Information and communication technology (ICT) makes it possible to bring information to everyone who wants to learn. Rapid advances in technology offer strong support for using ICT in teaching. Online education can intensify and improve students' learning process, and enables us to reach more students than by traditional means. The number of courses and modules being offered online is increasing rapidly worldwide. This is happening not only at traditional institutions for distance education, but even more so in the "classical" institutions for higher education. Such decisions are motivated by the improved technology available for web lectures, combined with financial motivations, i.e. being able to offer courses to larger groups of students. There is a huge trend toward open massive online courses or MOOCs. Prestigious universities offer MOOCs free of charge to a mass audience, often up to hundreds of thousands of learners.


Although online education can reach more people nowadays and new and challenging learning experiences can be created with it, in the average university course the digital dimension too often remains limited to simply publishing the existing face-to-face course content online. Educational technology is often seen as an "extra", a luxury tool, and not as an integral and indispensable element of a university's teaching design. It is thus crucial that lecturers have and can obtain knowledge about how to design technology-enhanced teaching. Technical advances can be expected to continue in the future, and those who wish to implement educational technology in their own teaching practice must reckon on becoming lifelong learners. This fits the culture of academic teachers perfectly: they are already lifelong learners and creators of new knowledge within their discipline.
This book is based on the notion that a lecturer who uses ICT in teaching must learn how to apply his or her knowledge about content, pedagogy and technology in an integrated manner. The idea of integrating these three types of knowledge is based on the TPACK model, which stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model.