Overview

Most institutions use technologies to make their courses more engaging and improve access to learning for students. As new technologies have become more reliable, viable and sometimes more affordable, they’ve brought exciting opportunities to reconsider how we teach, engage with or involve learners in different ways.

Online learning offers institutions a way to take advantage of these opportunities, either for large scale distance learning courses or as an element of existing face-to-face courses. This guide considers a range of factors that contribute to ongoing capacity for online learning provision. It offers guidance, resources and case studies to support the development and use of technologies to support online courses and distance learning programmes. It also considers barriers and highlight actions you can take, illustrated with examples from institutions that have developed useful approaches to overcome them. Your institution will need to consider some fundamental questions to assess how they can use and integrate a range of technologies to support online learning. Throughout the guide, Jisc highlight these questions and offer some ideas and examples.