This special edition of the Educational Communications and Technology Yearbook Series bears a title of “Learning Environment and Design: Current and Future Impact”. It provides a timely forum to share theoretical and practical insights in both the local and international contexts in response to the fact that new media and technologies have infiltrated and shaped the learning environments from mere physical spaces into multifaceted possibilities, impacting the ways individuals teach and learn. Designs of learning environments to harness technologies appropriately to engage learners better, as well as the roles of learners and educators play in this changing learning environment, are examples of important global issues in the discourse of the contemporary educational developments. Having gathered a diverse collection of research papers written by scholars and practitioners in the fields of education, communication and humanities across Asia, Australasia, Europe and the United States, this book gives readers a cross-cultural background on the developments of technological designs and educational practices, investigating areas in redefining of quality education; online learning and blended learning; new media in education; gamification, AI, and innovative learning technologies. Aimed to catalyze knowledge exchanges and provide fresh views on interdisciplinary research, the book sheds light on how emerging technologies can be adapted in the fields of education and communication, so as to facilitate the current and future designs of learning environments to improve learners’ performances.

A part of the Learning in a Changing World Series, Designing the Learning Environment discusses how we develop effective learning spaces with an emphasis on understanding the needs of the major stakeholders of these spaces - students.

Designing Distributed Learning Environments with Intelligent Software Agents reports on the most recent advances in agent technologies for distributed learning. Chapters are devoted to the various aspects of intelligent software agents in distributed learning, including the methodological and technical issues on where and how intelligent agents can contribute to meeting distributed learning needs today and tomorrow. This book benefits the AI (artificial intelligence) and educational communities in their research and development, offering new and interesting research issues surrounding the development of distributed learning environments in the Semantic Web age. In addition, the ideas presented in the book are applicable to other domains such as Agent-Supported Web Services, distributed business process and resource integration, computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and e-Commerce.

This book first presents the evolution of education, from traditional face-to-face to the current remote and online education and its various iterations. The author shares experiences and insights on the most effective teaching techniques in both environments, some recent approaches, and highlights where there is need for continued improvement. Educators are provided with practical suggestions and examples to aid them in the design, promotion, and teaching of online courses worldwide. Topics include applying student and colleague feedback to improve teaching skills in an online setting; benefits of teaching, learning, and working in an online environment; and contrasts between synchronous and asynchronous modes of online instruction, among others. The ultimate goal is to promote accessible and equitable online education for all, regardless of the pandemics or political unrest. The reader is invited on a hands-on journey to discover the potential of the online educational experience, with thought-provoking questions to encourage reflection and growth along the way.

The Design of Digital Learning Environments provides comprehensive guidelines for creating and delivering high-quality online and blended learning experiences in higher education. With increasing numbers of students engaged in partially or fully digital education, graduate students preparing for design, development, or faculty roles need fresh, practical applications of cutting-edge research and theory. This textbook uses the Community of Inquiry framework, an influential and invaluable pedagogical model focused on deep learning, to aid educators in forging meaningful, collaborative connections with students engaged in digitally supported multi-modal learning in colleges and universities, MOOCs, and lifelong learning initiatives. Across five parts, the book covers the basic structure, concepts, terminology, and history of the Community of Inquiry; principles for designing and delivering digital courses; design for specific course conditions; applications of learning activities guided by the framework; and current limitations and directions for further research.

Designing Adaptive and Personalized Learning Environments provides a theoretically-based yet practical guide to systematic design processes for learning environments that provide automatic customization of learning and instruction. The book consists of four main sections: In "Introduction and Overview," the concepts of adaptivity and personalization are introduced and explored in detail. In "Theoretical Perspectives with Example Applications," various theoretical concepts underlying adaptive and personalized learning are discussed, including cognitive profiling, content-based adaptivity, exploration-based adaptivity, and mobile and ubiquitous settings. In "Practical Perspectives with Example Applications," the implementation process for adaptive and personalized learning environments is described, followed by application in various contexts. In "Validation and Future Trends," various evaluation techniques for validating the efficiency and efficacy of adaptive and personalized learning systems are discussed. This final section concludes with a discussion of emerging trends in adaptive and personalized learning research. Based on cutting-edge research, Designing Adaptive and Personalized Learning Environments is appropriate as a primary textbook for both undergraduate and graduate courses focused on the design of learning systems, and as a secondary textbook for a variety of courses in programs such as educational technology, instructional design, learning sciences, digital literacy, computer based systems, and STEM content fields.

As the world rapidly moves online, sectors from management, industry, government, and education have broadly begun to virtualize the way people interact and learn. Virtual Learning Environments: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications is a three-volume compendium of the latest research, case studies, theories, and methodologies within the field of virtual learning environments. As networks get faster, cheaper, safer, and more reliable, their applications grow at a rate that makes it difficult for the typical practitioner to keep abreast. With a wide range of subjects, spanning from authors across the globe and with applications at different levels of education and higher learning, this reference guide serves academics and practitioners alike, indexed and categorized easily for study and application.

The whole landscape of space use is undergoing a radical transformation. In the workplace a period of unprecedented change has created a mix of responses with one overriding outcome observable worldwide: the rise of distributed space. In the learning environment the social, political, economic and technological changes responsible for this shift have been further compounded by constantly developing theories of learning and teaching, and a wide acceptance of the importance of learning as the core of the community, resulting in the blending of all aspects of learning into one seamless experience. This book attempts to look at all the forces driving the provision and pedagogic performance of the many spaces, real and virtual, that now accommodate the experience of learning and provide pointers towards the creation and design of learning-centred communities. Part 1 looks at the entire learning universe as it now stands, tracks the way in which its constituent parts came to occupy their role, assesses how they have responded to a complex of drivers and gauges their success in dealing with renewed pressures to perform. It shows that what is required is innovation within the spaces and integration between them. Part 2 finds many examples of innovation in evidence across the world – in schools, the higher and further education campus and in business and cultural spaces – but an almost total absence of integration. Part 3 offers a model that redefines the learning landscape in terms of learning outcomes, mapping spatial requirements and activities into a detailed mechanism that will achieve the best outcome at the most appropriate scale. By encouraging stakeholders to creating an events-based rather than space-based identity, the book hopes to point the way to a fully-integrated learning landscape: a learning community.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Blended Learning, ICBL 2020, held in Bangkok, in August 2020. The 33 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The conference theme of ICBL 2020 is Blended Learning : Education in a Smart Learning Environment. The papers are organized in topical sections named: Blended Learning, Hybrid Learning, Online Learning, Enriched and Smart Learning, Learning Management System and Content and Instructional Design.