Clicks & Mortar - Online & Distance Learning in Higher Education

Largest Online Course Ever...

2012-02-06T06:56:00.000-08:00

How many students can you satisfactorily teach in an online class? Well, most people would say about 20-25 students is the maximum for most online classes, but what about 160,000 students in one class? Well, that is exactly what Sebastien Thrun did in his online class at Standford University in fall 2011. As part of Standford's initiative to put Thrun's course online, he decided he would open his class to anyone anywhere in the world who wanted to take it along with the 200 or so students in his face-to-face class. Online students would cover same materials and take same exams and assessments as F2F class. Of the 160,000 students, Thrun reported 248 students passed with a perfect score. And while the completion rate was about 12 percent, his face-to-face class dropped from 200 students to 30 because students left the F2F classroom for the online version because they felt it was more intimate and better than the live classroom version. Thrun has now started a new online called Udacity and he hopes to enroll 500,000 students in his next course offering on building a search engine. Thrun feels this is portent of the future of higher education wordlwide and the demonstrable proof of the relevancy and enormous potential of online education. Read more Here.

Watch Sebastien Thrun talk about this experience Here.

eBooks Getting eConomical

2012-01-19T05:25:00.000-08:00

The eTextbook movement just got a big push and might not be long before the hardcopy textbook market disappears from the higher education landscape in America. Inside Higher Ed reported that Internet2, a consortium of 221 colleges and universities agreed with MacGraw Hill to pilot a discount program on ebooks that could mean big savings to students and move the campus-based brick and mortar book stores one step closer to shuttering its doors. Read it Here. Basically the idea behind the consortium's strategy is that individually students can't make the book publisher reduce costs on eBooks to where they are a much better deal than hardcopies, but collectively institutions can negotiate better prices for their students and really drive this trend to market. Bottom line is that this approach is another portent of doom for the traditional textbook business in higher ed. Makes sense considering most campus bookstores are run by big box third-party book retailers these days and they are disappearing like arctic ice flows. Have you seen a Barnes and Noble bookstore or a Walden Books on the block lately? They started leaving town shortly after Tower Records.

iPads or iFads?

2012-01-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

Interesting article from Doug Ward in the The Chronicle about the iPad. Read it Here. It really re-enforces my view of the iPad as a boutique web browsing device. Now before you accuse me of being a Luddite, hear me out. Ward is a professor at U of Kansas. He had all his students use iPads in a technology course for a semester and here's what was learned. Ward's students felt that laptops were still more functional than iPads for most of things they needed to do as students and they felt that the mobile phone is still more convenient than an iPad for the thing that they do most, which is texting. In the end the iPad became just one more piece of technology they didn’t want to lug around. According to Ward, they were frustrated by the iPad's lack of functionality (lack of a mouse, lack of a USB port, and a virtual keyboard that favors two-finger typing).

But they found the iPad was useful for reading and viewing things online which is basically what the iPad is - a presentation device. Even for reading, though, the iPad was a runnerup to the Kindle in one student's mind. She reported that if she were choosing a device for reading e-books, she’d buy a Kindle. In her mind, it is cheaper, is easier on the eyes and offers fewer distractions than an iPad.

Ward felt if you really want to make iPads useful in your course you need to create what Marc Prensky calls “Digital Native methodologies,” a term that refers to digital pedagogies amenable to the iPads limitations. In other words, Ward says you must change your assignments to match the technology you are using in your class.

So if you have a cohort or controlled setting you could give all your students iPads and develop all your course materials and activities to be delivered through the iPad and it would be enormously useful for your students. But why would you limit your educational approaches to the constraints of a piece of technology? And few schools, especially adult and continuing education providers have control over the devices their students use to access educational materials so it would be foolhardy to make the product suitable for a single device.

Furthermore, placing technology before pedagogy goes against the grain of research-based, proven methodologies for education that say you should base pedagogy on outcomes and then teaching strategies and then determine the appropriate technology to support them. You don't design education to match the latest technology; you identify the educational outcomes needed and then find an appropriate technology to meet those needs. So after selling possibly 30 million of these devices so far, the Apple iPad may still be more IFad than anything else in terms of educational value.

We Don't Need No Badges...

2012-01-11T08:20:00.001-08:00

Maybe the banditos in Humphrey Bogart's film Treasure of the Sierra Madre didn't have any use for badges but badges are finding a following with today's 21st century adult learners . Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story on how badges are becoming the latest fad in online learning. It's sort of a new take on the old certificate programs which were more economical and time-saving than a traditional degree but provided the essential skills or learning adults needed for a particular skill or job. I think badges are a good idea for demonstrating mastery of a particular topic but colleges and universities need to be careful that the badge approach doesn't diminish the value of the more indepth and rigorous degree programs that are their bread and butter. The emergence of badges does point to the need for colleges and universities to emphasize outcomes in their programs more and more since one of the ways you will be able to differentiate the value between badges and full-blown degrees is the difference in proficiency among students who hold them. Read more at the Chronicle.

Cheaper to Go Digital

2011-12-06T06:30:00.001-08:00

Everyone keeps wondering why online education hasn't tipped the scale in favor of ebooks over textbooks, but that tipping point may have occurred sometime in the last year according the Huffington Post. In the Education section Tom Vander Ark says that it is cheaper to give a student an ebook or tablet loaded with course reading than it is to buy a backpack full of books today; and they will definitely have more access to online content with a digital device; you connect to the Web from a hardcover right? So what are we waiting for? Read more at Huff Post here.

Online Learning Setback in Colorado

2011-10-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

Students attending Colorado’s multiple online secondary education programs trailed their Face-to-Face classmates on nearly every academic indicator according to a recent report. From test scores to to high school graduation rates, the results of kids who participated in online programs for two years declined by double-digits in some cases. Colorado's online schools also had the highest dropout rates and lowest graduation rates in the state for the last two years. Now you could ask is it the online education or the standardized testing that is off kilter here because some parents feel their children learned and had more success in these schools despite the test scores. And remember that the online schools are usually a last resort for students who failed out of the traditional classrooms. But I think what is more telling is the way Colorado went about delivering online education to its high school students. They went with big box vendors like K-12 to provide the courses and programs. That means less ownership of the materials and the program for the teachers who need to deliver the courses to the students and definitely less professional development in online facilitation for the teachers. The teachers are still the most effective and important component of any online delivery that I have participated in or observed so far. And when there is little or no ownership of the content and insufficient development of the facilitators, you usually have poor online education. That's why I have always said that you need to develop online educators in these programs, not just online courses. Programs that I' ve helped initiate in Massachusetts focus entirely on having the teachers become online students before they ever teach an online class and we emphasize that the teachers participate in the development of the courses and truly learn best practices and standards for designing and delivering online education. This results in sustainable online education in the schools because the teachers and district own the courses and they have the skills to revise them any time they wish. The problem with dealing with vendors is once they go away you usually are left with online programs that don't have the skills nor the capacity to sustain. And in some cases the learning my be questionable as well

Read more in Education Week by clicking Here.

Who's Most Invested in Online Education

2011-09-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

Eduventures recently released the results of a survey they did with 316 institutions from community colleges to four-year public and private institutions on how heavily invested they were in online learning and faculty training to prepare for it. And while 88% of Community Colleges and 84% of Public 4-year institutions reported being either “Engaged” or “Fully Committed” to online learning (surprising only 11 percent of the four-year publics were Fully Committed), the For-Profit four-year schools led the way with 42 percent being fully committed to online education. Faculty training and preparation was a surprise too. Most public and private four-year schools don't have comprehensive training to prepare faculty to teach online. Only ¼ of faculty at public and private four-year institutions is prepared for online instruction. Only 2.4 percent of the public four-year schools felt 90-100 percent or their faculty were prepared to teach online and 4,7 percent of the private non-profits trained 90-100 percent of the their faculty. Considering that nearly 25 percent of these institutions say they want to move between 80-100 percent of their programs online in the next three years, they have a lot of training to do.

2011-07-12T10:55:00.001-07:00

You'd think a prestigious institution like North Caroline and its highly-regarded Kenan-Flagler business school would have a more sophisticated view about online education, but the surprises keep coming. Click Here to read about UNC's business school "groundbreaking" leap into the future reported in the Wall Street Journal. There are a couple of wrong assumptions going on at UNC. First, UNC officials believe that "in 20 years" most business schools will want to get into online education. I might shorten that timeframe by a couple of decades folks, considering the way EMBANET and other third-party vendors are gobbling up well-regarded MBA programs like a scene out of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Second, associate dean Doug Shackleford's comment that online education does not have a "sterling reputation" seems dated given the numerous studies and reports indicating no significant difference between learning modalities, including the U.S. Dept. of Education's meta-study that found hybrid and online superior modalities to face-to-face given the expanded opportunities for time-on-task, collaboration, access, flexibility, and the general notion that online faculty are often more engaged in their courses than in face-to-face. I guess online detractors think if they keep saying it enough times people will continue to believe them. Yet online is growing by 21 percent annually according to Sloan C while onground inches along at 1.8 percent growth. I think the people are voting with their feet, or keypads, on this issue. And third, UNC officials feel online will be more attractive only to students who live too far away from campus to attend in person. My bet is they will find that the online MBA will enormously popular with students within driving distance as well as students who live too far to commute. The online MBA will boost enrollments all around and it will do it without cannibalizing the the F2F enrollments they already have. People need to realize online is about flexibility, convenience, access, and 7x24 teaching and learning. It is not geared toward the students who cannot come to campus; they choose not come to campus because of life constraints such as family, work. or other commitments. But good luck to UNC; they are making the right decision to join the 21st Century.

For-Profit Schools Lead the Way in Federal Student Loan Defaults

2011-06-03T06:57:00.001-07:00

There is one category that for-profit institutions lead all others in higher education, and that's in students defaulting on federal loans. For example, for-profit schools like University of Phoenix educate only 12 percent of the students in U.S. post-secondary education, yet they receive about 25 percent of all federal student aid and make up nearly 50 percent of the student loan dollars in default. Read more about the rise in federal student loan defaults Here in The Chronicle. No wonder the Feds are trying to put some restraints on the for-profits with the "Gainful Employment' rule.

Publishers Try to Mimic ITunes with eBooks

2011-06-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take an MBA to figure out that the best way for the educational titles publishing industry to move into the 21st Century is to mimic the success iTunes had with music and sell chapters of books instead of clinging to the expensive textbook model. But it is interesting to see the perspective they are putting on this approach of selling eBook chapters. They think the economics of the issue is the big battle; if they offer chapters at $3.99 per on the iPad with Inkling then students will flock to the new format. But the naysayers say the old textbook isn't dead because students like to resell their expensive books Sure, student's like the idea of getting cash back at the end of the semester, but most people will catch on to the idea that it is better not to pay too much t begin with. I think the real issue is access and flexibility, along with the economics. Get me access to the textbooks I need for class, inexpensively, and on whatever most common devices, say I prefer iPad, Kindle, or PC, and that is the model that will drive the adoption of eBooks. Read The Chronicle's story Here on this topic.

Skype Was Never Really Free for Universities

2011-05-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

You can't miss what you never really had... That's the way I look at Microsoft's intended acquisition of the ubiquitous and free Skype voice/video instant messenger. A lot of schools and colleges have used the tool for free since its launch in 2003; but if you read the fineprint it was always intended for personal use; if you were using it as an enterprise tool in the way that most schools and colleges are using it, you should have been paying for an enterprise license. The free ride is probably nearing an end; institutions are going to have to pony up for enterprise licenses now that Microsoft is calling the shots on this application. Read this to learn more about Microsoft's plans to productize Skype. Many of the larger schools that have been pitching Skype to faculty and students over the years without paying for it better hope Ebay wasn't tracking their usage because they may be looking at some retroactive billing in the same way the recording industry tried to collect from all the pirate sites like Naptster years ago.

Mobile Devices Are on the Verge of Changing Education... Again

2011-02-17T07:44:00.001-08:00

It's been a while but this one needs commentary; Chronicle of Higher Ed broke that mobile devices are one year away from changing education as we know it, according to the 2011 Horizons report; Again! In fact, this is the third year in a row Horizons has reported this; it is bound to happen sometime soon fellas; click here for the story. The thing about mobile devices that most of these people don't get is the word mobile! You want online education that you can use on the go; but most sane, practical individuals don't want online education entirely targeted at mobile devices. They want to do what they can on their handhelds and and do everything else on more suitable devices. Try as you might with min-keypads, mini-mouse, mini-printer, and mini-whatever else, all you iPad users out there really don't want to write a thesis on such half-way there devices do you? In reality, if you want to scale all your online courses so everything can be done on a mobile device, it will require a limited and rigid course framework that eliminates many of the things that make online advantageous. I'm all for supporting mobile technolgy in education but except for extreme or specific circumstances, why limit the potential of technology-mediated education to a mere mobile device?

Online Growth Continues to Beat Classroom Growth in 2009

2010-12-04T08:18:00.001-08:00

Online growth continues to expand; Sloan Consortium reports 5.6 million students took at least one online course in fall 2009. That's a million more than the previous fall. Online's growth rate drastically outpaced classroom growth 21 percent to 2 percent. Click Here for the whole article at the Sloan C site.

iPad Tablet Space is About to Get More Crowded

2010-10-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

Just when I was starting to warm up to the idea of the iPad Samsung, Cisco, Blackberry and others are about to make the tablet computer space a lot more interesting and competitive in both price and performance. Click Here to read TechRepublic's review the challengers.

Moore's Law Revisited $35 Laptops from India

2010-08-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

One of the big issues facing educational technologists today is how to get the access our students need to make use of all the helpful resources in cyberspace. Cheap laptops are not cheap enough to give every student one with Ipads going for $500 and netbooks hovering around $300 each. And school-based computer labs are a colossal waste of money because they are unsustainable long-term and cannot provide the immense scalability and accessibility needed to keep pace with the technology needs of today's teachers and learners. So if you were thinking of plunking down a million-plus for a computer lab at your school or you were thinking of dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy everyone trendy, but semi-functional iPads, you might want to hold that thought for a while. With a 63 percent literacy rate, India is a classic case of supply and demand for scalable, sustainable educational technology; India's government has been pursuing the idea of a cheap laptop to put technology in the hands of all their students so they can learn the 21st century way for a while. In a classic case of Moore's Law wherein computer hardware gets faster and cheaper exponentially as time goes on, India's promise of a $35 wireless-enabled, fully-functional laptop with 2GB of memory seems like the tipping point where these devices will cost no more than a textbook yet provide the access and functionality for all to fully participate in 21st teaching and learning. India led the way with cellphones to the masses in the 1990s to create a telephony revolution in its country; now with plans to bring broadband to 250,000 villages and distribute laptops for $35 or less, it looks like India might become the model for scalable and economical educational technology as well. Click Here to read more about this new initiative from CNN's site.

A Business Case for Twitter

2010-07-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

Anytime I bring up Twitter for educational use I usually get a negative reaction but I always felt this could be a pretty useful social media tool for teaching and learning in the right hands. It is true that most people use it for pretty mundane purposes, but there are some educators out there using it effectively. Businessweek reported that some prestigious business schools such as Harvard, Columbia, and the Carroll School at Boston College are delivering courses in social media and Twitter is one of the applications they are featuring in these courses. With 190 million users out there and growing according to Businessweek, Twitter is one current technology that is worth harnessing to a business plan. Click Here to read more.

What's Better? Online or Face-2-Face?

2010-06-22T06:16:00.000-07:00

A new study from Northwestern University argues that face-to-face instruction is better for certain low achieving students when compared to online; Nathan Figlio, a professor at Northwestern, argues that live instruction benefits Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students over online instruction focused on the same materials. This research contradicts the recent DOE study that showed the advantages of online learning over classroom-based instruction. One problem with this study is its limitations; it basically compared the student testing results of watching a video on economics online or listening to a classroom lecture and how the students later performed in assessments; there is a lot more to effective online learning than video lectures; so the jury is still out on this one. Click Here to read more about this research.

The Real Deal for e-Reader Technology

2010-02-27T04:55:00.000-08:00

Staying on the topic of e-Readers, the proof may be in the software, not the hardware. I've felt all along that hardware-based readers are a big mistake for the the industry; it's all about access when it comes to information. How you get it should be up to you, not Apple or Google. So my feeling is the best way to tackle the e-Reader issue is to find software that can replicate the largest volume of books or content fastest and easiest in multiple formats while retaining the layout of the the original document. And lo and behold someone is doing just that! Blio software is releasing a product soon that allows students to access millions of books online, interact with the texts in full color and imagery, multimedia such as videos, from any device they like, with highlighting and annotation, and sharing! And it is free! I have a Kindle, but it is a pretty one-dimensional device, there is limited access to textbooks right now, and I use it for entertainment only at this point. The iPad is both here and there and something in between. It gets Apple in the e-Reader game but I am not sure what it is and I don't think Apple knows either yet. I call it a transitional technology. It is a piece of halfway hardware they sell for $499 until they can figure out which way the wind is blowing on the e-reader/ handheld computers. It is sort of the like bag mobile phone for those of us old enough to remember. Something to get by with until the real deal comes along. Blio might be the real deal. Click Here to learn more about Blio.

e-Readers Not Ready for Prime Time

2010-02-23T16:09:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of buzz about e-Readers like the Kindle and the IPad these days, but are college campuses really ready to go paperless with textbooks? Probably not. A recent study including Case Western, Princeton University, and the Darden School of Business at Virginia showed that while students liked the idea of the e-readers the lack of proper notetaking options and the limited display of the Kindle made the electronic reader somewhat undesirable as a full-time textbook tool. Couple that with the limited availability of textbooks and the fact that e-text are often not significantly cheaper than paper textbooks and sometimes available for limited time periods after purchase and you don't have a very compelling reason to make the switch. For instance, a typical e-textbook on CourseSmart, a bigtime publisher-backed online e-retailer of textbooks, lists for $33.86 for a 180 subscription to the book, about a semester's worth of time, while the actual hardcopy sells on Amazon.com for $42.23. So where's the value? Click Here to read more about the study.

Safeguarding Online Courses from Cheating

2009-10-23T12:34:00.001-07:00

Academic integrity in online courses is always a topic of discussion for newbie online faculty; apparently they think there is more cheating online than what is going on right under their noses in the F2F classrooms. It takes a long time to change perspectives, but one way to provide some reassurance is to give them best practices for diminishing cheating online. Our friends at the WCET came up with this handy "Cheat Sheet" for safeguarding online courses from an institutional level to a course level. Click Here to read about it.

Can You Do Engineering Programs Online?

2009-10-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

One thing that always comes up in distance learning conversations is what you can and can't do online. Personally, I think we can do anything online, and probably better, than face-to-face instruction, given enough time to think through the migration problems. Subjects that always come up in this conversation is science and engineering; two of the more challenging areas for online delivery. Most engineering programs do some form of streaming video with online labs on virtual machines and some sort of LMS-based asynchronous learning. One area that has been challenging is group work and code reviews. There are some existing products out there such as Codestriker and Mondarian, and now there is a new product out that might help make this part of the equation a little less problematic. Review Board is an application that lets you collect all the information needed for a full code review online including code changes and screen shots and make them available to your team or classmates to review and comment. You can write comments right into the lines of code and there is a discussion area and dashboard that summarizes reviews. This is just one tool there to make it easier to tackle difficult subjects online, but we'll look at more soon, Click here to read more about this product.

U.S. Falls From the Top of e-Learning Readiness

2009-10-04T16:53:00.000-07:00

Apparently the level of e-learning readiness in the United States rises and falls with the economy; that's what the Economist Intelligence Unit reports in this year's e-Learning readiness survey. The U.S. fell from first to fifth behind Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, and Norway in the latest report. The EIU ranks countries on a number of factors including technology infrastructure, economic climate, social and cultural environment, and government policy and vision. Click Here to read the full report.

Value Proposition for Online Learning at Traditional Research School

2009-10-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

What's the value proposition for faculty at traditional academic research institutions to move their courses from face-to-face to online learning? It's a tough question that many college administrators are wrestling with as distance education becomes a larger and larger presence on most campuses. The March or Die order that programs must convert to distance learning or lose enrollments doesn't wash with most traditional tenured academics because according to the U.S. Department of Education, college enrollments are increasing at degree granting institutions like never before. For example, enrollments rose by 14 percent between 1987 and 1997 and grew at an even faster rate (26 percent) between 1997 and 2007, from 14.5 million to 18.2 million, according to the U.S. But with 66 percent of degree-granting schools providing distance education programs it beginning to look like a party that you don't want to miss if you are forward-looking institution. So how do you convince reluctant faculty to embrace distance education? Well, one way to do it is to show them the proof that distance learning or technology-mediated instruction equals better student outcomes and greater learning. To help with that strategy I'm going to post research findings and studies that I come across that show the advantages of distance learning for college students. For starters, take a look at this study from Mark Grove and John O'Donoghue that provides some indicators of the advantages of online learning, but also raises some questions. Click Here to read the study from Online Learning Update.

Multimedia Presentations for Online Delivery

2009-09-13T18:04:00.000-07:00

If you don't know this already, you should familiarize yourself with some the multimedia tools used to provide more engaging lectures and instructor perspectives in your online courses. Products including Articulate and Adobe Presenter let you easily and quickly create multimedia lectures from your Powerpoint slide presentations, add audio narration, video, quizzes or exams, and more right from your desktop or laptop PC. Similar products like Profcast do the same thing for the Macintosh platform.

A sample Adobe Presenter presentation looks something like this. You can try it for yoursel for free with a 30 day trial at www.adobe.com/downloads. Click Here to watch this YouTube video of the powers of Presenter now.

Online Supports Credit Recovery in High Schools

2009-08-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

I've always felt that distance education was primed for providing advanced placement courses and curriculum enhancement courses rather than serving the equally important needs of at risk students, but current trends in online education for secondary schools indicates otherwise. A recent study released by the state of Indiana reports that 80 percent of respondents were using some type of distance education in their high schools and 65 percent of those respondents report they are using it for credit recovery followed by scheduling conflicts (32 percent). Click Here to read more in the Indiana Star. The study had a low response rate, but nonetheless, it shows people are using DE for remediation and seemingly having some success at it. Georgia is another state using this approach to help students recover from failing grades. Unfortunately, much of this approach is self-study with little or no instructor interaction, which I think is less effective distance learning in many cases. Click Here for the Georgia website.

Web 2.0 LMS Solutions? Is This the future?

2009-07-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

It's easy to see that as lifestyles and business needs go more and more in the mobile direction that education will have to follow suit. As much as centralized LMS vendors like Blackboard and others seem to know that and appear to be modeling building blocks in that direction, I think it is going to be too big a leap for them to make in the long run since they were founded on the traditional Western educational concept of isolating the classroom form the outside world, rather than the Deweyesque and Web-centric vision of making the world your classroom. However, there are some LMS vendors making small steps toward that vision and one them is Haiku which has an Embed the Web strategy as the foundation of its mission to deliver Web 2.0 and beyond learning in the virtual classroom. In my opinion Haiku is more of a step in the right direction than a next generation move into the future of delivering and managing online courses, but it is worth a look from a usability and cost-benefits standpoint, especially if you are a K-12 client who wants to put a few courses online to get started. Click Here to check out their homepage.

Distance Education is Better than Classroom Afterall...

2009-06-30T07:26:00.000-07:00

So maybe Richard Clarke was wrong afterall... A recent Department of Education report concluded that online education has definite advantages over face-to-face classroom instruction regarding teaching and learning. The DOE study found that online students performed better than face-to-face students taking the same course. It ranked the best modalities to instruction today as first, blended, second, online, and bringing up the rear, face-to-face. Click here to read the Inside Higher Ed article and link to the report.

Army Imitates Life

2009-06-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

In the past, military technological advancements often led to improvements in civilian life but here is one example of how civilian technology is paving the way for military innovation. U.S. Army commanders in Afghanistan are using the mega popular microblogger Twitter to update each other and the rest of world on how things are going in the Taliban theater. Click Here to read more about how the military is using Twitter and other Web 2.0 social networking tools to keep tabs on the war. Stateside the Boston police are using Twitter to report crime and crowd control during public events; they used Twitter to update people on arrests and crowd movement during the last St. Patrick's Day parade in South Boston. Click Here to read about it.

Affinity and Community in Online Programs

2009-06-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk about estalblishing community in online programs in higher education, but I really think what we are talking about is creating affinity with our online students, new and old. The distance learner is different from the day school student in that way. They care less about knowing where the next get-together is ocurring and more about getting services and support from their virtual institutions. I'm going to be looking at this in detail going forward but one way to get the ball rolling when creating affinity at your institution is connecting your prospective or enrolled students with someone who can help them when they visit your Website. And how do you do that? One way is to create a live chat tool on your site. They're fast, easy, and cheap to deploy and every school should have one! Click Here to see a list of the best ones out there right now.

Another One Bites the Dust

2009-05-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

It looks like the battle for the LMS landscape has taken another casualty. Michael Chasem CEO of Blackboard, announced that the leader in the academic LMS space has just purchased Angel. Chasen said it was a logical move since Blackboard is always interested in improving the customer experience and Angel has a great customer support model and innovative interface that Blackboard can take advantage off. No news on how Blackboard will combine forces with Angel but you can bet they won't handle it the way they did with Web CT Vista. Click Here to read more.

Storefront Higher Education

2009-03-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

If you are an entrepreneur, a good market to get into might be the for-profit distance education space. But I'm not talking about starting another U. of Phoenix... Instead, consider starting a service company that provides distance education for non-profit colleges and universities. This is an emerging trend that is growing like a tidal wave across United States campuses. Companies like Embanet, Higher ed Holdings, and others are designing and delivering higher education for many schools and colleges for a big cut of the profits with long term contracts. It's real education and it is designed under the guidance of master instructors from the campuses it's sold on under the school's brand, but some people think this amounts to nothing more than storefront college distributed by big higher education manufacturers with little differentiation between schools. Some feel it reduces selecting a degree program to deciding where to buy a pair of pants, Wal Mart, J.C. Penney, or Sears? They all sell the same things, more or less. So what do you base your decision on? Read this article from Inside Higher Education about how one company is making it easier for schools to deliver much needed distance education to students and the faculty are not happy about it. Click here to read about this more.

Northeastern University Online Distance Learning Graduate Certificate

2009-02-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in getting a formal foundation in the fundamentals of distance education for K-12, Higher Education, or business, Northeastern University Online has a graduate certificate for you. We started this program less than a year ago to help training and education professionals get a foothold in the growing distance education environment. To read more about Northeastern University's graduate certificate in distance education, click this this link: graduate certificate program.

Changing Demographics in Higher Education

2008-09-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting comments from the chancellor of the Nebraska State College system recently. According to Dr. Stan Carpenter a lot of things are changing in the Higher Education landscape these days, including:

- Distance education (DE)has improved accessibility to courses, of course, but the credibility of DE is also increasing as most chief academic officers now believe that the learning outcomes of their institutions’ online programs are comparable or better than their traditional programs.
- Today's students are different than students even a few years ago. He says they are different in their behaviors, different in their experiences and different in their expectations for your classrooms. He says "“we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve always done them - in what we feel is the traditional way."
- And finally,the United States is falling behind in the number of college graduates we produce. The U.S. had 1.3 million college graduates in 2006 compared to 3.1 million in India and 3.3 million in China. And those countries turn out a larger percentage of graduates in science and technology.
Click Here to read the complete article.

High Schools Go To College

2008-08-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

This is something I've always thought was a big problem with a no-brainer solution and it looks like it is finally gaining traction in the U.S. A recent Gallup Poll found that six out 10 Americans feel the senior year in high school is unproductive and needs to be revamped. So the solution to this problem is let's allow high school kids to earn college credits in their senior year and make it more worthwhile. In fact, nine out of 10 Americans polled believe students should be able to earn college credits while in high school accrording to the poll, which you can click here to view in the Chronicle for Higher Education. Locally schools like Southeastern Regional in Easton, MA have matriculation agreements with local community colleges for students to earn credits in health care and IT studies while still in secondary school. I think this is great for fields such as nursing, technology, service fields where shrinking or insufficent labor forces could be bolstered by an influx of lower paid but skilled entry-level workers from the high school ranks. These workers could continue to learn while work and earn paychecks.

Newsweek Recognizes Distance Education

2008-08-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

It's not exactly like making the cover of Rolling Stone, but you know you've made it when Newsweek magazine catches up with you. So distance education must have stepped from the shadows of alternative education to mainstream sometime in the last year or so if Newsweek is writing about its relevance. In a story on the emergence of distance education at elite colleges like Stanford and MIT Newsweek declared that the convergence of improved online programs and high gas prices has distance education on the map at most schools. Distance education enrollment is up by 100 percent at many schools. And according to Newsweek, University of Phoenix is on track to have 500,000 students by 2010. Newsweek writes that U.S. employers are still lagging in acceptance of online degrees, noting that 83 percent of U.S. hiring managers said in a June survey that online degrees are more accepted today than five years ago, but only 35 percent considered them equal to traditional degrees. And they quote the obligatory skeptical educator who fears that the profit-driven nature of some online programs and the loss of intimacy you allegedly get in a face-to-face classroom diminishes worth. Anita Levy from the American Association of University Professors say "You lose something by not having human contact." ButI'd argue that you have more intimacy with an online course because your students can contact you 7x24 by email, discussion forum, or in some cases, audio instance messaging. There's no where to hide online! In fact, I think Frank Mayadas from Sloan Consortium is a lot closer to the truth when he argues in the same article that Web-based learning is closer to students' future on-the-job realities. "Much business is now conducted online," says Mayadas. "Education is mimicking the way we conduct business, communicate and exchange ideas today." Touche Frank!
Click here to read the full article.

Windows Vista Problems Gives New Life to Macintosh

2008-07-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

One new study suggests IT professionals are taking a new look at the Macintosh platform due to Windows Vista's never ending problems. As reported in Campus Technology, a King Research survey of 1162 IT pros indicates that 60 percent of the respondents had no plans to implement Vista any time soon. But the bad news for Microsoft was that 42 percent of respondents said they were considering alternative operating systems, including the Mac OS. One expert believes we're headed for a more heterogeneous desktop environment with Macs running side-by-side Windows computers in most offices. Read the full article at:

http://www.1105newsletters.com/t.do?id=1436633:14931389

2008-07-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Synchronous applications such as Web conferencing and collaboration tools are in demand more and more in distance learning courses these days. Web conferencing tools with Voice over IP, file presentation, and desktop sharing are increasingly common in online programs, but the execution often leaves much to be desired. There are two ways to go these applications. You can buy a license from a vendor or use free tools with some limitations. The pay tools such as Wimba Live Classroom, Adobe Connect, and Elluminate are the leaders in this area in Higher Education, but they have moments of unreliability or even failure, leading to disappointment and sometimes slow adoption among faculty and staff. So why not try the free ones? One free Web conferencing application that looks promising is Vyew at http://vyew.com/. it has VoIP, Webcam, desktop sharing, and file presentation and it's free version lets you connect with up to 20 in unlimited meetings.

2008-07-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

Demand for online learning is high and there seems to be no end to the number of schools and colleges entering the elearning marketplace. But how do you separate the diploma mills from the legitimate post-secondary institutions in the virtual world? Well, now you can go to GetEducated.com (http://www.geteducated.com/) and get a thorough analysis of the quality of your online choices. GetEducated is an online counseling center for adult learners run by Vicky Phillips. It's a clearinghouse for showcasing accredited online degrees. But what's the difference between GetEducated and the clearinghouse-like advertisers you see on distance learning-related Websites? Unlike other online degree directories, GetEducated.com reviews and evaluates the programs on its site. Whereas the online advertisers simply list the schools and colleges that pay the most for the listing. Furthermore, GetEducated applies the following criteria to keep the diploma mills off its list:
►No unaccredited distance learning colleges.
►No Online colleges accredited by bogus agencies.
►No Degree mills – fake Internet universities.
One interesting service GetEducated provides is the Diploma Mill Police where you can pick from a list of colleges and get information on any general or local consumer warnings and accreditation information. While some known suspects survive the Diploma Mill scan it does call out schools without accreditation or any school that local or national consumer warnings against it. So it is a good first stop for checking out a potential school. And GetEducated has numerous links to Top Ten lists and buyer's guides for all types of online programs. They suggest if you suspect your choice of college may have a suspect accreditation, you should consult the Council on Higher Education Accreditation at http://www.chea.org/. As always follow the golden rule of consumerism Caveat Emptor: Buyer Beware! If you're looking to enroll in an online program, GetEducated might be the best choice in cyberspace to shop for your online degree.

2008-06-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

You may be running a creepy treehouse and you may not even know it. As defined by the blog Flexknowledgy (http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/) a creepy treehouse is a place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids. To visualize that concept in the world of higher education, they further define it as any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards. What this implies is anyone using the pseudo-tools found in many learning management systems such as Blackboard to deliver wikis, blogs, and so on, could be labeled landlords of a creepy treehouse and your students are reluctantly tenants thereof... According to the creepy treehouse effect anytime institutions try to mimic a successful social phenomena like facebook, myspace, or Web 2.0 tools like PBWiki or Blogspot, they impose a phony, closed environment on their audience and they almost always discourage or prevent the free-spiritedness and self-discovery that the original ideas or tools embodied. Blackboard sync may be another example of this phenomena. It's sort of like higher education's version of the rock or folk mass trying to lure reluctant teenagers to church on Sunday. Come on, kids, even staid, out of touch, hundreds if not thousands of years old institutions like us can be hip and cool, too! But somehow it just doesn't feel right!
I get what the critics are saying, and I agree with it on some level, but from a practical standpoint I see the value in many of the Web 2.0 tools and social networking environments leading LMS vendors are trying to provide to add value to their products in a world where the central LMS seems to be deconstructing before our eyes. I guess we need to know where to draw the line. For me, the primary issue with using many of the original or pre-existing applications in your LMS courses is training and support. If your faculty uses whatever tools they want in and outside of your LMS how do you handle support and training for that? How do you provide a simple, and easy approach to using your courses if everyone is doing something different? And some of these vendor tools are pretty useful and well-done, so I'm not sure it is a fair characterization in all instances. But you have to be aware of the student perspective out there. Students won't participate or use the vendor knock-off or imitation when the original is better and more suited to the millennial learner lifestyle of self-discovery and socio-educational networking. We have to determine how to bring our online programs and courseware into today's social networking mainstream and not the other way around. Again, I think the central LMS is losing importance for anything more than a gradebook and assignment function and the tools and applications that our customers use in their daily lives as students and professionals are becoming more and more significant so it is important that we make use of them in our seamlessly in our learning environments.

2008-04-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

The migration from Blackboard to alternative Learning Management Systems is underway at the community college level, according to a recent survey by Inside Higher Ed. While most respondents among the 154 colleges surveyed are still in the Blackboard camp, the numbers fell from 84 percent last year to 77 percent this year. In fact, 31 percent of respondents last year reported they were looking at other LMS vendors and some of them actually made the move as Moodle increased its share from four to 10 percent among respondents, and Angel and Desire2Learn also plucked customers from Blackboard.

2008-02-06T20:12:00.000-08:00

To Moodle or not to Moodle? That seems to be the big question these days as disatisfaction with established proprietary learning management systems rises at higher education institutions large and small. Many institutions are beginning to try out open source applications as a solution to their unfulfilled Learning Management System needs, and the one that seems to be generating the most buzz is Moodle. It stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle) and claims to have more than 38,000 registered sites deployed around the world and more than 16 million users. Certainly this free open source course manangement system (CMS) is growing by leaps and bounds, but the reality is that the bulk of these Moodle sites are sandboxes, minor corporate adoptions, or online gamer training sites for Runescape, Warcraft, and the like, rather than legitimate higher education distance learning sites. A recent EduVentures survey of more than 550 two-year and four-year colleges shows Moodle with about 7.8 percent of the market with Blackboard grabbing a whopping 66.3 percent market share. Proprietary LMS vendor Angel leads the rest of the pack with 4.1 percent followed by Desire2Learn (3.2 percent), Sakai (2.5 percent), e-College (1.6 percent) and others. Nonetheless, Moodle seems to cast a large shadow over the distance learning landscape long dominated by Blackboard and WebCT. Founded on a social constructionist pedegogy of constructivism andf constructionism (according to the Moodle community Website at Moodle.org), Moodle is heralded by its adopters as more robust, versatile, and more customizable than Blackboard or WebCT.
However, one question that no one seems to be willing or able to answer is how much their "free" open source system is costing them. Brandeis University just went through a major deployment of Moodle that required the services of more than 60 employess and endless hours of programming and support. The end result is a branded version of Moodle they are calling LATTE ( Learning and Teaching Technology Equipment) But ask them how much it all cost and they don't seem to have an exact number. MIT also deployed Moodle as a supplemental LMS using a team of programmers and a product manager, but no cost estimate is available. You don't need an MBA to figure out that the resources of 60 FTE's or even three or four FTE's and the server hardware and connectivity required to host and deliver an LMS easily costs a lot more than the $90,000 per year it costs to host a typical enterprise LMS with a vendor like Angel or Blackboard. And while I understand the unhappiness with Blackboard, which has had great difficulties handling its rapid growth the past few years, at this point, I feel that deploying Moodle as a Learning Management System in higher ed is akin to slaughtering your own cattle and growing your own vegtables to eat in the 21st Century. Why grow your own and farm the fields when there is economical, more than adequate proprietary solutions readily available from reliable vendors such as Angel, Learn.com, and others, who also offer hosting services. Supporters of Moodle like the idea that the application is built by educators for educators and it is less about online learning and more about building an online learning community. And third party hosting services like Site Ground (http://www.siteground.com/) are providing the server space and support for a fee to get schools up and running, just like the proprietary vendors. So there is some middle ground here.
Detractors claim Moodle might have great presentation, but its tools such as the Wiki and discussion boards are clunky and inferior to Blackboard's tools. In fact, after listening to a number of Moodle adopter presentations, it is difficult to determine how many of their issues with the traditional LMS are real problems or products of their own misunderstanding and lack of sophistication with their former LMS platforms.
But I guess you really know you made it when technical book publisher O'Reilly publish a second edition of Using Moodle: Extending the Chalk and Talk Classroom with Open Source CMS. Is a Moodle for Dummies far behind?
We all know there are a lot reasons for the migration from Blackboard. Lousiana State University dumped Blackboard for Moodle in 2007 because of rising costs, faculty unhappiness with Blackboard, and a preference for a more customizable, central LMS that was free (There's that word again).
UCLA also adopted Moodle as its central LMS. The list of adopters goes on and on. Even with all the defectors, Blackboard still appears to be the big cheese in real mission-critical distance learning. EduVentures sees continued Blackboard's dominance, with increasing but modest support for Moodle, Angel and others. But if Blackboard customers co,ntinue to abandon the classic LMS for the hipper Moodle, the 800 pound gorilla may turn into a 98 pound weakling overnight.

2008-01-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about how blogging has replaced traditional media on the presidential campaign trail as the primary source for voter information. Certainly candidates like Barack Obama and Ron Paul had a lot of success pushing their candidacies online instead of focusing on traditional media such as newspaper endorsements and the like. According to PEW research (March 2007), 71 percent of Americans use the Internet on a routine basis. About 39 percent of them read blogs as a source of their information. Likewise, blogging is becoming a staple course material in the world of distance learning. But how is it being used in online classes? Typically, blogging is used for podium-like presentations of student or teacher perspectives on a routine basis in an online course. For example, some students post weekly perspectives on politics or business, or national and international events in relation to current classroom themes or topics. Other students comment on these perspectives. In some instances, these student blogs in the virtual classroom have replaced the use of home pages or Web sites once used for similar puporses. Learning Management Systems, like Blackboard, have building blocks you can install so students can posts blogs right inside a virtual classroom easily instead of linking to external blogs. Other classroom bloggers post their papers and allow classmates to comment on them on. This is a resourceful way to provide peer editing in the online classroom. Student introductions is another way to use blogs in the online classroom. Each student starts a blog and introduces himself to the other students in the class and it builds a sense of community and continuous communication in the virtual classroom. And it doesn't have to compete with or replace current tools like discussion threads. while you can do almost anything you want with a blog, remember, blogs are most useful as podium-like tools that deliver comments, information, or perspectives from one to many and allow all to comment. Other tools like discussion boards or wikis are more collaborative in nature and intent and are better tools for group work on discussion topics and collaborative methods.

2007-09-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

You know distance learning is taking off when the media giants such as the New York Times are trying to partner with colleges and universities to sell e-learning to students. The New York Times recently announced they are planning to make courses available to various schools for a price, so the schools can then turn around and enroll students and use their instructors to teach the courses online for tuition. Colleges such as Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts are interested in this approach because it gets them into the e-learning game without putting out much cash for an e-learning infrastructure. The Times plans to charge a fee, say $10,000 per school, for access to their courses. Instructors would receive a stipend from the school they teach for in addition to their regular paycheck for their normal workload.
The problem with all this is that the course are non-credit and I think the world is just moving way too fast these days for anyone to pay serious money for non-credit e-learning anymore. Barnes and Noble tried a similar approach about five years ago where they offered free e-learning courses on many interesting and worthwhile subjects. Their profit motive was that you get the course for free but you must buy the textbooks from B&N. It didn't make it. And unless the Times figures out how to accredit their courses, I don't think their non-credit e-learning is going to make it either.

2007-03-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

With the proliferation of online programs at colleges and universities nationwide, there is some concern that the growth in online enrollments may begin to plateau. However, data gathered by the Sloan Consortium suggests a different trend altogether. In a report on the growth of distance learning in southern states, Sloan reports that 1.1 million students enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2005. And nationally 3.2 million students enrolled in online courses in fall 2005, which was a 34 percent increase over the previous year.
But while the numbers are still on the rise for enrollments in distance learning, especially in the South, the report suggests there is a greater concentration of online learners in undergraduate programs nationally, particularly associates degrees, compared to graduate programs. Sloan reports that both nationally and in the southern states, online learners are overwhelmingly undergraduates. And these learners are more likely to be studying at larger, public institutions rather than small, four-year colleges. These numbers appear to contradict what's happening locally in Boston where graduate studies seem to be on the rise on virtual campuses but the higher than average numbers of undergraduate degrees in the Boston area may account for that regional difference.
Meanwhile the number of academic leaders who feel online learning is critical to the growth of their schools continues to rise. with 58 percent of the respondents in agreement nationally. So academic leaders appear to recognize the trend toward online in student enrollments.

2006-10-29T10:40:00.001-08:00

Back in the days of the traditional live classroom life was easy. Students showed up at a scheduled time and you delivered lectures on your subject matter. The Internet changed everything. Electronic mail made communication between students and faculty easier and more convenient. Online classes shifted instruction from the bricks and mortar classroom to cyberspace and everything changed. Proprietary Learning Management Systems became part of our vocabulary. SCORM and ACC compliance became the standard for online delivery of courses. And we all needed to know the difference between synchronous and asynchronous delivery methods. Now everything is changing again! Social constructivism is the buzzword in e-learning where students learn from each other as much as from the instructor of the online classroom. And open source Learning Management Systems such as Moodle, Sakae, Claroline, ATutor, and Dokeos are changing the way we think about delivering our online content. Traditional LMS applications like Blackboard and WebCT are becoming old hat and everyone is wondering where to turn next. The problem with the open source applications is that you'll need to hire a staff of programmers and administrators to keep it running on your campus. There are some hosting options out there with private companies but then you have wonder how much different that is from the current position you find yourself in with your existing LMS vendor. I think what most people are realy searching for is an LMS that has the scalability and vision to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape in higher education. And I for one am not counting out the proprietary LMS just yet, as much as I'd like to. But I do think Blackboard has overplayed its hand in the higher education market. What was once a promising learning environment that help legitimize e-learning in many colleges and universities has become a technical laggard with a quilt-like approach to keeping up with the ever-changing distance learning world. Each release of Blackboard seems to introduce as many issues as it fixed and weak customer support has left a lot people looking for an alternative. Angel is one proprietary LMS that seems like a possible remedy for the Blackboard Blues. Buit the real buzz is around open source applications. At a recent NERCOMP (Northeast Computer Program) gathering 68 representatives from various colleges and universities throughout the Northeast met to learn about Moodle and the possibilities it holds for distance learning. And while it is not the complete package just yet, it already holds some significant advantages over Web CT and Blackboard. For instance, Moodle uses a blocks motif that lets you easily setup your course structure for navigation menus, links, and sections, and you can easily toggle between student and faculty views. Course setup is point and click throughout and you select from a variety of preconfigured formats for your courses including weekly lessons, topic, SCORM, and LAMS. There's a Groups function that is easy to use and works as advertised, unlike its counterpart in Blackboard 7.0. And you can choose to nationalize your interface by pointing and clicking to choose from dozens of languages. The assessment engine all the includes traditional approaches as well as rubrics, error bands and more. Moodle's Wiki function lets your students easily collaborate with each other on group projects. And the history feature shows you who contributed what and when. The Workshop component lets you share assignments for review by students and instructors. There's also a glossary element that both students and faculty can use to build a list of terms and definitions for the course. Furthermore, Moodle administration is more sophisticated than Blackboard. It's easy to define system roles, so you don't have to hand out system administrator priviledges to everyone who wants to view all course in your system.
Moodle adoption is definitely on the uptick. according to Moodle.org. Check out these numbers. There are 20,383 registered Moodle sites in the world delivering 812,365 courses! There are 38 Moodle sites with 20,000 or more learners!
There are some drawbacks, however. One big one is that Moodle doesn't have an easy way to integrate with back-end registration systems. But that problem should be remedied in future releases as the need becomes greater and more colleges and universities adopt the application. And there doesn't seem to be an easy way to move your content from your proprietary LMS to Moodle without a lot of handcarving.
And while the application's code is free, the administration of it is not. You'll need to hire a staff of people to run your Moodle deployment. At a minimum, you'll need a server and a programmer with PHP skills. So there's still a choice to make about whether or not your college or university should go with proprietary LMS like Blackboard or travel the new and exciting path of Open Source LMS. But Moodle is helping to make that decision easier to make.

2006-09-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

I often hear the same argument from the classroom traditionalists that e-learning may be good for some things, but you can't teach this or that online. But everyday I hear stories about new courses and programs launched successfully online that are just as good as their classroom counterparts, and in some cases, considered better than the live, face-to-face editions. I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Wasel Ghanem from Beirut University in Gaza. He's visiting the United States to learn more about how we handle online learning and accreditation for our e-learning programs in the states. He talked about how he delivered engineering courses online with very positive results and highly satisfactory feedback from the students. It's another example of how you actually can teach anything online if you want to. The secret is that you need instructors who truly believe in the immense potential of e-learning and you need motivated and self-reliant students who understand the accessibility and versatility that online learning affords them. Wasel's dream is that someday the best instructors and educators in the world will be accessible to anyone anywhere on the planet. In his mind, e-learning is potentially the great equalizer among people and nations all over the world and the educational benefits that have been limited to the few will now be available to all who want to take advantage of them. I share that view. I truly believe that e-learning is in its infancy and that we have only seen a brief glimpse of its power these past few years. At my University, we have more than 5000 enrollments completing undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, all online! We offer hundreds of courses in humanities, physical sciences, health sciences, and technology. Currently we have a highly regarded and well-enrolled doctoral program in physical therapy. Our students receive in-depth instruction on the theory and the application of physical therapy using multimedia lectures, discussion forums, and video examples. It's truly a case study in how you can successfully teach and learn anything online. Our online program overall is growing by more than 50% each year and I belief we're only scratching the surface of what we can achieve with e-learning here at Northeastern University. EduVentures reports that e-learning will make up 50% of all higher education within the next five years in this country. This means as time goes on, half of all adult learners will be participating in e-learning. Nonetheless, you'll hear the naysayers complain that you might be able to teach courses online but students can't really learn from them. Fortunately a good portion of today's adult learners disagree with that argument.

2006-09-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

If someone tells you he or she is an expert in e-Learning, they're either lying or they're misguided. We're in the infancy of e-Learning and anyone who thinks they got it all figured at this point is fooling themselves. I've been involved with e-Learning in one form or another for more than 10 years now and I still feel like I'm at the beginning of a wild and exciting journey. I have an idea of where I'm going with this, but I have no idea where I'll end up. So, I'm starting this blog to comment on my journey in the world of e-Learning to help inform you about what's going on in distance education and e-Learning, and also to help myself figure out what is going. I once had an instructor who told me if you can't write about it, then you don't really know it. So, I'm going to write about my findings, document discoveries, and discuss trends in the world of e-Learning in an attempt to keep pace with this rapidly changing field we're interested in, exchange ideas with other distance educators and administrators, and maybe make a few contributions of my own in this space. So, visit often and contribute if you like, and we'll all take this journey together.

Chuck Kilfoye