Designing Globally Networked Learning Environments

Faculty, administrators, and others in higher education face growing pressures to position their institutions, programs, and courses in "global markets" and to prepare students for global work and citizenship. These pressures raise urgent questions: What might higher education look like in a globally networked world? Do traditional industrial models of learning suffice, or what new visions for learning are emerging? What does it take to implement and maintain these visions? To address these questions, 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. Instead, these educators build robust partnerships to design globally networked learning environments that connect students with peers, instructors, and communities across traditional institutional, national, and other boundaries to facilitate the kind of cross-boundary knowledge making that students as professionals and citizens will need to participate in the shaping of an emerging global order and to address the most pressing global problems we face. The book offers these visions as opportunities for faculty, program directors, administrators, international program experts, instructional designers, faculty development experts, and others in higher education to work together to deliberate, develop, and shape inspiring visions for globally networked learning and to become active participants in the globalization of higher education.