Real Outreach to Students - Simply Well Done

I'm happy to share this excellent, but very simple, UStream video share of a live university event.  In this case, it's a tuition hearing - but the event is not the point.  What's important here is that the event is broadcast in real time and available for students off campus either live or as an archived video.  What an excellent effort using a common tool and inexpensive equipment.  My contgratulations to all those responsible, and to the hearing participants who were willing to share the important event.  Good work that needs to be acknowledged.

eLearn: Best Practices - 10 Ways to Ensure Distance Learning Success

eLearn: Best Practices - 10 Ways to Ensure Distance Learning Success: "10 Ways to Ensure Distance Learning Success

By Cindy Wolfe, University of Phoenix

December 17, 2009
Distance learning students must take a far more active role in learning and accessing information than traditional students in face-to-face classrooms. Written messages or posts from the professor and classmates replace other means of direct communication, and course materials are posted online. Rather than simply sitting through a class and jotting notes, you must take the initiative to download and read lectures and course materials."

Ms. Wolfe's excellent article has me thinking about student responsibility for learning. It's an interesting, but often overlooked concept. So, who is responsible for learning?

At the institutional level - we see universities contorting themselves to insure student "success". Fine. At the classroom level, we see courses designed and taught to insure student "success". We see a wide range of auxiliary and anciliary staff to support student learning (e.g. tutors, advisors, mentors). At the broadest levels of policy debate we see this concept playing out in the conversation about what role states and federal government play in higher education - through funding, accountability, and policy-making. Is it, in fact, the responsibility [or best interest] of the state to provide citizens with higher education [or make it accessible]? What responsibility does the individual citizen have when it comes to educating themselves beyond high school?

I don't have the answers here, but today's blog begins what I hope will be an ongoing exploration of these topics. Stay tuned...

In defense of online learning - a balanced approach

Nice article.  Sorry I missed this before.

Online Learning: Reaching Out to the Skeptics - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Teaching is so complex that categorical distinctions—traditional courses are superior; online, inferior; or vice versa—are far too simplistic to take seriously as a basis for institutional decision making.

Professionals with many years of experience and a track record of proven success should be allowed, within appropriate boundaries, to exercise their own judgment about the best ways to reach their students. On the other hand, the rhetoric of traditionalism can sometimes be more than a legitimate assertion of time-tested personal experience; it can be a mask for understandable but counterproductive attitudes and emotions.

---

Thomas Benton's excellent article in the September 18th Chronicle of Higher Education is a well-reasoned discussion of how we should approach the topic of instructional delivery methods.  Of particular interest are the seven goals.

---

Obviously, some faculty members have convictions that no amount of evidence to the contrary can change. But I think there are increasing numbers of teachers who, while mildly skeptical, are at least open to the idea of experimentation. Persuading them to recognize the possibilities of new technologies has at least seven interlocking components:

1. Move away from a dichotomous view of teaching as online or face to face, and toward the idea that all courses can potentially involve both methods.

2. Create opportunities for consultation and collaboration among faculty members, librarians, and technologists.

3. Eliminate most of the uncertainties and technical problems faced by faculty members who would like to try new methods but don't know how and lack the equipment.

4. Provide continuing support to faculty members who experiment with new teaching methods, not just during the development phase of a course but throughout its implementation, so that teachers can learn and adapt "on the ground."

5. Find new ways to streamline the process of developing online content and managing courses to protect the time of faculty members.

6. Reduce the isolation of teachers by promoting the development of collaborative new-media projects—with students as well as other faculty members—as a legitimate and recognized supplement to traditional, solitary research production.

7. Show the effectiveness and complementarity of different approaches to teaching, taking care that assessment instruments do not skew the results.

---

And in conclusion, he really gets the obvious, but often ignored part of the job for those of us in the elearning support business.

---

Ultimately, the quality of the teacher and the effort put forth by the individual student are more important than any specific method. A method that fails for one person can succeed for another, and so I want to keep the chalkboard, the overhead projector, and the cross-legged conversation under the trees just as much as I'd like to see more faculty members supplement their traditional teaching with a variety of new-media and online projects.

This is a test of the mobile blogging feature. Sent from my cell phone.

Developing the Educational Widget - undergraduate courses

In a very insightful interview, Kevin Carey provides a glimpse of several attempts in the direction of innovation in higher education by a private sector, for-profit company.  I'm not talking about publishers or software vendors, the interests of whom are not likely to demand innovation anytime soon. No, this is a genuine attempt to develop an education widget (I use the term with some affection) - the undergraduate course.  As difficult as it is for us to admit, the delivery of undergraduate courses is, more a required component of university campus practices than it is a demonstrably effective method of teaching and learning.  Is it possible, therefore, to build the widgets and sell them online to a group of students who willingly and knowingly buy them?

I recommend the whole article, but these two concluding statements caught my attention.

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly

Which means the day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.