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Online Learning News and Research 
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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
The Content of Collaboration - Daphnée Rentfrow, Educause Review
In the column that inaugurated this department five years ago, Deanna Marcum turned our attention to the "payload" that technology delivers—that is, to the e-content created, organized, used, studied, and evaluated by scholars, students, and teachers. The goal of the new E-Content department, for which she served as editor for two years, was to "encourage and enhance collaboration in e-content development among librarians, IT staff, teaching faculty, and others with roles in making scholarly resources available to campus communities." The department was intended for anyone with "a stake in digital resource development," and the content was planned to "illuminate the challenges faced by all who are trying to use electronic technology effectively to serve teaching and research."1 (0) comments
Do We Need Discreet Computing in Instruction? - William O. Plymale, Educause Review
Torgersen Hall, also referred to as the Advanced Communications and Information Technology Center (ACITC), contains the most technologically advanced classrooms on the Virginia Tech campus. Virginia Tech's Learning Technologies Division—which includes the Faculty Development Institute, Educational Technologies, the New Media Center, the Assistive Technologies Laboratory, the Graduate Education Development Institute (GEDI), and the Pervasive Computing Laboratory—resides in Torgersen Hall. Across the corridor from the Learning Technologies Division are numerous research laboratories: Computer Science's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Computer Engineering's e-Textiles Lab, ESM's University Visualization and Animation Group, and Digital Libraries. Thus opportunities abound in Torgersen Hall for collaboration among pedagogists, teaching and research faculty, and students to explore innovative technologies for the purpose of enhancing student engagement and learning. (0) comments
Confessions of a Podcast Junkie - Carie Windham, Educause Review
When the Pew Internet & American Life Project released results of a phone survey of U.S. adults in early 2005, I was not one of the more than 22 million adults who owned an iPod or MP3 player. Nor was I one of the more than 6 million people who had downloaded a podcast.1 No, my love affair with podcasting began later, during my graduate studies the next year, in an accidental and serendipitous way. Though I would later spin my story to say that I was on a news-deprived quest for current-events recordings from National Public Radio (NPR), in truth I came to discover the wide world of podcasting through a chance click in the Apple iTunes online store while I was looking for copies of Desperate Housewives episodes. (0) comments Tuesday, May 15, 2007
UNCG Honored for Distance Learning Programs - Michelle Hines, UNCG University Relations
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has received two national honors for its distance learning programs. The United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) honored Dr. Jeff Jones, a UNCG history professor who specializes in Russian history, with a Gold Best Practices Award for online teaching. USDLA also recognized UNCG’s groundbreaking online videogame economics class, ECON 201, with a Gold Best Practices Award for online technology. (0) comments
Distance-learning certification passes board of education - Great Falls Tribune
Over the objections of school administrators and parents, the Montana Board of Public Education unanimously passed an online education proposal Friday pushed by the teachers’ union. It requires that all distance learning, including college courses, be supervised by a Montana-certified K-12 teacher accredited in the discipline being taught. However, the board voted to delay implementation of the rule change to no later than July 1, 2009, to tweak the proposal and give the Legislature time to fund it. There was no estimate of what it might cost to provide accredited teachers in state school districts. (0) comments
Obtain your online degree ... easily! - Juli Kaganand Lisa Garcia-Heintskill, RDH
Are you bored with the rudimentary tasks of dental hygiene day after day? Do you want to take on more challenges? Do you want to become a leader in your organization or profession? Do you sometimes wish you had a different job? Do you have a desire to expand your knowledge or your “self”? If you answered yes to any of these questions, it may be time for you to return to school to earn your bachelor’s or master’s degree. But do you have family obligations, financial considerations, or time constraints that could keep you from achieving this goal? Think again! With the advent of online education programs, obtaining another degree is easier than you can imagine! Acquiring an education online allows you to study at your convenience - late in the evening, early in the morning, at home, in the office, or on vacation. Some online programs allow you to learn at your own pace, while others provide professor-directed and paced education. In both cases, you determine the time and place where you study, because all you need is a computer and access to the Internet! (0) comments Monday, May 14, 2007
IU wins grant to train future military officers in strategic languages and cultures
Indiana University has been selected to receive a two-year federal grant for $481,630 to provide strategic language and culture training to undergraduate students in Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs....the languages covered by IU's program are Arabic, Russian, and the Central Asian languages Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Pashto, Tajik, Turkmen, Uyghur and Uzbek.... "This grant allows IU to craft innovative approaches, including new curricula and enhanced use of distance learning technologies, that respond to needs the U.S. government recognizes as critical now and in the future," Foster said. (0) comments
US Soldiers Reap Rewards from College Degree Programs
The millions spent on educating US troops can now translate into college classroom credits. Some military personnel are receiving accredited degrees based on the credit hour equivalence of their life experience and training. Randford University embraces the revised policy to accept military training and experience as part of the curriculum to earn an accredited degree. "Quality training is at the core of the Army's mission, and it's absolutely vital to readiness," said Colonel Sharon Holmes as the Distributed Learning System project manager. The quality of military training is what influenced Randford University to accept both the military life experience and distance learning programs as classroom credits. (0) comments
Online students will never meet a tutor - Jon Boone, Financial Times
Degrees that are delivered entirely online without any face-to-face contact with a tutor are to be offered for the first time in Britain by a leading US company. The two- or three-year foundation degree courses in four areas of business studies are to be devised by Kaplan, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, and validated by the University of Essex. Although the company has said it wants to take advantage of recent deregulation that in theory allows non-universities to award their own degrees, the deal with Essex gives it an immediate foothold in the higher education market. (0) comments Sunday, May 13, 2007
Virtual High School Recognized as Best Practice by the United States Distance Learning Association
Virtual High School Global Consortium (www.govhs.org), the pioneer of online learning for high school students and online course design for teachers, today announced they have received the United States Distance Learning Association’s (USDLA) 21st Century Best Practice Award in Distance Learning. This is the second time the organization has received this prestigious acknowledgement. (0) comments
Open University expands e-learning capabilities - Tom Young, Computing
The Open University (OU) is to extend its e-learning scheme and introduce real-time forums. The university has 200,000 students and already uses e-learning tools, but will introduce new technology to allow real-time interaction between students. ‘Most courses have forums, but this system will be for real-time communication rather than forums where people post at different times,’ said Niall Sclater, director of the OU’s virtual learning environment programme. ‘It will allow students to communicate with each other outside of scheduled sessions,’ he said. Sclater says the distance learning specialist intends to introduce new systems by the end of the summer. (0) comments
State considers change to distance learning - KRISTI ALBERTSON, The Daily Inter Lake
Education panel will vote Friday on plan to amend accreditation standards. Students taking online, video or correspondence courses from out-of-state instructors soon may have limited distance-learning options, pending the outcome of a Montana Board of Public Education vote Friday. At its next meeting, held in Great Falls today and Friday, the board will vote on several amendments to distance-learning accreditation standards in elementary and secondary schools. Whatever the outcome, the vote will have the force of law, because the Board of Public Education controls accreditation standards. One of the most significant proposed changes would require those who teach online, distance or technology-delivered classes to be licensed and endorsed by the state in their areas of instruction. (0) comments Saturday, May 12, 2007
Second Life Users Top 1.3 Million in March - Enid Burns, ClickZStats
Second Life attracted 1.3 million users who logged in March 2007, a 46 percent increase over January of this year, according to data on the virtual world released by comScore Networks. Second Life is a virtual world created by Linden Labs. Users create an online persona and interact with other users, own property and build residences, and can hold jobs and earn Linden dollars. Data listed on Second Life's Web site states just over 6 million as the total number of residents, and says 1.7 million have logged in over the past 60 days. (0) comments
Moving Beyond the Game: Social Virtual Worlds - Betsy Book, Cultures of Play Panel State of Play 2 Conference
In “Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds,” Jack M. Balkin predicted that MMORPG technologies will soon be adopted for non-gaming enterprises, leading to a more diverse future for virtual worlds: As multiplayer game platforms become increasingly powerful and lifelike, they will inevitably be used for more than storytelling and entertainment. In the future, virtual worlds platforms will be adopted for commerce, for education, for professional, military, and vocational training, for medical consultation and psychotherapy, and even for social and economic experimentation to test how social norms develop. Although most virtual worlds today are currently an outgrowth of the gaming industry, they will become much more than that in time. (0) comments
Second Life user base explodes - Earth Times
Second Life is a three dimensional online world that allows residents to create their own personas using which they can build homes and behave in much the same manner as in real world. "During the past 15 months, Second Life's population has expanded from 100,000 to more than five million registered users worldwide," said Joe Miller, vice president of Linden Lab. Many global companies have active presence in Second Life as they hope to capitalize on a growing user base. "It is little wonder that bricks and mortar businesses are seeing Second Life as a virtual-world way of accessing a global, real-world customer base," Bob Ivins, the European head of comScore revealed. (0) comments Friday, May 11, 2007
Face-to-Screen Learning - Hadley Hickman, Business Tennessee
Distance learning is hardly a foreign idea in the United States. In fact, scholars on distance education suggest that as early as 1873 efforts were sought to expand educational opportunities by corresponding via mail. And by the mid-twentieth century, with the help of advancing technologies in film and radio, the University of Wisconsin established a Correspondence Study Unit that helped boost confidence in distance learning across the country. Today, the emerging technological revolution is rapidly changing the way we learn. Colleges and universities can no longer solely focus on learning in classroom settings and instead must concentrate efforts on the emerging technology that makes it simple for students and teachers to communicate in non-traditional methods. (0) comments
School's out, play ... online - Lee U-Wen, Channel News Asia
Thrice a week after the school dismissal bell sounds, 12-year-old Kevin Chang travels to faraway countries such as Brazil and Egypt, goes rock-climbing and takes part in exciting steeplechase races. The Primary 6 student is one of 40 lucky pupils who have been chosen to take part in an online gaming trial project called e@Leader, at North View Primary School. The online learning platform was introduced earlier this year in more than 400 schools in Hong Kong. North View Primary is the first school to use it in Singapore. The programme exposes students to different challenges and tasks in the form of interactive games. These are set against a backdrop of various cultures and communities. (0) comments
Cyber boys and girls - Stephen Manning, TES
If you’ve ever worried your pupils can spot you’re wearing the same outfit two days running, or that they have already figured out the rotation of your three ties, you might consider the kind of teaching where all such vanity is suspended – the virtual classroom. Pupils unable to attend school through illness or exclusion could have their access to education transformed by the developing technology around personalised learning. One such project is the Nisai Virtual Academy (NVA), which is now in its fifth academic year as an online learning community for out-of-school children, from key stage 2 up to AS-level. Nisai Education produces software for “e-learning and remote education”. About half of the virtual classroom’s 250 pupils, who are based all over the country, have physical conditions ranging from ME to leukaemia, plus five who are paralysed. It also caters for excluded pupils whose goal is reintegration into mainstream education. (0) comments Thursday, May 10, 2007
Second Life worth second look: Virtual world will change interactions, lecturer says - Weiwen Ji, Daily Texan
Incorporating 3-D virtual world instruments into corporation marketing, education and entertainment is beginning to change the way that people communicate, said Joe Sanchez, School of Information assistant instructor, during a speech at the J.J. Pickle Research Center Wednesday evening. During his speech, which was sponsored by UT's Texas Advanced Computing Center, Sanchez showed more than 80 attendees the images of a virtual world, called Second Life, which has provided a 3-D social network service to more than 6 million users since 2003. Second Life is a virtual space created by users which includes performing centers, libraries, museums, teaching environments such as UT's island, which Sanchez created for his class, a corporation presenting room such as a Toyota plant, and community connection spaces like a Virginia Tech monument, Sanchez said. "Virtual spaces will be more prominent in the Internet world," Sanchez said. "That will be a new way we interact with information, and the Internet revolution will include something like that." (0) comments
Web-based curricula are becoming more popular with students - Paris Achen, Medford Mail Tribune
Citing its academic benefits in captivating students and gauging instructional effectiveness, the Medford School District is poised to adopt its first Web-based curricula as part of its update of high school-level world studies, advanced placement social sciences and economics. The popularity of online instruction has manifested itself mostly in distance learning classes through community courses and universities. But it is growing in high schools across the nation and even in elementary schools. (0) comments
An Online Course in Ethics - Inside Higher Ed
The director of Florida International University’s online education arm stepped down this week amid an investigation into charges that he arranged for students to buy their electronic textbooks from a company that he and a former colleague reportedly owned. (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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