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Online Learning News and Research
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Saturday, November 27, 2004
Implementing eLearning Programmes for Higher Education: A Review of the Literature - Kayte O’Neill, Gurmak Singh, and John O’Donoghue , JITE
This paper is a consideration of the issues associated with the infrastructural aspects, pedagogic considerations and the need to associate the usefulness of technology to enhance the learning ex-perience. This technological path will potentially enhance the learning process, not replace the lecturer or tutor. For lecturers and students, the implications of eLearning are extensive. Increas-ingly universities must provide quality and flexibility to meet the diverse needs of students – this will inevitably involve tailoring courses to suit differing educational needs and aspirations. (0) comments
Most outstanding: Once again, University of Wisonsin's MEPP recognized for excellence
The University of Wisconsin's College of Engineering's Master of Engineering in Professional Practice (MEPP) is the 2004 Most Outstanding Online Teaching & Learning Program as chosen by The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), an association of more than 900 institutions and organizations of higher education engaged in online learning. "We are honored," says MEPP Director Wayne Pferdehirt. "Coming from a group of experienced online educators, MEPP's selection for this highly competitive award is a strong affirmation of what our program's faculty, students and staff have achieved together." Sloan-C judges selected MEPP as the Most Outstanding Program based on its demonstrated performance in achieving Sloan's five "pillars of quality" for online learning: learning effectiveness, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, cost effectiveness and access. (0) comments
UMC 'taking stock,' planning for successful future - Mike Christopherson, Crookston Times
With a few weeks behind him and his chief executive officer title official, Joe Massey says some decisions are coming into focus at the University of Minnesota, Crookston, and some other issues and initiatives are still being determined.... Massey said enrollment continues to be the highest priority. "We need more students, whether they're fresh out of high school, transfers or whatever," he said. "And distance and online learning is going to be a big part of that, too, because our audience is changing. Our new Bachelor of Applied Health degree online is just a huge development and it's going to attract students to UMC from across the state, nation and even the world." (0) comments Friday, November 26, 2004
Faculty Preferences for Course Delivery: Distance and Traditional Settings - Lisa O’Quinn and Michael Corry, Instructional Tech and Distance Learning
“Learning is bursting its previous bounds, with more people gaining access to a wider range of people and things. And once again, the duration and pace of interaction – students with students, students with experts, students with academic resources are changing” (Ehrmann, 1999). Teaching via distance education requires not only that faculty learn how to use new technologies, it also requires a paradigm shift in how educators orchestrate the act of learning (Dillon and Walsh, 1992; Hassenplug and Harnish, 1998). (0) comments
Teaching Network Security in a Virtual Learning Environment - Laura Bergström, et al; JITE
The article begins with an introduction to the evolution of the information security requirements, the different areas and uses for cryptography and to the need of an active network security administration. The structure of the Finnish educational system is presented together with the strategy, goals and structure of the Finnish Virtual Polytechnic. The course development process is described in detail together with the software tools used to produce the course material. The contents in each chapter of the virtual course are also presented in this article. (0) comments
Rules of the Collaboratory Game - Eric Bender, Technology Review
Enter the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, or BIRN. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, BIRN is a virtual collaboration project for biomedical big science. It aims to let a given research community share its instrumentation, data, software tools, and other resources over very high speed networks. One of the first BIRN testbeds is for schizophrenia researchers, who will pool their images to create a national treasure trove. BIRN is a prime example of a collaboratory: "an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks." That's the definition of Gary Olson, professor of human-computer interactions at the University of Michigan and his colleagues in the Science of Collaboratories project, which is backed by the National Science Foundation. (0) comments Thursday, November 25, 2004
Learner Support Services in Distance Education System (A Case Study of Turkey) - Salih Usun, TOJDE
A distance education program must design and applicate effective learner support services and systems. Unfortunately, in many distance education systems, more resources are invested in the technical system at the expense of the learner support system. Equivalent or more resources should be invested in the learner support system if the distance education enterprise is to be successful (Gunawardena, 1996, 271). Dillon and Blanchard (1991) described four types of support systems: 1) Learner support and learner needs 2) Learner support and content 3) Learner support related to the institutional context, and 4) Learner support and technology. The aim of this study is to review and determine the applications and important problems of the learner support services and systems and present a number of suggestions to enhance learner support in the Turkish distance education system, Open Education Faculty (OEF). (0) comments
Online Learning Teams: Indispensable Interaction - Muhammad K. Betz, Instructional Technology and Distance Learning
In a learning-centered educational environment (Glatthorn, 2000) the curricula, courses, and lessons are structured to optimize learning as the top priority of educational enterprise. In the educational environment commonly established for the milieu of online courses, an indispensable variable for ensuring optimal learning is that of interaction (Betz, 2002). It is a given that online courses usually include either synchronous or asynchronous requirements for student participation with the intention of creating student interaction. In the popular Blackboard system for hosting courses, for example, there is a special section called, Discussion Board, that allows instructors or students to post threaded messages to which other students reply. (0) comments
University researchers head creation of virtual laboratory - Cati Vanden Breul, Minnesota Daily
The University of Minnesota is leading an international group of universities in developing a virtual laboratory for Earth and planetary studies with a grant from the National Science Foundation. The laboratory will help researchers study planetary materials, such as rocks, ice, iron and gases, under conditions difficult to reproduce without a computer, principal investigator and University chemical engineering and materials science professor Renata Wentzcovitch said. Ten universities, including two from the United Kingdom and one from Italy, will set up the infrastructure for an Internet-based portal that will allow scientists to share data and conduct experiments simulating extreme temperatures and pressures. (0) comments Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Internet plagiarism has increased among students: Hi-tech answer to student cheats - BBC
New measures to help detect cheating students are being demonstrated at a conference in Newcastle. A survey of around 350 undergraduates found nearly 25% had copied text from another source at least once. A new service that can scan 4.5 billion web pages is now online so that lecturers can check the originality of the work submitted by students. The software is being demonstrated at a meeting of the Plagiarism Advisory Service at Northumbria University. (0) comments
Strategic Recommendations to Develop e-Learning Projects - elearning Europa
Trainers Training and Evaluation are essential factors in an e-learning project, although they are not often considered as such. This article presents some key recommendations to develop a good e-learning project. The European Commission launched in 2002 the analysis of the ICT features of 150 relevant Projects funded under the Leonardo da Vinci programme. The objective was to identify the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of e-Learning in the field of vocational training. The results are available at the document “e-Learning in Europe – Results and Recommendations”. Throughout the following lines we present an edited version of this study, where some recommendations for action were stablished. These recommendations draw up some useful guidelines to undertake e-learning projects, since they summarize the ‘lessons learnt’ through real projects. Although these recommendations were focused on Leonardo da Vinci projects, they can be really helpful to assess e-learning initiatives in a broad sense. (0) comments
ISU study seeks to improve virtual learning -PHIL ROONEY, Daily Nonpareil
A three-year, $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education will allow Iowa State University's College of Education to become the nation's first teacher education program to prepare undergraduates for virtual schooling. "Virtual learning is sort of one of those buzz words for learning with technology," said Niki Davis, director of Iowa State's Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching and the project's director. In virtual learning, sometimes referred to as distance learning but excluding correspondence courses, teachers and students are not in the same place and two-way video and Internet courses may be involved. The Iowa Communications Network (the state-owned fiber optic network that connects to every school district) is one way much virtual schooling takes place in Iowa. Other courses may be taught over the Internet, and sometimes the sources may be blended (0) comments Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Another New Paradigm for Instructional Design - Reuben Tozman, Learning Circuits
A major goal of good instructional design is to marry content with presentation—both physically and theoretically. Armed with current technologies, instructional designers have new options for designing and developing content. In this array of possibilities lies a new paradigm: dynamic construction of instructional content based on an independently managed presentation and delivery layer. Without the marriage of content to presentation and delivery, content can be easily reused across different media platforms. (0) comments
Aston is first university with converged network - Mark Samuels, Computing
Aston University has become the first UK higher education institution to roll-out a fully converged voice, video and data network.The £4m installation uses Cisco's IP communications technology to deliver audio and video to academics and students.The network incorporates 6,000 plug-in-points and can support well over 2,000 voice over IP (VoIP) handsets.'This technology allows us to take a leap into the future - and become a lead institution in elearning,' said Fahri Zihni, ICT director at Aston University. (0) comments
Guidelines for Selecting Quality K-12 Online Courses - Patricia Deubel, THE Journal
According to Ruben Lopez, Florida ’s former chief technology officer, e-learning will become the cornerstone of how K-12 curriculum will be delivered in the future (Miller 2003). By 2006, it is estimated that a majority of high school students will have taken an online course before graduating (Fulton 2002). Whether these predictions become reality remains to be seen, but there is evidence to support the growing presence of K-12 online learning. The technology infrastructure appears in place with 99% of U.S. public schools having Internet access in the fall of 2002 (Kleiner and Lewis 2003). (0) comments Monday, November 22, 2004
Reasoning and Ontologies for Personalized E-Learning in the Semantic Web - Nicola Henzem, Peter Dolog, Wolfgang Nejdl; Journal ETS
The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a framework for personalized e-Learning in the semantic web and show how the semantic web resource description formats can be utilized for automatic generation of hypertext structures from distributed metadata. Ontologies and metadata for three types of resources (domain, user, and observation) are investigated. We investigate a logic-based approach to educational hypermedia using TRIPLE, a rule and query language for the semantic web (0) comments
The Academic Culture and the IT Culture: Their Effect on Teaching and Scholarship - Edward L. Ayers, Educause Review
As someone who believes that the rapid development of information technologies is perhaps the most significant long-term social change of our time, and as someone who believes that the academy is among the most important of human institutions, I think we simply must find ways to get the two cultures to work together more effectively. The academic culture has already changed radically before. It has adapted to a vastly larger and more diverse student body, to entirely new disciplines, and to a reliance on philanthropy and research dollars. It can change again, to a time when the ancient joys of face-to-face education can be made even greater, through the pioneering work being done within the IT culture and through the wise integration of new technological tools. (0) comments
Getting your Degree: Working adults like the online programs- Patrick Garmoe, Chicago Daily Herald
As if taking English 101 in your pajamas wasn't good enough, now McHenry County College - and soon other area colleges - will offer whole degrees from the comfort of your computer. McHenry County College students now can earn associate degrees in science, art or general education through online degree programs. "Now we can legitimately say you can get a degree online," said Julie Giuliani, director of Distance Education at McHenry County College. Although its electronic program is far from the first to receive accreditation, the college is on the leading edge of the trend of colleges adding whole degrees online. (0) comments Sunday, November 21, 2004
Distributed learning in the Nordic Countries and Canada - Arnór Gudmundsson and Asrun Matthiasdottir, EURODL
Distributed learning is defined as learning that makes use of distributed resources and the breaking down of traditional boundaries between face-to-face and open and distance learning. Examples of distributed learning from three countries, Iceland, Canada and Finland, are discussed and the differences in approaches adopted by the three countries and that they are reflected in the policy, organization and methods used. (0) comments
Victoria University seeks closer ties with Malaysia - Randal Jackson, Computerworld
Victoria University will hold a joint seminar this week with Malaysian ICT specialists in an endeavour to seek closer ties with Malaysia. Victoria’s pro vice chancellor for IT, Warwick Clegg, says Malaysia is remarkably advanced and the “super corridor” for IT companies has had massive government support. “The seminar will focus on common ICT issues, particularly on aspects of developing infrastructure,” he says. “We’ll be looking at potential collaboration, particularly in the area of e-learning. “When New Zealand has access to high bandwidth, we will be able to engage with the global community.” (0) comments
Universal Knowledge Solutions and Ohio University conclude Middle East tour
The tour was organized by UKS and aimed at cementing existing relations between Ohio University and some of its Middle East partners, as well as creating new ones. Dr. Thomas Shostak, Dean of Lifelong Learning at Ohio University said about the trip... "We think there is a tremendous opportunity of cooperation especially in the areas of Life Long Learning and e-Learning. Ohio University has developed some of the finest programs in these areas and we look forward to the opportunity of introducing them to the Middle East." (0) comments Online Learning News Blog Archives OTEL - Ray's Home Page - Notebook - UIS Online - U of I Online - UIS Home Fair Use |
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