Distance Learning
Evaluate Distance Learning: evaluate find the pro's and con's. Distance learning school programs Digital diploma, Accrediation and evaluate online schools.
- LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience. The Devils Dictionary - The Military, Industrial, Educational Complex and the New CEO
- Ivory Tower Executive Suite Gets C.E.O. Level Salaries
Father Guido Sarducci teaches what an average college graduate knows after five years from graduation in five minutes.
K -12 ONLINE LEARNING RESOURCES
- ONLINE SCHOOLS FLUNK AUDIT
A recently released state audit described a booming online education system with poor student performance, sloppy accounting and lax oversight of taxpayer dollars by the Colorado Department of Education. Just 7 percent of 10th-graders enrolled in online schools could do grade-level math, compared with 31 percent statewide during the 2005-06 school year. The audit team, which made 16 recommendations, urged the Education Department to place a moratorium on new public online schools until problems revealed in the audit are fixed. From 2003 to 2006, the number of online schools in Colorado has increased from 12 to 18, and the number of students has more than tripled -- from 1,900 to about 6,200 -- according to the report. Annual funding for online schools jumped from $8.4 million to $32.8 million during the same period. But there has been little to no state monitoring over the quality of those students' education or how those public tax dollars are being spent, reports Karen Rouse and Jennifer Brown in the Denver Post. Rather, the report detailed a troubled system in which students enrolled in online schools performed worse on state reading, writing and math exams than their peers across the state for the last three years; online students dropped out or repeated grades at higher rates than students statewide; and at least five online schools appeared to violate requirements that teachers are highly qualified. Auditors also found that public dollars were subsidizing private school tuition at some Hope Online learning centers. - 2007 1 Million in all the K-12 online classes across the US Los Angeles Times reports . It cites figures from the North American Council for Online Learning projecting growth of 30% a year. "Nearly half the states offer public school classes online, and last year Michigan became the first in the nation to require students to take an online course to graduate from high school. In California, a state senator introduced a bill last week to allow public high school students to take online classes without depriving schools of the state funding they receive for attendance." Why do students enroll? "Online schools are also popular with home-schooled children, with students who are devoting large blocks of time to such activities as ballet, acting or tennis, as well as students who don't enjoy a traditional school atmosphere or who need to work.
- K - 12 Homeschooling Resources
- Who owns the IP of K-12 Online Content?
- Buying K-12 Learning Management Systems
EVALUATE DISTANCE LEARNING
ONLINE EDUCATION TRENDS
PROTECT YOURSELF
How do you know if you are getting what you pay for?
2007
"Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006" The Complete report is the fourth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group and the Sloan Consortium. The , based on responses from over 2,200 colleges and universities, addresses these questions:
-- Has the growth of online enrollments begun to plateau?
-- Who is learning online?
-- What types of institutions have online offerings?
-- Have perceptions of quality changed for online offerings?
-- What are the barriers to widespread adoption of online education?
Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative that "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education."
Some key trends that the report calls attention to include
-- Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate,
-- Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
-- Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync
-- The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are
-- Students' views of what is and what is not technology are
2006
WHO BESTOWS ACCREDITATION TO ONLINE SCHOOLS? A regionally accredited college will generally fully accept all your credit in transfer by other regionally accredited colleges. Credits and degrees earned at non-regionally accredited universities are not commonly accepted in transfer by regionally accredited institutions.
"Assessing Consumer Attitudes toward Online Education
WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?
The complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf.
The Weatherstation Project was conceived as "an antidote to those first descriptions of the market for e-learning, which were often warped by missing data and overly hopeful assumptions about how quickly new products would come to market and how receptive learners and instructors were likely to be."
"Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to E-learning and Why" presents the results of the Weatherstation Project of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania. This study sought to answer the question "Why did the boom in e-learning go bust?" Over an eighteen-month period authors Robert Zemsky, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and William F. Massy, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, tracked faculty and staff attitudes towards e-learning at six colleges and universities. Their findings challenged three prevalent e-learning assumptions:
- If we build it they will come -- not so;
- The kids will take to e-learning like ducks to water -- not quite;
- E-learning will force a change in the way we teach -- not by a long shot.
The MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion Report
"In 2004 the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America created a task force to examine current standards and emerging trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English and foreign language departments in the United States. The MLA survey showed that well over 20% of tenure-track faculty members leave the departments that originally hired them before they come up for tenure. Data from studies conducted by other groups suggest that fewer than 40% of the PhD recipients who make up the pool of applicants for tenure-track positions obtain such positions and go through the tenure process at the institutions where they are initially hired, and a somewhat larger number of modern language doctorate recipients—more than 40%—never obtain tenure-track appointments. In the aggregate, then, PhDs in the fields represented by the MLA appear to have about a 35% chance of getting tenure.loads. Over 62% of all departments report that publication has increased in importance in tenure decisions over the last ten years. The % of departments ranking scholarship of primary importance (over teaching) has more than doubled since the last comparable survey, conducted by Thomas Wilcox in 1968: from 35.4% to 75.7% (Comprehensive Survey 36).
The status of the monograph as a gold standard is confirmed by the expectation in almost one-third of all departments surveyed (32.9%) of progress toward completion of a second book for tenure. This expectation is even higher in doctorate-granting institutions, where 49.8% of departments now demand progress toward a second book. While publication expectations for tenure and promotion have increased, the value that departments place on scholarly activity outside monograph publication remains within a fairly restricted range. Refereed journal articles continue to be valued in tenure evaluations; only 1.6% of responding departments rated refereed journal articles “not important” in tenure and promotion decisions. Other activities were more widely devalued. Translations were rated “not important” by 30.4% of departments (including 31.3% of foreign language departments), as were textbooks by 28.9% of departments, bibliographic scholarship by 28.8% of departments, scholarly editions by 20% of departments, and editing a scholarly journal by 20.7% of departments. Even more troubling is the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format.
An Analysis of WebCT, BSCW, and BlackBoard by Paul Pavlik Collaboration, Sharing and Society /Teaching, Learning and Technical Considerations
- Distance Learning Just as good?
Find out if Distance Learning is just as good as the conventional way - 24 Measures of Quality in Internet-Based Distance Learning
- Evaluating Online Courses
- Problems with Distance Learning and the Research
- Economics of Education Review
- Higher Education Policy
- Review of Higher Education
- Society for College and University Planning
WORKSHEETS
Interactive worksheet to help administrators calculate the price tag for creating an online program developed by Brian M. Morgan director of the center for instructional technology at Marshall University. Online education can be an expensive proposition, with many hidden costs. Interactive Worksheet
Online Worksheet - Helps Colleges Anticipate the Costs of Distance Education
The Distance Learning Business and Higher ED
DIGITAL DIPLOMA MILLS:
THE AUTOMATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION
"Online Education's Drawbacks Include Misunderstood E-Mail Messages, Panelists Say" by Jeffrey R. Young, How the Internet is affecting interaction between faculty and students, see THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, June 11, 2002
Virtual University -
California state program fosters 'virtual' universities
Net Could Change Education
BOSTON--Without ever taking a seat in a classroom, millions of students around the world will soon be able to earn a diploma by taking courses over the Internet, computer industry leaders said.
THE POWER OF THE INTERNET FOR LEARNING: MOVING FROM PROMISE TO PRACTICE, 169-page pdf report constitutes the "most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of education and the Internet." Final report of the Web-Based Education Commission to the President and the Congress of the United States (WBEC) online.
"Is Anyone Making Money on Distance Education?" (CHE, February 16, 2001, p. A41) "While distance-education programs are not going under like their dot-com counterparts, administrators are recognizing that the costs of expanding programs are -- in some cases -- greater than had been anticipated," writes Sarah Carr inAnd "[s]ome researchers describe the list of potential costs as never-ending and, in the final analysis, unknowable."
"Author Says Colleges Must Reallocate Money to Academic Technology" (by Florence Olsen, CHE, February 27, 2001, A. W. (Tony) Bates, director of distance education and technology in the Continuing Studies Division at the University of British Columbia, says that "colleges will have to reallocate money from other accounts to pay for essential academic-technology projects. And that's easier said than done. . . "
Bad Distance Learning School Warnings - Experiences
Seven Points to Overcome to Make the Virtual University Viable
OWNERSHIP - DISTANCE EDUCATION, INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY, COPYRIGHT
Who Owns On-Line Courses? Colleges and Professors Start to Sort It Out The varying policies, on control and royalties, are increasingly the subject of contract talks
Addendum to The University of North Texas Health Science Center Intellectual Property Policy Distributed Learning Creation, Use, Ownership, Royalties, Revision and Distribution of ELECTRONICALLY DEVELOPED COURSE MATERIALS AGREEMENT
American Association of University Professors suggests these guidelines for negotiating ownership.
Copyright Office Study on Distance Education
Distance Education Copyright Management Center
HIGHER ED SCHOOLS AND TRAINING
FREE SOURCES - OPEN COURSE SOFTWARE
A Wealth of Knowledge Free to the World
- The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is pleased to welcome you to the initial phase of its pilot OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, providing free and open access to the School's most popular courses to students, self learners, and educators anywhere in the world.
- MIT's OpenCourseWare: A free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
- CADDIE.NET Course Server Portal, http://ken.mit.edu/DevShell/desktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=301 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has built a portal-development application designed to help institutions set up and manage distance-education programs. Called Caddie.net, the software, which can be downloaded free, allows users to build various portals for the different aspects of a distance-education program. Portals can be built, for example, for registration, course management, or online testing. the application is similar to those sold by Blackboard or WebCT. that you can control yourself. Developed to be highly scalable across institutions and countries, it can support an unlimited number of courses and students. The CADDIE Collaborative Architectures for a Distributed Instructional Environment is designed to take advantage of the wide range of collaboration technology available on today's highly calable Web Platforms, including messenger, voice over IP and real time and streaming video.
- Online school & Projects
1997 (kept for historical context)
The School Study Council has launched SSCOnline, a new virtual campus that offers small, highly interactive classes customized by each instructor. The 10 week graduate level courses...
Distance Learning | courses | mba | programs and educational degree
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- Distance Learning Listserv
- International Centre for Distance Learning (ICDL) England
