Trend Toward Self-Paced Online Classes

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured the article "Will Technology Kill the Academic Calendar?" which discusses the trend of some community colleges to offer classes that allow students to start and complete the course at any time and that consists of assignments without deadlines. The discussion includes whether this module is primarily financially driven and whether students' needs can really be met without a cohort and the structure of a traditional semester.

Too many choices and not enough time...

An interesting column in the New York Times that talks about yesterday's hot new commodities and what they still mean to online learning opportunities.

Great content coming down the pipe...

Sure. Everyone is throwing their hat into the ring of online learning. Why not Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Bootsy Collins? Bootsy Collins' Funk University offers online bass instruction. To be honest, as a wannabe bass player, I am considering trying a class on for size. Maybe I can learn to slap like Marcus, or do whatever it is that Victor does.

The point: Even pipe dreams can be sustained with the promise of online learning.

Growth of Distance Learning at Community Colleges

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that according to an Instructional Technology Council study published in March 2010, enrollment in distance learning at community colleges has increased from 11% in the 07-08 academic year to 22% in 08-09. The article suggests enthusiasm of community colleges for distance learning, the economic downturn, and enrollment efforts as possible reasons for the growth.

Direct learning while students read

Something I learned from an instructor several years ago was the power of creating interaction with students in the middle of a reading assignment. The example at the time was to have students read focused content (in this instance about "Character" as it relates to Ethics) and then prompt the student with questions in the middle of the content before they continue reading. In this example, he would embed a form into the page, and ask questions related to having good/bad character. This form would then be processed and the instructor would get an e-mail which he could respond to if necessary--for instance, if the student didn't quite get the concept correct.A new tool, Tal.ki provides the opportunity to not only embed a single question, but entire conversations between students and the instructor around any given topic. There are some limitations to the implementation, the biggest of which seems to be the inability to focus a specific topic on a page. This might be addressed, but I'm still looking. Call if you're interested in exploring this with a Distance Learning staff member.

New Service for Video/Screencast distribution

Tubemongul OneLoad is a free one-step service that allows you to upload a video or screencast and have it distributed efficiently to number of different video and social networking sites including Google, Yahoo! YouTube, vimeo, viddler, and myspace. It may come in handy if you use a number of different sites to distribute content to your students. The service also includes analytics in case you would like to track viewership and engagement.

Emerging technology and the way things were

In yet another blog entry on iPad, the folks at Gizmodo did a quick review of the effects on ebooks and the obsolescence of book covers. In particular, the effect of this on the market place seemed well placed related to learning:

"Yes, people who would have purchased a book because they saw three people reading it at Starbucks may not purchase said book in an ebook world. But they might purchase another book, because they saw it on their buddies' Twitter feeds, or because iTunes spat out some kind of automated recommendation for them that's actually grounded in data, beyond their 20-person, Dan-Brown-biased coffee shop sample group. More to the point, the loss of this totally unquantifiable benefit to publishers is probably—and probably massively—offset by the fact that all these secretive ebook enjoyers are now, at all times, just seconds away from tapping into a vast digital bookstore, which delivers books in a matter of seconds." (Source)

Similar arguments are directed to learning, and yes the new technology in the old environment can be problematic...but it's the new technology in the new environment where things get exciting.

Online graphic organizing tools

The blog Free Technology for Teachers has a recent post illuminating nine freely available online tools that can be used for graphic organization of ideas or mind mapping. These can be useful tools for visual learners and can help students broaden and narrow research topics and see the relationships between different concepts. Among the tools highlighted are Wise Mapping, Slatebox, exploratree, and mindmeister. The library also has Creedo Reference (you must login to access this link from off campus), a database aggregating electronic encyclopedia articles which includes a "Concept Map" feature similarly allowing students to visually see the connections between different research topics.

The Debate Over Making Lectures Available Online

In the Chronicle of Higher Education article, "College 2.0: More Professors Could Share Lectures Online. But Should They?", Jeffrey R. Young highlights both sides of the issue many professors are considering: whether to make their lectures available to students (and possibly the public at large) online. The discussion includes increased access to class content for students, copyright concerns, managing the recording process, and facilitating the free flow of ideas.

Challenging Perceptions About Distance Education

In a recent column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Yale University Librarian and San Jose State University and Wayne State University distance learning instructor Todd Gilman discusses the reactions he has received from colleagues who have never taught online classes and debunks some of the myths about distance learning that still seem to perpetuate.

Spaced Education.

SpacedEd is a learning environment that focuses on using questions to facilitate the learning of content.

From the Website:

It is based upon two core psychology research findings: the spacing effect and the testing effect. In more than 10 randomized trials completed to date, spaced education has been found to:

• Improve knowledge acquisition;
• Increase long-term knowledge retention (out to 2 years);
• Change behavior; and
• Boost learners' abilities to accurately self-assess their knowledge.

The system sends questions to e-mail two times a day. If the questions are answered incorrectly they are redelivered after a week. I'm currently testing it out on the "Philosophy" class which focuses on the philosophy of education. I've only answered two questions, but have already started to see some potential use for the classroom (especially if SMS is allowed.)

Obama's Push for Online Education

In this article I ran into from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Perry reports on a plan that's emerging from the Obama administration to provide colleges with access to "open" online classes for which the government would potentially fund the development. Colleges (and there seems to be a special indication of community colleges in particular) could repackage and add value to these classes by providing the actual online interaction and instruction to the students while still keeping costs affordable. There's also the suggestion that a community college or consortia of community colleges could house the project's development. Also included in the article is a broader discussion of the need for change from the current model of higher education and how online education can prove a better use of an instructor's time and a way to better tailor to the learning needs of students.

Problems with Google Scholar for Scholars

Google collaborated with many academic libraries to make many scholarly material easily searchable. But as Peter Jacso from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa points out in this article, the biggest problem with Google Scholar (and also Google's Book Search) is the poor job Google has been doing with the metadata associated with these materials. When Googling, most people don't care much about metadata, but faulty metadata can provide an inaccurate picture of the value of a resource to researchers. For example, materials are often categorized under incorrect author names or assigned bloated citations counts. All of this can be a factor for ECC students or faculty who are relying on Google Scholar as a research tool. It can mean inaccurate citations or search results that favor less valuable materials. It's good to keep this in mind when encouraging students to think critically about their information sources.

Teaching Online Classes from a War Zone

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about Cheryl J. Wachenheim, a North Dakota State University instructor of agribusiness and applied economics, who chose to continue teaching an online economics class while on active duty as a captain in the Minnesota Army National Guard stationed in Balad, Iraq. She comments on the challenges and benefits of teaching and interacting with her students from a war zone. We often think about the benefits that online teaching and technology extend in terms of flexibility to students, but it's also interesting to think about the possibilities online learning can present to educators and the challenging circumstances in which online learning can still prevail.

Cheating in Online vs Cheating in Face-to-Face

This study intrigues me. I have not been able to fully get into it (will read tonight), but I thought others might be interested. I've seem some reviews that say the study says that cheating may not be as prevalent in online classes as it is in face-to-face...That assessment right there is enough to get me to read the article. Full Title: Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom

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.

Finding Educational Videos Online Made Easy

WatchKnow.org, a website that catalogs videos online that are available for educational purposes. I found a video about the stifling of creativity by copyright laws that could be used in an appropriate learning space. Sure, I could have found it anyway, but WatchKnow made it easy to browse. There are many videos already there, and I would expect that over time, as more and more educators get involved in the WatchKnow community, I would expect this will evolve into a key resource to keep in our pocket.

Thinking of Online Classes as Distributed Teams...

ReadWriteWeb published a nice review of 4 Essential Apps for Distributed Teams. This was intriguing to me as it felt like I was reading a best practices for online learning. If our "connection" improves satisfaction and success, and "connection" is essential to good team development, these are worth a look. The four apps are:

1. Instant Messaging and Chat;
2. Wiki;
3. Task Tracking (Keeping tack of work); and
4. Web Conferencing (synchronous classroom experiences).

All of these are available in Web 2.0 implementations, or are included in most Course Management Systems (ours being Desire2Learn). In addition to the options noted by RWW, other options include:

1. Meebo (for instant messaging)
2. D2L has a chat room
3. pbworks for wiki's
4. Elluminate (for "web conferencing"...free Vrooms for up to 3 people are free)

Cheaper eBook reader challenges Kindle

Do you enjoy reading ebooks? Ebooks (short for electronic book) are becoming a part of higher education, many people are starting to see a shift to e-books on campus. Now you can purchase a COOL-ER for much cheaper then Kindle. Interead's Cooler, costs just $249, which is $240 less than the Kindle DX!

New Report Finds Effectiveness in Online Learning

Inside Higher Ed reports on a study done by the Department of Education that supports the notion that online learning has advantages to face-to-face learning. Story includes link to the final report.