Online Learning Update

by Stephen Downes, the Huffington Post

This week I am in week five of an online course called PLENK, which I’m offering with three colleagues in the research community here in Canada. As we reach the midpoint of the course, enrollment has just passed 1500 student mark. The discussions are reasonably active, we’re aggregating 227 student blogs, 1340 of them are reading the daily newsletter, and the tweet count has just passed 1701. Our course is just the latest in a series of projects intended to rethink the concept of a course, to redesign learning, learning theory and learning technology, and to open access to learning to every person (or at least, every person with an internet connection) in the world.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-downes/a-world-to-change_b_762738.html

by iNACOL, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning

Online learning is growing at an astonishing 30% rate annually in the United States in K-12 education. More than 3 million students are taking online and blended courses to expand access to high quality courses taught by teachers online, any time, any place. Hosted by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, the VSS conference provides professional development for K-12 administrators, policy leaders and practitioners.

http://www.virtualschoolsymposium.org/

by Tom Vander Ark, Huffington Post

By the end of the decade most U.S. schools will blend online and on-site learning to customize learning and extend the day and year. Most high school students will do most of their work online. All students (and teachers) will have Internet access devices and broadband. Cloud-based school-as-a-service will provide 24/7 access. The good news is that digital learning won’t cost more, and it will boost achievement and graduation rates. It’s inevitable. We’re a decade behind where we should be in terms of innovation, improvement, and achievement, but the rate of change is increasing. Online learning is growing by more than 30 percent annually. Like college kids, high school students are blending their own learning where options exist.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-vander-ark/how-digital-learning-will_b_765807.html

by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed

Facebook has shown unique value is as a data-gathering tool. Never has a website been able to learn so much about its users. And that is where higher education should be taking notes, said Angie McQuaig, director of data innovation at the University of Phoenix, at the 2010 Educause conference…. Phoenix’s Learning Genome Project will be designed to infer details about students from how they behave in the online classroom, McQuaig said. If students grasp content more quickly when they learn it from a video than when they have to read a text, the system will feed them more videos. If a student is bad at interpreting graphs, the system will recognize that and present information accordingly — or connect the student with another Phoenix student who is better at graph-reading.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/18/phoenix

by Daniel McCoy, Wichita Business Journal

Cowley County Community College has seen a 34 percent surge this fall in the number of students enrolled full time in online courses, compared to the same period in 2009. The school now has nearly as many enrollments online — 1,066 — as it does on its main campus in Arkansas City — 1,150 — says Ben Schears, executive director of enrollment at the school. Overall, Cowley has had a 21.2 percent increase in enrollment year over year, according to the Kansas Board of Regents.

http://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/stories/2010/10/18/focus3.html

By Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Moodle, the open-source software for managing courses, is gaining ground on Blackboard, the best-selling commercial system. Leaders from both software projects discuss coming features, including better interfaces for smartphones and integration with other education software.

http://goo.gl/NhQg

by Skola

The application for next eTwinning Learning Event (online course) is now open. It will take place between the 25th October and the 5th November and will deal with: Exploiting Web 2.0; eTwinning and Collaboration. It will be presented by Tiina Sarisalmi and the language will be English. In this Learning Event the participants will learn about and try out a few basic Web 2.0 tools that can be used in eTwinning projects.

http://etwinning.skola.edu.mt/2010/10/exploiting-web-20-etwinning-and-collaboration-online-course/

by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Arizona State University is celebrating the fourth year of its use of Google Apps for Education. It was four years ago this week that ASU and Google announced at Educause that the ASU student community would be the recipients of the first large-scale deployment of the free online suite of tools that includes Gmail for e-mail and Google Docs for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That also represents another benchmark. An entire generation of ASU’s students who started classes at the Tempe-based institution in 2006 will be graduating in another few months with an academic career that has relied on cloud computing.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/10/14/a-cloud-class-faces-graduation.aspx