Pictures of prototypes for the $100 laptop for the OLPC project
A project at WikiMedia with the mission:
Wikiversity is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:
Among the things I found interesting here is a list of how people can participate in this project:
Some Ideas for Effective Initial Participation
There are definitely some ideas here that I can see for eXtension.
Marc Rosenberg discusses trends in e-learning:
...via SmartMobs
OpenCourseWare is the MIT project to make their class materials available on the web to everyone. Five years ago--on April 4th--MIT announced the OpenCourseWare project:
There are now 1,285 sets of course material available on the OCW web site at http://ocw.mit.edu. There have been nearly 20 million unique visits to MIT OCW content since Oct. 1, 2003. In February alone, there were an average of more than 36,000 visits to the site daily.
"We're getting traffic from virtually every country on earth. From a very simple but profound idea, OCW has grown into a global movement" now used daily by thousands of people worldwide, according to Jon Paul Potts, communications manager for OCW.
Visitors include educators elsewhere (17 percent), students everywhere (32 percent) and a huge audience defined as "self learners" (49 percent).
...via elearningpost
From The Chronicle-- Michigan is considering requiring at least one online course to graduate from high school:
The new requirement would appear to be the first of its kind in the nation. Mike Flanagan, the Michigan state superintendent of public instruction, said he proposed the online-course requirement, along with other general requirements, to make sure students were prepared for college and for jobs, which are becoming more technology-focused.
"We don't want our kids left in the global dust," Mr. Flanagan said. "It's an experience we need to have."
A new portal that provides easy access to freely available educational resources:
A new Web initiative launched today at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), will connect anyone with Internet access and the desire to learn to a world of free, high-quality open educational materials. The Development Gateway Foundation’s “Open Educational Resources” portal aims to equalize access to education and help people in developing countries improve their chances for a better life.
The portal features free course materials and other educational content offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Chinese Open Resources for Education and other institutions around the world. The initiative is launched in partnership by the Development Gateway Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
...via
There's been a fair amount of interesting talk about offering college courses via mobile phones. Here's an article from the Guardian on mobile learning in elementary and high schools:
According to the LSDA, mobile phones can have a positive impact on learning, particularly for students who find traditional teaching methods difficult to deal with. Jill Attewell, the programme manager for the m-learning project, points out that "most kids have a mobile phone and it's already a big part of their lives. So, if we can use that enthusiasm to get them involved with their learning activities, it can only be a good thing." Schools in the UK have already started to take advantage of their pupils' fascination with all things digital. Wren's Nest primary school, located in the west Midlands, has implemented a project where pupils are given PDAs. So far, it's proven successful.
...via Smart Mobs
Stephan Downes talks about what he considers the three most important principles for effective e-learning :
No doubt there are other aspects of effective e-learning. Pedagogical theorists will talk about scaffolding, talk about learning objectives and outcomes, talk about practice and examination, and more. In various contexts these are all important and will play a significant role in determining the success of failure of a given learning enterprise.
None of these, though, are as central to the design of effective learning as the three criteria listed above. By ensuring that e-learning content is interactive, usable and relevant a designer can be virtually sure that the e-learning outcome will be a success. or at the very least, appreciated by the learners. Who are, after all, the final judge.
...via elearningpost
Gary A. Berg, dean of extended education at California State University Channel Islands recently took a look at the University of Phoenix and commented in an interview at Inside Higher Ed
Q: Phoenix recently announced that it would begin to offer programs for traditional-age undergraduates. Should the rest of higher education be worried?
A: For the most part, no. However, third tier non-residential teaching institutions are likely to see increased competition. My guess is that the University of Phoenix must have noticed a large market opportunity to make such a major change in its policy, perhaps for students in the military and in their greatly expanding international market. Broadening its market represents a big change for the University of Phoenix, because one of its strengths has always been exploiting a niche market of first generation college and working adult students. Additionally, its pedagogical approach relies to a great extent on prior work and life experience — serving younger students complicates this effort.
...via elearningpost
Scott Adams has remixed the Cluetrain Manifesto for Education:
...via JoHo the Blog
Salon has an article on distance learning and academia (requires you to get a free day pass). It covers a lot of the things we've been talking about at ISUE.
...via elearningpost
Via the University of Calgary, Best Practices in e-learning newsletter, a paper on Success in e-Learning: It's about Reliance and Integration, which talks about seven areas that need to be considered and integrated when developing a successful e-learning strategy: technologies, support staff, curriculum/subject matter, learners/succcess, institutions, society/culture, teachers/facilitators.
Some musings at elearningpost on rich e-learning experiences, what people need to know, and how we translate information to knowledge and knowledge to action.
Amy Gharan at Contentious talks about effective corporate e-learning and how much of it is not:
Rather than burden employees with a constant stream of detailed documents about new regulations, products, laws, policies, and minutiae of the business landscape, just deliver overview-level, 'so what'-style highlights of the new information. Focus on context: How the new information relates to what employees already know and do. If they understand how the information landscape is changing, they'll be able to navigate it more effectively.Then, make the full details easily available on demand. That is, accept that they will probably end up looking up details when they have a specific need rather than memorizing them in advance.
...via elearningpost
An article at elearnspace by George Siemens shares his perspective on Learning Management Systems:
The very notion of “managing learning” conflicts with how people are actually learning today. Outside of primary and secondary school, most of our learning falls into the “topping up what we know” category. As a result, we need tools that allow for rapid creation and breakdown. Searching Google, blogs, and wikis has a very quick learning structure creation and breakdown. An LMS has a long creation/breakdown process (and once the learning structure has been broken down (i.e. end of course), it is no longer accessible to learners). LMS' still view learners as canisters to be filled with content – this is particularly relevant in light of the heavy emphasis on object repositories for learning. Essentially, most LMS platforms are attempting to shape the future of learning to fit into the structure of their systems, even though most learning today is informal and connectionist in nature.
Although learning management systems are an important part of an e-learning environment, there are other important pieces too. Siemen lists the following:
Any learning environment should:
At Learning Circuits, Clark Aldrich talks about six criteria for an educational simulation.
Wired News has an article about Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game, offering free accounts to students when their professors offer their classes online in the Second life environment:
In order to help teachers bring their classes to Second Life, Linden Lab donates accounts for each student, as well as an acre of land in the metaverse for the teacher and students to work and build on. Afterward, anyone wishing to stay a member can do so at half price.
To date, in addition to Delwiche and Beamish, professors from San Francisco State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Vassar College have used Second Life in their courses.
Judith Boettcher in a Syllabus article on Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?, provides some rules of thumb
...via elearningpost
Tris Hussey talks about using Convoq ASAP to make a meeting work:
So picture this, me and my two colleagues are on the conference call with a potential client (three people in one person's office) and listening to him struggle with typing in the case sensitive meeting information. He's not doing well and the frustration in his voice is coming through loud and clear. Side note here: One thing that really helped save the day was that my two colleagues and I had an open MSN IM session going so we could chat without the client knowing, or "hearing" the panic in our typing.Now as any six year veteran of the Boy Scouts would, I had the backup plan ready. I had already converted the presentation into ASAP%u2019s Flash-based format and set up a meeting in ASAP. I had also used the "Prepare a meeting" function so the slides were all queued up and ready. Before we lost the client in a fit of frustration, I invited my two colleagues via IM and the client via e-mail into the ASAP meeting. In less than two minutes the meeting was back on track. I gave a quick wave on the camera, then went full screen on the presentation. Technologically, the rest of the meeting went off with out a hitch.
In an earlier post, there's some discussion about taking an initial look at Convoq ASAP and Macromedia Breeze.
We've been using Breeze Live for a few months now (and using Breeze for over a year for some specific applications). Here's a very interesting article on one person's specific experiences with Breeze Live:
Over the past couple of years, I investigated whether to use web conferencing software as part of my business. While I was excited by the potential, I weighed whether the costs would outweigh the benefits for my small company. The opportunity to try Breeze Live gave me compelling evidence that such a technology is a necessary part of my business.In the following sections, I explain how I used the Breeze Live trial to deliver the following communications:
- Ten, two-hour developer seminars
- Six client meetings
- Three conversations with my remote developer teams
- Two conference talks
There's lots of good and useful detail about organizing and delivering, what works well, and how to make a successful presentation.
There's also a terrific checklist for presenters:
Preparation Checklist for Presenters
...via elearningpost
The Internet makes us simultaneously more connected and more isolated. The use of mail, weblogs, shared workspaces, online conferences and other collaborative tools often means that we have less face to face contact than ever before. And online activities still don't do explicitly and efficiently what even a brief face to face contact provides--broader context, body language, casual conversation, and other social capital building and information cues.
Designing Collaborative E-learning For Results in Learning Circuits discusses strategies for "building connection, interactivity, and relationships via online learning:"
The proposed e-learning solution had to maintain the high-touch level of the face-to-face seminar within the constraints imposed by the physical separation of the participants and the technologies used to connect them. A redesign converted the lunch seminar into six 75-minute synchronous online sessions delivered over VisionCast (a version of Microsoft LiveMeeting provided by Premiere Conferencing) and a phone conference.
The following design elements were incorporated into the program:
The redesign proved successful in overcoming the constraints of physical separation and the limitations of distance learning technology. In the most recent cohort to complete the redesigned conflict management program, 100 percent of the participants rated it as “valuable to highly valuable.” In addition, 100 percent of the participants found that the course helped them recognize and deal with their own and others' conflict styles. Participants cited scheduling flexibility as an obvious advantage, but they also valued the interactive communication tools that were built into the program design. One participant said, “I am the last person normally to be impressed with computer technology, but I have to admit the technology was extremely impressive and effective.”
- numerous case examples from participants and their co-workers
- a team project that asked participants to apply new tactics and strategies to
- a real case example, which was provided by senior management
- senior executives joined the course at the beginning and end to reinforce its importance to the company, as well as to critique work and motivate employees to integrate what they learned into their daily practice
- extensive use of interactive features, such as polling and breakout sessions
- an assessment tool and a survey designed specifically to generate rich profiles of each participant from which they could learn about themselves and their co-workers. The resulting data was woven throughout the course to connect theory with practical reality.
They suggest factors to keep in mind:
The article includes issues that should be on anyone's list when outlining a successful distance learning strategy.
elearningpost talks about building experience into elearning:
For example, a logically well-laid building plan might fulfill a functional need but not necessarily the experiential need. The functional needs could be space, plumbing, electrical etc., and the experiential need could be privacy, character of a space, mood it evokes, ambience etc. For elearning to fit into today's consumption, its design too needs to be crafted for experience.The paper contends that thinking only about the functional aspects of elearning hampers our experience outlook. It identifies strategies to overcome this conflict and to successfully engage today's learners. Through a range of examples from diverse areas such as print, documentation, presentation, and elearning, the paper illustrates how deliberate attempt to think beyond mere functionality, makes an obvious difference to the experience of the output. The cues from these examples provide directions to build elearning products that are functionally sound and experientially engaging.
What does this mean for elearning?
Psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that positive experiences are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought. She discovered that people who felt good were more curious, better at learning, and were able to come up with creative solutions (Isen, A. M. 1993). The scope of design therefore, should extend beyond functionality to fulfill the need for experience....
The constraints on the designer and the expectations of the learner create a gap that is difficult to bridge. A designer thinks a great deal about what his product will be like, but the environment in which his product is consumed might change. Likewise a designer cannot control the development of expectations in the learners’ minds. The designer can only control the product.This difference often leads to a layout-experience gap. A brilliant design fails because of a failure to pay adequate attention to small but decisive details that shape the final experience. To elaborate on the point, let’s consider a parallel example from architecture and understand what it implies for elearning. A logically well-laid building plan might fulfill aesthetic and functional needs but may not necessarily fulfill the experience-needs. The needs that may be taken care of by an architect might be things like space, services, etc. But the architect might still miss on experience needs like privacy, lighting, ambience, etc.When a building-plan is thought of as a layout-plan one sets a certain standard for building-design. But when this layout is translated into experience, it can get far away from the expected standard. Design should be understood not as layout, but as the translation of layout into experience.
An interesting post on using weblogs to create an engaging learning experience:
Why are weblogs so successful? Apart from being very easy to use, I feel that there are three key attributes that have contributed to its success: 1) personal point of view, 2) chronological nature and 3) byte-sized posts. Together, these three attributes help create experiences that are both engaging and memorable. In this article, I will outline a design method that incorporates these weblog attributes.
Jason Schultz, the LawGeek has a set of three posts here, here , and here discussing Penn State's decision to ban students from having servers. Edward Felten also comments at Freedom-to-tinker.
Everything cannot be locked down. When we try to do it, we get lost in a tangle that usually ends up leading us somewhere that begins to remind us of Charles Dickens and Hard Times:
'You are to be in all things regulated and governed,' said the gentleman, 'by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use of ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,' said the gentleman, 'for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.'
Thomas Grandgrind found, much to his dismay that this approach didn't work out all that well. And yet, it's not an easy task, keeping systems up and running, making sure the universities don't get sued and allowing things to happen that might not be specifically accounted for. For universities that manage and continue to do these things we all owe a debt of gratitude.
Will Richardson of Weblogg-edposts the news that the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun have RSS feeds. And adds:
So is there any reason why next fall we shouldn't give our kids their ID numbers, their network passwords, and their login info to their Bloglines account prepopulated with world, national, and local news, the latest sports and weather, and a few choice fun feeds for kids to follow?
...via The Shifted Librarian
elearningpost talks about the possibilities of Learning Experience Design, extrapolating from design that considers user's experiences (user experience design):
I sense a similar shift in e-learning design: from instructional design to learner experience design (LXD). If this too is going to be a mind, body, and soul shift, then we are need to be more holistic. We need to look beyond learner characteristics and learning objectives. We need our own set of learner experience methods to help us understand the complexities of learning, working, and decision making in the real world.
The eLearning Forum is now the Emergent Learning Forum:
eLearning has reached adolescence. It has grown up and we elders have to let it get out of the house make its own friends. The action is moving from eLearning itself to what happens as its relationships with others. That why we added this plank to our mission: "Position learning as a core business process."Emergence is what results when complex systems interact. It's up to us to mold Emergent Learning into a useful concept. My notion of Emergent Learning includes:
- Greater than the sum of its parts
- New arrangements of components
- Multidisciplinary
- Self-organizing
- Dynamic, evolving
- Often surprising
- Becoming, not established
The new Emergent Learning Forum recently had an event to talk about social networking, relationship capital, and expertise management
Our topic, the impact of social networks on corporate learning, perfectly fit the bill. Social network software is a relatively recent phenomenon, pundits and investors feel it is ready to take off, and very little consideration has been given to how it can improve the quality of learning.
More good stuff coming, I'm sure. Some of the issues of social networking are trust, privacy, how dynamic it is, how to make it useful place for everyone before everyone's using it, and other things. Integrating learning adds another level of participation with lots and lots of potential.
eLearn Magazine has a column on e-learning predictions for 2004 (there doesn't seem to bea permalink to this column; it's currently on the front page):
“In 2004 colleges and universities will finally stop thinking about using information technology (IT) and start thinking seriously about how IT can be used to improve student learning, increase student retention and serve students more cost effectively. IT will be viewed as a vital institutional investment rather than an operating expense.” —Carol A. Twigg, Executive Director, Center for Academic Transformation“I see things coming together that have been operating separately, for example, knowledge management practices integrated with structured learning events such as courses; Web-based technology used in the classroom; formal and informal learning integrated in the same overall activity or course; and learning objects found or created by the learners themselves as the results of learning activities. Should any of these be called "e-learning" Or all of them? We need a new name for these sorts of synergies.” —Betty Collis, Shell Professor of Networked Learning, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
National Learning Network has a reference document on e-learning.
The new reference document Paving the way to excellence in e-learning has been produced by the NLN Materials Team at Becta, to share the procedures that are followed to ensure the e-learning materials commissioned for the NLN are of the highest quality possible.The guidelines cover pedagogy, accessibility (both design and technical requirements), technical standards and quality assurance. It also contains information about the implementation and dissemination activities carried out by the team to integrate the NLN materials into the post-16 sectors.
An Australian report expresses concerns about online learning:
UNIVERSITIES may be compromising their teaching standards in order to maximise revenue from online education, a Federal Government report has revealed.The report says while online learning can be a powerful tool for distance education, both students and staff suspect universities are using it as a money-maker and not investing adequate resources.
...via elearninpost
eLearn Magazine has a good article on making e-learning less boring and more memorable:
For teaching to be effective, cognition and emotion must work together,” says Norman. He says four elements must be present for an e-learning experience to be successful:
- Strong motivation: The material is structured around a problem the student really cares about.
- Positive encouragement: Efforts to explore and understand the material are rewarded.
- The social factor: A strong social commitment is present, achieved either by having people work in teams or by establishment of a strong personal commitment to the teacher through continual feedback and interaction.
- Stress: Frequent assignments that impose deadlines on learners. A little stress is a great focus-booster.
...via elearningpost
The University of Alberta has a number of articles from their Academic Technologies for Learning unit on designing for distance learning, including:
...via elearningpost
David Carraher has an article on weblogs in education:
Two current shortcomings of education could could be addressed through weblogging technologies. The former is highly problematic throughout K-12; it is not a major problem in graduate school. The latter remains a problem at all levels.
Someone told me recently that when they offered an online course through WebCT, the biggest issue they had was helping people use the interface.
A recent article in e-Learn Magazine discusses the difference between learners and uers:
Think of it this way: In a history course, a learner needs to know how to write an essay—that is forming ideas, doing research, synthesizing information, and presenting cogent arguments on a position. A user, on the other hand, needs to know how to submit the essay—what tools to use to create it and where and how to transmit it so that the instructor receives it on time.
MIT, which last year announced plans to put all their courseware online, is set to publish the first set of courses on September 30th. Subject matter includes:
Anthropology
Biology
Chemistry
Economics
Linguistics and Philosophy
Ocean Engineering
Urban Studies and Planning
According to a recent article at Wired News, DMACC's West Des Moines campus has gone almost entirely wireless, paperless, and library-less. They've substituted a resource center for the library, required PDAs of all technology students, and supplied faculty with smartboards on which to write notes that can be downloaded into PDAs.
Dean Tony Paustian says, "We are heading toward a world where, instead of reading a bunch of Bill Gates' quotes, you want to have a video clip of him actually speaking that quote..."
I have to admit that I'm still a 'Social Life of Paper' adherent and that I find it much faster to read a bunch of quotes than watch someone say them, and in fact, Paustian also says that students still print e-documents out to read them and adds:
"Once they have surpassed that amount (of allotted printouts), they have to go back and add more copies to their account," Paustian said. "Otherwise, they'll print off reams of paper."
So, maybe not quite the end of paper, but an interesting experiment, nonetheless.
According to a recent article in HBS Working Knowledge, while it's simple to convey content on the Web, it's not always easy to supply context. John Seely Brown, in a talk at Harvard, says that the tools exist to convey both content and context and its the kids who know how to do it. He calls 'screen language,' the vernacular of digital culture and says that it can be seen in things like instant messaging, video games, movies, and the open source movment.
New media, screen language, vernacular communication and programming aesthetics have tools that we could be and should be looking at for online education. None of these approaches are necessarily more information-packed than plain text. They are different. And as such convey different information in new ways.
Everyone has a 'learning style,' a way that they can take in and process new infomration most easily. At least, that's one theory about how we learn and why one person can get a whole lot more out of a class than someone else.
A recent article at Trainingmag.com brings together several experts to discuss the concept of learning style and its uses and abuses.
From a recent article in The Chronicle:
Many colleges and universities ask staff to respond to student's email within a specified period of time. Online classes go on all the time, asynchronously. Classes used to be run in discrete blocks of time with set office hours--often one or two hours a week. In the brave new world of online courses, faculty are now wrestling with how to be available to students and still protect their time 'outside' the classroom.
According to recent article in The Chronicle, Columbia University's Senate has issued a report critical of the amount of money the university has invested in its for-profit, online-learning venture, Fathom. In particular, the report says that Fathom should be developing content from Columbia (and its other partners Fathom head, Ann Kirschner says they are, in fact, doing this) rather than developing its own independent conent.
In 2001, Columbia invested 15 million dollars in Fathom while the company took in $700,000 in fees and sales.
According to a recent article in Wired News, American University in Washington is getting rid of wires. Students will use cell phones not desk phones for their voice communication and, assuming their computers are laptops and wireless-enabled, they will be able to surf the net and check email from anywhere on campus.
It's not clear from the article whether cell phone and wireless networking will also be used exclusively by faculty and staff, though it does mention that the efficiency of the wireless network will depend on a high-speed wired network already in place.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, American universities have spent upwards of 100 million dollars producing Web-based distance education offerings. Fathom, a spinoff of Columbia University is now giving their offerings away free as short courses rather than the semester long for-fee courses that were part of its start-up model. NYUOnline has closed after a 20 million dollar investnemtn and few takers (500 student peak enrollment).
One successful entrant in online education has been University of Phoenix with more than 37,000 students enrolled for online courses. They claim their success comes from branding, marketing and infrastructure.
Another article on weblogs.
This one talks about their potential in e-learning and knowledge management.
Weblogs filter information. The ones you look at every day may be different from the ones I look at every day. They help make learning personal, informal, and possible given the huge amount of content on the web.
According to a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, two researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln have conducted a study to measure the impact of ‘link-rot’ on online education.
‘Link-rot’ is the disappearance or movement of Web pages so that when someone follows a link on one page it leads them to a ‘Page not found’ error page or a different page entirely.
Links in the three online courses studied were found to have a half-life of about 55 months. That is, half the links were ‘bad’ within a 55 month period. This means that there is online maintenance involved in every course that needs to be, but is currently often not, included in the costs of offering the course.
According to a recent survey in the UK, less than a third of the organizations surveyed are using e-learning for staff training and those who are using it are doing so sparingly.
Training managers in general:
Training managers use e-learning most frequently for teaching IT staff.
According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Hubert Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, says that distance education is an overhyped misunderstood trend that could backfire and result in worse education, not better.
Nietzsche and Kirkegaard would agree with him, he says--if they weren't dead.
Michigan Virtual University has developed a set of standards for designing and developing online courses. They have made the standards 'open source' including a downloaded Course Evaluator.
Their philosophy of design, as stated on their web site is:
The application of ID, referred to as Instructional Technology, is rigorous and takes time to complete. This requires more planning, preparation and effort for designers. However, when applied, produce more efficient, effective and appealing instruction for the learner.
All of our standards are based on ID principles and not specific practices. Principles such as active engagement of the learner, appropriate practice and feedback, evaluation, establishment of goals and objectives, and mapping to real world performance are all vital to our process (Yelon and Berge, 1988; Yelon, 1996).
We also believe that the technological learning environment should be as 'transparent' as possible. In other words, navigation, layout, access and speed should be designed in such a way that the learner can concentrate on the material instead of worrying about the delivery vehicle, thus reducing anxiety and increasing learning.
Real learning is measurable and must be measured. All online instruction activities should be tested to find out if they are effective. Though helpful, we believe that evaluations should go beyond "did you like the course?" to "what did you score on the evaluation that determines whether you learned something?"
The OID standards themselves are divided into Technology, Usability, and Instructional Design categories.
According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the State University of New York at Buffalo has dropped its 18-month-old online MBA program.
Although they had planned for upwards of 1,000 students they only actually signed up 35.
Each course has to have an instructor, a graduate assistant, technical people to be there in case the connection breaks down, as well as someone to design the course," said Howard G. Foster, associate dean for academic programs at the business school. "We've found these courses to be very labor-intensive."
In addition, there was resistance from faculty members who aren't convinced about the effectiveness of online learning and an outside partner that failed to live up to its promises.
Clive Shepard, in his article, In Search of the Perfect e-Learner, explores the possibility that some people are better suited to e-learning than others. IT literacy, access to high-quality networks and hardware, a desire to think over responses, and different social needs may all contribute to e-learning success.
Different people sign up for classes for different reasons. Even the same person may want something different when it's a different topic or they're in a different stage of life. Sometimes skimming a topic gives the learner everything they're looking for. Sometimes deep immersion, lots of discussion and frequent testing are called for.
Tools that are useful in broadening the appeal of e-learning: dialogue, tutoring, regular assessment, a 'live' instructor.
According to an article in Fast Company, a spin-off from the University of Nebraska's Division of Continuing studies, class.com, is making a success of offering e-learning to students at approximately 4,200 high schools around the country.
It's an interesting article though it doesn't offer much detail about how class.com's success might be measured.
In addition, the impression is that its ongoing strategy for success assumes infinitely expanding time on the teachers part (let's add more students, expand the time they can expect you to respond to them, emphasize as much personal contact as they want, constantly restructure the course), no stress and/or an unending supply of non-burned out eager young teachers to replace the ones used up in the previous round of classes. E-learning done this way may work for the students, though the findings aren't yet conclusive, but we will need to develop a system that works for both teachers and students if we want it to be sustainable.
AOL is climbing onto the E-learning bandwagon with their launch of the AOL Online Campus, a portal offering access to a variety of online courses. The Online Campus is focusing on career advancement, degree courses, and personal enrichment (hmm...when you think about it, what other categories are there?).
In an article in InformationWeek.com, Terry Crane, AOL VP of information and education products, says that according to an AOL survey 65% of AOL users would like to take an online course. And that number jumps to 93% when offered as part of an AOL membership. Partners in the venture include University of Phoenix, University of California, Berkeley, Extension program, Keller School of Management and, according to Crane, thousands of other content partners.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~webteach/articles/discussion.html
Providing an online discussion component to a university class can have a number of benefits and also create new issues to contend with.
Benefits
Drawbacks
There are several kinds of discussions, both synchronous (chat) and asynchronous (discussion groups). How they are set up (single topic/threaded discussion) and what rules are established can influence who participates, what they contribute and how often they post.
http://www.chronicle.com/free/2001/11/2001112601u.htm
Creating web pages for all their courses is MIT’s first step in their Open Courseware Project designed to put all their class materials online so anyone can look at them. Right now they’re piloting and refining the process. Web skills of MIT professors vary widely--some use the Web extensively, some don’t use it at all. One of the challenges will be designing an interface that’s useful and that will be used by as large a group as possible.