Technical Communication Quarterly Special Issue: Online Teaching and Learning: Preparation, Development, and Organizational Communication

Online teaching and learning have become common to many organizations. Various traditional colleges and universities currently conduct academic courses—such as rhetoric and technical communication—online. Many times, students need acculturative exercises to assess their “readiness” for the online environment and possible follow-up orientation. Those who teach online and administer such programs also need orientation and training for their own “readiness” in online environments. They need training at organizational levels not just for technical platform-specific skills development, but also for the practical and theoretical transfer of pedagogical principles and practices to online environments. Similarly, non-traditional educational institutions that provide learning assistance or market to distance learners conduct employee training and development. In any of these cases, such training often occurs at a distance. It is important to examine what kinds of principles and processes address the very real challenges that arise when an institution conducts some or all of its training and professional development online–via the Internet or other modalities. This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly explores organizational communication, needed preparation, and development strategies for online educators.

Possible Topics

We welcome articles that will help practitioners, teachers, and researchers understand training and development principles specifically geared towards the delivery of online educational programs; issues of communication among the administrators, online trainers, and online trainees; and technologies and organizational dynamics as related to preparing for online education at various levels. We seek articles that offer new insights into commonly-held educational principles and practical activities that online training necessitates: investigation, individualization, immersion, association, and reflection into online training processes and experiences. We also seek articles that discuss “successes” as well as “lessons learned” in the development of online programs; specifically, we seek essays that analyze the consequences of applying or ignoring such principles in online practice, education, or research. Other topics might include:

• What are the social, economic, legal, and organizational consequences of addressing or ignoring training for online educational settings?
  
• What practical concerns arise within organizational structures when training and development activities occur primarily via online and/or distance educational technologies?
  
• To what extent and in what ways can educators apply commonly-held principles of investigation, individualization, immersion, association, and/or reflection to develop appropriate training in diverse traditional and non-traditional educational settings?
  
• How can educators prepare themselves and others for online training challenges?
  
• What ethical concerns arise in education-based online training and professional development programs? How can they be addressed and/or mitigated at organizational levels?
  
• What does empirical evidence reveal about the online training process and how can that be applied, if at all, to other situations?
  
• In what ways do new technologies influence principles and processes that are applied to online training and development in different educational settings?
  
• What support and orientation do learners new to an online environment need?
  
• In what ways and for what purposes can students of technical communication receive training through online media? How can their experiences be understood theoretically? How can experiences be measured and researched?

Please email proposals (500 words maximum) using .doc or rich text format by July 31, 2005 to both guest editors: Beth L. Hewett: beth.hewett@comcast.net and Christa Ehmann:cehmann@smarthinking.com

In the subject heading of your email, write: “TCQ Proposal: YOUR LAST NAME”