Online Learning Update

by Michigan State University

We’ve reviewed hundreds of instructional resources on the Web and selected particularly useful sites to create this comprehensive Online Instructional Resources website. These diverse teaching and learning resources were reviewed, organized, and annotated to create fifteen major categories subdivided into 125 subcategories. Each subcategory is arranged to give instructors both basic and advanced information on each topic. Teaching in the Disciplines is a new resource that is designed to complement the general and cross-disciplinary resources in the rest of the Online Instructional Resources website. Teaching to the Competencies is also a new resource that is designed to support MSU’s Liberal Learning Goals and Outcomes as well as provide additional resources focused on competency-based education.

http://fod.msu.edu/OIR/index.asp

By Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Think you know what the proposed Digital Public Library of America should look like? Now’s your chance to weigh in. The project’s steering committee has just announced a “Beta Sprint,” inviting the public to contribute “ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc.” Anyone who wants to take part must submit a statement of interest by June 15, and final submissions are due September 1. “We hope geeks and librarians, especially, will join forces to develop beta submissions in support of this initiative,” John Palfrey, the director of the steering committee, said in a statement.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/wanted-your-ideas-on-how-to-build-a-digital-public-library-of-america/31391?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

By Ben Wieder, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Enrollment growth in distance education at community colleges outpaced overall growth in higher education, and colleges are increasingly turning to off-campus instructors who telecommute to deal with that demand, according to the results of the Instructional Technology Council’s 2010 Distance Education Survey. The survey of 139 colleges found a 9-percent increase in online enrollment from fall 2009 to fall 2010, which is greater than the 7-percent overall growth and 8-percent community-college growth reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. Enrollment in online courses grew among both traditional and nontraditional students, according to the survey conducted by the council, which is affiliated with the American Association of Community Colleges.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/more-distance-education-students-means-more-off-site-instructors-survey-finds/31393?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

By Laura Devaney, eSchool News

Cloud computing is one of multiple technologies that schools will implement over the next five years. An annual report reveals that mobile learning and cloud computing are poised to reach widespread adoption in schools in one year or less, with game-based learning and open educational content not far behind. The New Media Consortium Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition is the third annual report from the New Media Consortium (NMC) that focuses on emerging K-12 technologies. It is supported by a grant from HP’s Office of Global Social Innovation.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/05/17/annual-report-pegs-mobile-learning-cloud-computing-as-imminent/

by eSchool News

Could the internet mean the end of snow days? Some schools think so, and they are experimenting with ways for students to do lessons online during bad weather, potentially allowing classes to go on during even the worst blizzard. “Virtual snow days” would help ease pressure on school calendars. Because districts are required to be in session for a certain number of hours or days, losing teaching time to winter weather can mean extending the school day or cutting short spring break or summer vacation.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/05/18/could-the-internet-spell-the-end-of-snow-days/

by Judy Guenseth, Galesburg Register-Mail

In a society that focuses on the comforts of life, the challenges of coping with technological changes may put baby boomers out of their comfort zones. On the other hand, the youth of today have grown up with computers, the Internet and technological gadgets and are at ease with the digital world. The education setting has provided a springboard for this exposure and it has changed the way the classroom is structured. These vast changes have taken on a personal significance for me, as I will be graduating today from the University of Illinois at Springfield having never stepped into a campus classroom. Online education may have challenges not associated with the traditional education, but virtual classrooms do provide a quality education and also a unique learning opportunity to cast aside a few prejudices.

http://www.galesburg.com/newsnow/x1357379716/Judy-Guenseth-Virtual-classrooms-provide-unique-learning-opportunity

by Mary Vorsino, Star-Advertiser

A free online tutoring program that helps public school students with math problems in real time will be available to community college students for the first time starting this fall. Officials hope the expansion will help students who leave high school unprepared for the rigors of college-level math. The Online Learning Academy, whose tutors are University of Hawaii math and science students, was launched three years ago as a way to provide one-on-one help to public school students, especially those in rural areas. So far this school year, the academy has provided more than 3,000 tutoring sessions to 755 students. That’s up from about 2,000 sessions last school year and fewer than 1,000 the year before.

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/hawaiinews/20110511_uh_will_expand_online_tutoring.html

by Liliputing

Starting on June 15th, Google will begin offering subscription-based packages for students and for businesses. For a monthly fee you’ll get a Chromebook laptop running Google Chrome OS, as well as ongoing software support, a warranty, and even replacements for obsolete hardware. The business package will run $28 per month per user, while the education package will be available at a lower $20 per month fee

http://liliputing.com/2011/05/google-unveils-subscription-based-chromebooks-for-business-education.html

by David Atkinson, the Guardian

A multimedia lecturer has seen the potential of the real-time reporting of fast-changing events to engage his students. The real-time reporting of fast-changing events, posted to blogs and pushed via social networking sites, is the latest buzz in the high-octane world of online news. I used to think it was a fad. But just as Twitter broke the story of the Mumbai terrorist bombings in November 2008, live blogging has this year been crucial to breaking news about the Arab spring. Live blogging, characterised by its real-time invitation for readers’ comment, an ability to move the story on quickly and link to external sources for wider discussion, now makes rolling TV news look positively passe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/2011/may/12/live-blogging-social-media-teaching

by the Associated Press

Yale University announced Tuesday that it will offer free online access to digital images of millions of objects housed in its museums, archives and libraries, and the school said it’s the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible that way. No license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use, which will allow scholars, artists and others around the world to use Yale collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration, Yale said.

http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-yale-collections-online-0511-20110510,0,6338448.story

by the Associated Press

The New York Times Knowledge Network and New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University have formed a partnership in order to offer accredited courses online. The courses, ranging from homeland security studies to global healthcare, will be open to all students and may be taken individually or used towards an academic certificate. Moreover, all jointly offered courses will be taught by Fairleigh Dickinson staff and will feature content from the Times.

NY Times To Offer Accredited Online Courses

By Paul Taylor, Kim Parker, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, Wendy Wang, Gabriel Velasco and Daniel Dockterman, Pew Charitable Trust Social Trends

This report is based on findings from a pair of Pew Research Center surveys conducted this spring. One is a telephone survey taken among a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older. The other is an online survey, done in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, among the presidents of 1,055 two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and universities.

http://pewsocialtrends.org/2011/05/15/is-college-worth-it/

by Frank Rennie, Sigurbjörg Jóhannesdóttir & Stefania Kristinsdottir, IRRODL

The recent economic crisis in Iceland has raised issues of the sustainability of Icelandic higher education to new levels of importance. A key strategy in relation to this economic crisis is to consider the merger of the four public universities in Iceland and to introduce a much higher enegagement with online and open delivery methods of higher education. The Net-University Project was an EU Leonardo-funded initiative to compare approaches to open and distance education in Iceland, Sweden, and Scotland, with additional lessons from Atlantic Canada. In particular, it sought to focus on the transfer of innovation in continuing university education, with particular emphasis on the development and delivery of online higher education courses throughout rural Iceland (i.e., outside of Reykjavik). The partners concentrated on how knowledge and experience about distributed and distance learning models could be transferred between the partner countries and how such models can be integrated into the education system to better support higher education and lifelong learning. There was a particular interest in the practical use of open educational resources (OER) for course design and in the sharing of these course modules among university partners. Some good practice and lessons from OER use in course creation are listed.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/871/1800

by Nancy Steel & Patrick J. Fahy, IRRODL

The research reported here commences with a review of the literature to investigate the following: 1) the contribution distance education makes globally to learning access in remote areas (and resulting economic growth for under-served populations); 2) how support is provided to retain isolated students; and 3) the help needed to assist remote students to complete distance programs. Community consultations with social service and education agencies in three communities were conducted in order to obtain their perspectives about what helps to attract and support students to educational programs and the barriers students typically encounter, which might be mitigated by distance methods. Finally, a survey was designed and distributed in 87 Alberta-North communities in northern Alberta and across Canada’s Northwest Territories to add perspective to the consultation results.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/936/1801

by Mariann Solberg, IRRODL

The Arctic is a vast, sparsely populated area. The demographic situation points to online distance education as a solution to support lifelong learning and to build competence in the region. An overall aim of all university education is what Hans Georg Gadamer calls Bildung, what we in Norwegian call dannelse and what Richard Rorty has called edification. A first problem to be addressed here is that in online distance learning some teachers find that is harder to support the development of the student’s voice. Being able to express oneself and to position oneself in a scientific community is vital for a well-educated graduate. Another problem in online education has been the extensive use of writing as a means in the student’s learning process. Writing is vital to academic education, but in online courses there is in general a danger of overuse. At the University of Tromsø we have tested the web conference tool Elluminate Live. This is a real-time application, integrated in the University’s learning management system (LMS), Fronter. The application enables synchronous oral dialogue, simultaneous sharing of texts, and so forth. I present our main experience with the use of Elluminate Live and discuss the extent to which this application has turned out to be helpful in developing the quality of online courses.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/850/1799

By Amber Allen, Wakey Wakey News

The BBC is committed to improving people’s lives by becoming the largest broadcasting company to produce programs that will educate and enrich learning. The company has expanded this goal to an online learning program called Bitesize, which was made available to help students with their school work and assist older scholars with their exams. Originally the program focused on the basics of English, Mathematics and Science. In creating the online syllabus the broadcasting company used components from the materials used for learning in schools.

http://wakeywakeynews.com/58343/bbcs-bitesize-online-program-2

by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed

These arrangements are unusual beyond the oddity of anointing a Utah-based institution as a state university of Indiana and Washington. (Online education is common at public universities, and Indiana and Washington are no exceptions.) Rather, the main point of departure has to do with Western Governors’s pedagogical model, which focuses not only on teaching new skills but also on awarding credits for existing ones. No classes, no lectures, no fixed academic calendar. For what students can prove they already know, they get credit. For what they can’t, they are given learning materials and some light guidance. Students are charged tuition every six months and take exams whenever they feel they are ready.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/09/western_governors_university_and_online_competency_based_learning_model_gain_traction

By Randell Jenkins, Red, White and Blue Press

As we enter into the first weeks of May 2011, many students may already be thinking about either their return to school or beginning for the first time in the fall, but there are still issues that some may have to face when it comes to financing their college education as the cause of both public and private universities are on the rise and could lead to more financial strain if students rely on loans as a way to meet these college costs. However, some are stressing the advantages of alternatives that can be made available to major universities, as online university degree programs or community college classes can not only offer courses when it comes to helping a student meet their general education requirements, but some students are simply using these more affordable routes to a degree as a way to complete the entirety of their education.

http://www.rwbpress.com/2011/05/10/online-university-and-community-college-classes-for-general-education-saving-on-college-costs-outside-of-major-universities/

by Montana State University

Montana State University in Bozeman and MSU-Great Falls College of Technology are among the partners on a new distance learning grant that will help faculty learn how to develop and offer science labs online. The project, titled the North American Network of Science Labs Online (NANSLO), will explore the use of online science labs in both associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs. Faculty from the MSU campuses, along with colleagues in Wyoming, Colorado and British Columbia, will study a system now in existence that allows online students to use the Web to access and control actual lab equipment, perform lab exercises and collect data in real time.

http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=9829

by Chloe Maddux, My High School Journalism

Sitting on the couch in your pajamas for college classes sounds great, right? Online classes give the student the opportunity to schedule their learning on their own time. This seems like fun and really easy and relaxed, but that’s not quite true. It is a relaxed environment because it’s home (or wherever you choose to work), but if the student is not getting up and going to class, it can get very difficult to be motivated to actually get the work done. If motivated though, this is a really great opportunity to earn a degree while working full time or taking care of other duties.

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/articleid/439574/newspaperid/818/Online_classes_provide_less_stressful_learning_environment.aspx

By David Silver, Chronicle of Higher Ed

While many discussions about Twitter and teaching revolve around the brevity of tweets (140 characters or less), my use of Twitter has more to do with the public nature of its platform. I have my students begin a Twitter account for a number of reasons. First, because their Twitter accounts are public, their professor, their classmates, and the larger Twitter community have access to their work. As I learned years ago when my students posted their work on their home pages, the larger the potential readership is, the better they make their work. With Twitter, the stage is bigger and the stakes are higher—and invariably, students’ work improves. Second, because they tweet under their real names, they become, I believe, more responsible for their work.

http://chronicle.com/article/Twitter-Meets-the-Breakfast/127379/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en