A course with at least 80% of the content delivered via the web or Internet.
Published in Chapter:
Designing and Developing Online and Distance Courses
Dazhi Yang (Purdue University, USA) and Jennifer C. Richardson (Purdue University, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch081
Abstract
The fifth annual report on online education in the United States revealed that nearly 3.5 million college students enrolled in at least one online course in Fall 2006 (Allen & Seaman, 2007). The Peak Group estimates 1 million K-12 online course enrollments in 2007 (NACOL, 2007). In addition, online courses are continuing to expand in terms of both numeric enrollment records and institutions’ long-term strategies for meeting the needs of online courses. Because of the common use of computers and information technologies in education, especially the Web, distance courses and online courses have become two interchangeable terms. With the rapid growth of online courses and online programs, how to design and develop effective online or distance courses has attracted increasing attention from all sectors of education, corporate, and industry. Online teaching and learning is different from traditional teaching and learning (Harmon & Jones, 2001). In addition, many online course designers and developers, such as the majority of faculty members in higher education, have little or no formal training in instructional design and learning theories (Perrin, 2004) and many of them will attempt to transfer traditional classroom teaching to online teaching (Johnson & Aragon, 2003a). Therefore, guidelines on how to design and develop online and distance courses are needed.