Online Learning Update

by USF

Sometimes faculty are hesitant to contact the E-Learning office to request assistance from an Instructional Designer when building or revising an online course. The reasons for this hesitation are as varied as the teaching and learning styles in our university. However, taking that first step to meet with a designer and discuss the design or re-design of an online course can be one of the best steps you’ll ever take for your course and your students.

http://usfsm.edu/blog/e-learning-blog-the-role-of-instructional-design-in-course-development/

by Karen MacGregor, University World News

Boundaries between contact and distance universities are rapidly blurring, and boundaries between institutions and developers of technology-enhanced learning ought to be broken down if both worlds are to benefit from each other’s expertise in the interests of sustainable development, thought leaders told a global conference on open, distance and e-learning. Major shifts and challenges for open and distance learning, and how it might support the newly adopted United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, were explored by a panel at last week’s conference of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, or ICDE.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20151017100641870

by the Hechinger Report

Two weeks ago I wrote about the overwhelming research evidence that community college students aren’t doing as well in online classes as they are in face-to-face traditional classes. Students are failing in higher numbers and getting lower grades. That remains true, but it isn’t the whole story. Peter Shea, who is the associate provost of online learning at the University of Albany—SUNY, contacted me to share his research findings. Community college students who take online courses are more likely – 25 percent more likely to be exact – to complete their two-year associate degree or some sort of certificate than students who didn’t take any online classes. Not only are online course takers more likely to graduate, they’re more likely to graduate sooner than students who don’t take any online classes, Shea also found. He presented this research in a working paper at the American Education Research Association conference in Chicago in April 2015. “It’s a bit of a paradox,” said Shea. “They’re doing worse at the course level, but at the program level – despite lower grades – they’re finishing.”

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/05/11/the-online-paradox-at-community-colleges

by Andrew Kelly, Forbes

The point is: all of these ideas are part of the future of learning. Because the set of prospective students is large and diverse, that future must be a “big tent” containing a variety of new ideas, not just online learning. Some of the tools (i.e., MOOCs) will be low-touch, low-cost affairs with little interpersonal contact. Others will feature short, intense doses of direct instruction and mentorship and cost significant amounts of money. In short, entrepreneurs will produce different products because learners have different preferences. While The End of College implicitly acknowledges this by talking about more than just MOOCs, other models always seem to take a back seat to the open online courses that Carey expects to dominate in the future.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/akelly/2015/04/08/the-university-of-everywhere-isnt-for-everyone-the-future-of-learning-will-be-a-big-tent/

by WCET Frontiers

A public university in the Midwest recently discovered what can happen in a relatively straightforward situation in which the institution failed to get authorization. Institution X enrolled an online student in a state in which state authorization is required, but did not get that authorization. When the institution contacted the appropriate agency in the student’s state of residence, state officials there indicated that not only was the tuition debt uncollectable, but all of the student’s tuition that had been collected had to be refunded in order to avoid formal action against the provider, which could have included a ban on operating in that state, as the institution had no authority to charge tuition to a resident of that state. Yes, states really do take action, it just rarely appears in the headlines.  (see the URL for more details on non-compliance)

https://wcetblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/what-can-happen/

By JONAH BROMWICHMARCH, NY Times

Susan Orlean was considering giving up teaching. She had taught courses at New York University and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College but was finding it difficult to maintain a consistent class schedule while fulfilling her obligations as a staff writer for The New Yorker. “I just started thinking, well, maybe there’s a different way to do this that doesn’t tie me to a physical location,” she said. “And right around that time, Skillshare contacted me.” Skillshare is an online video platform that allows anyone to sign up and teach a class. The company has proved adept at recruiting experts to teach on its website. Aside from Ms. Orlean’s class on creative nonfiction, the website has a class on visual storytelling from the design maven Debbie Millman and a marketing course taught by the entrepreneur Seth Godin. The company allows users to determine the courses they want to teach and take. A thousand courses are available for $10 a month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/education/anyone-can-be-a-teacher-in-this-online-school.html?_r=0

by Sarah Spickernell, City AM

Not only is more of the world’s population gaining access to digital platforms on a daily basis, the quality of online learning is improving rapidly.In 15 years the material on offer will be “wildly better” than anything available today, and all available through phones and tablets. “Online learning will dramatically improve education in developing countries,” explained Gates. “It makes it easier for students and teachers to connect.” “We are not yet at the point of providing the world’s best teacher, who can see when you’re confused and set the right pace for you, but 15 years ago we were just sticking videos online and claiming that was the solution. “It won’t replace face-to-face social contact, but it will play a huge role in helping students catch up and get ahead, as well as overcoming any limitations related to class size.”

http://www.cityam.com/208484/bill-gatess-vision-2030-how-world-will-change-over-next-15-years

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Academia.edu, ResearchGate and other websites jostle for the title of go-to social network for researchers, but when faculty members go online to discuss their peers’ work, many of them turn to Twitter. That’s one takeaway from Richard Van Noorden’s study of social media use in higher education, published last week in the science journal Nature. Van Noorden, senior reporter for the journal, surveyed 3,509 scholars worldwide this summer about their online habits, and his results suggest many researchers only use the social networks designed specifically for academics to establish a presence, and not much else. When asked specifically about their use, two-thirds of the scholars said they registered Twitter “in case someone wishes to contact me about my research.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/19/study-scholars-are-present-professional-networks-engage-twitter

by Traci Peterson, Phys.org

The participants in Mintz-Binder’s study – 38 students in the online courses and 21 in the on campus courses – took an online survey focused mainly on stress levels and their sense of belonging or feeling connected. Some of the findings she observed already:

• Both groups experienced what Mintz-Binder saw as a satisfactory level of feeling that they belonged to a community or were connected, scoring an average of about 60 on a test with an 80-point scale. Online students scored slightly higher on the measure.
• All but five of the online students made contact with academic coaches who supplement instruction in the online classes. For those students, more contact with the online coach translated into a stronger sense of belonging.
• Both groups indicated similar levels of stress. For the online students, Mintz-Binder observed a stronger relationship between their grade in the course and their stress. Not surprisingly, lower grades were linked to more stress.

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-online-students-stress.html

By MICHAEL BRINDLEY, NH Public Radio

New Hampshire Bar Association President Jaye Rancourt says online learning is likely have a larger place in legal education, as schools adapt to a changing market. But she says there’s already growing tension between older, more experienced lawyers and the younger generation coming into the field and relying more on email to communicate. “I would hate to see a movement of more younger lawyers coming out of law school relying even more on technology and less on face-to-face contact.” Another part of what may be holding law schools back are restrictions when it comes to accreditation. “Under our rules, a law school may give students up to 12 units of credit for fully online courses toward the Juris doctorate. And the standards, our standards require a minimum of 83 credits to graduate,” said Barry Currier, managing director of accreditation and legal education for the American Bar Association.

http://nhpr.org/post/law-schools-recover-online-learning-part-equation

by Harry Slater, the Guardian

Online communities can be great resources and a means of communication to assist medical students and junior doctors. The internet can make studying to be a doctor easier, if you know where to access the right resources. More importantly, the internet is effectively addressing the flaws of traditional offline learning. Online learning adds variety, too. Medical students from all over the country who are taught in different ways can exchange methods. Similarly, it’s an opportunity to share clinical experience that some students – because of the way their course works – won’t always be familiar with. For example, you may have only a little GP contact and then, in your third year, be sent straight to work on wards. Sophie adds that there is the opportunity for follow-up when the scenario finishes. “There’s a chance to say ‘this is what you should have been thinking’ and ‘here’s where you could have saved the situation.'” Afterwards, tweets from the discussion are grouped together using Storify and depending on the case, additional notes are provided.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/feb/12/doctors-educated-online

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Online learning offers a host of conveniences that make it a popular option for students. Students don’t need to live near a physical university to take the classes, timing is often flexible, and it is generally a cheaper option than attending a brick and mortar school. Stepping up the efforts to maintain good contact with your students when you’re teaching online likely tops most online teachers’ must-do lists. The handy infographic linked below looks at some tips and best practices for online faculty, from the ever-wonderful Mia MacMeekin.

http://www.edudemic.com/encouraging-better-online-student-faculty-contact/

By Ronald C. Jones, Faculty Focus

As an online instructor, I can fulfill the minimum requirements of the university regarding interacting with students, or I can create a learning environment that facilitates student engagement in the classroom. Students enroll in online classes because of the need for scheduling flexibility, work-life-school balance, costs, and convenience. Although online learning holds many advantages, the potential drawbacks revolve around the lack of personal interaction between the instructor and student, as well as the student-to-student contact. Keeping students engaged in the course is a vital function of an effective instructor.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/keeping-students-engaged-in-the-online-classroom/

by Andrew Glencross, Huffington Post

As a recent study has shown, even elite colleges devoted to the liberal arts can be criticised for exposing students to esoteric disciplinary jargon and developing an unhealthy cult of campus exceptionalism. MOOCs could be a corrective and beneficial influence in this regard by making the content of elite institutions accessible to all. Yet the triumph of massive online courses will undoubtedly come at a cost by rarefying actual contact with scholars of the liberal arts and by making its teaching the preserve of an ever smaller caste.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-glencross/moocs-and-the-liberal-arts_b_3717527.html

By Melissa Beattie-Moss, Gant Daily

In higher education, 2013 may be remembered as the year of the MOOC. For those playing catch up, MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are college-level classes taught entirely over the Internet. Like students in brick-and-mortar classrooms, students enrolled in MOOCs take notes and tests and participate in discussions. Unlike traditional courses — or even typical online courses — MOOCs are usually free, draw hundreds or even thousands of students, and are run with minimal direct contact with teachers, with an emphasis instead on brief and (presumably) engaging video presentations. Colleges and universities are scrambling to get onboard the MOOC train (hundreds now offer some form of Web-based curriculum) while at the same time debating what the trend means for the future of higher education. Is MOOC-mania justified and are MOOCs here to stay?

http://gantdaily.com/2013/06/23/probing-question-are-moocs-here-to-stay/

By Jane Stancill, News Observer

Duke University philosophy professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has unusual interactions with his students these days. One contacted him with an excuse for why she was behind in class. She had suffered a personal calamity: Her home in Fiji had been hit by a cyclone. Another claims to be a goat farmer in Afghanistan. And two students – a 12-year-old and her mother – sent the professor a Christmas card from Germany. They are among the 180,000 students who registered for a class called “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue,” co-taught by Sinnott-Armstrong and Ram Neta, a philosophy professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/01/19/3798851/in-a-duke-logic-class-with-180000.html

BY TONY BATES, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources

Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities requested in August 2012 that each post-secondary education institution in the province submit a strategic mandate agreement (SMA) proposal. Each institution was asked to provide a brief submission identifying three priority objectives, and a vision of how the institution plans to implement the objectives, using a template provided by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. (The documents submitted by each institution are available online.) Contact North, Ontario’s publicly-funded Distance Education and Training Network, has published a ‘non-exhaustive’ analysis of the institutions’ proposed priority objectives to highlight the key patterns related to educational access, flexibility, student success, and university and college cooperation – and the central role to be played by technology in the future of postsecondary education in Ontario.

http://www.tonybates.ca/2013/01/14/online-learning-set-to-expand-and-become-a-core-function-in-ontarios-universities-and-colleges/

by sgreenla, Pedablogy

It has been said that no plan survives first contact and that has certainly been my experience teaching online this semester. I thought I was well prepared to teach this course, as well prepared as anyone can be who has never taught a fully online course before. I have explored teaching with different digital technologies in my otherwise face-to-face courses since about 1992. I have used groupware, discussion boards, wikis, blogs, and other tools. Admittedly, I am writing this during final exam week, so I may not have enough distance yet for an objective look, but looking back it appears that many/most of the components of my course that were intended to differentiate it and make it a genuinely liberal arts & sciences experience were ultimately jettisoned in an effort to save time and cover the content.

http://pedablogy.stevegreenlaw.org/2013/01/online-teaching-learning-its-harder-than-it-looks/

by April Joyner, Inc. Magazine

2tor partners with Georgetown, UNC-Chapel Hill, and USC to offer online degrees that match their on-campus counterparts in graduation and job placement rates. Though online universities have opened access to higher education, they have taken knocks for subpar academic quality. Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and chief marketing officer of online education startup 2tor, wants to reverse that. Ironically, Johnson, 28, is a college dropout. As a junior at Princeton, he founded Zandigo, a social network where high school students could find information on college admissions. It was acquired by Zinch in 2007. While mulling over the decision to work on Zandigo full-time, he contacted John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review. Despite going against Katzman’s advice to finish college, Johnson kept in touch, often exchanging ideas to improve higher education. Katzman brought Chip Paucek, the former CEO of Hooked on Phonics, into the discussion, and the three started 2tor in 2008.

http://www.inc.com/30under30/april-joyner/jeremy-johnson-founder-of-2tor.html

by Virtual College

Using high-quality online learning courses does not negatively impact the academic attainment of higher educational students, a study has shown. Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials was produced by Brown Center on Education Policy fellow Matthew Chingos and his colleagues at Ithaka S+R. It involved randomly assigning people to take an introductory statistics course through either traditional university educational models – which typically involve three or four hours of direct instruction every week – or through a hybrid format, with one hour of face-to-face contact with instructors every seven days and e-learning tools providing machine-guided assistance. Mr Chingos explained that both groups of students did just as well when their abilities were tested through performance on standardised tests in the subject, as well as in terms of final exam results and pass rates.  “These zero-difference coefficients are precisely estimated,” the report declared.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/Elearning-courses-are-as-effective-as-traditional-education-newsitems-801377454.aspx