Actualizing Learning and Teaching Best Practices in Online Education with Open Architecture and Standards

As the integration of online education into the mainstream of higher education intensifies, maintaining quality, including learning effectiveness, remains a central issue. This paper explores how active learning strategies in the traditional classroom environment may be put into practice for online education using a wide range of open standards and technologies. First, the paper presents an overview of various research-proven learning strategies. Then it presents an array of open technologies and standards relating to learning resources, collaboration and learning experience management, and media markup languages. It discusses how the open technologies and standards may be employed in effecting active learning strategies in online learning and instruction. Furthermore, the paper calls for research into devising appropriate metrics for measuring skills such as team building, effective communication, and interpersonal behavior, so as to facilitate qualitative evaluation of the effectiveness of various learning tools.