Distance Course on Electronic Democracy and Identity Theft

I recently had a discussion with a colleague at a medium sized university.

The question was - 'How can we reach new clienteles?"

I suggested offering an all distance learning class I've developed and which attracts large numbers of students and has gotten excellent reviews.

My colleague said "We are not that kind of university. Maybe in the summer of you have a month or two we can schedule it and you can come and tech".

"That kind of university?!" Is that like "I AM NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL?!"

The perception out there (and even "in here") seems to still be that distance learning (i.e. all web based classes) are only for Phoenix University or the even less "respected" fly-by-night degree mills.

This is astonishing and shows that we in the IT, Distance Education community have done a lousy job in educating university folks on the sophisticated and high quality education we can now offer at a distance.

We have a long way to go. And we need to go out there and educate!

Posted by Steffen at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently became frustrated because many of the students in my distance learning class are not "coming to class" on my WebCT site as often as they should. So, I decided to record and post a short video explaining what I believe a distance learning class is all about and what the student obligations are. (This example is from Coastal Policy class).

The video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an8rZyqCXW0

I received several e-mails from students in the class thanking me for giving them specific advice on how they should deal with a distance class. Apparently they could not figger out how to do this on their own!

* do the readings in a timely manner
*"come to class" frequenlty - log one once a day
*post discussion when they are due and be serious about your postings
*treat this the same as you would a face-to-face class

Another point I need to make is that we are discovering that now 75%of the Internet bandwidth is being used by streaming media (mostly digital video). I have been shooting, editing, and putting short mini lectures (many shot in the field out on beaches around the world) for many years. I found ISU to be very unhelpful in this regard and I had to pretty much scrounge around for help.

Now i plan to develop a whole series of small docu-lectures and post them on YouTube. ISU still has no user freindly video serving system except Camtasia. We need a revolution in this regard!

Posted by Steffen at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)