This book documents progress to date in what works in distance learning (DL). An overriding goal of this effort was to create a robust and clear set of design guidelines to support the next generation of DL training. The book is targeted mainly toward the research and program management communities. A companion book contains a set of lessons organized by guideline area. The lessons depict specific guideline areas in terms of how a particular guideline would look instantiated in a lesson.

The purpose of this book is to document sample lessons based on our What Works in Distance Learning: Guidelines (O'Neil, 2005). The intent is to provide an instantiation of our various distance learning guidelines. An overarching goal of our research was to create a robust and clear set of design guidelines and example lessons to support the next generation of distance learning systems. Each lesson in this book constitutes a case (Mayer, 2005) or partially worked example (Kalyuga, Chandler, Touvinen, & Sweller, 2001). A case is a description of a realistic problem scenario that is relevant to...

Web-Based Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice explores the state of the art in the research and use of technology in education and training from a learning perspective. This edited book is divided into three major sections: *Policy, Practice, and Implementation Issues -- an overview of policy issues, as well as tools and designs to facilitate implementation of Web-based learning; *Theory and Research Issues -- a look at theoretical foundations of current and future Web-based learning; the section also includes empirical studies of Web-based learning; and *Summary and Conclusions --...