I teach Masters level courses at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland on qualitative research methods, On-line group working, and how to provide Online Learning using a VLE.  These are all delivered totally online.

Five years of developing and delivering these courses has made me a keen advocate of online learning.  Using new Web 2.0 technologies such as web streaming, tag clouds and other multi-media techniques, the interpersonal benefits of Face to Face teaching can be delivered without actually being there.  Increasingly, the use of digital technologies offers both pedagogical and accessibility benefits to learners at all levels.

I have been focused upon developing two online pedagogical models in particular.  The first is Facilitation of student interaction and learning in an Online Environment.  Here i have developed Learning Units which provide ways to think about online facilitation, do's and dont's, and practice which i model in Discussion Forums within the courses i teach.  These are linked to pedagogical theories of other practitioners and will eventually result in the publication of a paper on the topic.  Secondly i am developing a focus on the building of online Learning Communities -- their benefits, socially and pedagogically; their features; and how to develop them.  Experience suggests that a well-built online Learning Community not only supplants the kind of social and group-building features of face to face learning, but that it can actually provide a better learning experience to more students and is more inclusive and effective in producing constructivist learning.

In 2007 I edited a book called “Lifelong Learning and Sustainable Rural Development” for the Euracademy Foundation.  It’s seven chapters demonstrated how the use of digital communication technologies can empower remote and rural citizens to learn, organise themselves and increasingly, participate in distant economies, providing social, cultural and economic development in the local area.  It would seem that online learning is ideal for informal learning as well as academic learning.  Distance vision and audio technologies are becoming sufficiently ubiquitous that they provide new alternative channels for learning, both accredited and informal.