Lessons Learned from the Global Campus

Inside Higher Education has an interesting article about the demise of the University of Illinois Global Campus online education, degree-granting, for-profit project. It sounds like the model they embraced - to take course content crafted by experienced on campus faculty and have less experienced, less expensive faculty teach that content - was at the heart of the problem. One of the commenters in the article, Nicholas C. Burbules, a Urbana-Champaign educational policy professor, spoke about how online education is not just a different mode of delivery of on-campus course content. It sounds like the university is now moving in the direction of examining current successful online programs and building those programs into something bigger. This is something to consider when building distance and online classes - instead of just thinking about taking curriculum that works in the in-class environment and delivering it virtually, perhaps this points in the direction of considering what instruction has proved very sucessful (maybe even more sucessful than in the physical classroom) and how can we build up the strength of and expand online learning from those examples.