The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge and potential of online higher and continuing education, of fostering and promoting, in a global perspective across time and space, democratic values working for a better world.
The paper presents a generalized dialogic learning architecture of networked collaborative learning and makes a plea for a theory‐informed networked collaborative learning architecture and methodology appropriate for adult learners in higher and continuing education.
Values include mutual political and intercultural understanding, collaboration, and tolerance to cultural and ethical diversity, and they are mediated through collaborative dialogue and knowledge‐building processes between learners. While embedded, empirically, in a networked distance learning context, established through synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies, the paper advocates for theory informed pedagogical designs and a teaching‐learning methodology, which assumes online collaborative dialogue as the centre of a genuine learning process.
The paper complements this plea with a description and evaluation of the implementation of the pedagogical architecture into a Danish Master Programme.
