Instructors new to the online teaching and training environment, as well as experienced online educators, will discover the groundbreaking skills and techniques needed to be a successful online instructor. Discover how to effectively facilitate dialogue and build a community of learners as well as hurdle common roadblocks. Learn how to create a learning community where the instructor moves from center stage to a collaborative learning environment.

Education has traditionally studied the world by bringing it into the classroom. This can result in situated learning that appears to students to have no relevance outside the classroom. Students acquire inert, decontextualized knowledge that they cannot apply to real problems. The obvious solution to this shortcoming is to reverse the situation and bring the classroom to the phenomena: to learn in a rich, real-world context. The problem with the real world is that it is complex and filled with interactions that are hard to sort out. The editors and authors believe that the right tools might help students with this sorting process and result in learning in rich contexts. This book is an account of a series of experiments designed to explore the validity of this insight.