ABSTRACT
The future of online education is with us, not ahead of us. We now have great opportunities to help it and us reach its and our great education potential, as well as great challenges. For our new online education world to best meet its challenges and make best use of its opportunities we need to understand what these challenges and opportunities really are. We also need to understand how COVID-19 has accelerated our new online education world and its great new challenges and opportunities. For instance, online education offers important advantages over traditional education including increased scope and reach, such that it extends education opportunities by making it available to people who are potentially isolated, including by geographic location or disabilities. It also extends education opportunities by reducing the cost of education, including because it reduces the need for increasingly expensive physical teaching spaces (McKenzie, Garivaldis, Dyer, 2020). An important barrier to the full acceptance of the value of online education is an ongoing perception that it lacks equivalence with face-to-face education. This great challenge is being successfully met via progressions in online education quality and supporting technology, which are allowing equivalence and even greater than equivalence with face-to-face education to be achieved in an increasingly wide range of online courses. The current and potential advantages of online education are particularly valuable in our post-COVID-19 education world, where tertiary education institutions are facing great financial challenges, including loss of revenue from international students. This chapter describes how we can help our online education expansion story end happily, by creating an optimal online education future, now. The chapter describes key online expansion aims, issues and barriers, and ways to strategically transform great online education challenges into great online education opportunities. © 2022 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The global online education sector was expected to become mainstream by 2025. However, the COVID-19 global health crisis has accelerated the adoption of online or flexible modes of teaching and learning. The crisis has also created an unprecedented context for teaching and learning, which has had further impact on how online education has been delivered and received. Despite this upheaval, the higher education industry now has an abundance of experience to draw on, including knowledge of what worked well and what needs to improve in the delivery of education online. In this chapter, we draw on the experience of educators developing and delivering Masters level programs in behaviour change during 2020, in two different case studies. The first case study discussed involves the experience of translating an on-campus unit of study originally designed for face to face delivery, into the fully online mode in response to the Australian government's first imposed "lockdown" restrictions. The second case study presented here involves the building of a purposely designed fully online micro-credential. In both cases, we reflect on the key principles and priorities considered in developing and delivering these programs, and we share some of the feedback received from students on their perceptions of how teaching took place. To conclude, we summarise our reflections on good practice in educational design, that apply irrespective of delivery mode. © 2021 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.