Online Education 2.0 ― Evolving Adapting and Reinventing Online Technical Communication

Online Education 2.0: Evolving, Adapting, and Reinventing Online Technical Communication continues the work of Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie's first collection, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers, which won the 2006 National Council of Teachers of English award for Best Collection of Essays in Technical or Scientific Communication. Online Education 2.0 addresses a changing virtual landscape in which online education is expanding to include more schools, more levels of education, and a more diverse population of students, including international students.The collection asks how faculty, courses, and programs have responded and adapted to changes in students' needs and abilities, to economic constraints, to new course management systems, and to Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, virtual worlds, and mobile communication devices. Addressing these questions, Online Education 2.0 includes contributing voices from a wide variety of post-secondary institutions—from large state universities and from private and for-profit universities; from urban and rural institutions; and from technological and career colleges. Several chapters address the challenges of sustaining online programs, achieving consistency between courses, and training new faculty in the face of high personnel turnover, changing technology, and cutbacks in funding. Other chapters discuss such topics as multimodal course material design; library services for online students; issues of privacy and intellectual property; and strategies for creating and maintaining online communities of practice.This edited collection explores the current state of higher education online (distance) technical communication instruction. Chapters examine how instructors and program administrators have innovated computer-assisted internet instruction to respond to changing post-secondary student needs and abilities, economic constraints, and new technologies.

Kelli Cargile Cook (PhD, Texas Tech, 2000) is an Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University. She has taught online undergraduate and graduate technical courses for Texas Tech and Utah State University. She co-edited, with Keith Grant-Davie, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (Baywood, 2005), and recently co-authored, with Thomas Pearsall, The Elements of Technical Writing (2009). In addition to her research in online education and training, she also studies technical communication pedagogy, program development, and program assessment. Dr. Cook is an editorial reviewer for Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Professional Communication, Programmatic Perspectives,and Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization. She is a past president of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and of the Council for Programs in Technical, Scientific, and Professional Communication. Keith Grant-Davie (PhD, University of California, San Diego, 1985) is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Utah State University. From 1999 to 2011 he was the department's Director of Graduate Studies. This position gave him a central role in the development of USU's online master's program in Technical Writing, which began offering online classes in 1996. In addition to helping administer the program, he has taught online classes and has been the adviser to all the online students who have passed through the program. He co-edited, with Kelli Cargile Cook, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (Baywood, 2005). Besides online education, his scholarly and teaching interests are in rhetorical theory. His work has appeared in JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Rhetoric Review, The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, and Computers and Composition.