Abstract:

As distance education and online learning applications remove numerous borders such as place, time, teacher in the process of learning-teaching, and provide participants with flexible learning environment and opportunities, the learners/teachers having many different characteristics can find opportunity to make communication and interaction with each other and can share the same learning environment. This situation sets forth the fact that culture is an important factor required to be taken into account while designing, developing, presenting, planning and researching online learning and distance education processes. Furthermore, the case in point rises in importance by massive open online courses (MOOCs), open course materials, international or local distance education applications of the companies or institutions that ever increase, in particular in recent years. For this reason, the issues regarding culture in the field of distance education are required to be examined more in detail, to be discussed within a holistic view and to be reflected on online learning/teaching processes by evaluation. In this context, the book Culture and Online Learning provides many different people from researchers to online learning designers, from support staff to administrators and to learners with important and useful information regarding cultural issues in online learning.

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