Distance Learning

HISTORY

DIGITAL DIPLOMA MILLS: THE AUTOMATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The Military, Industrial, Educational Complex and the New CEO

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.

Virtual University - California state program fosters 'virtual' universities

Business Bennies

Online Courses Lead For-Profit Learning Trend

Moving Your Course to the Web

RESOURCES

GLOSSARY OF DISTANCE EDUCATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TERMS

PERIODICAL LITERATURE CITATIONS: ELECTRONIC LEARNING

Mailing List Resources

• Distance Education Mailing Lists discussion list
• International Centre for Distance Learning (ICDL) England

K -12 ONLINE SCHOOLS

• The U.S. Department of Education has released its first guide to evaluating K-12 online-learning programs. The report comes at a time when online education is growing rapidly, notes Education Week, and school districts have been turning increasingly to online courses to fill a range of instructional and support needs. But methods for evaluating online education have failed to keep up with its swift growth, varying application, and complexity. The 68-page guide, "Evaluating Online Learning: Challenges and Strategies for Success," draws lessons from seven recent evaluations of online programs and instructional resources. It was prepared by WestEd , Inc., based in San Francisco.
• 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.
• Online Schools Under Scrutiny
• 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.
• 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...
• Who owns the IP of K-12 Online Content?
• Buying K-12 Learning Management Systems

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 Intellectual Property Policy Addendum to The University of North Texas Health Science Center 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.

UT Who Owns What? Copyright Office Study on Distance Education

HIGHER ED COSTS

Ivory Tower Executive Suite Gets C.E.O. Level Salaries

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.

Online Worksheet - Helps Colleges Anticipate the Costs of Distance Education

Open Course Software A Wealth of Knowledge Free to the World

WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?
The complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at.
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:

1. If we build it they will come -- not so;
2. The kids will take to e-learning like ducks to water -- not quite;
3. E-learning will force a change in the way we teach -- not by a long shot.

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. . . "

Seven Points to Overcome to Make the Virtual University Viable

EVALUATE DISTANCE LEARNING

PROTECT YOURSELF How do you know if you are getting what you pay for?

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.

"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?

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

 

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,and communicate.
• Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
• Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
• The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
• Students' views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty.

Bad Distance Learning School
Warnings - Experiences

"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