Michael Grahame Moore - Handbook of Distance Education

Michael Grahame Moore

Part 1
Historical and Theoretical Foundations: An Overview

William C. Diehl

Linda M. Black

William C. Diehl and Leslie Cano

Michael Grahame Moore

Jon Dron

Martha Cleveland-Innes, D. Randy Garrison, and Norman Vaughan

Edith Gnanadass and Amelia Y. Sanders

Robert M. Bernard, Eugene Borokhovski, and Rana M. Tamim

Part 2
Teaching and Learning: An Overview

William C. Diehl

Richard E. West, Janette R. Hill, and Liyan Song

Mike Allen, Kikuko Omori, Andrew W. Cole, and Nancy Burrell

Tina M. Stavredes and Tiffany M. Herder

Maggie Hartnett

Elaine Fabbro and Jennifer Rempel

Charles R. Graham

Melody M. Thompson

Zane L. Berge

Elizabeth Childs and Susan Crichton

Priya Sharma, Kimberly Tohill, Philip Tietjen, and Mahir Akgun

Vanessa P. Dennen

Rick L. Shearer and Eunsung Park

Rebecca Heiser and Penny Ralston-Berg

Shelley Kinash, James Birt, and Madelaine-Marie Judd

Linda Barril

Part 3
Management, Policy, and Administration: An Overview

William C. Diehl

Michael F. Beaudoin

Ray Schroeder and Vickie S. Cook

Van L. Davis

Sheila Jagannathan

Julie Porosky Hamlin and Lori Williams

Tomas A. Lipinski and Martin J. Brennan

Patrick R. Lowenthal and Gayle V. Davidson-Shivers

Kay Shattuck

Part 4
Audiences and Providers: An Overview

William C. Diehl

Shanna Smith Jaggars

Scott Gibbons, Matthew Yauk, and Kay K. Seo

Peggy L. Kenyon and Timothy Flora

Dietmar Kennepohl

Shari L. Jorissen

Saul Carliner

Michael K. Barbour

Beatriz Fainholc

Tian Belawati and Melinda dela Pea Bandalaria

This newly revised edition of the Handbook, like its predecessors, is about research and other scholarship in distance education. The book follows a similar thematic structure to previous editions, with the exception being the combining of the section dealing with teaching and the one dealing with learning. Thus the book is presented in four Parts, as follows:

• Historical and Theoretical Foundations
• Teaching and Learning
• Management, Policy, and Administration
• Audiences and Providers

This structure is only slightly modified from that of previous editions, and its purpose remains the sameto provide access to a broad selection of the scholarly and research literature, organized in a way that will enable students and practitioners to identify sources relevant to their particular needs, as the first step leading to their personal, in-depth, follow-up literature research. It was the perceived need for such a compilation that led to the publication of the first edition of the Handbook in 2003, at a time when it had become apparent that distance education had already emerged to be one of the most significant developments in education of the previous quarter century.

The need for a new and updated edition is no less acute, six years from the last edition, as distance education continues to make inroads into the mainstream of educational and training practice at all levels, and in virtually every field of learning. Across this wide educational spectrum, it remains the subject of close attention by policy makers and administrators as well as teachers and students. Its traditional role of opening opportunities for learners and its more recent role of adding to the quality of teaching are roles now widely recognized, as much by professors in universities and community colleges as by trainers in corporations and the armed forces, in continuing professional education of teachers, physicians and nurses, public accountants and pharmacists, leaders of voluntary organizations, managers in the corporate boardroom and workers seeking new skills on the factory floor. What I described in the first edition as the recent frenzy of precipitant innovation driven by excitement about Internet technology, has subsided to a considerable extent, as those who got caught up in that early excitement have discovered for themselves the challenges as well as the benefits offered by the technology. Online communication has long ceased to be an innovation for most teachers, as they have settled down to confront the more interesting work involved in acquiring the skills needed for designing and delivering quality programs and understanding their students beyond the classroom. Less cautiously than before, an increasing number of the leaders of their institutions have also faced the challenge of developing the different management and administrative changes needed to accomplish good quality distance teaching. Most difficult among these are changing the allocation of resources required to produce mediated programs with quality, and the particularly difficult job of channeling their faculty into roles more appropriate for the information age than those they have been accustomed to performing in the classroom. Even so, in this regard, timidity still overshadows boldness and considerable more education of the leaders is called for. Of course it is the students who are learning new ways and set the pace for both their teachers and administratorsa generation having grown up to be at ease with social networking and mobile technologies, accustomed to learning informally out-of-school, and inducted from an early age into the satisfaction of independent learning online.