in different settings. Additionally, the chapters dive into the future perspectives and trends within virtual learning environments and the creation/evaluation of virtual learning strategies. These insights range from diverse countries, education levels, industry sectors, and academic disciplines, making this book a comprehensive research tool. This book will greatly benefit e-learning and instructional designers, university senior managers, university staff responsible for mobility and exchange, researchers, professionals responsible for organizational development and further education, human resource directors, global company executives, managers, practitioners, stakeholders, academicians, and students looking for information on how virtual learning environments are preparing students for the global workplace.

The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Learning Edited by: Vivien Hodgson, Maarten de Laat, David McConnell and Thomas Ryberg This book brings together a wealth of new research that opens up the meaning of connectivity as embodied and promised in the term ‘networked learning’. Chapters explore how contexts, groups and environments can be connected rather than just learners; how messy, unexpected and emergent connections can be made rather than structured and predefined ones; and how technology connects us to learning and each other, but also shapes our identity. These exciting new perspectives ask us to look again at what we are connecting and to revel in new and emergent possibilities arising from the interplay of social actors, contexts, technologies, and learning. Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia Despite creating fundamentally new educational economics and greatly increasing access - teaching and learning in networks is a tricky business. These chapters illuminate the complex interactions amongst tools, pedagogy, educational institutions and personal net presences – helping us design and redesign our own networks. In the process, they take (or extract) network theory from the practice of real teaching and learning contexts, making this collection an important contribution to Networked Learning. Terry Anderson, Athabasca University What kinds of learning can social networking platforms really enable? Digging well beneath the hype, this book provides a timely, incisive analysis of why and how learning emerges (or fails to) in networked spaces. The editors do a fine job in guiding the reader through the rich array of theories and methods for tackling this question, and the diverse contexts in which networked learning is now being studied. This is a book for reflective practitioners as well as academics: the book's close attention to the political, pedagogical and organisational complexity of effective practice, and the lived experience of educators and learners, helps explain why networked learning has such disruptive potential — but equally, why it draws resistance from the establishment. Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University The networked learning conference, a biannual institution since 1998, celebrates its 14th year in this volume. Here a range of studies, reflecting networked learning experiments across Europe and other global contexts , show important shifts away from a conservative tradition of Œe-learning1 research and unpeel dilemmas of promoting learning as an elusive practice in virtual environments. The authors point towards important futures in online learning research, where notions of knowledge, connectivity and Œcommunity1 become increasingly elastic, and engagements slide across material and virtual domains in new practices whose emergence is increasingly difficult to apprehend. “p>Tara Fenwick – University of Stirling. The chapters in this volume explore new and innovative ways of thinking about the nature of networked learning and its pedagogical values and beliefs. They pose a challenge to us to reflect on what we thought networked learning was 15 year ago, where it is today and where it is likely to be headed. Each chapter brings a particular perspective to the themes of design, experience and practice of networked learning, the chosen focus of the book. The chapters in the book embrace a wide field of educational areas including those of higher education, informal learning, work-based learning, continuing professional development, academic staff development, and management learning. The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Learning will prove indispensable reading for researchers, teachers, consultants, and instructional designers in higher and continuing education; for those involved in staff and educational development, and for those studying post graduate qualifications in learning and teaching. This, the second volume in the Springer Book Series on Researching Networked Learning, is based on a selection of papers presented at the 2012 Networked Learning Conference held in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

While local conditions remain at the forefront of writing program administration, transnational activities are slowly and thoroughly shifting the questions we ask about writing curricula, the space and place in which writing happens, and the cultural and linguistic issues at the heart of the relationships forged in literacy work. Transnational Writing Program Administration challenges taken-for-granted assumptions regarding program identity, curriculum and pedagogical effectiveness, logistics and quality assurance, faculty and student demographics, innovative partnerships and research, and the infrastructure needed to support writing instruction in higher education. Well-known scholars and new voices in the field extend the theoretical underpinnings of writing program administration to consider programs, activities, and institutions involving students and faculty from two or more countries working together and highlight the situated practices of such efforts. The collection brings translingual graduate students at the forefront of writing studies together with established administrators, teachers, and researchers and intends to enrich the efforts of WPAs by examining the practices and theories that impact our ability to conceive of writing program administration as transnational. This collection will enable writing program administrators to take the emerging locations of writing instruction seriously, to address the role of language difference in writing, and to engage critically with the key notions and approaches to writing program administration that reveal its transnationality.