MBAIn 2017 my Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at 
rjensen@trinity.edu if you really need to file that is missing

 

Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Disclaimer:  Although I really try to separate the legitimate from the bogus
training and education programs, doing so for certain is impossible.
Always try to verify the legitimacy of any program linked in this document.
Never take the word "accreditation at face value since that term  often is misleading.

Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


Before reading this, you should read about asynchronous learning at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_learning

Introductory Quotations

First Consider Learning On Your Own

College and University Online Rankings and Comparisons

The Future:  Badges of Competency-Based Learning Performance

Mega Universities Partnering with Private and Public Sectors for Employee Education and Traning
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Partnerships

How to Sign Up for a Free MOOC Course (credits have added fees)

How to Lower the Costs of College Degrees (often at $0 tuition)

Employer-Subsidized and/or Inexpensive Online MOOC Degrees

Readings and Other Printed References of Possible Interest

2014 Report: 83 Percent of High Schools Offer Online Courses

MOOCs Are Free and Open to Everybody in the World

Cross-Border Training Alternatives (including languages training and learning to code)

Cross-Border Education Alternatives
Includes US News Rankings of Undergraduate Online and Various Online Graduate Programs

Online Cheating

 

Obama's Ideas on Affordable Education

Assessment --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Future of Education Technologies --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm

Test Drive Running a University ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TestDrive

The Dark Side of Education Technology and Online Learning

Explosive Growth in Online Enrollments in the U.S.
(Including a Project that Enlists Women to Help Women Learn Online)

Concerns About High Attrition Rates in Online Courses

Updates on the Quality and Extent of Distance Education in the United States

Education Fraud and Gray Zone Warnings About Questionable Online Program 
(Including the 50% Rule Controversy)
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
 

An Innovative Online International Accounting Course on Six Campuses Around the World

An Internationalization Experiment With 800 Online Courses at East Carolina Univ.

Life Experience College Level Examination Program (CLEP) 

Update on Online K-12 Schools

College Credit by Telephone

Online and Other Non-Traditional Doctoral Degrees

Unaccredited Distance Education Index
 

Online Graduate Business (mostly MBA) Programs
First look for AACSB accreditation

 

Masters of Accounting and Taxation Online Degree Programs
First look for AACSB accreditation

 

Learning Portals and Vortals  (including the demise of Fathom)

Places to Learn from Krislyn

Babson College's experiments with "Tailor-Made Degrees"

Government and Military Online Training and Education 

International Journals, Resources, and Newsletters for Distance Education

International Teacher Training and Lesson Sharing

Reaching Across Boundaries:  The Bryant College-Belarus Connection

There are thousands of distance education courses in England

OpenCourseWare (OCW)

 

eLearning Africa --- http://www.elearning-africa.com/

Portal to Asian Internet Resources --- http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:3200/PAIR/index.html 

UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/themes/icts/m4ed/mobile-learning-resources/unescomobilelearningseries/ 

U.S. Department of Education  --- http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml

Department of Education: Office of Vocational and Adult Education ---
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ovae/index.html?src=oc

European Centre for Higher Education --- http://www.cepes.ro/

The term "electroThenic portfolio," or "ePortfolio":   What does this mean?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ElectronicPortfolio

Search for University Lectures Available as Podcasts
Bob Jensen's threads on podcasting, Apple's iPod U, RSS, RDF are at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework

Bob Jensen's threads on science and medicine tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Science%20and%20Medicine

Bob Jensen's links to math helpers  ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Cross-Cultural Investigations: Technology and Development (Multicultural Online Education and Open Sharing) ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/anthropology/21a-801j-cross-cultural-investigations-technology-and-development-fall-2012/

Bob Jensen's threads to free textbooks and other learning materials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Free online tutorials in various disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm/#Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AccreditationIssues

Bob Jensen's threads on Online Education Effectiveness and Testing ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus

Online Distance Education is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance in Traditional as Well as For-Profit Colleges ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation

The Dark Side ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

Social Networking for Education:  The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses of Twitter)
Updates will be at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

 

Warning
No higher education program that substitutes “life experience” or “job experience” for academic credit in the real world is respected in academe. This does not mean that experience is not educational. It merely means that it is impossible or impractical to determine knowledge attainment unless more formalized processes of courses and examinations are administered for academic credit. Hence, a degree from any school that replaces some courses with "experience" is not worth much more than the paper it is printed on. Graduates from such a school should be evaluated on the basis of their life experiences. They should not be evaluated on the basis of that school's course credits. Paying for such credits is a waste of money in my viewpoint.

Bob Jensen's threads on phony diploma mills are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill 

Phony Education and Training Search Sites

These phony education search programs sponsored by for-profit universities are getting a bit more sophisticated by salting a very few not-for-profit programs to make you think they are legitimate education and training search programs. But in reality they are still phony for-profit university search sites.

For example, I read in my old zip code 78212 into the search site http://lpntobsnonline.org/ 

Sure enough, up pops the University of Phoenix and other for-profit university alternatives. No mention is made of San Antonio's massive University of Texas Health Science Nursing Alternative and other non-for-profit nursing education alternatives in the area.


Boo/poo on this http://lpntobsnonline.org/  site!

 


e-Education:  The Shocking Future

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Table of Contents

Overview of The Future of Higher Education
Introductory Quotations
Long-Term Future of Education and Education Technologies
(including grid computing, Blogging, Podcasting, and video games
Motivations for Distance Education 
2004 Update on the Quality and Extent of Distance Education in the United States
Models for Distributed/Distance Education
Classroom and Building Design --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Design 
Comparative Advantages of Colleges and Universities
Corporations and Universities Sign Partnership Pacts
Corporations Sign Pacts With Professors Affiliated With Prestige Universities
Universities Partner With Each Other
Degree and Certificate Programs Online
Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World:
OKI, MIT, Rice, and Other Sharing Universities
Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged  
University of California's XLab  
A Crystal Ball Look Into the Future (including Concept Knowledge)
Babson College's experiments with "Tailor-Made Degrees" 
A Cloudy Crystal Ball
Distance Education Magazines and Journals  http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#Resources 
The term "electroThenic portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. What does this mean?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ElectronicPortfolio
Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students?
Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

 

Introductory Quotations

From Hapless to Helped
"autodidacts disadvantaged by distance" (Don't you love love alliteration as a memory aid?)  In the quotations below, contrast and compare the impact of the interactive Internet and ebullient email on evolving education from 1858 versus 2001.  

The Year 1858

When the University of London instituted correspondence courses in 1858, the first university to do so, its students (typically expatriates in what were then the colonies of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa), discovered the programme by word of mouth and wrote the university to enrol.  the university then despatched, by post-and-boat, what today we would call the course outline, a set of previous examination papers and a list of places around the world where examinations were conducted.  It left any "learning" to the hapless student, who sat the examination whenever he or she felt ready:  a truly "flexible" schedule!  this was the first generation of distance education (Tabsall and Ryan, 1999):  "independent" learning for highly motivated and resourceful autodidacts disadvantaged by distance. (Page 71)
Yoni Ryan who wrote Chapter 5 of
The Changing Faces of Virtual Education --- http://www.col.org/virtualed/ 
Dr. Glen Farrell, Study Team Leader and Editor
The Commonwealth of Learning


Video:  Open Education for an Open World
45-minute Video from the Long-Time President of MIT --- http://18.9.60.136/video/816

Bob Jensen's threads on open source video and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS  ($75) ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=76319&PK=N1S1009
Also see "Tomorrow's College" (free)  http://chronicle.com/article/Tomorrows-College/125120/
 

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

 


Minnesota State Colleges Plan to Offer One-Fourth of Credits Online by 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3476&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


The Year 2008

The Washington Post Finds Distance Education More Profitable Than the Newspaper Business
The Washington Post Company continues to diversify not in journalism but in for-profit education. Last year, the company reported that it took in more revenue from its Kaplan businesses than the newspaper business. In filings last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Post reported that it had purchased an 8.1 percent stake in Corinthian Colleges Inc.
Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/18/qt


The Year 2001

The combination of asynchronous and synchronous materials in the WebCT environment worked well for my students. I felt closer to my students than I did in a live class. When I loaded AIM and saw my students online, I felt connected to them. Each student had an online persona that blossomed over the semester. The use of emotions in AIM helped us create bantering communication, which contributed to a less stressful learning environment. 

At then end of the six-week course, I was tired, but I was equally tired at the end of the live six-week course last summer. I don’t think the online environment made my life easier, but it made it more fun. The students appreciated the flexibility, and they liked not having to drive to downtown Hartford for classes. Although many of my students would have preferred a live class, they performed well in this online class. I did not attempt to statistically compare their performance with my past live classes, but the exam distributions appear similar to past classes. I was happy with the overall class performance. 

One student concluded, “Just reading the material without having anyone explain it to you makes it more difficult to understand at first (at least for me). I waffled between wanting online and in person teaching … . Ultimately I chose online because this way we can do it at our own pace and we always have the ability to go back to where we might not have understood and do it over.” 

Thus, flexibility appears to outweigh what to the student appears to be an easier way to learn.
From "Genesis of an Online Course" by Amy Dunbar Amy Dunbar, August 1, 2001 
www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course.pdf 

A free audio download of a presentation by Amy Dunbar is available at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002 


Online you get to know your students' minds, not just their faces.
Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L., and Turoff, M. (1995). Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
As quoted at http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/tid_report.html 


LARSON: You can't get further from MIT than Singapore. Singapore from here is this way [points straight down]. We use Internet2 for connectivity. There's no statistical difference in performance between distance learners and classroom learners. And when there is a difference, it favors the distance learners
"Lessons e-Learned Q&A with Richard Larson from MIT," Technology Review, July 31, 2001 --- http://www.techreview.com/web/leo/leo073101.asp


For those of you who think distance education is going downhill, think again.  The number of students switching from traditional brick-and- mortar classrooms to full-time virtual schools in Colorado has soared over the past five years…

"Online Ed Puts Schools in a Bind:  Districts Lose Students, Funding," by Karen Rouse, Denver Post, December 2, 2004 --- http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257E2522702,00.html 

The number of students switching from traditional brick-and- mortar classrooms to full-time virtual schools in Colorado has soared over the past five years.

During the 2000-01 school year, the state spent $1.08 million to educate 166 full-time cyberschool students, according to the Colorado Department of Education. This year, the state projects spending $23.9 million to educate 4,237 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, state figures show.

And those figures - which do not include students who are taking one or two online courses to supplement their classroom education - are making officials in the state's smallest districts jittery.

Students who leave physical public schools for online schools take their share of state funding with them.

"If I lose two kids, that's $20,000 walking out the door," said Dave Grosche, superintendent of the Edison 54JT School District.

Continued in the article


What's Online Learning Really Like in a Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting Class?

The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

Jensen Added Comment
It wasn't mentioned, but I think Goldie took the ACC 460 course --- Click Here

ACC 460 Government and Non-Profit Accounting

Course Description

This course covers fund accounting, budget and control issues, revenue and expense recognition, and issues of reporting for both government and non-profit entities.

Topics and Objectives

Environment of Government/Non-Profit Accounting

Fund Accounting Part I

Fund Accounting Part II

Overview of Not-for-Profit Accounting

Current Issues in Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on free online video courses and course materials from leading universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


So much learning now takes place online, including faculty office hours, study groups, and lectures.
What extra value are you going to need to offer to bring the students of the future to your college?
Read the new report, "The College of 2020: Students," from Chronicle Research Services.

"THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009 ---
http://research.chronicle.com/asset/TheCollegeof2020ExecutiveSummary.pdf?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This is the first Chronicle Research Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research Services panel of admissions officials.

To buy the full, data-rich 50-page report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the faculty of the future.

 

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by  Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) announced a new report called, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” now available at MIT Press. The report is in response to our changing times, and addresses what traditional educational institutions must know to keep up. From the announcement,

“Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.”

A central finding was that “Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.”

Not coincidentally, one of the ten principles for redesigning learning institutions was open source education: “Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.”

The report is available in PDF via CC BY-NC-ND.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf

Also see http://www.convergemag.com/workforce/47240132.html

Our Compassless Colleges --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz

 


The Bright Future of Grand Canyon University online
The Apollo Group is the king of for-profit higher education, parent of the University of Phoenix. By comparison, Grand Canyon University, another for-profit college in Phoenix, is David to Apollo’s Goliath. But that’s obviously not quite how Brian Mueller sees it. Mueller, the president of the Apollo Group and the driving force behind the University of Phoenix’s highly successful online division, is betting that Grand Canyon’s future is brighter — or perhaps more profitable — than Apollo’s. The two companies announced this morning that Mueller is giving up his position at Apollo to help lead Grand Canyon into its recently announced initial public offering, which was initially valued at $230 million. Compared to Apollo, which educates hundreds of thousands of students and is 35 years old, Grand Canyon is comparatively a toddler. Since 2004, when it was purchased by a team of investors, it has been transformed from a struggling nonprofit Christian college with fewer than 1,000 into a thriving institution that has about 20,000 students, most of them online. A full report on these striking developments will be available on our Web site Thursday morning.
Inside Higher Ed, June 25, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/25/qt


Fast Growth of Online Programs Relative to "Blended Programs"
Despite the growth of “blended” education — in which instructors mix in-person and online experiences for students — online education appears to be outpacing it in some ways, according to
a new study by Eduventures, the Sloan Consortium and Babson College. The report found a faster rate of growth in the percentage of classes offered online than for blended courses. The report found that while 55 percent of colleges offer at least one blended course, 64 percent offer at least one online course.

Inside Higher Ed, March 13, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/13/qt


Explosive Growth in Online Enrollments in the United States


Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States
The Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, 2012
http://babson.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4SjGnHcStH5g9G5

Some key report findings include:

Full Report Now Available.
(PDF and several eBook formats)


"Distance Ed Continues Rapid Growth at Community Colleges," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/distance

Community colleges reported an 18 percent increase in distance education enrollments in a 2007 survey released this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges, in Philadelphia.

The survey on community colleges and distance education is an annual project of the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the AACC. The survey is based on the responses of 154 community colleges, selected to provide a representational sample of all community colleges. Last year’s survey found community colleges reporting an increase in distance education enrollments of 15 percent.

This year’s survey suggests that distance education has probably not peaked at community colleges. First there is evidence that the colleges aren’t just offering a few courses online, but entire programs. Sixty-four percent of institutions reported offering at least one online degree — defined as one where at least 70 percent of the courses may be completed online. Second, colleges reported that they aren’t yet meeting demand. Seventy percent indicated that student demand exceeds their online offerings.

The top challenge reported by colleges in terms of dealing with students in distance education was that they do not fill out course evaluations. In previous surveys, this has not been higher than the fifth greatest challenge. This year’s survey saw a five percentage point increase — to 45 percent — in the share of colleges reporting that they charge an extra fee for distance education courses.

Training professors has been a top issue for institutions offering distance education. Of those in the survey of community colleges, 71 percent required participation (up from 67 percent a year ago and 57 percent the year before). Of those requiring training, 60 percent require more than eight hours.

Several of the written responses some colleges submitted suggested frustration with professors. One such comment (included anonymously in the report) said: “Vocal conservative faculty members with little computer experience can stymie efforts to change when expressing a conviction that student learning outcomes can only be achieved in a face-to-face classroom — even though they have no idea what can be accomplished in a well-designed distance education course.” Another response said that: “Our biggest challenge is getting faculty to participate in our training sessions. We understand their time is limited, but we need to be able to show them the new tools available....”

In last year’s survey, 84 percent of institutions said that they were customers of either Blackboard or WebCT (now a part of Blackboard), but 31 percent reported that they were considering a shift in course management platforms. This year’s survey suggests that some of them did so. The percentage of colleges reporting that they use Blackboard or WebCT fell to 77 percent. Moodle showed the largest gains in the market — increasing from 4 to 10 percent of the market — while Angel and Desire2Learn also showed gains.

The survey also provides an update on the status of many technology services for students, showing steady increases in the percentage of community colleges with various technologies and programs.

Status of Services for Online Students at Community Colleges

Service Currently Offer Offered a Year Ago
Campus testing center for distance students 73% 69%
Distance ed specific faculty training 96% 92%
Online admissions 84% 77%
Online counseling / advising 51% 43%
Online library services 96% 96%
Online plagiarism evaluation 54% 48%
Online registration 89% 87%
Online student orientation for distance classes 75% 66%
Online textbook sales 72% 66%

Rate of Growth in Online Enrollments --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#OnlineGrowthRates


The New University of Illinois Online Global Campus

Online-education venture at the U. of Illinois tries to distinguish itself from other distance-learning programs

"The Global Campus Meets a World of Competition," by Dan Turner, The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, April 3, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i30/30a01001.htm

The University of Illinois Global Campus, a multimillion-dollar distance-learning project, is up and running. For its March-April 2009 term, it has enrolled 366 students.

Getting to this point, though, has looked a little like the dot-com start-up bubble of the late 1990s. Hundreds of Internet-related companies were launched with overly ambitious goals, only to later face cutbacks and other struggles to stay alive. Most crashed anyway. Some observers now say the Global Campus must try to avoid the same fate of churning through a large initial investment while attracting too few customers.

The project, planned about four years ago, was designed to complement existing online programs offered by individual Illinois-system campuses at Urbana-Champaign, Springfield, and Chicago. Those programs primarily serve current students as an addition to their on-campus course work. The Global Campus, in contrast, seeks to reach the adult learner off campus, who is often seeking a more focused, career-related certification or degree, such as completing a B.S. in nursing.

Online education has proved popular with institutions, students, and employers across the United States, with opportunities and enrollment growing. According to the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit organization focused on online learning, the fall 2007 term saw 3.9 million students enroll in at least one online course, many at for-profit institutions like DeVry University and the University of Phoenix.

That growing popularity, says David J. Gray, chief executive of UMassOnline, the online-learning arm of the University of Massachusetts system, is part of the Global Campus's problem. The Illinois program, he says, is "fighting uphill in a market that's a lot more uphill."

The slope didn't seem as steep in the fall of 2005, when Chester S. Gardner, then the university's vice president for academic affairs, led a committee to investigate ideas for the future of online education at Illinois. That resulted in a proposal and business plan presented to the Board of Trustees the next year. The system's "existing online programs were not structured for adult learners," says Mr. Gardner, who is now leading the Global Campus.

The program was formally established in March 2007. The university initially financed it with $1.5-million of general revenue. The program started teaching its first 12 students in 2008.

Now, Mr. Gardner says, the Global Campus has a budget of approximately $9.4-million for the 2008-9 fiscal year. Approximately $1-million of that comes from the state, he says, and the remaining money comes from various grants, tuition, and loans from the Board of Trustees.

The trustees' investment has produced heavy involvement, Mr. Gardner says. "They're acting like venture capitalists," he notes, adding that "they're certainly doing their job of holding my feet to the fire."

This year the 366 Global Campus students are enrolled in five different degree and four different certificate programs; Mr. Gardner expects the number of students to rise to around 500 by May.

Those numbers put the program on a much slower track than earlier, sunnier estimates of 9,000 students enrolled by 2012. Mr. Gardner says the 9,000 figure came from his 2007 budget request to the trustees and was not precise. "We had no direct experience upon which to base our projections," he says.

Now, Mr. Gardner says, he has more realistic figures. Once 1,650 students are enrolled, the monthly income from tuition will equal monthly expenses, on average. His current projections show the Global Campus reaching that point of stability by the 2011 fiscal year.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on cross border distance education and training alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Distance Education is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance in the 21st Century ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Online Learning Tips & Online College Reviews  --- http://www.onlinecollege.org/

CHOOSE AN ACCREDITED ONLINE SCHOOL

An important factor to consider is accreditation. Traditional colleges and universities have long been evaluated by educational accreditors who ensure that their programs meet certain levels of quality. Regional and national organizations now accredit online programs too. In the United States, online colleges that are fully accredited have been recognized by one of six regional accreditation boards that also evaluate traditional campuses. These include:

In addition, the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) recognize the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC) as a reputable accreditor for education programs that offer online degrees. Once an online program becomes accredited, it’s more likely that a traditional school will accept its transfer credits and that employers will recognize its value.

 

HOW TO CHOOSE AN ONLINE SCHOOL

How should someone select an online school? Just as students have different priorities when choosing physical campuses, they will have different criteria for choosing an online institution. For example:

  • Prestige. Some students need a degree from a prestigious university in order to advance in their particular field. Others are not concerned with elite reputations; as long as their program is accredited, it will move them forward.
  • Expense. Some students wish to find schools that offer the most financial aid or have low tuition, but others - such as people with education benefits from the military - needn’t take cost into account.
  • Pace. Some people want to earn their online degree as quickly as possible. They seek accelerated degree programs or those that will accept their previously-earned academic credits or grant credit for life experiences (e.g., military training). Other people prefer to learn at a slower pace.

Clearly, the variation among individual’s means that there will be variation among any rankings that people would assign to online institutions. At the same time, it is helpful to consider as a starting point another’s list of top online schools. The twenty online schools presented below are all accredited by one of the six aforementioned accrediting bodies. Factors such as tuition, reputation, academic awards, and range of degree programs have also been taken into account.

 

TOP TWENTY ONLINE COLLEGE SCHOOLS

1. Western Governors University has an excellent reputation; in 2008 it received the United States Distance Learning Association’s 21st Century Award for Best Practices in Distance Learning. The school was founded by the governors of nineteen western states and it’s accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.

Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

 

This school is ideal for quick learners who want an accelerated program. With competency-based learning, students are able to progress as quickly as they can demonstrate having mastered the required knowledge.

A variety of online undergraduate and graduate degrees are offered. Some examples include baccalaureates and MBAs in business, 26 programs related to teaching, and several nursing programs.

2. The University of Phoenix is one of the best-publicized online educators. It is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. In addition to being experienced with web-based instruction, the University of Phoenix has physical campuses across the United States. As of 2008 it was the nation’s largest private university and had an enrollment of nearly 350,000 students. The university offers more than 100 degree programs at the associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels.

3. Florida Tech University Online is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. It has been ranked as a top national university by U.S. News & World Report, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, and Barron’s Best Buys in College Education. A special feature of instruction is the MP3 downloads that allow students to take lectures away from the computer.

Degrees are offered in business, liberal arts, criminal justice, and healthcare. Special discounts are available to members of the military and their spouses.

4. Capella University awards bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. The majority of students receive financial aid that is unrelated to their income, and many companies have such confidence in Capella University that they pay for their employees’ tuition.

Degrees are awarded in: business; computers and information technology; education and teaching; health and medicine; the social sciences; and criminal justice. Capella University is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

5. Walden University is accredited by the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges. In a 1999 review of fully online schools, the business magazine Fast Company awarded its only A grade to Walden University. US News and World Report has described Walden as well-regarded.

Walden offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate degrees ranging from nursing to information technology and business, including the MBA.

6. California Coast University is accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council. California Coast offers a unique self-paced program; courses are not structured by semesters or other traditional timeframes, so students are able to begin at any time of year. Degrees are awarded in business, education and teaching, health and nursing, the social sciences, and criminal justice.

7. South University has been educating students for more than a century. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and offers online degrees in business, nursing, healthcare, criminal justice, accounting, and information technology. With a flexible scheduling program, students may take just one course at a time or several concurrently for accelerated learning.

8. Drexel University was established as a traditional campus in 1891. This Philadelphia-based institution was named among the “Best National Universities” by U.S. News & World Report. Drexel is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.

Drexel University has offered online education since 1996. Degrees granted include the MBA, the Master of Science in Library & Information Science, the Bachelor of Science in Nursing, and many others.

9. Southern New Hampshire University is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. It offers more than 50 programs leading to undergraduate and graduate degrees and certificates. SNHU has been named “Best of Business” by the New Hampshire Business Review and in 2008 its business program was deemed the best online program in its class.

10. Vanderbilt University is a well-respected institution with a physical campus founded in 1873. It is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

As of 2008, Vanderbilt’s only fully online program is the master’s degree in nursing administration. This single program is worth mentioning because America’s Best Graduate Schools ranks Vanderbilt’s School of Nursing among the top nursing programs offering master’s degrees.

11. New England College was constructed in 1946 for post-war education and is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. It offers online master’s degrees in accounting, criminal justice leadership, nonprofit leadership, and many other subjects.

12. Nova Southeastern University is the largest independent university in Florida. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and has appeared on the Princeton Review’s list of the best distance learning graduate schools. Nova Southeastern offers online degrees in education and teaching.

13. DeVry University’s Keller Graduate School of Management awards a great number of business degrees in many specialty areas such as accounting, human resource management, and financial analysis. Students may choose to take all of their courses online or combine online learning with campus-based instruction.

14. Baker University features relatively low tuition and offers a wide variety of degrees at every level in business, computers and IT, health and medicine, and nursing. Baker is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Online learning takes place using Blackboard, a system that creates an online classroom setting in which instructors and students can interact.

15. Marist College has a physical campus in Poughkeepsie, NY and is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. It offers online degrees in communications, business, public administration, information systems, and technology management.

16. Upper Iowa University is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. It offers degrees through campus-based learning in several states, and its online programs include business, computers and information technology, health, nursing, and the social sciences.

17. Ashford University, founded in 1918, offers accelerated programs so that degrees can be earned in as little as one year. Courses are 5-6 weeks long and are taken one at a time. Examples of degrees include the Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Master of Arts in Organizational Management.

18. Kaplan University was founded in 1937 and is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. It offers campus-based learning and also grants online master’s, bachelor’s, associate’s, and professional law degrees, as well as online certificate programs. Subject areas include business, criminal justice, IT, and paralegal studies.

19. Northwestern University has been among the top schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Its School of Continuing Studies offers an online Master of Science in Medical Informatics online. Students may also take distance learning courses in a variety of other subjects.

20. Liberty University is the world’s largest evangelical Baptist university. In 2008 the Online Education Database ranked Liberty third of all online U.S. universities. More than 35 degree programs are offered, including the Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy.

Jensen Comment
Although the above information is helpful, it should be emphasized that some of the very best and largest online programs are really state-supported universities not in the above ranking, including such universities as the University of Wisconsin, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois (which has a new global online degree program), and virtually every other state university in the United States. In most instances the large universities have specialty degree programs not available in the above universities and sometimes many more courses to choose from in a give specialty.

And there are some outstanding online community college programs not mentioned above.

Western Governors University --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University


"In Boost to Competency Model, Western Governors U. Gets Top Marks in Teacher Ed," by Dan Barrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Boost-to-Competency-Model/147179/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

 

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based college credit ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

 


Good Luck Jack (and Suzi):  You're Going to Need All the Luck You Can Get

"Jack Welch Moves His Online M.B.A. Program to Strayer U.," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/jack-welch-moves-his-online-m-b-a-program-to-strayer-u/34231?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jack Welch’s online M.B.A. program began with a bang two years ago, heralded as an unprecedented venture that could shake up online education.

Now Mr. Welch is shaking up his own program.

The former CEO of General Electric said on Friday that his management institute would move to Strayer University from its current home at a struggling Ohio for-profit institution called Chancellor University. The Wall Street Journal reports that Strayer is paying about $7-million for the program, with Mr. Welch kicking in $2-million of his own.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Welch sounded like a baseball player who had been traded to a wealthier team with a better chance of making the playoffs.

“We needed a bigger game,” he said. “We’re going from 500 students with limited resources to 55,000 students with 82 campuses and much more reach.” Strayer’s advertising and technology budgets were part of the appeal, he added.

The Jack Welch Management Institute offers executive M.B.A.’s as well as certificates in subjects like “becoming a leader.” For students, part of the attraction is weekly Webcam sessions with Mr. Welch, who weighs in on current events like the situations in Greece and Italy.

Or baseball: One discussion focused on the umpire whose botched call spoiled a perfect game for the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga. The umpire, Jim Joyce, admitted his error. ”We use that as a wonderful teaching tool about coming forward when you make a mistake,” Mr. Welch said.

Mr. Welch doesn’t call his deal with Chancellor a mistake, saying he is “pleased as hell” with a venture that has attracted 200 students in its first 20 months. He described those students as “high-ambition middle managers” in companies that include Microsoft, Merck, and ESPN. Seventy percent of them either pay full tuition or have the cost covered by their employers, he said.

Robert S. Silberman, chairman and CEO of Strayer Education, said Mr. Welch raised the idea of a purchase to him in a telephone call in April: “He was looking for a new academic home.”

In the course of evaluating the institute, Strayer also looked into acquiring all of Chancellor, which was once a nonprofit university and is now owned by private investors. But Mr. Silberman said his company determined that the only part of the university it wanted was Mr. Welch’s institute.

Strayer was attracted to the curriculum of the executive-M.B.A. program and the short leadership courses. Strayer now offers similar courses on a limited basis but is looking to offer more of them, said Mr. Silberman. Such courses, typically paid for by students’ employers, help Strayer University keep its proportion of revenues from federal student-aid programs well below the 90-percent maximum allowed.

The purchase will very likely be a plus for Strayer. Unlike some of its for-profit competitors, the university has not been tarnished by allegations of wrongdoing. And its recent declines in enrollment—it has just reported that new-student enrollment fell by 21 percent—have been smaller than those of many other providers.

But at a time when many students are becoming increasingly conscious of colleges’ academic reputations and averse to high-cost educational programs, some analysts have questioned whether Strayer’s brand is strong enough to outweigh the competitive challenges it faces from for-profit and nonprofit colleges alike. The Welch institute could add some luster.

 

"Jack Welch Launches Online MBA:  The legendary former GE CEO says he knows a thing or two about management, and for $20,000 you can, too," by Geoff Gloeckler, Business Week, June 22, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2009/bs20090622_962094.htm?link_position=link1

A corporate icon is diving into the MBA world, and he's bringing his well-documented management and leadership principles with him. Jack Welch, former CEO at General Electric (GE) (and Business Week columnist), has announced plans to start an MBA program based on the business principles he made famous teaching managers and executives in GE's Crotonville classroom.

The Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI) will officially launch this week, with the first classes starting in the fall. The MBA will be offered almost entirely online. Compared to the $100,000-plus price tag for most brick-and-mortar MBA programs, the $600 per credit hour tuition means students can get an MBA for just over $20,000. "We think it will make the MBA more accessible to those who are hungry to play," Welch says. "And they can keep their job while doing it."

To make the Jack Welch Management Institute a reality, a group led by educational entrepreneur Michael Clifford purchased financially troubled Myers University in Cleveland in 2008, Welch says. Welch got involved with Clifford and his group of investors and made the agreement to launch the Welch Management Institute.

Popularized Six Sigma For Welch, the new educational endeavor is the latest chapter in a long and storied career. As GE's longtime chief, he developed a management philosophy based on relentless efficiency, productivity, and talent development. He popularized Six Sigma, wasn't shy about firing his worst-performing managers, and advocated exiting any business where GE wasn't the No. 1 or No. 2 player. Under Welch, GE became a factory for producing managerial talent, spawning CEOs that included James McNerney at Boeing (BA), Robert Nardelli at Chrysler, and Jeff Immelt, his successor at GE.

Welch's decision to jump into online education shows impeccable timing. Business schools in general are experiencing a rise in applications as mid-level managers look to expand their business acumen while waiting out the current job slump. The new program's flexible schedule—paired with the low tuition cost—could be doubly attractive to those looking to move up the corporate ladder as the market begins to rebound.

Ted Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, agrees. "I think it's a good time for someone to launch a high-profile online degree," Snyder says. "If you make the investment in contentthat allows for a lot of interaction between faculty and students and also among students, you can get good quality at a much more reasonable tuition level."

Welch's Secret Weapon That being said, there are challenges that an online MBA program like Welch's will have a difficult time overcoming, even if the technology and faculty are there. "The integrity and quality of engagement between faculty and students is the most precious thing we have," Snyder says. "Assuming it's there, it dominates. These things are hard to replicate online."

But Welch does have one thing that differentiates his MBA from others: himself. "We'll have all of the things the other schools have, only we'll have what Jack Welch believes are things that work in business, in a real-time way," he says. "Every week I will have an online streaming video of business today. For example, if I was teaching this week, I would be putting up the health-care plan. I'd be putting up the financial restructuring plan, talking about it, laying out the literature, what others are saying, and I'd be talking about it. I'll be doing that every week."

Welch and his wife Suzy are also heavily involved in curriculum design, leaning heavily on the principles he used training managers at GE.

Continued in Article

March 6, 2010 reply from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

Jack Welch bought a bankrupt college and started his own MBA program:
Below is a link to a very, very unusual accounting curriculum

http://www.chancelloru.edu/downloads/degrees/BSBA_Accounting.pdf

Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu

Jensen Comment

Thank you so much for this Jack Welch update Richard. I wrote previously about the startup MBA program of Jack and his wife Suzi, and I wrote about my concerns for how difficult it would be to succeed without accreditation. Startup corporate MBA programs have a very, very difficult time achieving AACSB accreditation. I really thought this startup MBA program might become General Electric's MBA Program and that a high proportion of the students would be GE employees.

It seemed a little less likely that Jack and Suzi would buy an entire university that came with accreditation. Firstly, I did not think Jack and Suzi were interested in running any programs other than MBA programs. Secondly, some bankrupt universities have regional accreditation, but it is rare for them to also have AACSB accreditation.

AACSB Accreditation via Partnering
One of the first for-profit venture to buy up a regionally accredited university was UNext Corporation when it bought up Cardean University ---
Steve Orpurt taught for UNext and made a CPE presentation in one of my technology workshops on August 11, 2001 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm
UNext originated in a for-profit venture to bring education programs into corporations in an alliance with several prestigious universities like Stanford, Columbia, and the London School of Economics ---
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/990715/unext.shtml
Also see http://www.learnshare.com/Press/NewsReleases/UNext.asp
And see http://chronicle.com/article/Closely-Watched-UNext-Rolls/13982/
I think UNext now operates as the Cardean Learning Group --- http://cardeanlearninggroup.com/
It seems to now be a distance education service provider for partnering institutions, many of whom have AACSB accreditation.---
http://www.onlinedegrees.net/schools/cardean-university/
Hence this is an example of achieving AACSB accreditation via a partnering arrangement to deliver online courses, although Cardean also provides instructors and complete courses.

Two of the leading for-profit universities that went the other route by achieving their own regional accreditations rather than buying them includes the University of Phoenix and Capella Univerersity. I don't think either one of these has yet achieved AACSB accredition. They are not likely to achieve AACSB accredition given the strong bias of the AACSB against granting first-time accreditation to for-profit universities.Some prestigious corporations and consulting groups formed MBA programs that tried and failed for years to get AACSB accreditation.

I tried to find Chancellor University in the current AACSB listing of accredited programs ---
https://www.aacsb.net/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=AACSB&WebKey=ED088FF2-979E-48C6-B104-33768F1DE01D
There is no accredited program on the list under Chancellor or Welch.
However, in addition to having regional accreditation, Chancellor University has added business accreditation from the
Assembly for Collegiate Business Education (IACBE) --- http://www.iacbe.org/
It is unlikely that Chancellor University will obtain AACSB accreditation which is more of a unionized Deans Club for reputable non-profit institutions worldwide.

 


More on the greatest swindles of the world
General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE. As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for...

Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
Jensen Comment
GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Question
How would you advise Jack and Suzi to modify the program for greater assurance as to success?

Answer
My advice would be to make this a GE Executive MBA Program. The business model would be to gear it to GE professionals, especially newly hired engineers that are strong on technical ability and weak on managerial skills, financial management, marketing, and accounting.

The key to success would be to have GE pay the tuition as a fringe benefit to the winning employees selected to get an MBA from Jack and Suzi. This may not be too difficult since there are shrines throughout the world in GE facilities where Jack Welch is worshipped as a God.

Some of the advantages of this business model are as follows:

There are successful business models of this nature already in existence, although in most instances the corporation or other organization selected an AACSB-accredited institution to devise a special curriculum for employees seeking degrees in that institution. A few examples are summarized below.

Bob Jensen's threads on available online training and education programs are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


Distance Education:  Stanford Center for Professional Development
Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive in that students must work for employers Must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements are as follows:

For details go to
http://scpd.stanford.edu/home

Most other top universities in the USA now have selected online certificate and degree programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of interest and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online doctoral programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for employment in the Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such doctoral degrees when seeking employment in the Academy.

"Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online) Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online 

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took its relationship with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of the Internet.

“I don’t know of anything else like this,” says Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online course].”

Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May 2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford, and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.

“We really want to create the high-engagement, community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she says.

The classes will be offered on a platform supplied by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program: About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.

“This is by far the most serious and most significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.

People go to business school for more than just lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer skills and build a network of peers.”

The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including Harvard Business Schools $1,500 nine-week online program and the Wharton School’s entirely free first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera last fall.

The program may seem less pricey, though, to the company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus program costs executives $62,500.

To Novoed, which also provides technology to Wharton, the Haas School of Business, and the Darden School of Business, the Internet is an obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive education programs.

Saberi says companies are interested in elite training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We expect that programs like this are going to grow.”

Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based education and training alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

 


"New Project Enlists Women to Help Women Learn Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3738&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Gail Weatherly has gotten phone calls from women near tears over their situations.

They’re taking care of kids. They can’t afford child care. They can’t make it to regular classes. And they don’t know about online learning, said Ms. Weatherly, distance-education coordinator at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, Tex.

Ms. Weatherly hopes such women could one day benefit from a project being developed by a scattered group of women involved in distance education.

Their work centers on a social-networking Web site that would allow women to share information about online education and serve as mentors to one another. It’s called the Collaborative Online Resource Environment for Women (Core4women), a still-in-the-works effort that Ms. Weatherly and her colleagues described during a workshop here Monday at the national conference of the United States Distance Learning Association.

The project, billed in the presentation as “A Better Way: Women Telling Women About Online Learning,” evolved from Ms. Weatherly’s dissertation research at Texas A&M University. Studies like the American Association of University Women’s “The Third Shift” had examined barriers to women pursuing education. Ms. Weatherly sought to push beyond that. She looked at how earning online degrees changed women’s lives, sometimes in major ways, like one woman who left an abusive relationship. In the process, Ms. Weatherly encountered research subjects who wanted to share the expertise they had gained with other women.

Long story short: Ms. Weatherly and some colleagues set up a pilot project on the free social-networking site Ning. A scattered group of female mentors from the the world of distance education worked with a small group of Texas college students, victims of abuse or poverty, who signed up to help test the private site. The project’s organizers hope to expand the effort and gain the sponsorship of the USDLA, which has an offshoot called the International Forum for Women in E-Learning.

A Chronicle reporter was the only male in the audience Monday, but two women present raised the subject of how the other sex fits into this: Is there going to be a mentor network for men? And why do they have to be separate? Why not Core4people?

In an interview after the presentation, Ms. Weatherly responded by returning to her research. Women shared experiences with her that they might not have shared with a man: taking an online class when they were expecting a child and very sick, for example. Men might be participating more in care giving these days. Largely, though, Ms. Weatherly said, “women still feel like they would sacrifice going to school for their family.”

“Sometimes I think they need another woman to say, It’s OK for you to work and take care of your children and earn a degree – and you can do that easier by online learning,” Ms. Weatherly said.


Distance Education:  Stanford Center for Professional Development
Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive in that students must work for employers Must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements are as follows:

For details go to
http://scpd.stanford.edu/home

Most other top universities in the USA now have selected online certificate and degree programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of interest and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online doctoral programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for employment in the Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such doctoral degrees when seeking employment in the Academy.

"Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online) Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online 

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took its relationship with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of the Internet.

“I don’t know of anything else like this,” says Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online course].”

Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May 2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford, and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.

“We really want to create the high-engagement, community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she says.

The classes will be offered on a platform supplied by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program: About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.

“This is by far the most serious and most significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.

People go to business school for more than just lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer skills and build a network of peers.”

The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including Harvard Business Schools $1,500 nine-week online program and the Wharton School’s entirely free first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera last fall.

The program may seem less pricey, though, to the company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus program costs executives $62,500.

To Novoed, which also provides technology to Wharton, the Haas School of Business, and the Darden School of Business, the Internet is an obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive education programs.

Saberi says companies are interested in elite training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We expect that programs like this are going to grow.”

Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based education and training alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

 


Corporations and Universities Sign Partnership Pacts --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OnlineDegreePrograms


"New Book by Pollster John Zogby Says Online Education Is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12, 23008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3236&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

John Zogby, president & CEO of the polling company Zogby International, says that American students are quickly warming up to the idea of taking classes online, just as consumers have taken to the idea of renting movies via Netflix and buying microbrewed beer.

In a new book by Mr. Zogby released today, he said that polls show a sharp increase in acceptance of online education in the past year. For more on the story, see a free article in today’s Chronicle.

National surveys show that a majority of Americans think online universities offer a lower quality of education than do traditional institutions. But a prominent pollster, John Zogby, says in a book being released today that it won't be long before American society takes to distance education as warmly as it has embraced game-changing innovations like microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and "the simple miracle of Netflix."

The factor that will close that "enthusiasm gap" is the growing use of distance education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House).

The book, which is based on Zogby International polls and other studies, also touches on public attitudes toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and international affairs, and on what men and women really do want from each other. Mr. Zogby says polls detect signs of society's emerging resistance to big institutions, and its de-emphasis on things and places. "We're redefining geography and space," he says—and a widening acceptance of online education is part of the trend.

Today there is still a "cultural lag" between the public's desire for flexible ways to take college courses and what the most-established players offer, Mr. Zogby said in an interview with The Chronicle on Monday. "There's a sense that those who define the standard haven't caught on yet," he said.

But Mr. Zogby writes that polling by his organization shows that attitudes about online education are changing fast. His polling also points to other challenges that colleges will face as they race to serve a worldwise generation of 18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls "First Globals."

In one 2007 poll of more 5,000 adults, Zogby International found that 30 percent of respondents were taking or had taken an online course, and another 50 percent said they would consider taking one. He says the numbers might skew a little high because this poll was conducted online and the definition of an online course was broad, including certificate programs or training modules offered by employers.

Only 27 percent of respondents agreed that "online universities and colleges provide the same quality of education" as traditional institutions. Among those 18 to 24 years old, only 23 percent agreed.

An even greater proportion of those polled said it was their perception that employers and academic professionals thought more highly of traditional institutions than online ones.

Rapid Shift in Attitude

Yet in another national poll in December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45 percent of the 1,004 adults surveyed believed "an online class carries the same value as a traditional-classroom class," and 43 percent of 1,545 chief executives and small-business owners agreed that a degree earned by distance learning "is as credible" as one from a traditional campus-based program.

Mr. Zogby said that differing attitudes in two polls within a year show that "the gap was closing"—and he said that wasn't as surprising as it might seem. As with changing perceptions about other cultural phenomena, "these paradigm shifts really are moving at lightning speed."

That, says Mr. Zogby, is why he writes about online universities in a chapter—"Dematerializing the Paradigm"—that discusses the rise of car-sharing companies like Flexcar (now merged with Zipcar), the emergence of Internet blogs as a source of news and information, and the popularity of microbrewed beer.

And while it may be true that microbrews and Zipcars, at least, are still very much niche products, Mr. Zogby says they are signs of transcendent change—just like the distance-education courses that are being offered by more and more institutions across the country. "When you add up all the niche products, it's a market unto itself," he says.

In the book, Mr. Zogby also highlights the emerging influence of the First Globals, whom his book calls "the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history." First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant and internationally aware.

It is these First Globals, he writes, who are shaping what he says is nothing short of a "fundamental reorientation of the American character away from wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources."

Higher education, he said in the interview, needs to take notice and adapt. These days, he said, students are much more likely to have experienced other cultures firsthand, either as tourists or because they have immigrated from someplace else. Whether college for them is a traditional complex of buildings or an interactive online message board, said Mr. Zogby, "there is a different student on campus."

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education are at the following sites:


"How to Be an Online Student and Survive in the Attempt," by Maria José Viñas, Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 11, 2008 --- Click Here

The lives of many online college students are not easy. They have to combine jobs, house chores, family life and, on top of all that, do some actual studying. To help online students cope with this burden, a blog sponsored by Western Governors University offers survival tips.

The Online Student Survival Guide, a program that kicked off in May, is meant to give online students tips on adjusting to online learning and staying motivated throughout the courses, while balancing life and school. Following the famous Latin maxim “mens sana in corpore sano”, the bloggers also write posts on healthy eating—not only for the online students, but for their families, too.

Once again, the link to the Survival Guide is http://onlinestudentsurvival.com/

Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

 

August 31, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

REDUCING ATTRITION IN ONLINE CLASSES

"Attrition rates for classes taught through distance education are 10- 20% higher than classes taught in a face-to-face setting. . . . Finding ways to decrease attrition in distance education classes and programs is critical both from an economical and quality viewpoint. High attrition rates have a negative economic impact on universities."

In "Strategies to Engage Online Students and Reduce Attrition Rates" (THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATORS ONLINE, vol. 4, no. 2, July 2007), the authors provide a review of the literature to determine methods for "engaging students with the goals of enhancing the learning process and reducing attrition rates." Their research identified four major strategies:

-- student integration and engagement

Includes "faculty-initiated contact via phone calls, pre-course orientations, informal online chats, and online student services."

-- learner-centered approach

Faculty "need to get to know their students and assess each student's pre-existing knowledge, cultural perspectives, and comfort level with technology."

-- learning communities

"[S]trong feelings of community may not only increase persistence in courses, but may also increase the flow of information among all learners, availability of support, commitment to group goals, cooperation among members and satisfaction with group efforts."

-- accessibility to online student services.

Services might include "assessments, educational counseling, administrative process such as registration, technical support, study skills assistance, career counseling, library services, students' rights and responsibilities, and governance."

The paper, written by Lorraine M. Angelino, Frankie Keels Williams, and Deborah Natvig, is available at http://www.thejeo.com/Volume4Number2/Angelino Final.pdf

The Journal of Educators Online (JEO) [ISSN 1547-500X ]is an online, double-blind, refereed journal by and for instructors, administrators, policy-makers, staff, students, and those interested in the development, delivery, and management of online courses in the Arts, Business, Education, Engineering, Medicine, and Sciences. For more information, contact JEO, 500 University Drive, Dothan, Alabama 36303 USA; tel: 334-983-6556, ext. 1-356; fax: 334-983-6322; Web: http://www.thejeo.com/ .

Jensen Comment
Attrition rates are high because online students are often adults with heavy commitments to family and jobs. Initially they think they are going to have time for a course, but then the course becomes too demanding and/or unexpected things happen in their lives such as computer crashes, a change in job demands (such as more travel), family illness, marital troubles, etc. Sometimes online students initially believe the myth that online courses are easier than onsite courses and, therefore, take less time. About the only time saved is the logistical time waster of commuting to and from a classroom site.

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education are at the following sites:

 

The Dark Side of Education Technology and Online Learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


Updates 2007

Question
What is the rate of growth in online enrollments in the U.S.?

"More Online Enrollments," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, October 23, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/23/sloan

More students than ever are taking courses online, but that doesn’t mean the growth will continue indefinitely. That’s the takeaway from the Sloan Foundation’s latest survey, conducted with the Babson Survey Research Group, of colleges’ online course offerings.

With results from nearly 4,500 institutions of all types, the report, “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning”, found that in fall 2006, nearly 3.5 million students — or 19.8 percent of total postsecondary enrollments — took at least one course online. That’s a 9.7-percent increase over the previous year, but growth has been slowing significantly: last year, the jump was 36.5 percent.

But compared to the growth rate for enrollment overall (1.3 percent), the report notes, the online sector is still rapidly expanding. Most of that expansion is happening where online classes are already being offered.

“The number of new institutions entering the online learning arena had definitely slowed [by last fall]; most institutions that plan to offer online education are now doing so,” the report’s authors wrote.

The institutions surveyed seem to believe that the most important reason for offering online courses is to improve student access, while the top cited obstacles to more widespread online offerings are student’ discipline or study habits, followed by faculty acceptance.

The survey focuses solely on what it classifies as “online” courses: those offering 80 percent or more of their content over the Internet. As a result, trends in so-called “blended” or “hybrid” courses, in which students occasionally meet in person with their professors while also receiving considerable instruction online, are not covered in the report.

The importance of online courses varies widely depending on the type of institution. Public universities, for example, view online education as much more critical to their long-term strategies than private or even for-profit institutions. And not surprisingly, two-year colleges have shown the most growth, accounting for a full half of online enrollments over the past five years:

Four-Year Growth in Students Taking at Least One Online Course

  Enrollment, Fall 2002 Enrollment, Fall 2006 Increase Compound Annual Growth Rate
Doctoral/Research 258,489 566,725 308,236 21.7%
Master’s 335,703 686,337 350,634 19.6%
Baccalaureate 130,677 170,754 40,077 6.9%
Community colleges 806,391 1,904,296 1,097,905 24.0%
Specialized 71,710 160,268 88,558 22.3%

The importance to online strategies is broken down in the following chart:

% Saying Online Education Is Critical to Their Institutions’ Long-Term Strategy

  Public Private Nonprofit Private For-Profit
Fall 2002 66.1% 34.0% 34.6%
Fall 2003 65.4% 36.6% 62.1%
Fall 2004 74.7% 43.8% 48.6%
Fall 2005 71.7% 46.9% 54.9%
Fall 2006 74.1% 48.6% 49.5%

Even if online growth can’t go on at this pace forever, most institutions still see room for increasing enrollments:

% Saying They Expect Online Enrollments to Increase

  Doctoral/Research Master’s Baccalaureate Associate’s Specialized
Expecting increase 87.5% 84.0% 75.6% 87.8% 75.3%

Tables From “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning”

The study also found that most growth was expected at institutions that are the most “engaged” — that is, “currently have online offerings and believe that online is critical to the long-term strategy of their organization. These institutions, however, have not yet included online education in their formal strategic plan.”

 


 

In theory, distance education is supposed to open up an era when all students have a range of options not limited by geography. But a new report from Eduventures finds that most distance students enroll at distance programs run by institutions in their own geographic regions, and that more than a third of these students take online courses offered by an institution within a 50-mile radius.
Inside Higher Ed, March 28, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/28/qt

More and more prestigious universities are sharing course material and lecture videos --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

MIT now has most of its entire curriculum of course materials in all disciplines available free to the world as open courseware. This includes the Sloan School of Business Courses --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Especially note the FAQs --- http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/OCWHelp/help.htm

By the end of the year all MIT's course materials will be available, which is probably the most extensive freely open knowledge initiative (OKI) in the entire world.

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) has formally partnered with three organizations that are translating MIT OCW course materials into Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese --- http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/Translations.htm

Question
What is the most popular download course at MIT?
Answer: According to ABC News last week it's the Introduction to Electrical Engineering Course.

Other major universities now have huge portions of their curriculum materials available --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

If you want to try something quite different, you might consider some online business and accounting courses from the University of Toyota --- http://www2.itt-tech.edu/st/onlineprograms/  (These are not free).

Other online training and education programs are listed at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen


Education Balance: Even Resident Students Can Benefit for Life With Some Online Courses

"Latest Twist in Distance Ed," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, August 9, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/09/american

Turns out, the American University online program is somewhat of a hybrid. While the university marketed that first course, about terrorism and the legal system, to all sorts of groups in an effort to gauge outside interest, all but two of the 27 students who took the class were its own. Many of the students were away from Washington for the summer, living abroad or at home

“The most important information we’ve gathered is that our distance learning courses are most attractive to our own students,” Ettle said. “Students know they can use credits toward a degree, whereas some students [outside] might be unsure how they could use the credits.”

As distance education continues to evolve, American’s model will likely become more common, according to Diana Oblinger, vice president for Educause, the nonprofit group that deals with technology issues in higher education.

“It makes absolute sense,” Oblinger said. “Both institutions and students are concerned about the time-to-degree. If you can take a course while you are away and when it’s convenient, that helps you progress toward graduation. From an institution’s perspective, why allow your student to take someone else’s course?”

This summer, American is offering 25 online courses, none of which are longer than seven weeks. The condensed schedule works well for students who are either amidst or have just finished study abroad programs or summer jobs and want to extend their stays away from campus while earning credits, Ettle said. It’s also popular with students who take on internships during the year and want to go to school in the summer without having a full course load.

American provides incentives for those who are part of the distance learning program. Starting several summers ago, the university began giving professors whose online course proposals were accepted a $2,500 course development grant. Summer teaching at American isn’t a substitute for teaching an academic year course, and the additional compensation is only monetary incentive to teach in the summer online. Students receive a discounted rate on summer distance courses, and the price hasn’t changed in four years. A three-credit course costs $2,200, which is about 30 percent cheaper than a graduate course and about 25 percent cheaper than an undergraduate course, Ettle said.

There are other obvious cost savings: Students don’t have to pay for campus housing, and the university frees up space for other uses. The overhead cost of running a distance education course is also significantly less than it is for a normal classroom-based course, Ettle said.

“We’re utilizing our facilities more efficiently,” she said. “We want repeat customers — it’s good for them and it’s good for us.”

Still, American limits students to two distance courses per summer to prevent those who are working or studying elsewhere from overloading their schedules. The university places no limits, though, on the number of summers a student can take an online course.

Oblinger said it’s becoming more common for a university to either require or strongly suggest that its students take an online course as a way to prepare them for how learning often takes place in the workplace.

Continued in article


Updates 2006

Open Sharing Catching on Outside the United States
Britain’s Open University today formally begins its effort to put its course materials and other content online for all the world to use. With its effort, OpenLearn, which is expected to cost $10.6 million and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the university joins Massachusetts Institute of Technology and institutions in several other countries in trying to put tools for learning within the reach of otherwise difficult to reach populations.
Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2006

Open2 Net Learning from Open University (the largest university in the U.K.) --- http://www.open2.net/learning.html

Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college in Fall 2005?

More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . . ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’
Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online

More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.

Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term, the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in 2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.

The report, a joint partnership between the group and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent of the content is delivered via the Internet.

The Sloan Survey of Online Learning, “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,” shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.” Both numbers are up from a year ago.

Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack of survey responses from those institutions.)

Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served by face-to-face programs.

What stands out is the number of faculty who still don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the programs.

Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers are striking.

“As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said. “It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”

Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in class).

She said she isn’t surprised to see data illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.

“Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.

The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.

Nearly all institutions with total enrollments exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment totals and not looking to expand into the online market.

The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be involved in online learning.

“Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges. The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.

Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said she plans to include that in next year’s edition.

Few survey respondents said acceptance of online degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Motivations for Distance Learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#Motivations

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of online learning and teaching are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Update in 2005

Distant distance education
Ms. Salin is part of a new wave of outsourcing to India: the tutoring of American students. Twice a week for a month now, Ms. Salin, who grew up speaking the Indian language Malayalam at home, has been tutoring Daniela in English grammar, comprehension and writing. Using a simulated whiteboard on their computers, connected by the Internet, and a copy of Daniela's textbook in front of her, she guides the teenager through the intricacies of nouns, adjectives and verbs.
Saritha Rai, "A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard," The New York Times, September 7, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/education/07tutor.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1126191549-1Ydu+7CY89CpuVeaJbJ4XA

The Blackboard:  A tribute to a long-standing but fading teaching and learning tool
From the Museum of History and Science at Oxford University
Bye Bye Blackboard: From Einstein and others
--- http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/blackboard/
Bob Jensen's threads on the tools of education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Controversies in Regulation of Distance Education

"All Over the Map," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, December 8, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/08/regulation

As the distance learning market continues to grow, state agencies charged with regulating the industry continue to operate in a “fragmented environment,” according to a report presented Thursday at the 2006 Education Industry Finance & Investment Summit, in Washington.

One of the main questions these agencies must consider is what constitutes an institution having a “physical presence” in their state. In other words, what is an appropriate test to determine whether regulation is needed?

More than 80 percent of agencies that are included in the report said that they use some sort of “physical presence” test. But few agree on how to define the word “presence,” in part because there are so many elements to consider.

That’s clear in “The State of State Regulation of Cross-Border Postsecondary Education,” the report issued by Dow Lohnes, a firm with a sizable higher education practice. (The firm plans to release an updated report early next year after more responses arrive.)

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of education technology are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

 



Long-Term Future of Education 
and Education Technologies

A Serious New Commercial Advance for Online Training and Education

"Opening Up Online Learning," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge

This has not exactly been a season of peace, love and harmony on the higher education technology landscape. A patent fight has broken out among major developers of course management systems. Academic publishers and university officials are warring over open access to federally sponsored research. And textbook makers are taking a pounding for — among other things — the ways in which digital enhancements are running up the prices of their products.

In that context, many may be heartened by the announcement later today at the Educause meeting in Dallas that three dozen academic publishers, providers of learning management software, and others have agreed on a common, open standard that will make it possible to move digital content into and out of widely divergent online education systems without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The agreement by the diverse group of publishers and software companies, who compete intensely with one another, is being heralded as an important breakthrough that could expand the array of digital content available to professors and students and make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of learning systems.

Of course, that’s only if the new standard, known as the “Common Cartridge,” becomes widely adopted, which is always the question with developments deemed to be potential technological advances.

Many observers believe this one has promise, especially because so many of the key players have been involved in it. Working through the IMS Global Learning Consortium, leading publishers like Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system makers such as Blackboard, ANGEL Learning and open-source Sakai have worked to develop the technical specifications for the common cartridge, and all of them have vowed to begin incorporating the new standard into their products by next spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually, but has not set a timeline for when.

What exactly is the Common Cartridge? In lay terms, it is a set of specifications and standards, commonly agreed to by an IMS working group, that would allow digitally produced content — supplements to textbooks such as assessments or secondary readings, say, or faculty-produced course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or appear, the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones like Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems like Moodle and Sakai.

“It is essentially a common ‘container,’ so you can import it and load it and have it look similar when you get it inside” your local course system, says Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL, who helped conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital publishing unit at Pearson.

The Common Cartridge approach is designed to deal with two major issues: (1) the significant cost and time that publishers now must spend (or others, if the costs are passed along) to produce the material they produce for multiple, differing learning management systems, and (2) the inability to move courses produced in one course platform to another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their courses from one college to another and for campuses to consider switching course management providers.

The clearest and surest upside of the new standard, most observers agree, is that it could help lower publishers’ production costs and, in turn, allow them to focus their energies on producing more and better content. David O’Connor, senior vice president for product development at Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company and other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year effectively moving content around” so that ancillary material for textbooks can work in multiple course management systems.

Because Blackboard and Web CT together own in the neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management market, Pearson and other publishers produce virtually all of their materials to work in those proprietary systems. Materials are typically produced on demand for smaller players like ANGEL, Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find usable materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that can, when they choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify digital content for selected textbooks, “small publishers often have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a result, “there are just fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard and WebCT, and more hurdles to getting it.”

Supporters hope that adoption of the common cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and money adapting one textbook’s digital content for multiple course platforms and more time producing more and better content. “This should have the result of broadening choice in content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an analyst at Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS platform, but could now go out and choose the best content that aligns with what’s happening in their curriculum.”

Less clear is how successful the effort will be at improving the portability of course materials from one learning management system to another. If all the major providers introduce “export capability,” there is significant promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog e-Literate and is assistant director of the State University of New York Learning Network. “This has the potential to be one of the most important standards to come out in a while, particularly for faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that his comments here represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much easier for them to take rich course content and course designs and migrate them from one system to another with far less pain.”

But while easier transferability would obviously benefit the smaller players in the course management market — and ANGEL and Sakai plan to announce today that their systems will soon allow professors to create Common Cartridges for export out of their systems — such a system would only take off if the dominant player in the market, the combined Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how excited Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty to migrate out of their product and into one of their competitors,” says Feldstein.

Chris Vento, senior vice president of technology and product development at Blackboard, was a leading proponent of the IMS Common Cartridge concept when he was a leading official at WebCT before last year’s merger. In an interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others are asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock up the format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he says, is that by helping the entire industry, he says, the project cannot help but benefit its biggest player, too.

“This will enable publishers to really do the best job of producing their content, making it richer and better for students and faculty, and more lucrative for publishers from the business perspective,” says Vento. “Anything we can do to enable that content to be built, and more of it and better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”

Blackboard is fully behind the project, Vento says. Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter, Blackboard has also committed to incorporating the new standard into its products, and that Blackboard intends to make export of course materials possible out of its platform. “Exactly how that maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he said, “but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures to do this.”

That pressure is likely to be intensified because of the public relations pounding Blackboard has taken among many in the academic technology world because of its attempt to patent technology that many people believe is fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of Pearson says he believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in the Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player, to be someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds: “There is an opportunity for them to mend some of the damage from the patent issue.”

Like virtually all technological advances — or would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will ultimately rise and fall, says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether Blackboard and others embrace it. “Everything comes down to adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every standard is the adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve too early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers decide not to support it for various reasons.”

Those behind the Common Cartridge believe it’s off to a good start with the large number of disparate parties not only involved in creating it, but already committing to incorporate it into their offerings.

Yet even as they launch this standard, some of them are already looking ahead to the next challenge. While the Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, will allow for easier movement of digital course materials into and out of course management systems, it does not ensure that users will be able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools (like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of course management systems, or with the next generation of tools that may emerge down the road. For that, the same parties would have to reach a similar agreement on a standard for “tool interoperability,” which is next on the IMS agenda.

“This is only one step,” Pearson’s O’Connor says of the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an important one.

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance education are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


 

The Global Technology Revolution 2020 ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR303.pdf

Questions
What are the most significant changes expected in higher education by the Year 2025? 
What major universities are now experimenting on the leading edge of such changes?


Answers
Answer 1  --- Cluster and Grid Computing!  The first test linked Caltech, Fermilab, 
                      UC San Diego, the University of Florida, and the University of Wisconsin

What's Microsoft been up to in grid/distributed computing? The company's not talking, but we've ferreted out some interesting details about the hush-hush "Bigtop" project. Our sources say it involves loosely coupled machines, and perhaps even a new version of Windows. Read our story for more details on what "Bigtop" could be, and when to expect it.
Jim Lauderback, What's New from Ziff Davis, December 30, 2004

From Syllabus News on September 24, 2002

Stanford Online Press Gets 'Clustering' Software

Stanford's HighWire Press, an online publisher of scientific and medical publications for researchers and institutions, has licensed "clustering" software that will allow it to organize its content into easy-to-navigate clusters for end-users. HighWire licensed the Clustering Engine and Enterprise Publisher from Vivisimo, Inc. to organize search results and publish larger document subsets on its master site. HighWire will offer the products to its own publishing customers for use on their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13 million online articles, so researchers need tools to reduce, refine, and tunnel into search results," said John Sack, director of HighWire. The new software, he added, "will help liberate readers from the need to make overly specific queries. Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill down from there, in the `I know it when I see it' style."

For more information, visit: http://highwire.stanford.edu .

 

"What Is Grid Computing, Anyway?" by Tim McDonald, NewsFactor Network July 24, 2002 --- http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18722.html 

One good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to observe whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto store shelves -- from science to commerce. According to that measure, grid computing is just coming of age.

Often called the next big thing in global Internet technology, grid computing employs clusters of locally or remotely networked machines to work on specific computational projects.

One well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.

From Science to Commerce

Grid computing traditionally has been useful to researchers working on scientific or technical problems -- much like the SETI project -- that require a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

But while this technology was once exclusively the province of academics in fields like biomedicine and weather forecasting, it has recently been making a strong foray into potentially lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has been used for several years as a load-balancing technique by server Latest News about server hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of age for other applications as well.

"Grid computing has advanced to the point now that there are products out there like Sun's Grid Engine Enterprise Edition," Aberdeen Group analyst Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.

Much like a load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software lets organizations create networked grids to share resources on a wider scale and to allocate processing resources according to department priorities.

Grid Computing Components

Essentially, grids are built from clusters of computer servers joined together over a local area network (LAN) or over the Internet.

While several grids that run over the Internet -- like the SETI project -- have been built with proprietary software, there are several development tools that can facilitate the growth and adoption of grid computing.

One of those tools is Globus, a research and development project focused on helping software developers apply the grid concept.

The Globus toolkit, the group's primary offering, is a set of components that can be used to develop grid applications. For each component in the toolkit, Globus provides an API (application programmer interface) for use by software developers.

Power to the People

Research scientists historically have been attracted to grid computing because it uses the power of idle computers to work on difficult computational problems.

Proponents of grid computing say the technology will enable universities and research institutions to share their supercomputers, servers and storage capacity, allowing them to perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.

In line with those expectations, HP recently announced that a 9.2-teraflop supercomputer Latest News about supercomputer soon will be connected to the Department of Energy's Science Grid. When installed, it will be the largest supercomputer attached to a grid anywhere in the world, according to the company.

Sharing Data

Until now, the problem with grid computing has been a lack of common software for developers to work with, largely because grids rely on Internet-based software.

In an effort to spur broader adoption of grids, the National Science Foundation established the US$12.1 million Middleware Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released software and other tools designed to make working on grids easier for scientists and engineers.

"Scientists are now sharing data and instrumentation on an unprecedented scale, and other geographically distributed groups are beginning to work together in ways that were previously impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support Center.

First Gaming Grid

In a real-world example of grid computing, IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release a computing grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net spent two years building the grid, which distributes games across a network of server farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.

Massively multiplayer games (MMGs) historically have been run on mirrored servers that essentially duplicate copies of the MMG universe to balance user loads.

While this technique is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so that each set of servers behaves responsively to user actions -- the mirroring technique limits the number of players who can participate at one time in the same game universe.

When load balances increase, the typical MMG response has been to add more servers, copy the game universe and spill the extra load into that new copy.

Now, however, Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server sentinels" that supports the interaction of millions of players in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players. According to the company, the extension of grid computing to the gaming world lets game developers support a limitless number of users in their MMGs.

'Taking Hold of an Industry'

Companies are lining up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This week, for example, software development site CollabNet announced it will work with Butterfly.net to develop an online environment that lets game developers test their games.

"IBM's been extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of investing resources and winning new partners and customers," IBM spokesperson Jim Larkin told NewsFactor.

"Butterfly is one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has worked with another company to help develop a computing grid that is in the commercial arena," Larkin said. "It's a clear example of how grid is taking hold of an industry."

"Digipede to Showcase .NET Grid Computing Solutions at Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference," PR Web, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400497.htm

"Grids Unleash the Power of Many," by John Gartner, MIT's Technology Review,  January 14, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_gartner011405.asp?trk=nl 

Computer scientists in three states -- West Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado -- are each combining their technology resources into separate computer grids that will give researchers, universities, private companies and citizens access to powerful supercomputers.

The project designers say these information aqueducts will encourage business development, accelerate scientific research, and improve the efficiency of government.

"Grid computing will provide 1,000 times more business opportunities than what we see over the Internet today," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of grid computing and networking services at MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC.

MCNC is spearheading North Carolina's statewide grid development that currently includes seven universities including North Carolina State, Duke, and the University of North Carolina.

The North Carolina project -- which has a goal to link 180 institutions -- is encouraging business development through its Start Up Grid Initiative, which allows fledgling companies to plug into the grid for up to nine months free of charge and afterwards at discounted rates, Gentzsch says.

Because raising capital and acquiring technology takes up most of a new company's time, "Startups usually only get to spend 10 percent of their time executing their idea," says Gentzch, who has launched seven companies.

According to a 2003 report by Robert Cohen, a Fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, North Carolina's grid could create 24,000 jobs and boost the state's output by $10.1 billion by 2010 if effectively implemented.

Before statewide grids can become a realit, the software used to share and manage resources needs to be improved to include more standard communication protocols. Gentzsch says the expected release of version 4.0 of the open source Globus Toolkit, which he estimates is used by 90 percent of grid projects, will greatly simplify connecting computers to the grid.

Securing a location's computing resources so that only specified resources are made available for sharing is a significant challenge, Gentzsch says. To protect data files, institutions must "encrypt everything," and configure the grid network so that "the CPU cycles are separated from the disk resources."

Gentzsch estimates that advanced computing resource utilization is just 25 percent, and grid computing could increase the efficiency to 75 percent.

"Back to Basics and the Next Big Thing," by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus, August 2002, pp/ 10-11 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590 

Grid Computing: The Next Big Thing

The next big thing to transform the Internet is likely to come from work going on with the grid. The grid is an infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of people, institutions, and resources.

It may be useful to recall that the birth of the Web came from a desire to share research papers among large numbers of particle physicists doing “big science” at CERN, the Swiss research center. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision has changed all our lives. In the world of international science, its impact has been staggering. Recognizing this, the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC), the UK analog of the National Science Foundation, has embarked on a £98 million project called the Core e-Science Programme, managed by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of the UK Research Councils. The e-Science project proposes to connect scientists with expensive remote facilities, teraflop computers, and information resources stored in dedicated databases. Add to these resources higher level services such as workflow, transactions, data mining, and knowledge discovery, and you begin to glimpse what’s envisioned. The grid is the architecture proposed to make this a reality.

What kinds of research are we talking about? Everything from particle physics (what goes around comes around) to basic medical investigation. For example, our understanding of even basic human physiology remains terribly limited. We don’t know how multiple parameters interact over time in fundamental processes like heart rate, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular indicators. Imagine if 100,000 people volunteered to wear real-time monitoring devices so that their daily metabolic functions were recorded and analyzed in real time. The volume of data is enormous but that’s just the beginning. We would want to compare how the data relate to the activities of the people as they went about their daily lives. In the end, predicting the likelihood of an impending physical problem becomes a potential reality. Just like the work underway to provide predictive intervention for the replacement of computing hardware, you can imagine high risk heart patients wearing proactive monitors that page them to head for a cardiac care unit because the data indicate a potential problem in the next 24 hours. Today it may seem like science fiction, but with research using the grid, it’s emerging into possible science fact.

This may seem far a field from the classroom. How far it is remains to be seen of course, but there are people working today on applying the potential of the grid to learning management or virtual learning environments. Better descriptions about teaching processes and the learning objects needed, along with work on metadata for educational objects, are underway. So stay tuned for more about the “next big thing” in future columns.

References

Laurillard, D. The Changing University. 1996.
http://itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper13/paper13.html

Metadata for Education Group
www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj

The full article is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590

CLUSTER AND GRID COMPUTING REFERENCES --- http://www.ic.uff.br/~vefr/research/clcomp/clustrefs.html 

"Time to Hop on the Gridwagon," by Daithí Ó hAnluain, Wired News, July 26, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html 

"Grid computing was the reserve of 'big science' five years ago," says Catlett, "But in five years, it will be completely pedestrian. I was working on a Cray Supercomputer in 1985, and my laptop would blow it away now!"

That's for the future. In the meantime, Grids are currently deploying among Fortune 2000 companies to deal with everything from batch analysis of financial data, trend analysis of point-of-sale data, and design, engineering and manufacture automation. Oh, and collaboration as well.

This last may seem a surprising tangent to the pure processing power that grids typically deliver, but collaboration and data analysis are two sides of the same logistical coin. Engineers or scientists are increasingly collaborating on projects and testing their theories across the same grid. They are also dealing with terabytes of data.

It's one of the moves that makes integration with Web services so obvious to grid gurus, like IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of technology strategy.

"Grid computing is really the natural evolution of the Internet. This is really looking at the Internet, with all its promise of universal connectivity and reach, and making it work far better by bringing the qualities of service that people are used to in enterprise computing, and ... (what) we all have gotten used to in utilities like electricity (and the) telephone."

Ultimately, then, the grid could provide computing power on a utility model for consumers or one-off projects or simply as a means to outsource processing.

Nonetheless, big science will still be a major part of the grid's future. A case in point is the TeraGrid, which goes live next spring and is set to steal the No. 2 spot from IBM's ASCI White in the world supercomputer rankings.

"The Earth Simulator is essentially a big computer grid," Catlett says. "A bunch of computers put in a grid to get the power. It's a short step from putting supercomputers in a grid across the room to doing it across the country, or across the world."

When completed, the TeraGrid will include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster computing power distributed at the four TeraGrid sites, capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes of data. It will be connected through a network 40 Gbps, which will become a 50 to 80 Gbps network or 16 times faster than today's fastest research network.

It will be used for National Science Foundation-sponsored projects and commercial applications.

So where will it all end? Nowhere in sight, that's for sure.

"We have the genome sequence and now we're working on the protein folding, and it won't be long before the life sciences are looking at whole life systems," Baird says. "The nature of grid computing is going to allow for bigger and bigger science applications. As long as we keep on putting out more power, people will design better applications for it."

There will be one paradigm shift that may be noticed only for what's missing: the end of technology.

"We're entering the post-technology age where users will be able to get on with what they want to do without worrying about making the technology work," IBM's Hawk says.

"It used to be cool to change your own oil. Now it's not. Soon people won't have to worry about the technology. Grid computing is what will make that happen."

The other parts of this article are at http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html 


"The future of computing:  The next big thing?" The Economist, January 15, 2004 --- http://www.economist.co.uk/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2352183 

IT is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand vision of “adaptive” information technology is about. It has something to do with “Darwinian reference architectures”, she suggests, and also with “modularising” and “integrating”, as well as with lots of “enabling” and “processes”. IBM, HP's arch rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls “on-demand computing”. Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of “seamless computing”. Other vendors prefer “ubiquitous”, “autonomous” or “utility” computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes “organic”. Gartner, a rival, opts for “real-time”.

Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name. What is certainly monumental, reckons Pip Coburn, an analyst at UBS, is the hype, which concerns, he says, “stuff that doesn't work yet”. Frank Gens at IDC, another tech consultancy, quips that, in 2004 at least, “utility” computing is actually “futility” computing.

Yet as a long-term vision for computing, what the likes of IBM, Microsoft and HP (and Oracle, Sun, etc) are peddling is plausible. The question is, how long will it take? Some day, firms will indeed stop maintaining huge, complex and expensive computer systems that often sit idle and cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and customers. Instead, they will outsource their computing to specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and pay for it as they use it, just as they now pay for their electricity, gas and water. As with such traditional utilities, the complexity of the supply-systems will be entirely hidden from users.

ER meets the Matrix The potential for a computing infrastructure such as this to boost efficiency—and even to save lives—is impressive. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies, etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the patient on to the network and crunch the data with the processing power of thousands of remote computers—not just the little machine which is all that the hospital itself can nowadays afford.

For its nuts and bolts, this vision relies on two unglamorous technologies. The first is “web services”—software that resides in a big shared “server” computer and can be found and used by applications on other servers, even ones far away and belonging to different organisations. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital would be getting the patient's info from his home clinic through such a web service.

The second technology is “grid computing”. This involves the sharing of processing power. The best-known example is a “search for extra-terrestrial intelligence” project called SETI@home, overseen by the University of California at Berkeley. Nearly 5m people in 226 countries have downloaded a screensaver that makes their computer available, whenever it is sitting idle, to process radio signals gathered from outer space. The aim is to find a pattern that may be from aliens. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital would similarly crunch patient-data using the internet, or grid, as if it were a single, giant virtual microprocessor, but for a more earth-bound purpose.

Both technologies have made great strides recently. Web services, for instance, need common standards and protocols. Some basic standards already exist—awkward acronyms such as XML, SOAP and WSDL provide a rudimentary grammar to let computers talk to each other. But the sticking point, says Phillip Merrick, boss of webMethods, one of the pioneers in the field, has been the many other fiddly but necessary protocols for security, transaction certification, and so on. A breakthrough occurred in October, when the two superpowers, IBM and Microsoft, simply got up on a stage together and declared what protocols they will use. Dubbed “WS splat” by the geeks, this ought to speed up the adoption of web services.

Web services are currently most visible in the business model of so-called application service providers. These are firms that offer to host software applications and databases for customers for a monthly fee—an analogy would be for firms to do their e-mailing via Yahoo! or their buying via eBay. The most successful is Salesforce.com, a San Francisco firm that, as the name says, specialises in software for managing customer information and marketing leads. It says that it was poaching so much business from a more traditional seller of customer-relations software, Siebel Systems, that Siebel had to adopt the model itself. In October, Siebel teamed up with IBM and now also offers its software as a service over the internet.

Nonetheless, this particular form of web services is overhyped, says Rahul Sood of Tech Strategy Partners, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. Such services appeal mostly to small businesses and firms that do not need to customise their applications very much. For the grander vision—the on-demand, adaptive, seamless, ubiquitous, organic sort—a lot more needs to happen.

At the core of the vision is flexibility—a firm must be able to make its operating costs, and therefore its computing and information costs, totally variable so that they go up and down with business volumes. Firms can improve cost flexibility today, says Mr Sood, but only if they stick with one vendor, such as IBM, or if they make only one of their many computing functions (data storage, say) flexible. But for computing to be bought and sold as a utility, firms must be able to switch vendors, to do it for all their computing functions, and with meter-based pricing. All of this will take a few more years to get right.

Continued in the article.


The Video Game Revolution (also available from PBS on videotape) ---  http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/ 

 

This is the story of how a whimsical invention of the 1960s helped spawn the computer industry as we know it. Video games have influenced the way children live and play, forever altered the entertainment industry, and even affected the way wars are fought. See how it all began and find out what it means for the future.


When recruiting teens for college and/or particular careers such as accounting, here's one of the competitive tools that we have not successfully exploited.  This type of thing is also being successfully employed in recruiting and training, but does not seem to have widespread success in educational institutions.

Question
What has become the most successful and most controversial recruiting tool of the U.S. Army? 

Answer

I viewed the answer to the first question of television.
I watched this while eating breakfast on March 31.
CBS News on March 30, 2004 proclaimed that an Internet game has become a major recruitment tool.  The game that is especially successful is called America's Army.  The official version of this game is at http://www.americasarmy.com/ 

"Army Recruits Video Gamers," CBS News, March 30, 2004 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/30/eveningnews/main609489.shtml 

The soldiers are real. But they're also actors, staging scenes for the Army's latest war game.

It's a video game created by the U.S. Army to win over the hearts and minds of American teenagers.

And, as CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta reports, judging by these faces, mission accomplished.

Game player Rob Calcagni believes the game is going to work on a lot of guys his age.

"Definitely, because it's a fun game," says Calcagni.

The game, "America's Army" has become such an overnight hit, the Army staged a tournament in New York. Recruiters were waiting at the door.

"This is a fantastic recruiting opportunity," says Lt. Col. John Gillette. "We would like to sign up as many as possible. We are looking for five to ten."

One of these teens enlisted after playing the game, the other two are thinking about it, which is exactly what the creator of "America's Army" had in mind.

"We look at all the things that the Army is doing that is under the control of the Army that captures people's attention and the game is number one," says the game's creator Col. Casey Wardynksi.

America's Army has surpassed even the Pentagon's expectations. It's now the number one online action game in the country. The Army hasn't seen a recruiting tool this effective since "Be all that you can be."

But psychology professor Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan, a critic of violent video games, complains "America's Army" isn't real enough.

"War is not a game," he says.

"The video game does provide a sanitized view of violence," says Bushman. "For example, when you shoot someone or when you are shot you see a puff of blood; you don't see anyone suffering or writhing in pain."

"Kids aren't stupid," says Wardynski. "They know if they come into the army there is a reason that we have rifles and tanks and all that stuff."

The players insist they understand the meaning of "game over."

"If you are going to join the Army, you know the risk," says one gamer, Bart Koscinski. "In this game you might die like eight times in like 15 minutes. In real life people know what they are getting themselves into."

New editions of "America's Army" are now being developed for home video game systems -- a move that will deploy even more young cyber-soldiers to the military's virtual battlefield.

CombatSim.com --- http://www.combatsim.com/ 

Welcome to the web's largest resource of professionally-written articles and news about military combat simulations and strategy games. Our archives of news and articles span the golden age of this category of games from January of 1996 to February of 2003.

DEFENSE COMBAT SIM OLYMPICS –METHODOLOGIES INCORPORATING THE “CYBER GAMING CULTURE” bu Flack Maguire, Michael van Lent, Marc Prensky, and Ron W. Tarr --- http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/IITSEC%20Paper%202002%20(536%20V2-Final).pdf 

There have been many changes in the past twenty years in the implementation of simulation and computer games, including game development, usage in fixed locations, and event-based experiences both in the civilian and commercial spaces. This paper examines each of these three areas individually in order to predict their likely future developments. It then evaluates the dynamic potential for the military that lies at the crossroads where these trends are merging, and relates their interaction to the growing popularity of the online computer gaming experience.

Although far from a complete study, this paper aims to add to the discussion of these industry trends.

The paper proposes that there is a strong benefit to the military for recruiting, pre-training, and training of active duty members through the combination of :

· Choosing, building, or modifying effective combat simulation games for military use.

· Operating computer game competitions with significant military presence – similar to the air shows of

today – for event-based and location-based computer gaming competitions

· Using the combined venues of (a) online gaming competitions, (b) location-based game centers, and (c)

large scale gaming competitions

· Operating under the sports model of Leagues (by appropriate military warfare specialty for each League)

and further dividing the Leagues into competing Divisions.

By reaching out in this way to a wider spectrum of possibilities for including the cyber entertainment culture, the military will, we predict, experience benefits in recruiting, pre-training, and training, making further use of the compelling attraction of computer games that has been demonstrated by games’ recent rise to a predominant role for military age people in our society.

"Computer Games Liven Up Military Recruiting, Training," by Harold Kennedy, National Defense Magazine, November 2002 --- http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/article.cfm?Id=967 

Computer games—which entertain millions of U.S. teenagers—are beginning to breathe fresh life into military recruiting and training.

Earlier this year, for example, the U.S. Army launched a new computer game—called “America’s Army”—over the Internet.

Aimed at encouraging teens to join up, it enables players to experience both basic and advanced training, join a combat unit and fight in a variety of environments, including arctic Alaska, upstate New York and a third-world city.

Players can fire on a rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper school, train in urban combat and parachute from a C-17 transport.

The game accurately depicts military equipment, training and the real-life movements of soldiers, said Lt. Col. George Juntiff, Army liaison officer to the Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., which developed the game.

“America’s Army” features sound effects by moviemaker George Lucas’ company, SkyWalker, and Dolby Digital Sound. In addition, sound effects from the movie “Terminator II” were provided at no charge.

The game is getting considerable attention. During its first two weeks, more than a million Americans downloaded the game for free, Juntiff said.

“That’s an enormous number,” he said. “It’s the largest release in computer game history.”

Even more people are likely to acquire the game starting in October, Juntiff said, when the Army was scheduled to begin distributing it as a free CD set to a target audience over the age of 13. The developers plan to upgrade the game every month to attract new players, he said.

Actually, “America’s Army” consists of two separate games—”Soldiers,” a role-player based on Army values, and “Operations,” a shooter game that takes players on combat missions. It was developed and distributed at a cost of $7.5 million by MOVES and the U.S. Military Academy’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, N.Y.

The computer game is a “very cost-effective” way to reach potential recruits, especially compared to television advertising, said Maj. Chris Chambers, OEMA deputy director. “It is also a more detailed means of showing the American people what we do.”

The game also puts the Army in a positive light, said Juntiff. “It lets people know the Army is high-tech. It’s not what they see in the movies.”

The game, in addition, raises ethical issues, Juntiff said. “The game sets rules of engagement, and if you violate those rules, you pay the price.”

Once they enlist, recruits, these days, can expect to encounter computer games throughout their military training, said Michael R. Macedonia, senior scientist for the U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), headquartered in Orlando, Fla. Even well-known commercial games have been adapted for military use, he told National Defense.

That process began, he said, in the 1980s, when the Army modified the Atari tank battle game, “Battlezone,” to let it have gunner controls similar to those of a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The idea, he explained, was to enhance the eye-hand coordination of armor crews.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the Marines edited the commercial version of the three-dimensional game “Doom” to create “Marine Doom,” to help train four-man fire teams in urban combat.

More recently, the Army’s Soldier Systems Center, in Natick, Mass., has commissioned the games developer, Novalogic, of Calabasas, Calif., to modify the popular Delta Force 2 game to help familiarize soldiers with the service’s experimental Land Warrior system.

The Land Warrior system includes a self-

contained computer and radio unit, a global-positioning receiver, a helmet-mounted liquid-

character display and a modular weapons array that adds thermal and video sights and laser ranging to the standard M-4 carbine and M-16A2 rifle.

A customized version of another computer game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, is issued to all Navy student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at 65 colleges around the nation. The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has installed the software at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.

LB&B Associates, of Columbia, Md., has modified the game engine from author Tom Clancy’s best-selling computer game, “Rainbow Six Rogue Spear,” to train U.S. combat troops in urban warfare. The game—marketed by Ubi Soft Entertainment, of San Francisco—is based one of Clancy’s military novels.

The new version—which is still being developed—will not be used to improve marksmanship, but to sharpen decision-making skills at the small-unit level, said Michael S. Bradshaw, LB&B’s Systems Division manager. LB&B has completed a proof-of-concept version, which “worked brilliantly,” Bradshaw said. The project, he explained, has been turned over to the Institute for Creative Technology for final development.

Continued in the article

October 4, 2005 Message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

PAPERS ON THE UNIVERSITY AND THE INTERNET

EDUCAUSE is making available online, at no cost, THE INTERNET AND THE UNIVERSITY: FORUM 2004. The book is a collection of papers from the Forum's 2004 Aspen Symposium. The papers cover three areas: technology and globalization, technology and scholarship, and technology and the brain. The book is available in PDF format at http://www.educause.edu/apps/forum/iuf04.asp .

The Forum on the Internet and the University "seeks to understand how the Internet and new learning media can improve the quality and condition of learning, as well as the opportunities and risks created by rapid technological innovation and economic change."

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 1,900 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with 15,000 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder, CO, and Washington, DC. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at http://www.educause.edu/.

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ACADEMIC COMMONS

In August the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College launched the Academic Commons -- a website offering "a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education." In addition to publishing essays and reviews and showcasing innovative projects, the site also offers the Developer's Kit, an area for sharing project descriptions and pieces of code, and LoLa Exchange, which shares high-quality learning objects. The Academic Commons is available at http://www.academiccommons.org/ .

The mission of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College is "to explore, test, and promote liberal arts education . . . [and] to ensure that the nature and value of liberal arts education is widely understood and to reestablish the central place of the liberal arts in higher education."

For more information about the Center: email: liberalarts@wabash.edu ; Web: http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ .

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MORE ON GAMES AS LEARNING TOOLS

The July 2005 issue of CIT Infobits presented a roundup of articles on computer games as learning tools ("Games Children Play," http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul05.html#4 ). For more on this topic, see the special issue of INNOVATE (vol. 1, issue 6, August/September 2005) which is devoted to the "role of video game technology in current and future educational settings." Papers include:

"What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video Game Look Like?" by J. P. Gee, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Changing the Game: What Happens When Video Games Enter the Classroom?" by Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor of Educational Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Game-Informed Learning: Applying Computer Game Processes to Higher Education" by Michael Begg, David Dewhurst, and Hamish Macleod, University of Edinburgh

The entire issue is available online at http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=issue&id=9 . You may need to register on the Innovate website to access papers; there is no charge for registration and access.

Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings. Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends, and participate in open forums. For more information, contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate;
email: innovate@nova.edu ; Web: http://www.innovateonline.info/ .

Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games (including video games) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment 


Important Distance Education Site
The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.aln.org/
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.


January 25, 2005 message from News Update [campustechnology@newsletters.101com.com

Internet Study Predicts Aptitude Will Drive Class Composition

A sweeping survey of nearly 1,300 technology experts and scholars on the future of the Internet has concluded - not surprisingly - that the Internet would reach into and influence every corner of American life over the next 10 years. The study, released under the auspices of Elon University and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, paints a picture of a digital future that enhances the lives of many but which also contains some worrisome notes.

For instance, over half of the respondents predicted the Internet would spawn "a new age of creativity" and that formal education would incorporate more online classes, with students grouped by interests and skills, rather than by age. At the same time, two-thirds predicted a devastating attack on the country's network infrastructure would occur or in the next 10 years, and that government and business surveillance would rise dramatically.

Full results of the survey can be found on the Web at http://www.elon.edu/predictions 


TechKnowLogia --- http://www.techknowlogia.org/ 

TechKnowLogia is an international online journal that provides policy makers, strategists, practitioners and technologists at the local, national and global levels with a strategic forum to:

Explore the vital role of different information technologies (print, audio, visual and digital) in the development of human and knowledge capital;
Share policies, strategies, experiences and tools in harnessing technologies for knowledge dissemination, effective learning, and efficient education services;
Review the latest systems and products of technologies of today, and peek into the world of tomorrow; and
Exchange information about resources, knowledge networks and centers of expertise.
  • Do Technologies Enhance Learning?
  • Brain Research, Learning and Technology
  • Technologies at Work for: Critical Thinking, Science Instruction, Teaching Practices, etc...
  • Interactive TV as an Educational Tool
  • Complexity of Integrating ICTs into Curriculum & Exams
  • Use of Digital Cameras to Enhance Learning
  • Creating Affordable Universal Internet Access

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Corporations are starting to salivate over grid computing's potential for massive storage and processing power. Its creators -- tech and science geeks -- look forward to a new era --- http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57231,00.html 


For years, connecting university and research-center supercomputers so they could share resources simply wasn't feasible. New standards are changing that and opening the door to new research possibilities --- http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57265,00.html 


Answer 2  --- The Intellectual Supermarket as Conceived Today by 
                      Fathom (Columbia University and its Fathom Partners)

"The Intellectual Supermarket," by Ada Demb, Educause Review, July/August 2002, pp. 12-22 --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0240.pdf 

Higher education requires a new model, one that can operate alongside the old model but that will expand the capacity and explode the boundaries of the industry with its new assumptions:

  1. Higher education can be accessed directly by any individual, without the intermediary of an institution.  Supported by technology, higher education can achieve society's long-term goal of population-wide, universal access.
  2. The demand for educational programming will far exceed the capacity of current institutions.  Designers of educational programs are unlikely to know the characteristics of the learners who will be accessing their material.
  3. Educational programming will be of a more general nature--modularized and accessible to a general audience, much as is television.
  4. In the context of lifelong learning, individuals will seek education intermittently, as somewhat unrelated "events," over a  much longer timeframe than is commonly associated even with part-time degree work.  The learner's objectives are likely to be situationally defined by personal or professional knowledge needs.
  5. Attracted by this potential market, and enabled by the lower barriers to entry, new providers will enter the market--providers from outside the current educational system.
  6. The value of a brand name will be determined by the value to the learner as much as it will be by a third party that seeks certification.
  7. As a result, radically new ways of assessing and "certifying" learning outcomes will be needed.

The Supermarket Analogy

By contrast with the assumptions of the current system--a very orderly context in which quality has been tightly controlled--the proposed assumptions for the new model may appear to lead to a chaotic mix of undisciplined entrepreneurial efforts.  To examine whether this new model might be a future worth pursuing, we need a radical analogy for the higher education industry.  The analogy should be consistent with the new assumptions and should also raise provocative questions about possible future scenarios.  An unlikely possibility can offer insights and images for exploring this new territory: the food-retailing industry--in particular, the supermarket.  Nine characteristics of the supermarket yield a provocative comparison with higher education:

  1. Most products in the supermarket can be characterized as commodities: there is a minimum standard of quality the product must meet in order to be fit for sale; beyond that minimum, competition occurs on the basis of price and of perceived differences in quality.  Profit margins on individual products are very small; profits are generated by volume of sales.
  2. The supermarket manager and the customer are always looking for better-tasting, cheaper, more-nutritious goods yielding larger profit margins.
  3. The supermarket represents the quintessential example of the movement from full-service to self-service.  The customer chooses the fruit, weighs the fruit, packages the fruit, and then takes the fruit to the check-out line to pay.
  4. The supermarket does not take responsibility for the quality of the customer's diet or overall physical or financial health.  The supermarket offers a fantastic array of goods, but it is up to the customer to make order from that array and to select items that form some sort of coherent diet or meal plan.
  5. The supermarket tailors its product line to the geographic area it serves, but generally it offers both low- and high-end products.
  6. The customer's safety and capacity for judgment are supported by related regulation and markets: (a) the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and state departments of health, which oversee the food supply from point of origin through processing and packaging to store delivery and purchase; (b) labeling, which details the nutritional value of foods on packaged goods as required by law; and (c) nutrition, food, and diet consumer education, which is supplied through a variety of media, including schools, public programming, and private publishing groups such as hospitals and for-profit publications on diet and health.
  7. Consumers can turn to a range of services for more personalized attention, from health spas to personal nutritional advisors, books and magazines, or simply restaurants.
  8. Brand names, including supermarket brands, are related to quality and are supported by both research and advertising.  They are evaluated by independent consumer groups, although not systematically.
  9. Food producers and processors are, for the most part, independent of the distribution system in the United States.  The "system" that has brought Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup into supermarkets for almost one hundred years is held together by buyer-supplier market relationships.

The power of the supermarket analogy is revealed more fully when undergraduate education and lifelong learning skills are considered separately from graduate education or professional certification.  Undergraduate education as presently offered in the United States is a commodity.  The larger higher education institutions opened up access and kept costs (and therefore tuition) down by creating lecture courses that could accommodate many students at one time.  Even when these lecture courses are broken down into recitation sessions or when these institutions hire more faculty to offer smaller classes, the basic curriculum remains the same.  This is "mass education"--higher education in the manner of Henry Ford.  There are certain minimum standards that must be met; however, beyond those, students are choosing on the basis of price and perceived differences in brand names.  Separating undergraduate education into its two primary components--general education and the major--and then applying the perspective of the supermarket analogy leads to some startling conclusions about possible transformations of the production and distribution system for higher education at the undergraduate level.

Continued at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0240.pdf 

To this I might add the increasing movement for colleges and universities to offer certificate programs in addition to traditional degree programs.  In Fall 2002, the graduate school of business at the University of Rochester commenced a six-course certificate program to complement its two-year MBA program.  Major universities such as Stanford University, Columbia University, and Carnegie-Mellon are now trading on their prestige names to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in training programs, especially in computer science, engineering, and information technology training courses.  Virtually all of the top business schools have executive development certificate programs both onsite and online.  

By the Year 2025, traditional degree programs may account for less than ten percent of the revenues of major universities who become part of the trend for education as well as training certificates.  The "traditional one-size fits all" bachelor, masters, and PhD degrees will fade in importance as resumes of the future will be built upon education achievement certificates in humanities, science, and the professions.

Top Ten Emerging Technologies According to CFO Magazine

THE NEED-TO-KNOW LIST
1. XBRL
2. Business Intelligence
3. Wireless Connectivity
4. Grid Computing
5. Multivariable Testing (MVT)
6. Digital Cryptography
7. Rich Media
8. Internet2
9. Biometrics
10. Small Technology

I used the following quotation in 1994 at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/215ach06.pdf 

No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space that computers have created indicates they are not the beginning of authority but its end. In the process of connecting everything to everything, computers elevate the power of the small player. They make room for the different, and they reward small innovations. Instead of enforcing uniformity, they promote heterogeneity and autonomy. Instead of sucking the soul from human bodies, turning computer users into an army of dull colons, networked computers --- by reflecting the networked nature of our brains --- encourage the humanism of their users. Because they have taken on the flexibility, adaptability, and self-connecting governance of organic systems, we become more human, not less so, when we use them. 
                                                                                           Birkerts, S. (1994). “The electric hive: two views,” Readings, May, 17-25.

August 23, 2002 reply from Miklos Vasarhelyi [miklosv@ANDROMEDA.RUTGERS.EDU

Education and its future Prospects (Trends)

Institutional 

  • Consolidation of educational institutions (universities will merge) 
  • States will tend to bring its several university entities together · Super state consortia will emerge · There will be a “career university sector” with 
    • For profit universities 
    • Virtual Universities (associated or not with existing ones) · 
  • New copyright policies, royalties for distance learning a la the sale of a book 
    • Faculty that develop a course will have royalties rights to it 
    • Universities will have the right, without paying royalties, to use these courses either locally or in any extended activities 
  • Organizations will have to emerge to take education to the outer limits of current civilization 
    • The economics are such that the incremental cost of providing usage over broadband of highly sophisticated learning materials is very small 
    • Consequently once packages are assembled, and their production is very expensive, their marginal cost of utilization is close to zero 

    • Consequently model will emerge from free to free for ‘used materials’, to name your price, to pay over your professional career 

    • Content pricing models as currently evolving over the net and e commerce will also rule education 

    • Some states may decided to develop or acquire educational content and make it available for free 

  • Alternate professor’s career will emerge 
    • Tenure will become less common 
    • A  large number of faculty will emerge as supporting faculty for modules prepared and delivered from elsewhere

Pedagogic 

  • Extensive usage of distance methods to ‘extend the classroom’ even in traditional courses 
  • Usage of mixed extended medium with many tools 
  • Change in the nature of faculty control 
    • Less prep time 
    • Modularized content re-used in different modules 
    • Different delivery approaches 
  • Separation of content and delivery 
    • The best deliverers are not the best content preparers 
    • Substantive investment in packaging the modules (that will go into several courses) · 
  • Link between courses and content for courses will be broken 
    • Package and offer content resources in varying sizes and depths in unlimited combinations 
    • Publishers are moving now to build large databases of content on the Web 
    • These databases of content are attractive portals for discipline knowledge · 
  • The nature of assessment will substantially change from block tests to micro testing and learning diagnostic tools that dynamically change the students tasks based on the measurement of their progress thru the distance learning materials 
    •  There will be tremendous demand for the development of both intelligent learning assessment tools (e.g. devices that can read an open ended exam answer, comment on it and assess it) and information / knowledge structure along which atoms of knowledge can be measured and learning modules re-required for students.

Tools

  • Teaching and learning management software systems will be linked to their back office administrative systems 
    • Web course management tool 
    • Student tracking and collaboration tools 
  • An entire suite of learning aids, personal bots will emerge 
    •  Personal digital assistants 
    • Summarizers, finders, connectors, learners 
  • The wide gulf between students and practitioners will be narrowed by education coming to the desktop and practicing experts made available for testimonials, examples, actual observation of behavior through broadband methods 
    • For example a lesson about geology and oil exploration may bring students to visually observe man at work on oil platforms, or drilling, or analyzing data, etc. 
    • For example, while discussing strategy for dot.com companies the CEO’s of these companies can be brought in through broadband to state their views or video prepared showing facilities, products, customers buying, etc..
  •  Translation automation will allow for substantial expansion of content markets. 
    •  Language will continue to be a barrier for ubiquitous education · Physical libraries will be transformed into study areas for students in residential colleges (much reduced in number) while enormous digital libraries with most books also encompassing video and audio and collaboration settings will be made available for students everywhere

Faculty 

  • Highly more specialized researchers and content developers will complement each other
  • Subsidy for research thru blind funding of faculty salaries will become more difficult once legislators realize that much of the delivery will come form elsewhere

Environment 

  • Tools for teaching and learning will become as portable and ubiquitous as papers and books are today 
    • Teaching and learning anywhere any time 
    • A larger percentage of content will age rapidly 
  • Alternate models for paying for education will evolve with less of government subsidies and more on the desk training paid by employers 
  • Students will be savvy consumers with substantive amount of choice 
    •  Increased level of student activism 
    • Degrees may be obtained with a much increased level of institutional mix (courses from multiple universities) 
    • Learning is moving off campus: to the home, the workplace, the field, or wherever the learner is 
    • Students will pick up and piece together certifications, skill sets, and knowledge sets

 


Answer 3 --- Podcasting and Blogs

Weblog (Blog) 

 Weblog = Blog = What?

Also see Podcasting at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework

Answer from Whatis.com ---

A Weblog (which is sometimes written as "web log" or "weblog") is a Web site of personal or non-commercial origin that uses a dated log format that is updated on a daily or very frequent basis with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects. The information can be written by the site owner, gleaned from other Web sites or other sources, or contributed by users. A 

Web log often has the quality of being a kind of "log of our times" from a particular point-of-view. Generally, Weblogs are devoted to one or several subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in general, can be thought of as developing commentaries, individual or collective on their particular themes. A Weblog may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual (a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone. Most of the latter are moderated discussions.

Listing of Accounting Blogs
 Among the millions of Web logs permeating the Internet, there are some by and for accountants worth checking out. This article includes an Accounting Blog List that you can download, bookmark or print.
 Eva M. Lang, "Accountants Who Blog," SmartPros, July 2005 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x49035.xml

 

Bloggers will love TagCloud
 Now, many bloggers are turning to a new service called TagCloud that lets them cherry-pick articles in RSS feeds by key words -- or tags -- that appear in those feeds. The blogger selects the RSS feeds he or she wants to use, and also selects tags. When a reader clicks on a tag, a list of links to articles from the feeds containing the chosen keyword appears. The larger the tag appears onscreen, the more articles are listed.
 Daniel Terdiman, "RSS Service Eases Bloggers' Pain," Wired News, June 27, 2005 --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67989,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_8

Weblog software use grows daily -- but bloggers abandon sites and launch new ones as frequently as J.Lo goes through boyfriends. Which makes taking an accurate blog count tricky --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54740,00.html 

Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping has become an important supplement to a business's online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal level -- and keep them visiting a company's Web site regularly.
Riva Richmond, "Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back," The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2005; Page B8 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110963746474866537,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace 

Want to start your own blog?     BlogBridge --- http://www.blogbridge.com/ 

What Blogs Cost American Business, Ad Age
 What Blogs Cost American Business In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Work Years Reading ThemBy Bradley Johnson LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age's analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- bloggers essentially take a daily...
 Bradley Johnson, "What Blogs Cost American Business, Ad Age, October 25, 2005 ---
 http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46494#

Time Magazine's choice of the 50 Coolest Websites for 2005 --- http://www.time.com/time/2005/websites/

How do we come up with our 50 best? Short answer: we take your suggestions, probe friends and colleagues about their favorite online haunts and then surf like mad. This year's finalists are a mix of newcomers, new discoveries and veterans that have learned some new tricks
 

The List: Arts & Entertainment
The List: Blogs
The List: Lifestyle, Health & Hobbies
The List: News & Information
The List: Shopping

 

Question
Does blogging hurt my chances for advancement?

See "Serious Bloggers," by Jeff Rice, Inside Higher Ed, February 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/20/rice

 

Blog Navigation Software
 Blog Navigator is a new program that makes it easy to read blogs on the Internet. It integrates into various blog search engines and can automatically determine RSS feeds from within properly coded websites.
 Blog Navigator 1.2 http://www.stardock.com/products/blognavigator/

It's easy to start your own blog.  Jim Mahar's great blog was set up at http://www.blogger.com/start
 
You too can set one up for free like Jim had done.
 There are many other alternatives other than blogger.com for setting up a free blog.  See below.

BlogBridge --- http://www.blogbridge.com/ 

Microsoft will open a free consumer blogging service, its latest attempt to attract more users to its MSN online service and away from rivals such as Google.

Question
A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year.
What is that word?

Answer

BLOG 
The other nine top words are discussed at CNN, November 30, 2004 --- http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/11/30/words.of.the.year.reut/ 

April 22, 2005 letter from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]

I would like some advice on what news aggregator to use for RSS feeds.  I read the BusinessWeek Online article on blogs this morning, and it piqued my interest

 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_18/b3931001_mz001.htm?c=bwinsiderapr22&n=link1&t=email

 The BusinessWeek Online blog, http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/  gave a link to various blog RSS feed in a side menu:

 http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/News_Readers/

 Is anyone using blogs in classes?  Any advice on how to set up links to RSS feeds?

 Thanks,
Amy Dunbar
UConn

Reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Amy,

I don’t use blogs in class and only find time to visit a few each week

For RSS feeds, look at the left hand column at http://www.rss-specifications.com/blog.htm  

 Bob Jensen 

"MBA Blogs," Business Week, September 12, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/MBAblog 

You're invited you to join BW Online's new MBA Blog feature as a guest blogger

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The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called "aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them.
 Business Week, April 22, 2005 --- , http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/  

"Controversy at Warp Speed," by Jeffrey Selingo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2005, Page A27

The deluge of messages left Mr. Corrigan wondering how so many people had found out about such a small skirmish on his campus.  So his assistant poked around on the Web and discovered that six days after the protest, a liberal blog (http://sf.indymedia.org) run by the San Francisco Independent Media Center had posted an article headlined "Defend Free Speech Rights at San Francisco State University" that included Mr. Corrigan's e-mail address.

It was not the first time that Mr. Corrigan has been electronically inundated after a campus incident.  Three years ago he received 3,000 e-mail messages after a pro-Israel rally was held at the university.

EVERYONE HAS A BEEF

Conflicts on campus are nothing new, of course.  But colleges today are no longer viewed as ivory towers.  Institutions of all sizes and types are under greater scrutiny than ever before from lawmakers, parents, taxpayers, students, alumni, and especially political partisans.  Empowered by their position or by the fact that they sign the tuition checks, they do not hesitate to use any available forum to complain about what is happening at a particular institution.

In this Internet age, information travels quickly and easily, and colleges have become more transparent, says Collin G. Brooke, an assistant professor of writing at Syracuse University, who studies the intersection between rhetoric and technology.  Many universities' Web sites list the e-mail addresses of every employee, from the president on down, enabling unencumbered access to all of them.

"That was not possible 10 years ago," Mr. Brooke says.  "Maybe I'd go to a library, find a college catalog, and get an address.  Then I'd have to write a letter.  Now it's easy to whip off a couple of sentences in an e-mail when it takes only a few seconds to find that person's address."
Continued in article

 

Student Blogs

"What Your College Kid Is Really Up To," by Steven Levy, Time Magazine, December 13, 2004, Page 12

Aaron Swartz was nervous when I went to interview him.  I know this is not because he told me, but because he said so on his student blog a few days afterward.  Swartz is one of millions of people who mainstream an Internet-based Weblog that allows one to punch in daily experiences as easily as banging out diary entries with a word processor.  Swartz says the blog is meant to help him remember his experiences during an important time for him --- freshman year at Stanford.  But this opens up a window to the rest of us.

Continued in the article.

See http://www.aaronsw.com/ 

"Microsoft Begins Free 'Blogging'," by Robert A. Guth, The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2004, Page D7 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110194455538888633,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news 

Microsoft Corp. today will open a free consumer "blogging" service, its latest attempt to attract more users to its MSN online service and away from rivals such as Google Inc.

Called MSN Spaces, the service will allow consumers to create Web logs, or blogs, that include pictures, music and text. Blogs are personal Web sites and opinion journals that have gained popularity in recent years. Early blogs focused largely on technology and politics, but millions of computer users have now at least experimented with the form.

It's been said that newspapers write the first draft of history, but now there are blogs. These days, online scribes often get the news before it's fit to print --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56978,00.html 

Blogs Help You Cope With Data Overload -- If You Manage Them," by Thomas E. Weber, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html 

If you're an information junkie, you've probably discovered the appeal of reading weblogs, those online journals that mix commentary with links to related sites. Obsessive blog creators scour the Internet for interesting tidbits in news stories, announcements and even other blogs, culling the best and posting links. A good blog is like the friend who always points out the best stories in the newspaper.

More and more, though, the growth of blogs is increasing rather than reducing information overload. By some estimates, the number of blogs out there is nearing three million. It isn't just amateurs either: Start-up media companies are creating blogs, too. Gawker, for example, publishes the gadgets journal Gizmodo ( www.gizmodo.com ) and Wonkette ( www.wonkette.com ), devoted to inside-the-Beltway gossip.

To help juggle all those blogs, I've started playing around with a relatively new phenomenon called a newsreader. Rather than forcing you to jump from one blog to another to keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring together the latest postings from your favorite blogs in a single place.

That's possible because many blogs now publish their entries as news "feeds." These are Web formats that make it easy for a newsreader program (or another Web site) to grab and manipulate individual postings. For a blog publisher, it's like sending out entries on a news wire service. To tell whether a site offers a news feed, look for a small icon labeled "RSS" or "Atom."

I've tested a number of popular newsreaders. At their best, they give you a customized online newspaper that tracks the blogs you're interested in. But using them is only worthwhile if you're willing to invest some time upfront getting organized.

Newsreaders come in several varieties. One is a stand-alone software program you install on your PC. In that category, FeedDemon ($29.95 from Bradbury Software) is especially powerful, with extensive options for customizing the way news feeds appear on your screen.

Other newsreaders integrate news feeds into your e-mail on the theory that mail has become the catchall information center for many users. NewsGator ($29 from NewsGator Technologies) pulls feeds into Microsoft Outlook, while Oddpost (www.oddpost.com) combines blog feeds with an excellent Web-based e-mail service for $30 a year. For Mac users, Apple just announced it will include newsreader functions in the next version of its Safari Web browser -- a sign of how important the news-feed approach is becoming.

Overall, I had the best experience with a service called Bloglines, and I recommend it, especially for beginners. Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) works as a Web service, which means there's no software to install and you can catch up with your blogs from any Web browser. You're no longer tied to the bookmarks on a particular PC, so you can check postings from home, work or on the road. The service is also free. Mark Fletcher, CEO of Trustic Inc., which operates Bloglines, tells me the site will use unobtrusive Google-style ads to bring in revenue.

After starting an account, you enter the blogs you want to track. When you visit Bloglines, your blog list will appear on the left side of the screen, along with a notation telling the number of new postings since your last visit; clicking on a blog pulls the new postings into a right-side window. The beauty of this is that you don't waste time visiting blogs that haven't posted new entries.

Of course, it's all pointless without interesting blogs to read. The best way to find great blogs is to follow your curiosity, tracking back links on blogs you visit. Here are a few to get you started:

GENERAL INTEREST: Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net) is one of the Web's most established blogs, and one of its most popular, too. By "general interest," I mean of general interest to your average Internet-obsessed technophile. The focus isn't explicitly on technology, but expect it to skew in that direction -- over a recent week, posting topics included robots, comic books and a cool-looking electric plug.

ECONOMICS: EconLog (econlog.econlib.org) offers a thoughtful and eclectic diary of economics, tackling both newsy developments (the real-estate market, taxes) and theory. It also includes a list of other good economics blogs -- there are more than you might think.

GADGETS: Engadget (www.engadget.com) can be counted on for a good half-dozen or more news morsels each day on digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones and more. When it isn't the first to stumble across something good, it isn't shy about linking to another blog with an interesting post, so it's usually pretty up to date.

POLITICS: WatchBlog (www.watchblog.com) has stuck with an interesting concept for more than a year now. It's actually three blogs in one: separate side-by-side journals tracking news on the 2004 elections from the perspective of Democrats, Republicans and independents.

TECHNOLOGY: Lessig Blog (www.lessig.org/blog). OK, this one's about politics too. More specifically, it covers the intersection between regulation and technology. Its author, Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig, weighs in on copyright, privacy and other challenging topics in high-tech society.

Blogging we will, blogging we will go!  In Iran?
So what would a really interesting and exciting piece of qualitative research on blogging look like? And how would it get around the problems of overfamiliarity with the phenomenon (on the one hand) and blogospheric navel-gazing (on the other)? To get an answer, it isn’t necessary to speculate. Just read “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan,” by Alireza Doostdar, which appears in the current issue of American Anthropologist. A scanned copy is available here. The author is now working at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, where he will start work on his Ph.D. in social anthropology and Middle Eastern studies.  “Weblogestan” is an Iranian online slang term for the realm of Persian-language blogs. (The time has definitely come for it to be adapted, and adopted, into Anglophone usage.) Over the last two years, Western journalists have looked at blogging as part of the political and cultural ferment in Iran — treating it, predictably enough, as a simple manifestation of the yearning for a more open society. Doostdar complicates this picture by looking at what we might call the borders of Veblogestan (to employ a closer transliteration of the term, as used specifically to name Iranian blogging). In an unpublished manuscript he sent me last week, Doostdar provides a quick overview of the region’s population: “There are roughly 65,000 active blogs in Veblogestan,” he writes, “making Persian the fourth language for blogs after English, Portugese, and French. The topics for blog entries include everything from personal diaries, expressions of spirituality, and works of experimental poetry and fiction to film criticism, sports commentary, social critique, and of course political analysis. Some bloggers focus on only one of these topics throughout the life of their blogs, while others write about a different topic in every new entry, or even deal with multiple topics within a single entry.”
Scott McLemee , "Travels in Weblogestan," Inside Higher Ed, March 29, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/29/mclemee 

 

Top Executives Are Finding Great Advantages to Using and Running Blogs

 

"It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog Business embraces the new medium as executives read—and write—blogs,"  by David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine, October 4, 2004 --- http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,699971,00.html 

 

Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, has recently criticized statements by Intel executives, mused that IBM might buy Novell, and complained about a CNET.com article—all by writing a blog on a Sun website.

Yep, blogs—which are a way to post text to a website—have found their way into business. Schwartz is the highest-ranking executive yet to embrace the new medium, which is burgeoning globally. About 35,000 people read his blog (http://blogs.sun.com) in a typical month, including customers, employees, and 

competitors. Schwartz encourages all Sun's 32,000 employees to blog, though only about 100 are doing it so far. But they include at least three senior managers other than Schwartz as well as development engineers and marketers.

The company's most popular blogger is a marketer known as MaryMaryQuiteContrary. Her blog ranges from rhapsodies about "proxy-based aspect-oriented programming" to musings about her desire to become a first-grade class mother. Says Schwartz: "I don't have the advertising budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers, just by taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message out to a fanatic readership." He adds, "Blogs are no more mandated at Sun than e-mail. But I have a hard time seeing how a manager can be effective without both."

Over at Microsoft, some 1,000 employees blog, says a spokesman, though no top executives do. Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most prominent blogger, says via e-mail that "I often link to bloggers who are not friendly to Microsoft. They know I'm listening, and that alone improves relationships." Other tech companies with company blogs include Yahoo, Google, Intuit, and Monster.com. Even Maytag has a blog.

But businesses are learning—sometimes the hard way—that this new medium has pitfalls. David Farrell, Sun's chief compliance officer, notes that the company will soon require employees to agree to specific guidelines before starting blogs. Companies are also worried about unflattering portrayals and leaks. Last year a Microsoft contract employee posted a photo of the company receiving a dockful of Apple computers; he was promptly fired. A Harvard administrator and a software developer at Friendster were also recently fired after personal blog postings. (Microsoft, Harvard, and Friendster declined to comment.)

But some managers find that even more important than writing blogs is reading them. During a recent conference for Microsoft software developers, top company executives huddled backstage reading up-to-the-minute blogs written by the audience to get a sense of how their messages were being received.

While most people agree on Web logs' value for promoting student expression and critical thinking in schools, there's no consensus on the amount of control over access and content that educators should exercise.  Blogs may become more of an issue in college courses when and if students begin to keep Weblogs of day to day classes, teacher evaluations, and course content.

"Classroom Blogs Raise Issues of Access and Privacy," by Kevin J. Delaney, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2004 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109882944704656461,00.html?mod=technology%5Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs 

First graders at Magnolia Elementary School used a Web log earlier this year to describe their dream playgrounds. Monkey bars were heartily endorsed, and live animals and bumper cars also made the cut.

Students in a handful of other classes at the Joppa, Md., school also used blogs, some trading riddles about book characters with peers at a school in Michigan.

Now, county administrators have frozen the use of blogs in the classroom amid concerns about oversight of what students might post online. Michael Lackner, a teacher who jump-started blog use at Magnolia last year, is optimistic that a technological fix will be found.

But the school's experience highlights some of the issues that educators and parents face as blogs -- simple Web sites that follow a diary-like format -- gain entry into the nation's classrooms. While most agree on blogs' value for promoting student expression, critical thinking and exchange, there's no consensus on the amount of control over access and content that educators should exercise. As blogging spreads, it could revive debates over student expression similar to those that have cropped up around school newspapers.

The issues surrounding blogging and related technology in the classroom are "pretty much uncharted," says Will Richardson, an educational-blogging advocate and supervisor of instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J.

The use of blogs in schools remains limited but is growing, as scattered programs piloted by tech-savvy educators generate buzz and followers. Teachers are attracted to blogging for some of the same reasons blog use has exploded among techies, political commentators and would-be pundits. Blogs are cheap, thanks to free or inexpensive software packages and services -- Hunterdon, for example, pays just $499 a year for software to run hundreds of student blogs. And their simple format makes them easy to set up. Using tools from Six Apart Ltd., Google Inc. and others, consumers can create a blog in less than 10 minutes and post messages to it over the Web or by e-mail. By some estimates, five million or more Americans already have created their own blogs, with some prominent bloggers even influencing the news and political agendas.

Students in Mr. Richardson's high-school journalism classes, for example, never turn in hard copies of their homework. They post all assignments to individual blogs. Their blogs also notify them when other students complete writing assignments, so they can read and comment on them.

Meredith Fear, 17 years old, has created two blogs for classes taught by Mr. Richardson. The 12th grader says posting her work online for others to see motivated her to do better and increased her parents' involvement in her education. "I don't often get a chance to talk with her about school, so having the opportunity to check her blog and see what she was up to was a great way for me to keep up on things," says Jonathan Fear, Meredith's father. He adds that was one factor in overcoming his wife's original concerns that ill-intentioned outsiders could see Meredith's writings through the blog.

Recognizing such worries, some teachers at Hunterdon protect blogs with passwords so only they and their students can see them, particularly for creative-writing classes for which the subject matter is more likely to be personal. There are other blogging precautions: Parents have to sign releases giving permission, and only students' first names are used online. Mr. Richardson says the school has hosted more than 500 student blogs in the past three years without incident.

Mr. Richardson is planning a session with parents later this fall to teach them about the technology and set up blogs and Web-text feeds so they can gain access to a broader range of information from teachers and see what their children are up to. "Kids like it. And I can see more enhanced learning on their part," Mr. Richardson says.

At Magnolia, teachers were happy with their classroom blogging and had plans to expand it this school year. But Harford County public school officials notified them this summer that such projects appeared to fall afoul of policies regulating student communication. In particular, they were concerned that students and others could post comments to the blogs before they were reviewed by a teacher.

"What we want to see is a Web log where a teacher has final control, acts as a filter for any postings or comments," says Janey Mayo, technology coordinator for Harford County Public Schools. "We're trying to be very cautious with this because we're working with kids." School administrators also want to see further research on whether blogging has educational value at the elementary-school level, but so far haven't found any.

Mr. Lackner believes there is potentially a quick technical fix to the problem: A blogging service could add a function that would forward any online comments to a teacher for review before posting them.

Continued in the article

 

July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

THE EDUCATED BLOGGER

According to David Huffaker (in "The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom," FIRST MONDAY, vol. 9, no. 6, June 2004), "blogs can be an important addition to educational technology initiatives because they promote literacy through storytelling, allow collaborative learning, provide anytime–anywhere access, and remain fungible across academic disciplines." In support of his position, Huffaker provides several examples of blogs being used in classroom settings. The paper is available online at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/huffaker/index.html.

First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv@uic.edu; Web: http://firstmonday.dk/.

-----

Suzanne Cadwell and Chuck Gray of the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill's Center for Instructional Technology have compiled two feature comparison tables that describe three blogging services and four blogging applications.

Blogging Services Feature Comparison

Using a blogging service generally doesn't require any software other than a web browser. Users have no administrative control over the software itself, but have some control over a blog's organization and appearance. Depending on the particular service, blogs can be hosted either on the service’s servers or on the server of one’s choice (e.g., www.unc.edu). Users purchasing a paid account with a service typically will have no banner ads on their blogs, more features at their disposal, and better customer support from the service. The Blogging Services Feature Comparison chart is available http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/services/.

Blogging Applications Comparison

Downloadable blogging applications require the user to have access to server space (e.g., www.unc.edu). Most of these applications are comprised of CGI scripts that must be installed and configured in a user’s cgi-bin folder. Although they are packaged with detailed instructions, applications can be difficult to install, prohibitively so for the novice. Blogging applications afford users fine-grained control over their blogs, and most applications are open-source or freeware. The Blogging Applications Comparison chart is available at http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/applications/.

 

Question
What services are available to help you create a blog?

Answer from Kevin Delaney

"Blogs Can Tie Families, And These Services Will Get You Started," by Kevin J. Delaney, The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html 

Online Web logs, or blogs, have long been a bastion of techy types, those prone to political rants, and assorted gossips. But now they're making inroads among families who want to keep up on each other's doings.

Blogs are personal Web sites where you can post things, including photos, stories and links to other cool stuff online. They resemble a journal, with information arranged chronologically based on when you post it. The simple form is a major virtue -- you don't have to think too hard about how to organize your blog.

I've used a variety of Web sites in recent years to share photos of my children with their grandparents and other family far way. Lately, I've wondered if it wouldn't be better to put photos, digital videos and other links I want to share with my family on one Web site, making it easier to manage and access them from afar.

With this in mind, I've been testing three of the most popular blogging services, which are available free or for a small monthly fee.

Blogger, a free service from Google at www.blogger.com, promises you can create a blog in "three easy steps." After selecting a user name and password, I chose a name and a custom Web address. Then I selected a graphic look -- "Dots," a simple design with a touch of fun that seemed right for a family site -- from 12 attractive templates. After that, Blogger created my blog. Within a few minutes, I was able to put a short text message on the site and have Blogger send e-mails to alert my wife and father of the blog's existence.

Blogger, like the other services, lets you further customize the organization and look of your site and put several types of information on it. Sending text to the blog is as easy as sending an e-mail. (In fact, Blogger and the other services I tested even let me post text to my blog using standard e-mail.) A Blogger button on Google's toolbar software, which must be downloaded and activated separately, offers the useful option of posting links to other Web sites on your blog as you surf the Web. Another nice feature lets you designate friends or family members who can post to the main blog.

To put photos on any blog hosted by Blogger, you have to download another free software package from Picasa called Hello. Hello blocks connections to computers operating behind what's known as a proxy server, which is a pretty typical corporate configuration. As a result, I couldn't upload photos from my work PC, though I was able to do so from home.

Blogger lacks some advanced features other services offer. But its main shortcoming is that it doesn't let you protect your site by requiring visitors to use a password to enter. I don't want strangers to look at photos of my kids or search notes I'm writing for family members. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on any plans for such a feature, citing restrictions related to the company's planned initial public offering.

TypePad from Six Apart, at www.typepad.com, provides a higher-powered service for creating blogs that does let you password protect your site. You can also upload a broader range of files, including video clips. But the tradeoff is a level of complexity that is unnecessarily frustrating.

The company offers three monthly subscription rates starting at $4.95. It costs $8.95 a month for the version that allows you to create photo albums, a feature that I consider essential for a family blog. Albums allow you to avoid filling up the main blog site with strings of photos. If you choose to password protect your blog, though, TypePad won't let you link your blog directly to photo albums. It's a surprising shortcoming, and Six Apart doesn't disclose it on its site. Its support staff gave me complicated instructions for another way to make such a link, but they never worked for me.

Six Apart Chief Executive Mena Trott says the photo-album-linking problem is a bug the company is working to fix. She acknowledges that parts of the service could be easier to use, and says improvements will be made. She also says that in practice Six Apart lets most users exceed the company's miserly limits on blog storage space, which are 100 megabytes for the $8.95-a-month plan.

AOL's Journals service, which requires an AOL subscription, is about as simple to use as Blogger. It allows you to restrict public access to your blog and provides nice albums for grouping photos. If you do decide to restrict access, your visitors will have to register with AOL. That registration is free, though, and many people already have an AOL "screen name" because they use the company's instant messaging service.

But other advanced features, such as the button in Blogger for easy linking to Web sites, are missing. In addition, the layout templates aren't nearly as attractive graphically as Blogger's and TypePad's. AOL says it's working on all of these issues, and expects to add a Web linking button and phase out the registration requirement later this year.

I'm not completely satisfied with Journals, and I would be happy to use Blogger or TypePad if they manage to work out their issues with photo albums and passwords. In the meantime, though, I've chosen AOL's Journals to create my family blog.

"WEBLOGS COME TO THE CLASSROOM," by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2003, Page 33

They get used to supplement courses in writing, marketing, economics, and other subjects

Increasingly, private life is a public matter.  That seems especially true in the phenomenon known as blogging.  Weblogs, or blogs, are used by scores of online memoirists, editorialists, exhibitionists, and navel gazers, who post their daily thoughts on Web sites for all to read.

Now professors are starting to incorporate blogs into courses.  The potential for reaching an audience, they say, reshapes the way students approach writing assignments, journal entries, and online discussions.

Valerie M. Smith, an assistant professor of English at Quinnipiac University, is among the first faculty members there to use blogs.  She sets one up for each of her creative-writing students at the beginning of the semester.  The students are to add a new entry every Sunday at noon.  Then they read their peers' blogs and comment on them.  Parents or friends also occasionally read the blogs.

Blogging "raises issues with audience," Ms. Smith says, adding that the innovation has raised the quality of students' writing;

"They aren't just writing for me, which makes them think in terms of crafting their work for a bigger audience.  It gives them a bigger stake in what they are writing."

A Weblog can be public or available only to people selected by the blogger.  Many blogs serve as virtual loudspeakers or soapboxes.  Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender, has used a blog to debate and discuss issues with voters.  Some blogs have even earned their authors minor fame.  An Iraqi man--known only by a pseudonym, Salaam Pax--captured attention around the world when he used his blog to document daily life in Baghdad as American troops advanced on the city.

Continued in the article.

"Weblogs: a history and perspective," Rebecca Blood, Rebecca's Pocket, September 7, 2000 --- http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html 

In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of "other sites like his" as he found them in his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on Camworld, and others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse's 'page of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.

Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron's list, and most interested people did. Peter Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to pronounce it 'wee-blog' and inevitably this was shortened to 'blog' with the weblog editor referred to as a 'blogger.'

At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing. Cameron's list grew so large that he began including only weblogs he actually followed himself. Other webloggers did the same. In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig's inclusive definition prevailed.

This rapid growth continued steadily until July 1999 when Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool launched, and suddenly there were hundreds. In August, Pyra released Blogger, and Groksoup launched, and with the ease that these web-based tools provided, the bandwagon-jumping turned into an explosion. Late in 1999 software developer Dave Winer introduced Edit This Page, and Jeff A. Campbell launched Velocinews. All of these services are free, and all of them are designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.

The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.

Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor's commentary. An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link (making them, as Halcyon pointed out to me, pioneers in the art and craft of microcontent). Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.

These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling.

But this type of weblog is important for another reason, I think. In Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, "Media is a corporate possession...You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation."

By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand.

Weblog editors sometimes contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with an article on a related subject; each article, considered in the light of the other, may take on additional meaning, or even draw the reader to conclusions contrary to the implicit aim of each. It would be too much to call this type of weblog "independent media," but clearly their editors, engaged in seeking out and evaluating the "facts" that are presented to us each day, resemble the public that Ruggerio speaks of. By writing a few lines each day, weblog editors begin to redefine media as a public, participatory endeavor

Continued at  http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html 

 The Weblog Tool Roundup, by Joshual Allen, Webmonkey, May 2, 2002 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html 

But then personal sites went from being static collections of bad poetry and award banners to constantly updated snippets of commentary, photography, sounds, bad poetry, and links. The popularity of this format grew (for a good primer on where weblogs came from and how they evolved, try Rebecca Blood's Weblogs: A History and Perspective), and people started building applications to simplify the process of maintaining a content-heavy personal site.

These applications have grown in number and sophistication over the years, and with some major upgrades appearing over the past few months (Blogger Pro, Movable Type 2.0, Radio UserLand 8.0), I thought the time was nigh to talk about what they do, why you might care, which one would best suit your needs, and how they can keep you company on those long, lonely nights, so empty since you were abandoned for someone who could write Perl scripts.

Continued at  http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html 

"Will the Blogs Kill Old Media?" by Steven Levy, Newsweek, May 20, 2002, Page 52

From Yahoo Picks of the Week on December 3, 2002

blo.gs http://www.blo.gs/ 

Weblogs continue to grow in popularity, no doubt in part to their immediacy. Denizens of the Internet enjoy the opportunity to drop by and catch an up-to-the-minute account on their favorite blog. However, nothing is more frustrating than encountering a cobwebbed blog that hasn't been updated in weeks. To remedy such situations, this site offers a minute-by-minute account of over 50,000 weblogs. It doesn't get fresher than this! For utility's sake, the site offers a tiny java applet that sits on your desktop and continually refreshes, keeping the weblogs whirring. You can also stop by the most popular blogs to see what kind of content is piquing the interest of others. Whether you're a neophyte or veteran blogger, you're sure to find an intriguing site or two to scour.

Some time ago, Glenn Reynolds hardly qualified as plankton on the punditry food chain.  The 41-year-old law professor at the University of Tennessee would pen the occasional op-ed for the L.A. Times, but his name was unfamiliar to even the most fanatical news junkie.  All that began to change on Aug. 5 of last year, when Reynolds acquired the software to create a "Weblog," or "blog."  A blog is an easily updated Web site that works as an online daybook, consisting of links to interesting items on the Web, spur-of-the-moment observations and real-time reports on whatever captures the blogger's attention.  Reynold's original goal was to post witty observations on news events, but after September 11, he began providing links to fascinating articles and accounts of the crisis, and soon his site, called InstaPundit, drew thousands of readers--and kept growing.  He now gets more than 70,000 page views a day (he figures this means 23,000 real people).  Working at his two-year-old $400 computer, he posts dozens of items and links a day, and answers hundreds of e-mails.  PR flacks call him to cadge coverage.  And he's living a pundit's dream by being frequently cited--not just by fellow bloggers, but by media bigfeet.  He's blogged his way into the game.

Some say the game itself has changed.  InstaPundit is a pivotal site in what is known as the Blogosphere, a burgeoning samizdat of self-starters who attempt to provide in the aggregate an alternate media universe.  The putative advantage is that this one is run not by editors paid by corporate giants, but unbespoken outsiders--impassioned lefties and righties, fine-print-reading wonks, indignant cranks and salt-'o-the-earth eyewitnesses to the "real" life that the self-absorbed media often miss.  Hard-core bloggers, with a giddy fever not heard of since the Internet bubble popped, are even predicting that the Blogosphere is on a trajectory to eclipse the death-star-like dome of Big Media.  One blog avatar, Dave Winer (who probably would be saying this even if he didn't run a company that sold blogging software), has formally wagered that by 2007, more readers will get news from blogs than from The New York Times.  Taking him up on the bet is Martin Nisenholtz, head of the  Time's digital operations.

My guess is that Nisenholtz wins.  Blogs are a terrific addition to the media universe.  But they pose no threat to the established order.

Mobile weblogging, or moblogging, is the latest trend in the world of blogs. New software allows users to update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and other handheld devices --- http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57431,00.html 

The meteoric rise of weblogging is one of the most unexpected technology stories of the past year, and much like the commentary that populates these ever-changing digital diaries, the story of blogging keeps evolving.

One recent trend is "moblogging," or mobile weblogging. New tools like Manywhere Moblogger, Wapblog and FoneBlog allow bloggers to post information about the minutiae of their lives from anywhere, not just from a PC.

The newest of these tools, Kablog, lets users update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and other handheld devices like wireless PDAs.

Kablog works on any device running Java 2 Platform Micro Edition, or J2ME, a version of Java for mobile devices. Those devices include cell phones running the Symbian operating system, many Sprint PCS phones, the Blackberry from RIM, and many Palm handhelds running OS 3.5, such as Handspring's Treo.

Todd Courtois, creator of Kablog, offers the program for free as shareware and says that word-of-mouth has already generated several thousand downloads in the short time it has been available.

What distinguishes Kablog from other moblogging software is that it does not use e-mail or text messaging for updating weblogs. Other programs such as FoneBlog enable users to e-mail posts from a cell phone or PDA to a server, which uploads the entry onto a site. Kablog lets those who use Movable Type as their weblogging software log directly onto their sites for updating.

Continued in the article.

September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

RHETORIC, COMMUNITY, AND CULTURE OF WEBLOGS

The Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota has created "Into the Blogsphere," a website to explore the "discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs." Educators and faculty can post, comment upon, and critique essays covering such areas as mass communication, pedagogy, and virtual community. The website is located at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/ 

For more information on weblogs in academe, see also:

"Educational Blogging" By Stephen Downes EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 9, no. 5, September/October 2004, pp. 14-16, 18, 20-22, 24, 26 http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp 

"The Educated Blogger" CIT INFOBITS, June 2004 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjun04.html#1 

January 2005 Update on Blogs

Eric Rasmusen (Economics, Indiana University) has a homepage at http://www.rasmusen.org/ 
His business and economics blog is at http://www.rasmusen.org/x/ 
In particular he focuses on conservative versus liberal economics and politics

Gerald (Jerry) Trites (Accounting, AIS) has a homepage at http://www.zorba.ca/ 
He runs an e-Business blog at http://www.zorba.ca/blog.html 
His site is a great source for updates on research studies in e-Business

Some Blog Directories

categorized directory of blogs and journals.

www.blogarama.com - 17k - Cached - More from this site

a blog directory where users can submit and find blogs.

www.blogcatalog.com - 23k - Cached - More from this site

... Weird is our choice blog this week, straight out of ... Blogwise often find a blog that stands out for its ... be featuring a new blog every week in this slot ...

www.blogwise.com - More from this site

... Download the Blog Search Engine Toolbar. The blog Search Engine is a web search resource for finding ... Free Video Game and Online Game Directory Web Conferencing Small Business Forum ...

www.blogsearchengine.com - 15k - Cached - More from this site

blog search engine and directory.

www.getblogs.com - 7k - Cached - More from this site

Bloghub.com - Your local blog directory! ... Bloghub.com is an international online blog directory and community where members from around the world gather here ... site to our directory, search our blog directory or join us for ...

www.bloghub.com - 64k - Cached - More from this site

features a directory of political blogs covering all viewpoints.

directory.etalkinghead.com - 9k - Cached - More from this site

... My Subscriptions Search The Web Subscribe To URL. Directory. Share. Home > Feed Directory. See Also: Most Popular Feeds | Most Popular Links ... View: Feed Directory | User Directory ...

www.bloglines.com/dir - 19k - Cached - More from this site

... and trackback services, and a Blog O the Week feature. Blog Universe. Blog directory categorized by genre ... like you. British Blog Directory - BritBlog. A directory of blogs written ...

www.lights.com/weblogs/ directories.html - 16k - Cached - More from this site

The BLOG page at Marketing Terms.com - Internet Marketing Reference. ... Blog. weblog. ---------------------------- (Requires JavaScript ... eatonweb.com - blog directory and portal. ...

www.marketingterms

"The Bottom Line on Business Blogs:  Entrepeneur.com, August 9, 2004 --- http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,316638,00.html 
They've moved beyond the realm of diarists and techies to benefit mainstream businesses.  

Anybody can go slogging, but it is most common among teenagers
 
Thomas Claburn discusses the new concept of "slogging," or slanderous blogging, about someone you know or wish you didn't. In my youth, we used to call this "gossip," and the cardinal rule was never to put anything in writing for fear our ill-tempered musings would be forever etched in stone and, worse, overheard or seen by the person being dissed. But getting "caught" by the subject is apparently the entire point of slogging, as I understand it. I would have thought in our overlitigated society that the voice of reason (if not politeness and/or basic human decency) would trump that of nastiness, but I would have been wrong.
 InformationWeek Newsletter, August 31, 2005

 

June 1, 2006 message form Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN THE DISTANCE EDUCATION EXPERIENCE

"Presence, a sense of 'being there,' is critical to the success of designing, teaching, and learning at a distance using both synchronous and asynchronous (blended) technologies. Emotions, behavior, and cognition are components of the way presence is perceived and experienced and are essential for explaining the ways we consciously and unconsciously perceive and experience distance education." Rosemary Lehman, Distance Education Specialist Manager at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, explores the idea that understanding the part emotion plays in teaching and learning "can help instruct us in effective teaching, instructional design, and learning via technology." Her paper, "The Role of Emotion in Creating Instructor and Learner Presence in the Distance Education Experience" (JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE AFFECTIVE LEARNING, vol. 2, no. 2, 2006), is available online at http://www.jcal.emory.edu/viewarticle.php?id=45

Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning (JCAL) [ISSN: 1549-6953] is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published twice a year by Oxford College of Emory University. To access current and back issues go to http://www.jcal.emory.edu/ . For more information, contact: Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, c/o Prof. Ken Carter, Oxford College of Emory University, 100 Hamill Street, Oxford, GA 30054 USA; tel: 770-784-8439; fax: 770-784-8408;
email:
kenneth.carter@emory.edu


USING BLOGGER TO GET STARTED WITH E-LEARNING

In "Using Blogger to Get Teachers Started with E-Learning" (FORTNIGHTLY MAILING, May 25, 2006), Keith Burnett discusses how "[s]imple class blogs can be used to post summaries of key points, exercises, links to Web pages of value, and to provide a sense of continuity and encourage engagement with the material." He includes a link to an online blogging tutorial and to examples of how some instructors are using blogs in their classes. The article is online at http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/05/using_blogger_t.html 

Fortnightly Mailing, focused on online learning, is published every two weeks by Seb Schmoller, an e-learning consultant. Current and back issues are available at http://www.schmoller.net/mailings/index.pl. For more information, contact: Seb Schmoller 312 Albert Road, Sheffield, S8 9RD, UK; tel: 0114 2586899; fax: 0709 2208443;
email: seb@schmoller.net 
Web: http://www.schmoller.net/

 


BOOKS VS. BLOGS

"Why would I write a book and wait a year or more to see my writing in print, when I can blog and get my words out there immediately?" In "Books, Blogs & Style" (CITES & INSIGHTS, vol. 6, no. 7, May 2006), Walt Crawford, both a book author and a blogger, considers the different niches and purposes of the two communication media. The essay is online at http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ6i7.pdf 

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large [ISSN 1534-0937], a free online journal of libraries, policy, technology, and media, is self-published monthly by Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, Inc. Current and back issues are at available on the Web at http://cites.boisestate.edu/ . For more information contact: Walt Crawford, The Research Libraries Group, Inc., 2029 Stierlin Ct., Suite 100, Mountain View, CA 94043-4684 USA; tel: 650-691-2227;
Web:
http://waltcrawford.name/ 

 

Podcasting at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework


Video Games

Answer 4 --- Serious Learning Applications of Video Games

Question
Have video game technologies changed learning styles?  I might add that this may also be true of women past their teens since there is now a larger target market for these women vis-à-vis young males who are often thought of in relation to game addiction.

Answer
In the next edition of New Bookmarks, I address how serious educators are predicting that video-style games will become a leading pedagogy for learning in the near future.

A new industry poll reveals that more women than teen boys are behind video game consoles. The poll also finds that lacking a better alternative, adult women prefer war themes over the light 'n' fluffy doll games now offered.
Wired News, August 27, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,60204,00.html 

August 28, 2003 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

VIDEOGAMES -- THE NEXT EDUCATIONAL "KILLER APP"?

In "Next-Generation: Educational Technology versus the Lecture" (EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 38, no. 4, July/August 2003, pp. 12-16, 18, 20-2), Joel Foreman, professor in George Mason University English Department, proposes a "fringe idea" with the potential to revolutionize the educational system. He believes that "large lecture courses may someday be replaced by the kind of immersive digital environments that have been popularized by the videogame industry. Viewed in this light the advanced videogame appears to be a next-generation educational technology waiting to take its place in academe."

Foreman illustrates his idea with a hypothetical Psychology 101 course that uses an immersive environment to engage students in "learning through performance." Using the videogame model, students would progress through several "levels" of the course as they build upon their knowledge of the material and meet the course's learning goals. The article is online at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0340.pdf.

EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619], a bimonthly print magazine that explores developments in information technology and education, is published by EDUCAUSE, 1150 18th Street, NW, Suite 1010, Washington, DC 20036 USA; tel: 202-872-4200; fax: 202-872-4318; email: info@educause.edu; Web: http://www.educause.edu/. Articles from current and back issues of EDUCAUSE Review are available on the Web at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/.

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education technologies are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

NEXT-Generation:  Educational Technology versus the Lecture, by Joel Foreman, EDUCAUSE Review, July/August 2003, pp. 14-22 --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0340.pdf.

Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, predicts that "shared graphical environments like those in the multi-user Internet games Everques or Asheron's Call" will be the learning environments of the future.  Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT's Games to Teach Project, leads an effort to "demonstrate gaming's still largely unrealized pedagogical potentials" and to explore "how games might enrich the instruction...at the advanced placement high school and early college levels."  And Randy Hinrichs, Group Program Manager for Learning Science and Technology at Microsoft Research, claims that game technology (among other innovations) "will move us away from classrooms, lectures, test taking, and note taking into fun, immersive interactive learning environments."

These pronouncements are based on some incontestable facts.  First, the world is now populated by hundreds of millions of game-playing devices.  Second, the videogame market, approximately $10 billion in 2002, continues to grow rapidly and to motivate the push for increasingly sophisticated and powerful interactive technologies.  As in other areas of IT development, these technologies are maturing and converging in novel and unexpected ways.  Text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs Object-Oriented) have evolved into massive multiplayer online communities such as Ultima and The Sims On-line, in which hundreds of thousands of players can simultaneously interact in graphically rendered immersive worlds.  And previously standalone game devices, such as Sony PlayStation2 and Microsoft X box, are now Web-enabled for geo-distributed multiplayer engagements.  Imagine that all of these networked "play stations" are "learning stations," and you can begin to sense an instructional revolution waiting to happen.

Still, some might argue that higher education students already have networked learning stations in the form of the Web-enabled PC.  What value is added by a game-based "learning station"?  The major difference is that game technologies routinely provide visualizations whose pictorial dynamism and sophistication previously required a supercomputer to produce.  These visualizations, best referred to as immersive worlds, can bring a student into and through any environment that can be imagined.  Instead of learning about a subject by listening to a lecture or by processing page-based alphanumerics (i.e., reading), students can enter and explore a screen-based simulated world that is the next-best thing to reality.

Continued in the article.

"Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?" by Scott Carson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 15, 2003, Page A31
Educators say the virtual worlds of video games help students think more broadly.

"People ought to use Grand Theft Auto in the classroom to think about values and ideology," James Gee a distinguished professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison says.  "There are lots of things people could learn from games."

This isn't the talk of a hobbyist or an eccentric, but of a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field.  Mr. Gee thinks that video games--even those like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in which players run around and blast Nazis--hold the key to salvaging American education.  His argument was recently delivered in a compact book: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan).

Although Mr. Gee's colleagues suggested that he was wasting his time when he started looking into video games, in the past two years he has found that he is part of a new and growing academic field.  "In the time that I was writing my book, the interest in games in academe went way up," Mr. Gee says.  "It's clear that by accident, I had entered an area where a wave of interest was coming up--and is still coming up."

New conferences and essays dedicated to games appear all the time.  Respected scholars, like Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discuss the cultural value of video games in the popular press.  And graduate students and professors are designing games for use in the classroom.

Despite the swell of interest, Mr. Gee and others say the academic study of video games is still controversial.  While some scholars embrace research on the games, others are recoiling.

Celia Pearce is the associate director of the Game Culture and Technology Lab at the University of California at Irvine, where two years ago the faculty rejected a proposal for a minor in game design.  A professor on the committee that made the decision called the idea of a video-games minor "prurient," she says.

She finds it "baffling" that schools these days use a "pre-information-society model" in teaching.  "Kids are playing games when they are not in school.  They are going from this digital environment into the classroom, and they're suddenly in Dickens."  Teachers and professors don't know what games are, or how to use them to their own advantage, she says.  "At the worst they fear games, and at the best they are completely ignorant of them."

Until a few years ago, Mr. Gee was himself clueless about video games.  He became interested in the subject as he watched his son, then 6 years old, play a game called Pajama Sam.  Mr. Gee wondered what a game for adults would be like.  So he bought a game called The New Adventures of the Time Machine, which was loosely based on the work of H. G. Wells.

"I was floored by how long and how difficult it was," he says, sitting in his office, one wall of which is now covered with posters of video-game characters.  He realized that the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood, which means that millions of people are plunking down substantial amounts for games that take on average 50 to 100 hours to complete--roughly the amount of time spent in semester of college courses.  "Some young person is going to spend $50 on this, yet they won't take 50 minutes to learn algebra," he says.  "I wanted to know why."

He says that game manufacturers deal with compelling paradox from which educators can learn.

Games have to be challenging enough to entertain, yet easy enough to solve--or at least easy enough for the player to feel like he or she is making progress.  "To me, that was the challenge schools face," he says.  "I wanted to see why these game designers are better at that."

September 8, 2003 message from Jon Entine

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Entine [mailto:runjonrun@earthlink.net
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 11:11 AM
Subject: Research audit on "Body Shop" available

For anyone studying or teaching The Body Shop, I've posted on my website my internal 48-page audit of the company, which I've previously only provided by email.

http://www.jonentine.com/reviews/Body_Shop_Roddick_audit.doc

It's an extremely detailed account of the practices of this company. It analyzes Body Shop over a range of areas including its environmental practices, its marketing and ethics, its franchise relations, corporate governance, product quality, etc. It's based on more than 100 interviews, most of them recorded (and available for fact checking).

It was first written in 1996 and has been updated slightly. A lot of it deals with the historical practices of the company, such as Anita Roddick's brazen stealing of the concept, name, logo, and products from the original Body Shop, the one founded in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1970 that Roddick visited, then ripped off without attribution, then lied about. The report is very revealing about the character of Roddick and the sad, dysfunctional, ethically-challenged multi-national corporation she has created and continues to oversee.

The backgrounder was prepared when Body Shop's lawyers (Lovell White Durrant...Robert Maxwell's ex corporate swat team) and its PR team (Hill & Knowlton ... The tobacco lobbyist PR firm) were hired to counter articles by me, New Consumer in England, In These Times, Stephen Corry of Survival International, and other progressives who published fact-based accounts of the ethical dysfunctionality of this company.

Please feel free to use it in your research.

Regards,

-- Jon Entine
Miami University
6255 So. Clippinger Dr.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45243 (
513) 527-4385 [FAX] 527-4386

http://www.jonentine.com

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education technologies are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


Answer 4  --- Distance Education Becomes Mainstream 
                      Both Off Campus and In Courses On Campus

Distance Education Soared in the Latter Part of the 1990s

Distance Education at Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions: 2000-2001, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), July 2003 --- http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003017 

This report presents data on distance education at postsecondary institutions. NCES used the Postsecondary Education Quick Information System (PEQIS) to provide current national estimates on distance education at 2-year and 4-year Title IV-eligible, degree-granting institutions. Distance education was defined for this study as education or training courses delivered to remote (off-campus) sites via audio, video (live or prerecorded), or computer technologies, including both synchronous (i.e., simultaneous) and asynchronous (i.e., not simultaneous) instruction. Data were collected on a variety of topics related to distance education, including the number and proportion of institutions offering distance education courses during the 2000–2001 12-month academic year, distance education enrollments and course offerings, distance education degree and certificate programs, distance education technologies, participation in distance education consortia, accommodations in distance education courses for students with disabilities, distance education program goals, and factors that keep institutions from starting or expanding distance education offerings.

Introduction

This study, conducted through the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Postsecondary Education Quick Information System (PEQIS), was designed to provide current national estimates on distance education at 2-year and 4-year Title IV-eligible, degree-granting institutions. Distance education was defined for this study as education or training courses delivered to remote (off-campus) sites via audio, video (live or prerecorded), or computer technologies, including both synchronous (i.e., simultaneous) and asynchronous (i.e., not simultaneous) instruction.

Key Findings

The PEQIS survey provides national estimates for the 2000–2001 academic year on the number and proportion of institutions offering distance education courses, distance education enrollments and course offerings, degree and certificate programs, distance education technologies, participation in distance education consortia, accommodations for students wit h disabilities, distance education program goals, and factors institutions identify as keeping them from starting or expanding distance education offerings.

The report's summary is continued at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/peqis/publications/2003017/ 


October 31, 2003 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

TRENDS IN DISTANCE EDUCATION

The American Federation of Teachers publication, AFT ON CAMPUS, is running a series of articles on distance education trends.

In "Trends in Distance Education" (September 2003, http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/sept03/technology.html ) Thomas J. Kriger, State University of New York, writes about how "critics of asynchronous courses and programs within higher education have recently found unexpected support in the corporate sector." Learners in corporations are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with online-only classes. This is leading to the creation of "blended learning" -- courses that combine "face-to-face teaching with software and Web-based teaching." Such courses also allow faculty to retain greater control in their distance classes.

The October 2003 issue continues the theme with "Making the Pedagogical Case for Blended Learning" by Cynthia Villanti, assistant professor of humanities at Mohawk Valley Community College, New York ( http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/oct03/technology.html ). She presents five primary pedagogical arguments for blended, or hybrid, courses. These arguments include: -- enabling a balance between faculty-centered and student-centered models; -- enabling faculty and students to develop a strong sense of classroom community both online and in person; -- allowing for both the "reflectiveness of asynchronous communication and the immediacy of spoken communication;" -- helping to alleviate faculty concerns about academic dishonesty and plagiarism.

AFT On Campus is published eight times a year by the American Federation of Teachers, 555 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001 USA; tel: 202-879-4400; email: online@aft.org ; Web: http://www.aft.org/  Current and back issues are available at no cost at http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/index.html

......................................................................

NEW RESOURCE ON ELEARNING AND COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

This month, SYLLABUS magazine began a new, free email publication, CMS REVIEW: A RESOURCE ON ELEARNING AND COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS. This bi-monthly newsletter will provide information, analysis, case studies, and technical tips on course management systems (CMS) in higher education. To subscribe, go to http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=2978 

Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/ . Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/  for more information.


Bob Jensen's links on online training and education programs can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Other documents related to this topic are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

 

Answer 5 --- The Future of Textbooks

The future of text books?
From Jim Mahar's blog on June 16, 2005 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

The future of text books?
Megginson and Smart
Introdcution to Corporate Finance--Companion Site

Wow.
I think we may have a glimpse into the future of text books with this one. It is the new Introduction to Corporate Finance by William Megginson and Scott Smart.

From videos for most topics, to interviews, to powerpoint, to a student study guide, to excel help...just a total integration of a text and a web site! Well done!

At St. Bonaventure we have adopted the text for the fall semester and the book actually has made me excited to be teaching an introductory course! It is that good!!

BTW Before I get accused of selling out, let me say I get zero for this plug. I have met each author at conferences but do not really know either of them. And like any first edition book there may be some errors, but that said, this is the future of college text books!

Check out some of the online material here. More material is available with book purchase.

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

 

 

Motivations for Distance Education 

Little Red Hen Motivations
(Those professors who go it alone without much institutional support.)
June 29, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

A REPORT ON THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE EDUCATION

Each year the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) conducts an annual survey on the state of U.S. higher education online learning. This year, the Consortium published its first annual special edition, "Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 - Southern Edition." Some of the findings reported include:

"Online learning is thriving in the southern states. The patterns of growth and acceptance of online education among the 16 southern states in this report are very similar to that observed for the national sample, with one clear difference: online learning has made greater inroads in the southern states than in the nation as a whole."

"[S]chools are offering a large number of online courses, and there is great diversity in the courses and programs being offered:

-- Sixty-two percent of southern schools offering graduate face-to-face courses also offer graduate courses online.

-- Sixty-eight percent of southern schools offering undergraduate face-to-face courses also offer undergraduate courses online."

"Staffing for online courses does not come at the expense of core faculty. Institutions use about the same mixture of core and adjunct faculty to staff their online courses as they do for their face-to-face courses. Instead of more adjunct faculty teaching online courses, the opposite is found; overall, there is a slightly greater use of core faculty for teaching online than for face-to-face."

You can download the complete report at http://www.sloan-c.org/ 

Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information go to http://www.aln.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for online training and education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

 


Online Education Effectiveness and Testing

Barbara gave me permission to post the following message on March 15, 2006
My reply follows her message.

Professor Jensen:

I need your help in working with regulators who are uncomfortable with online education.

I am currently on the faculty at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas and I abruptly learned yesterday that the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy distinguishes online and on campus offering of ethics courses that it approves as counting for students to meet CPA candidacy requirements. Since my school offers its ethics course in both modes, I am suddenly faced with making a case to the TSBPA in one week's time to avoid rejection of the online version of the University of Dallas course.

I have included in this email the "story" as I understand it that explains my situation. It isn't a story about accounting or ethics, it is a story about online education.

I would like to talk to you tomorrow because of your expertise in distance education and involvement in the profession. In addition, I am building a portfolio of materials this week for the Board meeting in Austin March 22-23 to make a case for their approval (or at least not rejection) of the online version of the ethics course that the Board already accepts in its on campus version. I want to include compelling research-based material demonstrating the value of online learning, and I don't have time to begin that literature survey myself. In addition, I want to be able to present preliminary results from reviewers of the University of Dallas course about the course's merit in presentation of the content in an online delivery.

Thank you for any assistance that you can give me.

Barbara W. Scofield
Associate Professor of Accounting
University of Dallas
1845 E Northgate Irving, TX 75062
972-721-5034

scofield@gsm.udallas.edu

A statement of the University of Dallas and Texas State Board of Public Accountancy and Online Learning

The TSBPA approved the University of Dallas ethics program in 2004. The course that was approved was a long-standing course, required in several different graduate programs, called Business Ethics. The course was regularly taught on campus (since 1995) and online (since 2001).

The application for approval of the ethics course did not ask for information about whether the class was on campus or online and the syllabus that was submitted happened to be the syllabus of an on campus section. The TSBPA's position (via Donna Hiller) is that the Board intended to approve only the on campus version of the course, and that the Board inferred it was an on campus course because the sample syllabus that was submitted was an on campus course.

Therefore the TSBPA (via Donna Hiller) is requiring that University of Dallas students who took the online version of the ethics course retake the exact same course in its on campus format. While the TSBPA (via Donna Hiller) has indicated that the online course cannot at this time be approved and its scheduled offering in the summer will not provide students with an approved course, Donna Hiller, at my request, has indicated that she will take this issue to the Board for their decision next week at the Executive Board Meeting on March 22 and the Board Meeting on March 23.

There are two issues:

1. Treatment of students who were relying on communication from the Board at the time they took the class that could reasonably have been interpreted to confer approval of both the online and on campus sections of the ethics course.

2. Status of the upcoming summer online ethics class.

My priority is establishing the status of the upcoming summer online ethics class. The Board has indicated through its pilot program with the University of Texas at Dallas that there is a place for online ethics classes in the preparation of CPA candidates. The University of Dallas is interested in providing the TSBPA with any information or assessment necessary to meet the needs of the Board to understand the online ethics class at the University of Dallas. Although not currently privy to the Board specific concerns about online courses, the University of Dallas believes that it can demonstrate sufficient credibility for the course because of the following factors:

A. The content of the online course is the same as the on campus course. Content comparison can be provided. B. The instructional methods of the online course involve intense student-to-student, instructor-to-student, and student-to-content interaction at a level equivalent to an on campus course. Empirical information about interaction in the course can be provided.

C. The instructor for the course is superbly qualified and a long-standing ethics instructor and distance learning instructor. The vita of the instructor can be provided.

D. There are processes for course assessment in place that regularly prompt the review of this course and these assessments can be provided to the board along with comparisons with the on campus assessments.

E. The University of Dallas will seek to coordinate with the work done by the University of Texas at Dallas to provide information at least equivalent to that provided by the University of Texas at Dallas and to meet at a minimum the tentative criteria for online learning that UT Dallas has been empowered to recommend to the TSBPA. Contact with the University of Texas at Dallas has been initiated.

When the online ethics course is granted a path to approval by the Board, I am also interested in addressing the issue of TSBPA approval of students who took the class between the original ethics course approval date and March 13, 2006, the date that the University of Dallas became aware of the TSBPA intent (through Donna Hiller) that the TSBPA distinguished online and on campus ethics classes.

The University of Dallas believes that the online class in fact provided these students with a course that completely fulfilled the general intent of the Board for education in ethics, since it is the same course as the approved on campus course (see above). The decision on the extent of commitment of the Board to students who relied on the Board's approval letter may be a legal issue of some sort that is outside of the current decision-making of the Board, but I want the Board take the opportunity to consider that the reasonableness of the students' position and the students' actual preparation in ethics suggest that there should also be a path created to approval of online ethics courses taken at the University of Dallas during this prior time period. The currently proposed remedy of a requirement for students to retake the very same course on campus that students have already taken online appears excessively costly to Texans and the profession of accounting by delaying the entry of otherwise qualified individuals into public accountancy. High cost is justified when the concomitant benefits are also high. However, the benefit to Texans and the accounting profession from students who retake the ethics course seems to exist only in meeting the requirements of regulations that all parties diligently sought to meet in the first place and not in producing any actual additional learning experiences.

A reply to her from Bob Jensen

Hi Barbara,

May I share your questions and my responses in the next edition of New Bookmarks? This might be helpful to your efforts when others become informed. I will be in my office every day except for March 17. My phone number is 210-999-7347. However, I can probably be more helpful via email.

As discouraging as it may seem, if students know what is expected of them and must demonstrate what they have learned, pedagogy does not seem to matter. It can be online or onsite. It can be lecture or cases. It can be no teaching at all if there are talented and motivated students who are given great learning materials. This is called the well-known “No Significant Difference” phenomenon --- http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/

I think you should stress that insisting upon onsite courses is discriminatory against potential students whose life circumstances make it difficult or impossible to attend regular classes on campus.

I think you should make the case that online education is just like onsite education in the sense that learning depends on the quality and motivations of the students, faculty, and university that sets the employment and curriculum standards for quality. The issue is not onsite versus online. The issue is quality of effort.

The most prestigious schools like Harvard and Stanford and Notre Dame have a large number of credit and non-credit courses online. Entire accounting undergraduate and graduate degree programs are available online from such quality schools as the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland.  See my guide to online training and education programs is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

My main introductory document on the future of distance education is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm

Anticipate and deal with the main arguments against online education. The typical argument is that onsite students have more learning interactions with themselves and with the instructor. This is absolutely false if the distance education course is designed to promote online interactions that do a better job of getting into each others’ heads.  Online courses become superior to onsite courses.

Amy Dunbar teaches intensely interactive online courses with Instant Messaging. See Dunbar, A. 2004. “Genesis of an Online Course.” Issues in Accounting Education (2004),19 (3):321-343.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a descriptive and evaluative analysis of the transformation of a face-to-face graduate tax accounting course to an online course. One hundred fifteen students completed the compressed six-week class in 2001 and 2002 using WebCT, classroom environment software that facilitates the creation of web-based educational environments. The paper provides a description of the required technology tools and the class conduct. The students used a combination of asynchronous and synchronous learning methods that allowed them to complete the coursework on a self-determined schedule, subject to semi-weekly quiz constraints. The course material was presented in content pages with links to Excel® problems, Flash examples, audio and video files, and self-tests. Students worked the quizzes and then met in their groups in a chat room to resolve differences in answers. Student surveys indicated satisfaction with the learning methods.

I might add that Amy is a veteran world class instructor both onsite and online. She’s achieved all-university awards for onsite teaching in at least three major universities. This gives her the credentials to judge how well her online courses compare with her outstanding onsite courses.

A free audio download of a presentation by Amy Dunbar is available at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002   

The argument that students cannot be properly assessed for learning online is more problematic. Clearly it is easier to prevent cheating with onsite examinations. But there are ways of dealing with this problem.  My best example of an online graduate program that is extremely difficult is the Chartered Accountant School of Business (CASB) masters program for all of Western Canada. Students are required to take some onsite testing even though this is an online degree program. And CASB does a great job with ethics online. I was engaged to formally assess this program and came away extremely impressed. My main contact there is Don Carter carter@casb.com  .  If you are really serious about this, I would invite Don to come down and make a presentation to the Board. Don will convince them of the superiority of online education.

You can read some about the CASB degree program at http://www.casb.com/

You can read more about assessment issues at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

I think a lot of the argument against distance education comes from faculty fearful of one day having to teach online. First there is the fear of change. Second there is the genuine fear that is entirely justified --- if online teaching is done well it is more work and strain than onsite teaching. The strain comes from increased hours of communication with each and every student.

Probably the most general argument in favor of onsite education is that students living on campus have the social interactions and maturity development outside of class. This is most certainly a valid argument. However, when it comes to issues of learning of course content, online education can be as good as or generally better than onsite classes. Students in online programs are often older and more mature such that the on-campus advantages decline in their situations. Online students generally have more life, love, and work experiences already under their belts. And besides, you’re only talking about ethics courses rather than an entire undergraduate or graduate education.

I think if you deal with the learning interaction and assessment issues that you can make a strong case for distance education. There are some “dark side” arguments that you should probably avoid. But if you care to read about them, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen

March 15, 2006 reply from Bruce Lubich [BLubich@UMUC.EDU]

Bob, as a director and teacher in a graduate accounting program that is exclusively online, I want to thank you for your support and eloquent defense of online education. Unfortunately, Texas's predisposition against online teaching also shows up in its education requirements for sitting for the CPA exam. Of the 30 required upper division accounting credits, at least 15 must "result from physical attendance at classes meeting regularly on the campus" (quote from the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy website at www.tsbpa.state.tx.us/eq1.htm)

Cynically speaking, it seems the state of Texas wants to be sure its classrooms are occupied.

Barbara, best of luck with your testimony.

Bruce Lubich
Program Director,
Accounting Graduate School of Management and Technology
University of Maryland University College

March 15, 2006 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

At my school, Bowling Green, student credits for on-line accounting majors classes are never approved by the department chair. He says that you can't trust the schools that are offering these. When told that some very reputable schools are offering the courses, he still says no because when the testing process is done on-line or not in the physical presence of the professor the grades simply can't be trusted.

David Albrecht

March 16, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

One tack against a luddites like that is to propose a compromise that virtually accepts all transfer credits from AACSB-accredited universities. It's difficult to argue that standards vary between online and onsite courses in a given program accredited by the AACSB. I seriously doubt that the faculty in that program would allow a double academic standard.

In fact, on transcripts it is often impossible to distinguish online from onsite credits from a respected universities, especially when the same course is offered online and onsite (i.e., merely in different sections).

You might explain to your department chair that he's probably been accepting online transfer credits for some time. The University of North Texas and other major universities now offer online courses to full-time resident students who live on campus. Some students and instructors find this to be a better approach to learning.

And you ask him why Bowling Green's assessment rigor is not widely known to be vastly superior to online courses from nearly all major universities that now offer distance education courses and even total degree programs, including schools like the Fuqua Graduate School at Duke, Stanford University (especially computer science and engineering online courses that bring in over $100 million per year), the University of Maryland, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas, Texas Tech, and even, gasp, The Ohio State University.

You might tell your department chair that by not offering some online alternatives, Bowling Green is not getting the most out of its students. The University of Illinois conducted a major study that found that students performed better in online versus onsite courses when matched pair sections took the same examinations.

And then you might top it off by asking your department chair how he justifies denying credit for Bowling Green's own distance education courses --- http://adultlearnerservices.bgsu.edu/index.php?x=opportunities 
The following is a quotation from the above Bowling Green site:

*****************************
The advancement of computer technology has provided a wealth of new opportunities for learning. Distance education is one example of technology’s ability to expand our horizons and gain from new experiences. BGSU offers many distance education courses and two baccalaureate degree completion programs online.

The Advanced Technological Education Degree Program is designed for individuals who have completed a two-year applied associate’s degree. The Bachelor of Liberal Studies Degree Program is ideal for students with previous college credit who would like flexibility in course selection while completing a liberal education program.

Distance Education Courses and Programs --- http://ideal.bgsu.edu/ONLINE/  ***************************

Bob Jensen

March 16, 2006 reply from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]

Count me in the camp that just isn't that concerned about online cheating. Perhaps that is because my students are graduate students and my online exams are open-book, timed exams, and a different version is presented to each student (much like a driver's license exam). In my end-of-semester survey, I ask whether students are concerned about cheating, and on occasion, I get one who is. But generally the response is no.

The UConn accounting department was just reviewed by the AACSB, and they were impressed by our MSA online program. They commented that they now believed that an online MSA program was possible. I am convinced that the people who are opposed to online education are unwilling to invest the time to see how online education is implemented. Sure there will be bad examples, but there are bad examples of face to face (FTF) teaching. How many profs do you know who simply read powerpoint slides to a sleeping class?! Last semester, I received the School of Business graduate teaching award even though I teach only online classes. I believe that the factor that really matters is that the students know you care about whether they are learning. A prof who cares interacts with students. You can do that online as well as FTF.

Do I miss FTF teaching -- you bet I do. But once I focused on what the student really needs to learn, I realized, much to my dismay, interacting FTF with Dunbar was not a necessary condition.

Amy Dunbar

March 16, 2006 message from Carol Flowers [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

To resolve this issue and make me more comfortable with the grade a student earns, I have all my online exams proctored. I schedule weekends (placing them in the schedule of classes) and it is mandatory that they take the exams during this weekend period (Fir/Sat) at our computing center. It is my policy that if they can't take the paced exams during those periods, then the class is not one that they can participate in. This is no different from having different times that courses are offered. They have to make a choice in that situation, also, as to which time will best serve their needs.

March 16, 2006 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Our model is similar to Carol Flowers. Our on-line MBA program requires an in-person meeting for four hours at the beginning of every semester, to let the students and professor get to know each other personally, followed by the distance-ed portion, concluding with another four-hour in- person session for the final examination or other assessment. The students all congregate at the Sheraton at Dulles airport, have dinner together Friday night, spend Saturday morning taking the final for their previous class, and spend Saturday afternoon being introduced to their next class. They do this between every semester. So far, the on- line group has outperformed (very slightly, and not statistically significant due to small sample sizes) the face-to-face counterparts being used as our control groups. We believe the outperformance might have an inherent self- selection bias since the distance-learners are usually professionals, whereas many of our face-to-face students are full-time students and generally a bit younger and more immature.

My personal on-line course consists of exactly the same readings as my F2F class, and exactly the same lectures (recorded using Tegrity) provided on CD and watched asynchronously, followed by on-line synchronous discussion sessions (2-3 hours per week) where I call on random students asking questions about the readings, lectures, etc., and engaging in lively discussion. I prepare some interesting cases and application dilemmas (mostly adapted from real world scenarios) and introduce dilemmas, gray areas, controversy (you expected maybe peace and quiet from David Fordham?!), and other thought-provoking issues for discussion. I have almost perfect attendance in the on-line synchronous because the students really find the discussions engaging. Surprisingly, I have no problem with freeloaders who don't read or watch the recorded lectures. My major student assessment vehicle is an individual policy manual, supplemented by the in-person exam. Since each student's manual organization, layout, approach, and perspective is so very different from the others, cheating is almost out of the question. And the in-person exam is conducted almost like the CISP or old CPA exams... total quiet, no talking, no leaving the room, nothing but a pencil, etc.

And finally, no, you can't tell the difference on our student's transcript as to whether they took the on-line or in-person MBA. They look identical on the transcript.

We've not yet had any problem with anyone "rejecting" our credential that I'm aware of.

Regarding our own acceptance of transfer credit, we make the student provide evidence of the quality of each course (not the degree) before we exempt or accept credit. We do not distinguish between on-line or F2F -- nor do we automatically accept a course based on institution reputation. We have on many occasions rejected AACSB- accredited institution courses (on a course-by-course basis) because our investigation showed that the course coverage or rigor was not up to the standard we required. (The only "blanket" exception that we make is for certain familiar Virginia community college courses in the liberal studies where history has shown that the college and coursework reliably meets the standards -- every other course has to be accepted on a course-by-course basis.)

Just our $0.02 worth.

David Fordham
James Madison University

 

Example 1
Amy Dunbar's Online Tax Courses

I think all educators should read at least the first 15 pages of "Genesis of an Online Course," by Amy Dunbar at www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course.pdf 

You Can Listen to a Live Performance on How Amy Wows Her Online Students!
A free audio download of a presentation by Amy Dunbar is available at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002 

I just shared a platform with Amy Dunbar in a workshop presented at Mercer University on November 9, 2001.  I am amazed at what both Amy and her husband (John) are accomplishing with online teaching of income tax and tax research.  

  • Although they are teaching as full-time faculty at the University of Connecticut, both Amy and her husband, John,  teach online courses from their house.  In practice, they don't have to go to the campus except to check mail, perform service activities, and work face-to-face with colleagues and students when needed.  In theory, they could move to a California beach house or a cabin on top of a Colorado mountain and still teach all their courses for the University of Connecticut.  I should note that the students in this online University of Connecticut program are adult learners who almost all have current jobs in the Hartford community.  Amy teaches all her courses online, and John teaches a summer course online.  Both professors teach taxation.

  • Amy won an all-university teaching technology award from the University of Connecticut.  This is just another of her many all-university teaching awards from the University of Texas in San Antonio, the University of Iowa, and the University of Connecticut.  She has this rare ability of being rated perfect by virtually any student no matter what grade she assigns, even a failing grade.  Amy's homepage is at http://www.sba.uconn.edu/users/ADunbar/Dunbaru.htm 

  • I don't have John's teaching evaluation scores (I'm told they're excellent), but you can read Amy's teaching evaluation scores on the last page (Exhibit 5) of the document at http://www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course.pdf 
    (Note that the highest possible rating is 10.00 in this University of Connecticut evaluation form.

  • I especially urge you to read the student evaluation narratives at http://www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course.pdf 

  • Amy developed all her own online course materials and relies heavily on a question and answer pedagogy using instant messaging.
  • Amy's workshop presentations and war stories about online education are AWESOME!

 

So what are Amy's highly controversial conclusions from her online courses?   Go to Page 13 in "Genesis of an Online Course," by Amy Dunbar at www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course.pdf 

One of the fastest growing segments of the communication industry is the area of Instant Messaging, where people can set up "buddy lists" on their computer and have real time text conversations with friends or colleagues. The problem until now has been how to capture the corporate benefits of Instant Messaging without spending the resources to ensure the security of the communication. Enter Microsoft. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/97256 

You can listen to Amy Dunbar discuss the use of instant messaging in her distance education tax courses at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002 

 


Example 2
An Innovative Online International Accounting Course on Six Campuses Around the World   http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm 

A highlight for me at the November 6-7, 1998 AICPA Accounting Educators Conference was a presentation by Sharon Lightner from San Diego State University and Linard Nadig from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.  This presentation followed a ceremony presenting Professors Lightner and Nadig with the $1,000 AICPA Collaboration Award prize.

The course syllabus is located at http://www.aznet.net/course/doors/ 

Bob Jensen's Web Link --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm 


"Surveying the Digital Landscape: Evolving Technologies 2004," Educause Review, vol. 39, no. 6 (November/December 2004): 78–92. --- http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm04/erm0464.asp 

Each year, the members of the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee identify and research the evolving technologies that are having the most direct impact on higher education institutions. The committee members choose the relevant topics, write white papers, and present their findings at the EDUCAUSE annual conference.


"Long Tails in Higher Education," by Saul Fisher, Inside Higher Ed, May 27, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/27/fisher

Education experts often wonder whether bestseller status among college courses might provide lessons about educational markets and planning, just as popularity shapes entertainment and cultural products. Such speculation has grown with the advent of online education. Some argue that by making the most popular courses virtual, colleges can slash costs, helping to pay for low enrollment courses.

The alternative has been to raise revenues for low-enrollment courses by adding enrollment. This “add seats” approach has become more attractive in the new world of online education. Which alternative makes more sense for colleges considering online versions of some courses?

Cost-cutting advocates suggest that great efficiencies may result from delivering online a small set of popular undergraduate courses. Courses such as Chemistry 101 or Introduction to European History would have large enrollments and “basic” curricula. These popular courses illustrate the “80-20 rule” — 20 percent of a resource typically generates 80 percent of the possible benefits. Popular courses may not even constitute 20 percent of the catalogue’s contents, yet they often represent 80 percent of enrollments. If that 80 percent can be served through automated, virtual means, that should release tremendous savings, offsetting the cost of courses that don’t lend themselves as easily or cheaply to virtual delivery.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education program costs are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/distcost.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/distcost.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

 

 

 

 

Learning Experimentation Motivations
Example 1 --- The SCALE Experiments --- http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/ 

Quotes from Professor Burks Oakley II, 
Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Asynchronous Learning Networking Promotes Greater Communication

  • 51% of students reported increased communication with instructor
  • 43% of students reported increased communication with other students
  • 40% reported increase in quality of interactions with instructor

Asynchronous Learning Networking Enhances the Learning Environment

  • 75% of students rated their overall experience good, very good, or excellent
  • ALN enables students 
         to "be more prepared for class,"
         gives them "a lot of time to learn out of class," and
         allows them "to work at their own pace."

Impact on Course Grades in ECE 270, Fall 1994, 2 traditional sections versus 3 ALN sections

Course Grade

Traditional

Computer Based

A
B
C
D
E
17.4%
31.8%
35.^%
6.8%
8.3%
38.1%
26.0%
21.5%
6.6%
7.7%

Source:  http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois 

For an August 2000 update, download Dan Stone's audio file and PowerPoint file from http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm 


Message from Richard Reams on May 8, 2002  (NPR = National Public Radio)

Hi Bob.

The May 7 “Soundprint” program on NPR was about technology in education, including a story about on-line education with a focus on Phoenix University and Temple.

The second segment was on Training College faculty in using technology.

http://www.soundprint.org/ 

Richard Reams, Ph.D. 
Senior Staff Psychologist Counseling Services 
Trinity University 715 Stadium Drive #85 San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

Voice: (210) 999-7411 Fax: (210) 999-7848 rreams@trinity.edu  
www.trinity.edu/departments/ccs/
 

You can read the following at http://www.soundprint.org/ 

Online University
Just recently the world was abuzz with the possibilities of the internet in education. On one end the classroom became a technology lab, with veteran teachers scrambling to learn new fangled tools. On the other end, soothsayers touted the age of the virtual classroom. No longer would one need to trudge to a distant classroom, the web would bring it to you. Smoke and mirrors or reality? Find out on Soundprint.

Click Here for College 
Remember the dot-com craze? Then perhaps you recollect the mad dash by universities and others to ring in the virtual university. The bubble may have burst but is the online university just another bad idea? Some say yes but others say no. But before you sign up for that virtual course, click along with Producer Richard Paul as he investigates the state of the online university.

Classroom Cool: Training Teachers in Using Technology 
Faced with the challenge of improving student performance, many schools turned to the widespread use of computers and the Internet. The trend has caught many veteran teachers unawares. Now they have to make use of the latest technology, while in their hearts they remain uncomfortable with the new wave. Though hard data is lacking on whether classroom high tech helps students learn, teachers feel the hot breath of urgency to adapt. Veteran teacher and producer Bill Drummond explores the rush to get America's teachers wired.


Top K12's 100 Wired Schools --- http://FamilyPC.com/smarter.asp 
The winners are listed at http://familypc.com/smarter_2001_top.asp 

Why (Some) Kids Love School --- http://familypc.com/smarter_why_kids.asp 

Dropout rates are down and test scores are up. Students are engaged in learning and their self-esteem is soaring. So what's really going on within the classroom walls of the country's top wired schools? By Leslie Bennetts


Linda Peters provides a frank overview of the various factors underlying student perceptions of online learning. Such perceptions, she observes, are not only informed by the student's individual situation (varying levels of computer access, for instance) but also by the student's individual characteristics: the student's proficiency with computers, the student's desire for interpersonal contact, or the student's ability to remain self-motivated --- 

Technology Source, a free, refereed, e-journal at http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/default.asp?show=issue&id=44 
IN THE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 ISSUE


The Problem of Attrition in Online MBA Programs

We expect higher attrition rates from both learners in taking degrees in commuting programs and most online programs.  The major reason is that prior to enrolling for a course or program, people tend to me more optimistic about how they can manage their time between a full-time job and family obligations.  After enrolling, unforseen disasters do arise such as family illnesses, job assignments out of town, car breakdowns, computer breakdowns, job loss or change, etc.

The problem of online MBA attrition at West Texas A&M University is discussed in "Assessing Enrollment and Attrition Rates for the Online MBA," by Neil Terry, T.H.E. Journal, February 2001, pp. 65-69 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3299.cfm 

Follow-up experiments also showed that West Texas A&M's online students did not perform as well as onsite students on examinations.


Important Distance Education Site
The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.aln.org/
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.


Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research --- Detail File


The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education --- Detail File

 

 

New and Expanding Market Motivations
Example 1 --- Stanford University --- http://ww.stanford.edu/history/fulldesc.html 

Probably the most successful use of video is the Adept program at Stanford University where engineering students can get an entire Masters of Engineering degree almost entirely from video courses http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cnc9838/cnc9838.html

Stanford University shook up the stuffy Ivy League and other prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge when it demonstrated to the world that its online training programs and its online Masters of Engineering (ADEPT) asynchronous learning degree program became enormous cash cows with nearly infinite growth potentials relative to relatively fixed-size onsite programs.  In a few short years, revenues from online programs in engineering and computer science exploded to over $100 million per year.

The combined present value of the Stanford University logo and the logos of other highly prestigious universities are worth trillions.  Any prestigious university that ignores online growth opportunities is probably wasting billions of dollars of potential cash flow from its logo.  

Virtually all universities of highest prestige and name recognition are realizing this and now offer a vast array of online training and education courses directly or in partnership with corporations and government agencies seeking the mark of distinction on diplomas.

 



Example 2 --- University of Wisconsin --- http://webct.wisc.edu/ 
Over 100,000 Registered Online Students in The University of Wisconsin System of State-Supported Universities

Having a long history of extension programs largely aimed at part-time adult learners, it made a lot of sense for the UW System to try to train and educate adult learners and other learners who were not likely to become onsite students.

The UW System is typical of many other large state-supported universities that have an established adult learning infrastructure and a long history of interactive television courses delivered to remote sites within the state.  Online Internet courses were a logical extension and in many instances a cost-efficient extension relative to televised delivery.

Also check out Iowa State University Extension --- http://www.extension.iastate.edu/


Example 3 --- Harvard University

In light of new online learning technologies, Harvard University changed its long-standing residency requirement in anticipation of expanding markets for "mid-career professionals" according to Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2002, Page 4.  Harvard has various distance education programs, including those in the Harvard Business School that currently cost over $4 million per year to maintain.


Example 4
From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002

Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program

Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a "fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees. The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and access interactive multimedia course content.

For more information, visit: http://www.babson.edu/mba/fasttrac


Example 5 --- Texas A&M Online MBA Program in Mexico --- http://olap.tamu.edu/mexico/tamumxctr.pdf 

Some universities view online technologies as a tremendous opportunity to expand training and education courses into foreign countries.  One such effort was undertaken by the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University in partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico.  For example, Professor John Parnell at Texas A&M has been delivering a course for several semesters in which students in Mexico City take the online course in their homes.  However, once each month the students meet face-to-face on a weekend when Dr. Parnell travels to Mexico City to hold live classes and administer examinations.

You probably won't have much difficulty making a guess as to what many students say is the major reason they prefer online courses to onsite courses in Mexico City?


Example 6 --- The University of Phoenix --- http://www.phoenix.edu/index_open.html 

The University of Phoenix became the largest private university in the world.  Growth came largely from adult learning onsite programs in urban centers across the U.S. and Canada.  

The popular CBS television show called Sixty Minutes ran a feature on the growth and future of the newer online training and education programs at the University of Phoenix. You can download this video from http://online.uophx.edu/onl_nav_2.asp# 

The University of Phoenix contends that online success in education depends upon intense communications day-to-day between instructors and students.  This, in turn, means that online classes must be relatively small and synchronized in terms of assignments and projects.

What's Online Learning Really Like in a Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting Class?

The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

  • All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase

  • $1,600 fee for the course and materials

  • Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content

  • Instructor had good communications with students and between students

  • Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs

  • 30% of grade from team projects

  • Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie

  • Goldie earned a 92 (A-)

  • She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she had the time

  • She considered the course to have a heavy workload

Jensen Added Comment
It wasn't mentioned, but I think Goldie took the ACC 460 course --- Click Here

ACC 460 Government and Non-Profit Accounting

Course Description

This course covers fund accounting, budget and control issues, revenue and expense recognition, and issues of reporting for both government and non-profit entities.

Topics and Objectives

Environment of Government/Non-Profit Accounting

  • Compare and contrast governmental and proprietary accounting.
  • Analyze the relationship between GASB and FASB.
  • Analyze the relationship between a budget and a Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR).
  • Determine when and how to use the modified accrual accounting method.

Fund Accounting Part I

  • Distinguish between expenses and expenditures.
  • Explain the effect of encumbrances on a budget.
  • Apply the principles of fund accounting.
  • Determine the closing process for the fund accounting cycle.
  • Explain the reconciliation of government-wide financial statements with the fund statements.

Fund Accounting Part II

  • Apply accounting procedures for recognizing revenues and other financial resources.
  • Record interfund transfers.
  • Prepare fund and non-governmental accounting entries.
  • Prepare a financial statement for a governmental agency.

Overview of Not-for-Profit Accounting

  • Examine the funds for different types of not-for-profit organizations.
  • Compare and contrast reporting by governmental, not-for-profit, and proprietary organizations.

Current Issues in Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting

  • Analyze current issues in government and not-for-profit accounting.

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on free online video courses and course materials from leading universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Example 7 --- Partnerships 
Lucrative partnerships between universities and corporations seeking to train and educate employees.

The highly successful Global Executive MBA Program at Duke University (formerly called GEMBA) where corporations from around the world pay nearly $100,000 for one or two employees to earn a prestigious online MBA degree --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html

UNext Corporation has an exclusive partnership with General Motors Corporation that provides online executive training and education programs to 88,000 GM managers.  GM pays the fees.  See http://www.unext.com/ 

Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 
This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.   The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 

Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation.  It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000 more students in 2002.  It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities.  The consulting arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system. 

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a program for online training and education for all IRS employees.  The IRS pays the fees for all employees.  The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 

Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an online MBA program for Deere employees.  Deere pays the fees.  See "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html 

The University of Georgia partnered with the consulting division of PwC to deliver a totally online MBA degree.  The program is only taken by PwC employees.  PwC paid the development and delivery fees.  See http://www.coe.uga.edu./coenews/2000/UGAusnews.htm 


New Markets for Colleges and Universities

Questions:
Will the most prestigious universities in the world commence to offer more onsite non-credit and certificate programs that (possibly) accompany their distance training, certificate, and preparatory programs?

What's new at the University of Rochester in terms of onsite revenue-generating programs?

Answer:
In previous editions of New Bookmarks, I have stressed that the most profitable distance education programs are those non-credit or certificate courses.  Degree programs often struggle for a number of reasons, not the least of which are as follows:

  • Difficulty obtaining a sufficient number of fully qualified applicants for a degree program, especially in costly private colleges and corporate programs.

  • Difficulty in attracting and keeping degree program students online due to the long-term time commitment for part-time students in a complete degree program.

  • Difficulty in maintaining academic standards (grading) online.

  • Difficulty of attracting instructors in online degree programs due to intensive online communications with students and the need for online students to communicate outside the working day, especially at night and on a Saturday or Sunday.  Students bent on getting “A” grades can hound instructors to death. 

  • Difficulty in getting online degree programs accredited.

Five specialists, especially Amy Dunbar, will address these issues on August 13 in San Antonio --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/cepSanAntonio.htm 

Many non-credit and certificate training distance education programs, including those in top universities, around the world are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Now it appears that in order to expand into more profitable markets, colleges and universities will be moving into onsite as well as online non-credit and certificate courses and programs.

Example:
News Flash (received July 24, 2002 by mail) from The William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester 
(one of the top graduate schools in the United States) --- http://www.simon.rochester.edu/main/default.asp 

Rochester, New York--July 17, 2002--In fall 2002, the University of Rochester's William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration will introduce a Certificate Program with five areas of concentration: Financial Analysis, Electronic Commerce Strategies, Health Sciences Management, Service Management and The Design of Effective Organizations.  The program will offer busy professionals who want to broaden their knowledge or retool their skills the opportunity to study at a world-class business school without committing to a full M.B.A. program.

According to the Simon School, participants will take courses from the existing M.B.A. curriculum, taught by the School's internationally renowned faculty, and learn alongside top business students from around the world.  The programs, which can be completed in as little as one year of part-time study, are targeted at professionals who want to enhance their current performance or gain cutting-edge knowledge to change or advance their careers.

"This certificate is going to give you knowledge that you can put to work right away," said Stacey R. Kole, Simon's associate dean for M.B.A. Programs and associate professor of economics and management.  "From a perspective of time and money, it's a relatively inexpensive way to get very high-quality training of a targeted nature."

If a Certificate Program participant decides to go on and earn an M.B.A. or M.S. degree at Simon, the credits are fully transferable.  "That's one of the big pluses of this program," said Kole.  "If you want to continue with an M.B.A. and your grades are good enough, you're a quarter of the way done."

Participants in Simon's Certificate Program must complete five or six designated M.B.A. courses, each of which are offered one night a week over a 10-week period.  The curriculum can be spread out over as long as three years.

The Certificate Program differs from the Simon School's Part-Time M.B.A. Program by allowing students to take fewer courses (five or six courses compared to 20 courses for part-time M.B.A. students), while focusing on a specific area of interest rather than pursuing a broader M.B.A. management degree.  Students who wish to continue their education upon completing the Certificate Program will have the option to matriculate into the part-time or full-time M.B.A. or M.S. program, provided they maintain a 3.0 cumulative average and meet other admissions criteria.

Certificate Programs --- http://www.simon.rochester.edu/prostudent/Program-Shell.htm 
All 5 Certificate Programs 
   Application Procedure
   E-Commerce Strategy
   Health Sciences Management
   Service Management
   Financial Analysis (Capital Markets and Investments)
   The Design of Effective Organizations (Organizational Design)


Some Parts of the Corporate Online Distance Learning Business Model Are Thriving
The LRN Center's business model is to provide legal and ethics training courses online to corporations, law firms, and other organizations who generally pay for employees to take courses in law and ethics.  For example, Dow Chemical contracted with LRN to train 50,000 employees.  LRN has similar contracts with many other corporations around the world.  I learned about the LRN Center from W. Michael Hoffman, the Director of the Bentley College Center for Ethics.  Dr. Hoffman writes course modules for LRN in the field of ethics.  After the recent corporate scandals, LRN's prospects for the future are very bright indeed.

LRN Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC)™ --- http://www.lrn.com/ 

LRN Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC)™ is the Web-based system that sets the standard for workplace ethics, legal and compliance education. With innovative technology, a powerful learning management system and a curriculum of more than 140 courses, LCEC offers your enterprise a complete workforce education solution.

Backed by a global network of 1,700 legal experts, LRN®, The Legal Knowledge Company™ offers an integrated legal knowledge management system that encompasses Expert Legal Research and Analysis, LRN KnowledgeBank®, proactive law services and much more. See how LRN is redefining the practice of law with innovation, efficiency and unparalleled expertise.

LRN® , The Legal Knowledge Company TM has been the country's leading purveyor of expert legal knowledge since 1994, with products that include sophisticated legal research and analysis for lawyers, databases of legal memoranda and other materials for corporate law departments and law firms, Web-based ethics and legal compliance education for corporate employees, ethics and compliance consulting, and proactive law services.

The LRN mission is to bring expertise and innovation to the creation, management and dissemination of knowledge that helps make a critical difference to businesses, lawyers and their clients. To accomplish this, LRN has built itself on a firm foundation of expertise. We feature a network of more than 1,700 of the world's finest legal minds, organized into more than 3,000 substantive areas of the law and expertly managed by our own team of highly experienced lawyers. Together, our research network and management team bring expertise to every step in the creation, capture and distribution of legal knowledge products. Our services include:

  • LRN KnowledgeEnvironment — an integrated platform for sharing and disseminating knowledge on an enterprise-wide basis. Fully customizable for our clients, this resource facilitates communications within the legal department and helps provide the entire enterprise with the legal and ethics knowledge it needs.
  • LRN Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC) — the first entirely Web-based platform designed to deliver customized legal education and training in workplace ethics and legal compliance to employees' desktops
  • LRN Ethics and Consulting Services — by combining LRN expertise with a network of ethics professionals, we help our customers develop, refine and maximize the value in their ethics and compliance programs.
  • LRN Expert Legal Research and Analysis — focused, fixed-price research and analysis performed by seasoned legal professionals
  • LRN Knowledge Platform — the solution for bringing the entire legal team, including outside counsel, together on one platform for sharing critical legal knowledge. Every team member can access research, contracts and every other document from any computer with Internet access.
  • LRN KnowledgeBank — the legal knowledge management system that combines LRN's expert legal research and analysis, the resources of in-house attorneys and the work product of outside counsel into a single, integrated and searchable database

Successful companies all over the world have grasped the power of LRN's expert-driven approach and used it to their advantage. Contact us to learn about how we can put our resources to work to meet your company's business challenges.

UNext also seems to be adopting the online business training model in a big way.  One of the first major contracts obtained by UNext was a contract to educate and train over 90,000 employees of General Motors Corporation.  You can read more about what is happening at UNext at http://www.unext.com/ 

Thomson Enterprise Learning Takes Cardean University to Large Businesses Worldwide

Exclusive Agreement with Thomson Brings Cardean University's Award-Winning Online Courses and M.B.A. to Large Businesses

American Marketing Association Partners with Cardean University

Special Offer Provides Professional Business Education Online to 38,000 Members

I had two speakers from UNext in my Atlanta workshop last year.  You can listen to their presentation and view their PowerPoint show at  http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

 

 

Expanded Alumni Relations
Many of the top colleges and universities are experimenting with various new programs for alumni.  For example, Stanford University's Graduate School of Business Alumni have the following new options:

 

 

Cost Savings Motivations 
Example 1 --- Stanford University --- http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/main.html 

It is possible to save enormous amounts of money using online versus onsite education delivery.  But to save enormous amounts of money, the circumstances probably must be highly unique in which students can succeed with very little communication and human interaction in every course.  

One such unique situation is the ADEPT online Masters of Engineering degree program at Stanford University.  The students are mature and are all graduates in engineering or science from top colleges in the world.  The students are generally highly motivated since a Stanford masters degree greatly improves their career opportunities, especially in economic downturns where competition for jobs becomes more intense.  Most importantly, the students are all extremely intelligent since Stanford can be highly selective regarding admittance into the ADEPT program.

The unique type of student described above allows ADEPT program to rely upon a video pedagogy where students to proceed at their own paces with very little demanded in the way of instructor supervision and communication.  It's the day-to-day instructional communication and supervision that comprise most of the cost of online training and education.  Online programs that minimize this cost will probably make money as long as sufficient numbers of students are willing to pay the fees for the online course materials and the prestige of the course transcripts.


Example 2 --- UNext Corporation --- http://www.unext.com/ 

UNext Corporation is not a low-cost training and education venture and is not yet a profitable venture.  However, UNext adopted a strategy that seeks to combine education prestige with lower cost delivery.  One of its headline programs entailed partnering with five prestigious universities (Stanford, Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, and the London School of Economics) to develop and continue to own and monitor 15 courses for an Executive MBA degree.  Each course's transcripts will carry the logo of the university that "owns" that course.  However, each course will be delivered by specially-trained instructors who hire out at much lower rates than faculty from prestigious schools that developed the courses.  In some cases the UNext instructors have doctoral degrees, but in many cases these instructors are highly trained specialists who do not have doctorates.  These instructors perform the labor intensive day-to-day communication and supervision duties.  The prestigious universities who "own" the courses, however, must monitor education standards in the courses since the names of those universities will appear on the course transcripts.

You can listen to UNext faculty and the course designer for Columbia University's accounting course at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm 


The Dark Side

All that glitters is not gold in terms of cost savings and profits from distance education.  Many of the startup ventures are having difficulty changing faculty attitudes and attracting paying students.  To me this is not surprising since faculty by nature are suspicious beings, and most potential customers of distance education are not yet adequately connected to the Web.  David Noble, however, sees the early failings of many ventures as ominous warnings that distance education is by nature inferior and over-hyped by profit mongers.

And now, in the year 2001, these latest academic entrepreneurs of distance education have begun to encounter the same sobering reality earlier confronted by UCLA and THEN, namely, that all that glitters is not gold. Columbia University's high-profile, for-profit venture Fathom is reported to be "having difficulty attracting both customers and outside investors" compelling the institution to put up an additional $10 million - on top of its original investment of $18.7 million - just to keep the thing afloat. According to Sarah Carr's report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia's administrators remain behind the venture whether or not it makes money.

Howevermuch it might enable administrators to restructure the institutions of higher education to their advantage vis a vis the professoriate, the investment in online education is no guarantee of increased revenues. "Reality is setting in among many distance education administrators", Carr reports. "They are realizing that putting programs online doesn't necessarily bring riches". Ironically, among those now preaching this new-found wisdom is none other than John Kobara, the UCLA vice chancellor who left the university to run Arkatov's company, which was founded upon the expectation of such riches. "The expectations were that online courses would be a new revenue source and something that colleges had to look into", Kobara remembered. "Today", he told Carr, "[chancellors and presidents] are going back and asking some important and tough questions, such as: 'Are we making any money off of it?' 'Can we even pay for it?' 'Have we estimated the full costs?'" Barely eight years after Lapiner and his UCLA colleagues first caught the fool's gold fever, Kobara mused aloud, "I don't think anybody has wild notions that it is going to be the most important revenue source".
David F. Noble, "Fools Gold" --- http://communication.ucsd.edu/DL/ddm5.html 

Distance Education Websites --- http://ejw.i8.com/distweb.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for distance education and training are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

 

 

Learning Curve and Left-in-the Dust Motivations
Example 1 --- Railroad Companies Versus Transportation Companies

In the middle of the 20th Century, just after World War II, the railroad industry was in pretty good shape.  Passenger trains were nearly always full going from coast-to-coast.  The freight business was highly lucrative.  

New opportunities arose (especially airplanes and freight trucks) into which railroad companies could have diversified.  But the railroads decided that they were in the business of hauling people and freight on steel rails rather than in newer 'transportation" alternatives.

And what happened?  Airlines, automobiles, and buses stole the entire passenger market from the railroads in the United States (except for urban commuter lines) and about the only long-haul passenger service had to be subsidized and run by the Federal Government.  Even the commuter lines lost huge market shares to automobiles.

Many colleges and universities are now facing the question of whether they are to remain only onsite (railroad) educational institutions or whether they will enter into distance education (transportation) missions.  Some colleges that have quality living accommodations and reputations as onsite campuses for full-time students will probably survive long into the future just like some railroad companies continue to hall freight and make money.  However, those colleges have minimal growth potential vis-a-vis colleges that expand into distance education.


Example 2 --- The Learning Curve Thing

Even colleges currently resisting all opportunities for expanding into distance education nevertheless find it utterly stupid not to embrace newer educational technologies.  Their new students are arriving on campus with technology skills that they want to expand upon while in college.  College graduates must have technology skills for admissions to graduate schools and employment careers.  

Faculty must have technology skills if they are to help their students improve in technology skills.  And faculty soon discover that technology skills do not come easily.  They increasingly are making demands upon their institutions to provide hardware, software, and technicians who can help in education technologies.

Colleges behind in the technology learning curve are now scrambling to catch up in terms of electronic classrooms, instructional support services, course delivery shells such as Blackboard and WebCT, laptop computers for students and faculty, wireless networking, etc.

Having progressed upward on the learning curve, taking on a mission of distance education becomes more of a possibility.  Faculty who increasingly rely upon chat rooms, discussion boards, virtual classrooms and other utilities in WebCT or Blackboard catch on to the fact that they could be doing the same things for distant students that they are doing for campus residents.  The opportunities for grant money and/or release time to develop a distance education course are no longer as frightening when faculty progress further and further along the technology learning curve.  Improved performances of technology-savvy students add more incentives.

 

 

Motivations to Show the World How To Do It Right
(Duke University Decides to Be in the Education Business Rather Than Merely the Classroom Business)
"THE HOTTEST CAMPUS ON THE INTERNET Duke's pricey online B-school program is winning raves from students and rivals," Business Week, October 27, 1997 --- http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549015.htm 

Update:  The Duke MBA --- Global Executive MBA Program (formerly called GEMBA) --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html 
As of Fall Semester 2001, there have been over 600 graduates from over 38 nations.  In terms of enthusiasm and alumni giving, this program is a real winner for Duke University.

The Duke MBA - Global Executive is every bit as academically demanding as Duke's other two MBA programs. Global Executive uses the same faculty base, the same rigorous grading standards, and provides the same Duke degree. However, the content has been adjusted to include more global issues and strategies to serve a participant population that has far more global management experience.

  • Like most other Executive MBA programs, the Global Executive program is a lock-step curriculum, meaning that all students take all courses. The courses are targeted at general managers who have or will soon assume global responsibilities. The program is designed for those who want to enhance their career path within their existing company. 
  • International Residencies: International residencies are an important ingredient in a global MBA program as they add to the value and richness of the classroom component by providing various lenses (social, economic, cultural, etc.) through which to view various economies and systems. Instead of simply studying about an economy, Fuqua provides an experiential component which adds value to the learning experience ... 
  • Global Student body: Unlike traditional Executive MBA programs which usually have a regional draw, the flexibility of Global Executive accommodates a student body from around the globe. Not only are the students diverse geographically, but they are also diverse in the types of global management experiences that they bring to the classroom.

For the class entering in May 2001, tuition is $95,000. Tuition includes all educational expenses, a state-of-the-art laptop computer, portable printer, academic books and other class materials, and lodging and meals during the five residential sessions. The tuition does not include travel to and from the residential sites.

You can learn a great deal about the extend of distance education in this program by looking at the academic calendar at http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/global_cal2001.htm 

Update:  Duke's Online Cross-Continent  MBA --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/cc/cc_home.html 
In Fall Semester 2001, there were 220 students tied into two distance education centers (in Durham, N.C. and in Frankfurt) for the Cross-Continent MBA program.

While in Germany in the Summer of 2001, I had dinner with Tom Keller, former Dean of Duke's Fuqua School of Business and Dean of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program.  Tom spent two years in the Frankfort headquarters of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program.  This program is quite different from the online Global Executive MBA Program, although both are asynchronous online programs and used some overlapping course materials.  

The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program allows high-potential managers to earn an internationally-focused MBA degree from Duke University in less than two years, utilizing a format that minimizes the disruption of careers and family life. It is designed for individuals with three to nine years professional work experience.

The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program will contain course work with a global emphasis in the subject areas of Management, Marketing, Operations, Economics, Finance, Accounting, Strategy and Decision Sciences.

Students will complete 11 core courses, four elective courses and one integrative capstone course to earn their MBA degree. Two courses will be completed during each of the eight terms of the program. Depending upon their choice of electives, students may choose to complete the one-week residency requirements for their sixth and seventh terms at either Fuqua School of Business location in North America or Europe.

The two classes - one on each continent - will be brought even closer together through a transfer requirement built into the program. During the third term, half of the class from Europe will attend the North American residential session and vice versa. In the fourth term, the other half of each class trades locations for one week of residential learning. After the transfer residencies, the students resume their coursework using the same Internet mediated learning methods as before, but with global virtual teams that have now met in a face-to-face setting

World-Class Resources 
When you're linked to Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, you're connected to a world of resources residing on a network with robust bandwidth capabilities. Duke MBA students have secure access to the Duke and Fuqua business library databases as well as a network of Duke faculty and outside experts.

World-Wide Content Delivery 
The virtual classroom can take on many different forms. Here, a faculty member prepares a macroeconomics lecture for distribution via CD ROM and/or the Internet. Students will download this lecture in a given week of study and follow up with discussion and team projects.

Bulletin Board Discussion 
Rich threads of conversation occur during this asynchronous mode of communication. Professors and guest lecturers can moderate the discussion to keep learning focused.

Real-Time Chat Session 
Occurs between students and classmates as well as faculty. Here, a student in Europe discusses an assignment with a professor in the United States
.

 

Because It is the Thing to Do for the Betterment of All People on Earth
Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) of MIT and Other Leading Universities

 


The Magnificence of Mentoring


The Magnificence of Global Outreach

From Syllabus, May 2002, pp. 41-42 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6341 

Linking to Mexico: Connectivity Without Borders

Like  other members of the Internet2 initiative, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) wanted to enhance its research and educational power by joining the consortium of U.S. universities linked to the ultra-high-speed network. But as a major university just miles from the Mexican border, it also wanted to play a role in linking Internet2 to a similar effort in Mexico and, from there, to Central America.
      UTEP is one of only 30 Internet2 gigaPOP sites, which allows it to serve as an Internet2 host for other institutions. To encourage scholarly and cultural exchanges with Mexico, as well as to provide access to the latest technology in both countries, UTEP built a high-speed, point-to-point wireless network. The network spans about five miles from El Paso to Mexico’s Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez (UACJ). UACJ is a member of a Mexican initiative to develop a high-speed network compatible with Internet2.

Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6341 


Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged

"Seeing-Eye Computer Guides for the Blind," by Louise Knapp, Wired News, March 30, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,62810,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

"Computer algorithms process the images and extract information from them to give the user information about what they are looking at," said Nikolaos Bourbakis, professor at Wright State University's College of Engineering and Computer Science in Dayton, Ohio.

Users can program iCare to feed them information continuously or only when prompted by a question, such as "What is directly in front of me?" or "Who just walked into the room?"

So far, iCare's greatest talent is its ability to translate type into spoken words. The iCare-Reader translates text into a synthesized voice using optical character recognition software and other software that compensates for different lighting conditions and orientations.

David Paul, one of two blind computer science students at Arizona State University, or ASU, who tested the system, said speed is one of the system's greatest assets. "It's as fast as a sighted person could read a book -- this is one of the phenomenal things about it."

The iCare-Reader not only enables blind people to choose any book from the library shelf, but also allows them to check out a restaurant menu, the size marked on a shirt tag or the label on a soup can.

The reader doesn't translate handwritten text well yet, but the team is still working on it.

ICare also lets the blind or visually impaired persons navigate websites previously only accessible with a mouse.

Screen-reader software, such as Jaws, can translate information on a computer screen to spoken word. But this is only useful if users are able to get to the pages they are interested in.

"The way a blind person navigates around the screen is with the keyboard, but there are some sites that don't work so well with keyboard alone and have some mouse-driven applications," said Terri Hedgpeth, disability research specialist at ASU. "But a blind person can't tell where the mouse cursor is, so (he or she) can't access these sites."

To overcome this problem, the ASU team developed another facet of the system, called the iCare-Assistant, that works with Blackboard, software designed to manage university course material.

"We have developed a software interface that bridges the screen-reader software and Blackboard through keyboard shortcuts that get you into these areas," Hedgpeth said.

 


Learning-challenged students in Ohio are using wearable computers that are helping the kids be more independent and confident.

"A Wearable Aid for Special Kids," by Katie Dean, Wired News, May 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52148,00.html 

Jeremy Rossiter was not able to speak when he first entered Lisa Zverloff's class for the multiple-handicapped. The third-grader, who is autistic, communicated by hitting and biting. But with the help of a wearable computer, Jeremy learned to mimic, then utter, words and small phrases.

His success story propelled Xybernaut, the manufacturer of the wearable computer, into a new market.

Xybernaut is more known for supplying computers to telecommunications companies and the military. The devices are used for maintenance purposes in locations where carrying a laptop is not possible, such as manholes and the tops of telephone poles.

Credit Zverloff, a teacher at Erwine Middle School in Akron, Ohio, with bringing wearables into the classroom. Her experience led to the product launch of the XyberKids wearable computers in March.

Zverloff says the durable, touch-screen portable computers have made her students more independent and confident. Some kids use it all day; others use it for specific activities. Several students are able to fully participate in mainstream classrooms while using the devices.

It all started with a cold call to Xybernaut.

Zverloff's fiance, Eric Van Raepenbusch, a special education teacher at Turkeyfoot Elementary, owned stock in the company and suggested she call them.

On the phone, she convinced a nearby sales representative to meet with her and Jeremy -- even though the company's initial response was along the lines of, "But ma'am, we don't use (the computers) for people with disabilities," Zverloff said.

Jeremy eventually tried the device and "he wouldn't put it down," Zverloff said. "That's the only proof I need. He didn't bite me, scratch me, pinch me –- this is a positive thing."

The device cost $9,000, but the company agreed to loan the device to Zverloff, a first-year teacher at the time, to see how Jeremy progressed.

She replaced the belt –- made for an adult -- with a bookbag so Jeremy would be able to carry the 6-pound, 8.4-inch touch screen, hard drive and battery. The device runs on the Windows operating system.

When Jeremy touched different pictures on the screen, a computer-generated voice dictated what the item was. He responded better to the digitized voice because the output is the same volume and tone every time, she said.

"After repeated mimicking of the computer, he then started mimicking the teacher, then he started putting utterances together," Zverloff said. "A three-word utterance is an amazing thing for someone who's only been speaking for two months."

Zverloff also discovered that Jeremy was learning to spell and read.

When she showed him pictures of different animals, he started typing the words and used the voice output. He regularly took the wearable to lunch and on field trips to help him communicate outside the classroom.

"At the end of the year, he was reading words and sentences on a first-grade level," she said.

Researchers are developing similar devices at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).

Continued at  http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52148,00.html 


Susan Spencer is designing online economics courses for San Antonio College (SAC). All online courses at SAC must be accessible by hearing and sight impaired students. Susan will discuss her innovative ideas in designing economics courses that can be delivered online to blind students.

Susan is an associate professor of Economics at San Antonio College. She has an MA from Washington University, a BA in Economics from the University of Missouri at Columbia and has worked at the Federal Reserve Board and Bureau of Labor and Statistics in Washington, DC. In San Antonio, she has taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and owned and managed Flexware Systems, Inc. a computer software/consulting company.

Susan Spencer's Presentation File Download: 

Susan's presentation file is not yet available.  It will be here soon.

Susan Spencer's MP3 Audio File Download

You may download Susan's MP3 file from the list of fMP3 files at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/

All MP3 LINKS ARE CASE SENSITIVE!

 

 

 

 

The Dark Side Versus the Bright Side
 

The Dark Side

In spite of the successes noted above, most attempts to offer online training and education programs by corporations, private universities, and state-supported colleges and universities have either failed or struggle on with negative net cash flows from the online operations.

Aside from the success story at the University of Phoenix, it appears that reputation and prestige of a university are necessary but not sufficient conditions for high success in online programs.  Online programs at Carnegie-Mellon University, Columbia University, Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, and other top-name schools have attracted students who want those logos on their transcripts.  The is the main reason why many corporations partner with those particular schools for training and education courses.  This "prestige criterion" makes it very difficult for startup education companies or colleges with less prestigious names to expand markets with Internet courses.

Many new online programs have failed to attract sufficient numbers of tuition-paying students to break even on the cost of developing and delivering those programs.  

  • Some like the online teacher education program at McGill University have ceased operations.   California Virtual University never got off the ground.   National Technologica University fell on hard times with poor timing and sold out to Sylvan Learning Systems.

  • Some programs struggle on with miniscule classes while supporting operations with outside funding or funding diverted from onsite training and education programs.

  • Monterrey Tech (which is to Mexico what MIT is to the US), has a multimillion dollar distance education program.  The main campus has a 12-story glass tower (a beautiful building indeed) equipped with production and delivery equipment that constitutes one of two main transmitting facilities of the Monterrey Tech Virtual University ---  the University that delivers courses daily to 29 campuses, 1,272 sites in Mexico, and 159 sites in 10 Latin and South American Countries.  Although this is one of the most successful distance education programs in the world, the number one problem still remains in finding more qualified students who are both willing and able to pay the fees.  See  http://www.ruv.itesm.mx/ 

Even in established universities that offer fully-accredited degree programs, expanding the market through online programs has been a hard struggle.  The University of Washington found that even free-course promotions did not attract large numbers of students.  http://www.outreach.washington.edu/about/releases/20010521freecourse.asp 

The Fathom program largely run by Columbia University finds that many of its free courses have sparse enrollments.  See http://www.fathom.com/ 


Links to ventures that became financial disasters are given in the following document:

The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education --- Detail File


The Bright Side 

The bottom line seems to be that for many universities seeking to expand markets with online programs, the best solution to date entails partnering with corporations or government agencies who both pay the fees and promote the programs among their employees.

For urban areas such as Mexico City locked in traffic jams, online education appears to have glowing prospects.

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, it will probably be more difficult for some foreign students to become students on campuses of developed nations such as the U.S. and the U.K.  Online education has bright prospects of reaching those students.

Open share initiatives such as the new open share program in which MIT will make learning materials from virtually all of its courses available for free online, will greatly expand learning opportunities for nearly all people in the world.

 

 

Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States
DOES DISTANCE LEARNING WORK?
A LARGE SAMPLE, CONTROL GROUP STUDY OF STUDENT SUCCESS IN DISTANCE LEARNING
by James Koch --- http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/vol8_no1/fullpapers/distancelearning.htm

The relevant public policy question is this---Does distance learning "work" in the sense that students experience as least as much success when they utilize distance learning modes as compared to when they pursue conventional bricks and mortar education? The answer to this question is a critical in determining whether burgeoning distance learning programs are cost-effective investments, either for students, or for governments.

Of course, it is difficult to measure the "learning" in distance learning, not the least because distance learning courses now span nearly every academic discipline. Hence, most large sample evaluative studies utilize students’ grades as an imperfect proxy for learning. That approach is followed in the study reported here, as well.

A recent review of research in distance education reported that 1,419 articles and abstracts appeared in major distance education journals and as dissertations during the 1990-1999 period (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001). More than one hundred of these studies focused upon various measures of student success (such as grades, subsequent academic success, and persistence) in distance learning courses. Several asked the specific question addressed in this paper: Why do some students do better than others, at least as measured by the grade they receive in their distance learning course? A profusion of contradictory answers has emanated from these studies (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001; Machtmes and Asher, 2000). It is not yet clear how important to individual student success are factors such as the student’s characteristics (age, ethnic background, gender, academic background, etc.). However, other than knowing that experienced faculty are more effective than less experienced faculty (Machtmes and Asher, 2000), we know even less about how important the characteristics of distance learning faculty are to student success, particularly where televised, interactive distance learning is concerned.

Perhaps the only truly strong conclusion emerging from previous empirical studies of distance learning is the oft cited "no significant difference" finding (Saba, 2000). Indeed, an entire web site, http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference, exists that reports 355 such "no significant difference" studies. Yet, without quarreling with such studies, they do not tell us why some students achieve better grades than others when they utilize distance learning.

Several studies have suggested that student learning styles and receptivity to distance learning influence student success (see Taplin and Jegede, 2001, for a short survey). Unfortunately, as Maushak et. al. (2001) point out, these intuitively sensible findings are not yet highly useful, because they are not based upon large sample, control group evidence that relates recognizable student learning styles to student performance. Studies that rely upon "conversation and discourse analysis" (Chen and Willits, 1999, provide a representative example) and interviews with students are helpful, yet are sufficiently anecdotal that they are unlikely to lead us to scientifically based conclusions about what works and what does not.

This paper moves us several steps forward in terms of our knowledge by means of a very large distance education sample (76,866 individual student observations) and an invaluable control group of students who took the identical course at the same time from the same instructor, but did so "in person" in a conventional "bricks and mortar" location. The results indicate that gender, age, ethnic background, distance learning experience, experience with the institution providing the instruction, and measures of academic aptitude and previous academic success are statistically significant determinants of student success. Similarly, faculty characteristics such as gender, age, ethnic background, and educational background are statistically significant predictors of student success, though not necessarily in the manner one might hypothesize.

Continued in this working paper

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


"Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004," The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/survey.asp 

Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004 represents the second annual study of the state of online education in U.S. Higher Education. This year’s study, like last year’s, is aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based on responses from over 1,100 colleges and universities, this year’s study addresses the following key questions:

-- Will online enrollments continue their rapid growth?

Background: 
Last year’s study, Sizing the Opportunity: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2002 and 2003 found that over 1.6 million students were studying online in the fall of 2002, and that schools expected that number to grow substantially by the fall of 2003. The nearly 20% growth rate expected in online enrollments far exceeds the overall rate of growth for the entire higher education student population. Would this very optimistic projection be realized, or would schools begin to see a plateau in their online enrollments?

The evidence
The online enrollment projections have been realized, and there is no evidence that enrollments have reached a plateau. Online enrollments continue to grow at rates faster than for the overall student body, and schools expect the rate of growth to further increase:

Over 1.9 million students were studying online in the fall of 2003. Schools expect the number of online students to grow to over 2.6 million by the fall of 2004. Schools expect online enrollment growth to accelerate — the expected average growth rate for online students for 2004 is 24.8%, up from 19.8% in 2003. Overall, schools were pretty accurate in predicting enrollment growth — last year’s predicted online enrollment for 2003 was 1,920,734; this year’s number from the survey is 1,971,397.

-- Are students as satisfied with online courses as they are with face-to-face instruction?

Background: 
Schools face the “if you build it will they come?” question: If they offer online courses and students are not satisfied with them, they will not enroll. Do academic leaders, those responsible for the institutions meeting their enrollment goals, believe that students are as satisfied with their online offerings as with their face-to-face instruction?

The evidence: 
Schools that offer online courses believe that their online students are at least as satisfied as those taking their face-to-face offerings:

40.7% of schools offering online courses agree that “students are at least as satisfied” with their online courses, 56.2% are neutral and only 3.1% disagree. Medium and large schools strongly agree (with less than 3% disagreeing). The smallest schools (under 1,500 enrollments) are the least positive, but even they have only 5.4% disagreeing compared to 32.9% agreeing. Doctoral/Research, Masters, and Associates schools are very positive, Specialized and Baccalaureate schools only slightly less so.

-- What role do schools see online learning playing in their long-term strategy?

Background: 
In order for online learning to enter the mainstream of American higher education, schools must believe in its importance and be willing to embrace it as part of their long-term institutional strategies. Will online learning be seen as a niche among higher education, or will schools see it as an important component of their future evolution?

The evidence: 
Schools believe that online learning is critical to their long term strategy. We asked if “Online education is critical to the long-term strategy” of the school. Every group with the exception of Baccalaureate schools agrees with this statement. Public and large schools were extremely strong in their opinions (only 3% disagreeing):

The majority of all schools (53.6%) agree that online education is critical to their long-term strategy. Among public and private for-profit institutions almost two-thirds (over 65% in both cases) agree. The larger the institution, the more likely it believes that online education is critical. Doctoral/Research, Masters, and Associates schools are very positive, Specialized schools slightly less positive, and Baccalaureate schools slightly negative.

-- What about the quality of online offerings: do schools continue to believe that it measures up?

Background: 
One of the earliest perceptions about online learning was that it was of lower quality than face-to-face instruction. The evidence from last year’s study showed academic leaders did not agree with this assessment. When asked to compare learning outcomes in online courses with those for face-to-face instruction, academic leaders put the two on very close terms, and expected the online offerings to continue to get better relative to the face-to-face option. Given the continued growth in the number of students online and the pressure that this growth brings in maintaining quality, do academic leaders still believe in the quality of online offerings?

The evidence: 
Schools continue to believe that online learning is just as good as being there:

A majority of academic leaders believe that online learning quality is already equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction. Three quarters of academic leaders at public colleges and universities believe that online learning quality is equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction. The larger the school, the more positive the view of the relative quality of online learning compared to face-to-face instruction. Three quarters of all academic leaders believe that online learning quality will be equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction in three years.

Distance Education Websites --- http://ejw.i8.com/distweb.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for distance education and training are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

 

 

 

Models

April 4, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

BEYOND E-LEARNING

"Just when we thought we had e-learning all figured out, it's changing again. After years of experimentation and the irrational exuberance that characterized the late 1990s, we find our views of e-learning more sober and realistic." In "What Lies Beyond E-Learning?" (LEARNING CIRCUITS, March 2006), Marc J. Rosenberg suggests that over the next few years we will see six transformations in the field of e-learning:

1. E-learning will become more than "e-training."

2. E-learning will move to the workplace.

3. Blended learning will be redefined.

4. E-learning will be less course-centric and more knowledge-centric.

5. E-learning will adapt differently to different levels of mastery.

6. Technology will become a secondary issue.

This article, online at

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2006/March/rosenberg.htm, is based on Rosenberg's book, BEYOND E-LEARNING: APPROACHES AND TECHNOLOGIES TO ENHANCE ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE. (Pfeiffer, 2005; ISBN: 0787977578). For more information about the book and a sample chapter, go to http://www.pfeiffer.com/WileyCDA/PfeifferTitle/productCd-0787977578.html.


From U.K.'s Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol
Social Science Information Gateway
http://sosig.esrc.bris.ac.uk/

Browse by Subject Map of the SOSIG sections
 
Anthropology

Business and Management

Economics

Education

Environmental Science

European Studies

Geography

Government Policy
 
Law

Philosophy

Politics

Psychology

Research Tools and Methods

Social Welfare

Sociology

Statistics

Women's Studies
 

March 3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

WHAT LEADS TO ACHIEVING SUCCESS IN DISTANCE EDUCATION?

"Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education," released February 1, 2005, reports on the study of distance education conducted by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). A-HEC surveyed 21 colleges and universities to "uncover best practices in achieving success with the use of the Internet in higher education." Some of the questions asked by the study included:

"Why do institutions move online? Are there particular conditions under which e-Learning will be successful?"

"What is the role of leadership and by whom? What level of investment or commitment is necessary for success?"

"How do institutions evaluate and measure success?"

"What are the most important and successful factors for student support and faculty support?"

"Where do institutions get stuck? What are the key challenges?"

The complete report is available online, at no cost, at http://www.a-hec.org/e-learning_study.html.

The "core focus" of the nonprofit Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) "is on communicating how higher education leaders are creating positive change by crystallizing their mission, offering more effective academic programs, defining their role in society, and putting in place balanced accountability measures." For more information, go to http://www.a-hec.org/ . Individual membership in A-HEC is free.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 


April 1, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM AND OPEN BOOK EXAMS

In "PCs in the Classroom & Open Book Exams" (UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 9, March 15-22, 2005), Evan Golub asks and supplies some answers to questions regarding open-book/open-note exams. When classroom computer use is allowed and encouraged, how can instructors secure the open-book exam environment? How can cheating be minimized when students are allowed Internet access during open-book exams? Golub's suggested solutions are available online at
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html

Ubiquity is a free, Web-based publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology, practices, and paradigms of the IT profession." For more information, contact: Ubiquity, email: ubiquity@acm.org ; Web: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/ 

For more information on the ACM, contact: ACM, One Astor Plaza, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036, USA; tel: 800-342-6626 or 212-626-0500; Web: http://www.acm.org/


NEW EDUCAUSE E-BOOK ON THE NET GENERATION

EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION, a new EDUCAUSE e-book of essays edited by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, "explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum." Essays include: "Technology and Learning Expectations of the Net Generation;" "Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not Just the Cool New Thing;" "Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations;" "Faculty Development for the Net Generation;" and "Net Generation Students and Libraries." The entire book is available online at no cost at http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/ .

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. For more information, contact: Educause, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax: 303-440-0461; email: info@educause.edu;  Web: http://www.educause.edu/

See also:

GROWING UP DIGITAL: THE RISE OF THE NET GENERATION by Don Tapscott McGraw-Hill, 1999; ISBN: 0-07-063361-4 http://www.growingupdigital.com/


EFFECTIVE E-LEARNING DESIGN

"The unpredictability of the student context and the mediated relationship with the student require careful attention by the educational designer to details which might otherwise be managed by the teacher at the time of instruction." In "Elements of Effective e-Learning Design" (INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING, March 2005) Andrew R. Brown and Bradley D. Voltz cover six elements of effective design that can help create effective e-learning delivery. Drawing upon examples from The Le@rning Federation, an initiative of state and federal governments of Australia and New Zealand, they discuss lesson planning, instructional design, creative writing, and software specification. The paper is available online at http://www.irrodl.org/content/v6.1/brown_voltz.html 

International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672; email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ; Web: http://www.irrodl.org/

The Le@rning Federation (TLF) is an "initiative designed to create online curriculum materials and the necessary infrastructure to ensure that teachers and students in Australia and New Zealand can use these materials to widen and enhance their learning experiences in the classroom." For more information, see http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/


RECOMMENDED READING

"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.ed u for possible inclusion in this column.

Author Clark Aldrich recommends his new book:

LEARNING BY DOING: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SIMULATIONS, COMPUTER GAMES, AND PEDAGOGY IN E-LEARNING AND OTHER EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES Wiley, April 2005 ISBN: 0-7879-7735-7 hardcover $60.00 (US)

Description from Wiley website:

"Designed for learning professionals and drawing on both game creators and instructional designers, Learning by Doing explains how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of educational simulation for the right situation. It covers simple approaches that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer games and flight simulators. The book role models content as well, written accessibly with humor, precision, interactivity, and lots of pictures. Many will also find it a useful tool to improve communication between themselves and their customers, employees, sponsors, and colleagues."

The table of contents and some excerpts are available at http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787977357.html

Aldrich is also author of SIMULATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF LEARNING: AN INNOVATIVE (AND PERHAPS REVOLUTIONARY) APPROACH TO E-LEARNING. See http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787969621.html  for more information or to request an evaluation copy of this title.

Bob Jensen's documents on education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Ideas for Teaching Online (including Distance Education via Centra Symposium and Webex) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Question
What is Hybrid Distance Learning

Answer:
"Putting a Faculty on Distance Education Programs, by William H. Riffee, Syllabus, February 2003, Page 13

 

At a Glance: Hybrid Distance Learning
  • Hybrid Distance Learning: A distance learning program using both electronic delivery and local facilitators or mentors to coach, counsel, and support students

  • Ideal Student/Facilitator Ratio: Approximately 12:1

  • Facilitator Traits: Teaching skills, clinical experience, time availability, compatible philosophy

  • Facilitator Training: Training at host university, shadowing current faculty member, telephone conferences, annual training updates

  • Compensation: Level based on current salary for such a professional in the region where they are located

  • Quote: "Traditionally, distance education has been developed as stand-alone Web-based programs with little interaction between faculty and students other than through electronic means. The University of Florida has found that the addition of the facilitator/mentor faculty has brought a new dimension to distance-based programs, one that has improved overall quality. The additional academic experiences available to our distance education students have put a now-familiar face on our distance education programs."—Bill Riffee

"The B-School at Company X," by: Sharon Shinn, BizEd from the AACSB, May/June 2004, pp. 32-37 (not free online)

Corporate universities are focused, committed to employee education, and here to stay.  Traditional business schools must learn how to work with them in creative and productive partnerships.

About ten years ago, when corporate universities were exploding onto the scene, sentiment was deeply divided between fear that such institutions would rob business schools of all their students and conviction that corporate universities would be a brief and passing phase.  It turns out that neither expectation was true.  Today's corporate university is an entrenched part of the business landscape, working hard to satisfy both its students and the CEOs of its parent organizations by providing targeted education that can demonstrably improve performance in the workplace.  Today's corporate university also draws heavily on the expertise of traditional four-year universities--and some people believe that broader and stronger partnerships between schools and businesses will shape the future of company-based education.

While the phrase "corporate university" has been used to mean everything from a revamped training department to a degree-granting branch of a major corporation, it's possible to come up with a more exact description.  One good definition comes courtesy of Mark Allen, director of executive education at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University, Culver City, California, and co-author of The Corporate University Handbook.  He believes a corporate  university must be a strategic tool that helps the parent organization achieve its mission through educational activities.  What's key, he stresses, is that whatever training or learning is involved be tied directly to the strategic mission of the company.

In other words, nobody goes to Corporate U just to kill a few hours.  Such a school offers learning with a purpose--improving a specific employee's performance in a specific area of the job in a way that's measurable.

THE CORPORATE GOALS

Corporate universities exist to fulfill four main goals: to teach topics like leadership and communication to executives; to standardize skills and knowledge for certain jobs within the company; to help the company as a whole develop a unified culture; and to develop strong networks among employees.

Developing "soft skills" is something corporate universities do very well, says Mike Morrison, dean of associate education and development at University of Toyota in Torrance, California.  "Part of it is, we have to," he says.  "Once people are in the work environment, they see that the work world is very relational.  Problem-solving skills, creativity and innovation are in much higher demand, and the ability to self-design work is critical."

Also critical is the ability to provide mission-specific education with instant relevance.  Tom Doyle, director of Menlo Worldwide's Menlo University in Dayton, Ohio, says, "Each of our courses is aligned with the strategic products, services, or value propositions that we take to the marketplace.  There are no electives.  You don't have to have a physical education unit to get through."

Just as important to many corporations is that their universities help them create a single image of the company or a standardized protocol.  Sometimes, as with Menlo University, the school is a consolidation of a disparate collection of training programs that used to be centered in different departments or physical locations.

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen's threads on education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

 


"Principles for Building Success in Online Education, by Jacqueline Moloney and Steven Tello, Syllabus, February 2003, pp. 15-17 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7252 

As higher education adminstrators, we faced numerous challenges beginning in 1996 when we launched our online efforts at UMass-Lowell. Which courses or programs to migrate, what faculty to involve, and which platform to use are just a few of the many complex decisions that institutions must confront in building online programs. To help others, we've created a rubric that covers five strategic areas of decision making:

A set of four operating principles that evolved with the success of our program exist as important guides:

Principles in Action
Consistent with the principles above, UMass-Lowell's online education program started very small, with a handful of pioneering faculty. Like many public universities, we were trying to identify new markets that could bring needed revenues to the campus and expand access to our programs. Therefore, the online program was initiated through the Division of Continuing, Corporate and Distance Education (CCDE) to address those campus needs. As a self-supporting organization, CCDE was to identify strategies that would generate sufficient revenues to cover program development and delivery costs. Working through decisions by employing the principles previously outlined, we were able to overcome the obstacles that often inhibit the growth of online education.

The online program at UMass-Lowell now offers six full degree programs and enrolls approximately 6,000 per year. It is one of the largest online programs in New England and is a major contributor to UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts system-wide effort to provide online education. The program at Lowell is entirely self-supporting and returns significant revenues to the campus that seed continuous growth. Below, we examine some of our formative decisions in the five strategic areas, and consider the operating principles that guided our choices.

Selection of Courses and Programs
Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7252  

 


October 8, 2003 message from Laurie Padgett [padgett8@BELLSOUTH.NET]

Lauretta,

Yes it was live chat (synchronous) using voice (which also had a text chat box). In s particular class we would meet every other week in the evening around 7/8. I think they lasted 1 hr to 1 1/2 hr (I can not recall exactly). I took two classes a semester so I would attend two live chats for every two weeks. The instructors would coordinate to ensure they would not plan the class for the same evening. In addition to the live chat, we also used another program that I just can not remember the name of it (I think it might have been called Placeware). It was really neat because it looked like an auditorium and you were a little character (or may I say a colored dot). You could raise your hand, ask a question, type text, etc. We would use the chat program where he would talk as he conducted the presentation in the other program. If you had a question you would raise your hand & then use the live chat to talk. The program was starting to get more advanced as I graduated.

The Master's of Accounting program that I went through (as I understand it from the professor I had) was one of the first to go online for this particular program. I was in the first graduating class which started April of 2000 and completed September 2001. I attended Nova Southeastern University in Florida. ( http://emacc.huizenga.nova.edu/ )

I know that some feel that live chat (synchronous) might not work due to time zones and some feel that the text works just as well. From my personal experience and opinion I feel that a Master's program in "Accounting" needs more than just text written but interaction between your fellow classmates too. I feel it was more productive because it is like you are sitting in a class listening to the instructor and you have the opportunity to ask a question by typing in the box & then the instructor sees it & answers it with his voice. Additionally, you cover much more subject area than you can with a text chat. It really worked well.

Again, these are my opinions and each person has his own. This is what makes us unique.

Laurie

-----Original Message-----
Subject: Re: peer evaluation of a web-based course

Laurie:

When you say "live" chat, are you referring to the chats in which all students come together at the same time (synchronous)? I tried to initiate this type of chat in my online class and found students's schedules to be an issue.

Has anyone tried putting students into groups to do synchronous chatting about assignments? How did this work for your class?

Lauretta A. Cooper, MBA, CPA
Delaware Technical & Community College Terry Campus


In September 2003, Bonnie B. Mullinix and David McCurry provide a helpful road map for online education—-in the form of an annotated "webliography" of resource centers, professional organizations, and other sites that promote the discussion and development of technology-enhanced teaching and learning environments --- http://64.124.14.173/default.asp?show=article&id=1002 

Bonk, C. J. (2003). CourseShare.com: Welcome. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://www.courseshare.com/Welcome.php 

Bonk, C. J., Cummings, J. A., Hara, N., Fischler, R. B., & Lee, S. M. (2000). A ten level web integration continuum for higher education: New resources, activities, partners, courses, and markets. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://php.indiana.edu/~cjbonk/paper/edmdia99.html 

Carlén, U. (2002, November). Typology of online learning communities. Paper presented at the NetLearning2002 conference, Ronneby, Sweden. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://www.learnloop.org/olc/typologyOLC.pdf 

Carroll, T. G. (2000). If we didn't have the schools we have today, would we create the schools we have today? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 1(1). Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss1/currentissues/general/article1.htm 

Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S. C. (1996, October). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 3-6. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/seven.html 

Lago, M. E. (2000, November). The hybrid experience: How sweet it is! Converge. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://www.convergemag.com/Publications/CNVGNov00/hybrid/index.shtm 

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Stammen, R. M. (2001, January). Basic understandings for developing learning media for the classroom and beyond. Learning Technology, 3(1). Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/january2001/#18 

Testa, A. M. (2000). Seven principles for good practice in teaching and technology. In R. Cole (Ed.), Issues in web-based pedagogy: A critical primer (pp. 237-245). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Vest, C. M. (2003). MIT OpenCourseWare: A message from the president. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/presidentspage.htm 

"The Changing Landscape of Distance Education: What micro-market segment is right for you?" by Judith Boettcher, Syllabus, July 2002, pp.22-27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6474 

What Micro-Market Segment is Right for Your Institution?

What is the state of distance learning and online learning in higher education today? It is in a state of evolution and development. The best strategy for traditional non-profit institutions may be to develop a “micro-market segment” in distance learning that is right for your institution. A possible strategy follows:

Education, and particularly e-learning, is a huge growth market for the foreseeable future. Depending on where you want to be, you and your institution will be a part of it. Online and distance learning may not be a silver bullet, but it might be one way for your institution to be reach out and provide valuable learning experiences, enriching your on-campus students as well as serving more remote and part-time students. “Focus and Extend”—focus on your expertise and extend out to similar students who can now reach you via the Internet.

 

Distance Education Websites --- http://ejw.i8.com/distweb.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for distance education and training are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Types of Institutions, Degrees, and Applications of Distance and Online Learning
Types of Institutions Degrees, Programs, Certificates, Modules Distance and eLearning Applications Target Market: Ages Target Market: Work Commitments
Traditional Research and Four-Year Comprehensive
  Traditional undergraduate, Master’s, Doctoral degrees Primarily campus-based w/online components, Web-enhanced courses 18-45 Working part-time
  Professional academic degrees, i.e, Medicine, Law, Engineering, Business, etc. Primarily campus-based w/online components, Web-enhanced courses 25-55 Working part-time
Community College
  Associate degrees
Primarily campus-based 18-45 Working part- or full-time
  Specialty trade education
Primarily campus-based 24-50 Working part- or full-time
  Ad-hoc skills training Primarily campus-based 16-70+ Working part- or full-time
Partnerships of Academe and Education Companies, (plus Continuing Ed divisions of traditional campus providers)
  Completion degrees, Bachelors, Master’s, etc. Primarily online w/some face-to-face meetings 24-60 Working full-time
  Specialty career degrees
Primarily online w/some face-to-face meetings 24-60 Working full-time
  Career updating, refreshing of professional degrees, continuing education modules Primarily online w/some face-to-face meetings 24-60 Working full-time
  Product and service training Either online or face-to-face or mix 24-60 Working full-time
For-Profit Education Companies
  Completion degrees, Bachelors, Master’s, etc. Primarily online w/some face-to-face meetings 24-60 Working full-time
  Specialty career degrees
Primarily online w/some face-to-face meetings 24-60 Working full-time
  Career updating, refreshing of professional degrees, continuing education modules Either online or face-to-face or mix 24-60 Working full-time

The introductory block of this article is at  http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6474


Models for Distributed/Distance Education
  Training Credential/Certification Degree Credits Undergraduate Degree Graduate Degree
Established College or University

U.S and International Distance Education Course Finders

Virtually all major college extension programs:

Examples:
U.S. Army
IRS
Open University
U. of Wisconsin
Michigan Virtual UCLA Online
U. of Texas

Iowa State University

American School and Univ. --- CLU

Microsoft Certifications at many colleges

Examples:
Nearly all colleges that have training programs, especially computer training programs and teacher certificate programs  --- Clearninghouse

Over half of all colleges offer courses for credit

Examples:
Open University
Harvard Univ..
Oxford Univ. 
Stanford Online
Penn State
UCLA Online
U. of Texas
Open University
U. of Wisconsin
Michigan Virtual UCLA Online
U. of Texas

Over a third of all colleges offer selected undergraduate degrees

Examples:
U.S. Army
IRS
Open University

Oxford University
UCLA Online

U. of Texas
Open University
U. of Wisconsin
Michigan Virtual UCLA Online
U. of Texas

Use great care in selecting online graduate degrees.  Many are frauds.  Some are legitimate, especially is selected areas of study such as masters and doctorates in education, information technology, and business

Examples:
Stanford's ADEPT
Duke's Global MBA
Open University

  Training Credential/Certification Degree Credits Undergraduate  Degree Graduate Degree
Corporate-Brokered College Delivery

U.S and International Distance Education Course Finders

National Technlogical University'

California's CVU

WGU

Christian University Global Net

Hungry Minds University

California's CVU
WGU
Hungry Minds University
California's CVU
WGU
Hungry Minds University
California's CVU
WGU
Hungry Minds University
National Technlogical University'

California's CVU

WGU

Hungry Minds Uniiversityv

 

College Content
Corp. Delivery
Most colleges using the following: 
eCollege
Campus Pipeline
DeVry Inc.
Sylvan Learning Systems

Examples:
UC Berkeley/AOL
Harvard/Pensare
Duke/Pensare

UNext/Stanford et al.

Most colleges using the following: 
eCollege
Campus Pipeline
DeVry Inc.
Sylvan Learning Systems
Blackboard

WebCT
Most colleges using the following: 
eCollege
Campus Pipeline
DeVry Inc.
Sylvan Learning Systems
University Alliance
Some colleges using the following: 
eCollege
Campus Pipeline
DeVry Inc.
Sylvan Learning Systems
University Alliance
Selected colleges using the following: 
eCollege
Campus Pipeline
DeVry Inc.
Sylvan Learning Systems
University Alliance

 

  Training Credential/Certification Degree Credits Undergraduate Degrees Graduate Degrees
Corp. Content
College Delivery
Most all college training courses dealing with corporate products and services Most all colleges teaching certification courses such as Microsoft Certification training courses Sometimes colleges outsource parts (but not all) of course content for their own courses.

Examples:
UNC's Pre-MBA Courses Used Quisc

  Sometimes colleges outsource parts (but not all) of course content for their own courses.

Examples:
UNC's Online MBA Used Quisc

Sylvan's video content  for the  Wharton School, , Johns Hopkins University (medical), and the USC  Marshall School of Business,

  Training Credential/Certification Degree Credits Undergraduate Degrees Graduate Degrees
Multiple University Partnerships Sometimes these partnerships are for dedicated programs.  For example Florida State University and the Jacksonville Community College partnered to deliver training and education courses for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service   The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan Business School, and the Darden School at the University of Virginia will offer each other's students online classes specializing in e-business. Example:
Virtually all universities in the University of Wisconsin system are cooperating of delivery on selected online degree programs.

Florida State University contracted to develop courses for Open University

JEBNET: Jesuit colleges team up to offer onsite and online programs http://www.jebnet.org/  (Includes an MBA program in China.)
College-Owned For-Profit Corporations Examples:
University of Maryland University College

New York University Online

Columbia U. et al. Fathom

Duke Education Corp

  Examples:
Maryland University College

New York University Online

Columbia U. et al. Fathom

Duke Education Corp

Columbia Univ.
Morningside Ventures

Examples:
Maryland University College

New York University Online

 

Examples:
University of Maryland University College

New York University Online

 

  Training Credential/Certification Degree Credits Undergraduate Degrees Graduate Degree
Other For-Profit Corporations

 

U.S and International Distance Education Course Finders

Univ. of Phoenix
The Kaplan Colleges

DeVry Inc. and Keller Graduate School of Management

Sylvan Learning Systems

UNext's Cardian U.

Arthur Andersen Professional Learning

Ernst&Young Univ.
Intellinex

General Electric U.
Sun Microsystems U.
Sears University
Motorola Univ.
Fordstar
McDonald's Hamburger Univ.

Univ. of Phoenix
The Kaplan Colleges

DeVry Inc. and Keller Graduate School of Management

Sylvan Learning Systems

UNext's Cardian U.

Arthur Andersen Professional Learning

Ernst&Young Univ.
Intellinex

 

Univ. of Phoenix
The Kaplan Colleges

Harcourt Univ.

DeVry Inc. 

Sylvan Learning Systems

UNext's Cardian U.

Arthur Andersen Professional Learning

Ernst&Young Univ.
Intellinex

General Electric U.
Sun Microsystems U.
Sears University
Motorola Univ.

 

Univ. of Phoenix
The Kaplan Colleges

Harcourt Univ.

UNext's Cardian U.

Arthur Andersen Professional Learning

Ernst&Young Univ.
Intellinex

General Electric U.
Sun Microsystems U.
Sears University
Motorola Univ.

 

There are many fraudulent degree programs.  Buyer beware.  In additon to online graduate degrees given by reputable corporations like Motorola, there are some respected graduate degrees.Those listed below are not frauds.

Concord School of Law

Jones International

Keller Graduate School of Management

UNext's Cardian U.

 

Professional Associations. Almost all professional associations are now providing or brokering continuing education training.
Example:
Mortgage Bankers Assn
.
Examples:

American Colleges of the South

American Chemical Society

   
           

Revenue and Accreditation Hurdles Facing Corporate Universities

One thing that just does not seem to work is a university commenced by a major publishing house.  McGraw-Hill World University was virtually stillborn at the date of birth as a degree-granting institution.  It evolved into McGraw-Hill Online Learning ( http://www.mhonlinelearning.com/  ) that does offer some interactive training materials, but the original concept of an online university ( having distance education courses for college credit) is dead and buried.  Powerful companies like Microsoft Corporation started up and then abandoned going it alone in establishing new online universities.

The last venturesome publishing company to start a university and fight to get it accredited is now giving up on the idea of having its own virtual university --- http://www.harcourthighered.com/index.html 
Harcourt Higher Education University was purchased by a huge publishing conglomerate called Thompson Learning See http://www.thomsonlearning.com/harcourt/ .  Thomson had high hopes, but soon faced the reality that it is probably impossible to compete with established universities in training and education markets.

The Thomson Corporation has announced that it will not continue to operate Harcourt Higher Education: An Online College as an independent degree-granting institution. Harcourt Higher Education will close on August 27, 2001. The closing is the result of a change of ownership, which occurred on July 13, 2001, when the Thomson Corporation purchased the online college from Harcourt General, Inc.

From Syllabus e-News on August 7, 2001

Online College to Close Doors

Harcourt Higher Education, which launched an online for-profit college in Massachusetts last year, is closing the school's virtual doors Sept. 28. Remaining students will have their credentials reviewed by the U.S. Open University, the American affiliate of the Open University in England.

We can only speculate as to the complex reasons why publishing companies start up degree-granting virtual universities and subsequently abandon efforts provide credit courses and degrees online.  

Enormous Revenue Shortfall (Forecast of 20,000 students in the first year;  Reality turned up 20 students)

"E-COLLEGES FLUNK OUT," By: Elisabeth Goodridge, Information Week, August 6, 2001, Page 10 

College students appear to prefer classroom instruction over online offerings.

Print and online media company Thomson Corp. said last week it plans to close its recently acquired, for-profit online university, Harcourt Higher Education.  Harcourt opened with much fanfare a year ago, projecting 20,000 enrollees within five years, but only 20 to 30 students have been attending.

Facing problems from accreditation to funding, online universities have been struggling mightily--in stark contrast to the success of the overall E-learning market.  A possible solution?  E-learning expert Elliott Masie predicts "more and more creative partnerships between traditional universities and online ones."

Roosters Guarding the Hen House
Publishing houses failed to gain accreditations.  I suspect that major reason is that the AACSB and other accrediting bodies have made it virtually impossible for corporations to obtain accreditation for startup learning corporations that are not partnered with established colleges and universities.  In the U.S., a handful of corporations have received regional accreditation (e.g., The University of Phoenix and Jones International Corporation), but these were established and had a history of granting degrees prior to seeking accreditation.  In business higher education, business corporations face a nearly impossible hurdle of achieving business school accreditation ( see http://businessmajors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050499.htm ) since respected accrediting bodies are totally controlled by the present educational institutions (usually established business school deans who behave like roosters guarding the hen house).  Special accrediting bodies for online programs have sprung up, but these have not achieved sufficient prestige vis-à-vis established accrediting bodies.  

Note the links to accreditation issues at http://www.degree.net/guides/accreditation.html )
Where GAAP means Generally Accepted Accreditation Principles)

All About Accreditation: A brief overview of what you really need to know about accreditation, including GAAP (Generally Accepted Accrediting Practices). Yes, there really are fake accrediting agencies, and yes some disreputable schools do lie. This simple set of rules tells how to sort out truth from fiction. (The acronym is, of course, borrowed from the field of accounting. GAAP standards are the highest to which accountants can be held, and we feel that accreditation should be viewed as equally serious.)

GAAP-Approved Accrediting Agencies: A listing of all recognized accrediting agencies, national, regional, and professional, with links that will allow you to check out schools.

Agencies Not Recognized Under GAAP: A list of agencies that have been claimed as accreditors by a number of schools, some totally phony, some well-intentioned but not recognized.

FAQs: Some simple questions and answers about accreditation and, especially, unaccredited schools.

For more details on accreditation and assessment, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Question:
Is lack of accreditation the main reason why corporate universities such as McGraw-Hill World University, Harcourt Higher Education University, Microsoft University, and other corporations have failed in their attempts to compete with established universities? 

Bob Jensen's Answer:
Although the minimum accreditation (necessary for transferring of credits to other colleges)  is a very important cause of failure  in the first few years of attempting to attract online students, it is not the main cause of failure.  Many (most) of the courses available online were training courses for which college credit transfer is not an issue.

  1. Why did the University of Wisconsin (U of W) swell with over 100,000 registered online students while Harcourt Higher Education University (HHWU) struggled to get 20 registered?

    Let me begin to answer my own question with two questions.  If you want to take an online training or education course from your house in Wisconsin's town of Appleton, would you prefer to pay more much more for the course from HHWU than a low-priced tuition for Wisconsin residents at the U of W.  If you were a resident of Algona, Iowa and the price was the same for the course whether you registered at HHWU or U of W, would you choose U of W?  My guess is that in both cases, students would choose U of W, because the University of Wisconsin has a long-term tradition for quality and is likely to be more easily recognized for quality on the students' transcripts.

  2. Why can the University of Wisconsin offer a much larger curriculum than corporate universities?

    The University of Wisconsin had a huge infrastructure for distance education long before the age of the Internet.  Televised distance education across the state has been in place for over 30 years.  Extension courses have been given around the entire State of Wisconsin for many decades.  The University of Wisconsin's information technology system is already in place at a cost of millions upon millions of dollars.  There are tremendous economies of scale for the University of Wisconsin to offer a huge online curriculum for training and education vis-à-vis a startup corporate university starting from virtually scratch.

  3. What target market feels more closely attached to the University of Wisconsin than some startup corporate university?

    The answer is obvious.  It's the enormous market comprised of alumni and families of alumni from every college and university in the University of Wisconsin system of state-supported schools.

  4. What if a famous business firm such as Microsoft Corporation or Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) elected to offer a prestigious combination of executive training and education to only upper-level management in major international corporations?  What are the problems in targeting to business executives?

    This target market is already carved out by alumni of elite schools such as Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, London School of Economics, Duke, University of Michigan, University of Texas, and the other universities repeatedly ranked among the top 50 business schools in the nation.  Business executives are more often than not snobs when it comes to universities in the peer set of "their" alma maters.  Logos of top universities are worth billions in the rising executive onsite and online training and education market.  UNext Corporation recognized this, and this is the reason why the its first major step in developing an online executive education program was to partner with five of the leading business schools in the world.


  5. Why does one corporate university, The University of Phoenix, prosper when others fail or limp along with costs exceeding revenues?  

    The University of Phoenix is the world's largest private university.  The reason for its success is largely due to a tradition of quality since 1976.  This does not mean that quality has always been high for every course over decades of operation, but each year this school seems to grow and offer better and better courses.  Since most of its revenues still come from onsite courses, it is not clear that the school would prosper if it became solely an online university.  The school is probably further along on the learning curve than most other schools in terms of adult learners.  It offers a large number of very dedicated and experienced full-time and part-time faculty.  It understands the importance of small classes and close communications between students and other students and instructors.  It seems to fill a niche that traditional colleges and universities have overlooked.


  6. What major corporation signed with a major state university to receive online MBA degrees in finance?

    "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html

You can read more about these happenings at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 
Especially note the prestigious universities going online at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


At the University of Wisconsin
"Online Degree Program Lets Students Test Out of What They Already Know," by Angela Chen, June 20, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-degree-program-lets-students-test-out-of-what-they-already-know/37097?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The University of Wisconsin plans to start a “flexible degree” program online focused on allowing undergraduates to test out of material they have mastered.

The new program, geared toward working adults with some college education, operates under a “competency based” model, said Raymond Cross, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges and University of Wisconsin-Extension. This model is similar to the Advanced Placement program, in which high-school students take AP tests to pass out of college-level courses.

In the university’s new program, college courses will be broken down into units. For example, a higher-level mathematics class could include units such as linear algebra and trigonometry. Students can then test out of certain units (instead of full courses) and spend time learning only material that is new to them. Eventually, the units will build into courses, and then a degree. The flexible-degree program and traditional-degree program will have identical course requirements, and since each flexible degree will be associated with a specific campus, the student will receive a diploma from the originating campus and not from the system.

“We’re trying to find ways to reduce the cost of education,” Mr. Cross said. “Implicit in the model is the idea that you can take lectures online from free sources—like Khan Academy and MITx—and prepare yourself for the competency test. Then take the remaining courses online at UW.”

The biggest challenge, he says, is determining how to best test competency. Some units will require tests, while others may require written papers or laboratory work. The difficulty of measuring “competency’” for any unit will affect the program’s pricing structure, which has not yet been determined.

The idea of competency-based credentials is common in technical and health fields, Mr. Cross said, but it is rare at traditional universities. The program is part of a push to encourage Wisconsin’s 700,000 college dropouts to go back to a university.

“With higher ed now, people often have a piece or two missing in their education, so we are responding to the changes in our culture and helping them pull all these pieces together,” Mr. Cross said. “Students already interface with a lot of different institutions and different classes and professors, and this will help that process. I don’t think this diminishes traditional higher ed at all. I think it’ll enhance it.”

The first courses in the flexible-degree program will be available starting in fall 2013. The university is still developing exact degree specifications, Mr. Cross said. Likely degrees include business management and information technology.

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment (including distance education assessment issues and competency-based testing) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

 


From Syllabus e-News on July 24, 2001

Online Degree Program to Address Teacher Shortage

Due to increasing student enrollment, teacher retirements, and class size reduction, California faces a crucial shortage of elementary school teachers, which is expected to intensify over the next ten years. In response to the problem, the Cali-fornia State University is now offering an opportunity for undergraduates to earn their liberal studies degree through Liberal Studies Online, an online degree completion program for individuals working toward a California teaching credential. Administered through CSU Chico, online courses will originate from the Chico campus and CSU Sacramento. The first online courses will be available beginning fall 2001.

For more information, visit http://liberalstudies.calstate.edu

Innovative and difficult to classify:

US Military --- Over 4,000 training and education courses from a variety of sources, including US Air University.

The U.S. IRS offers Internet education opportunities. IRS employees who want to get ahead in the organization are heading back to the classroom - 21st century style. College level courses in accounting, finance, tax law, and other business subjects will be available on the Internet to IRS employees. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/46816/101 

For example, the IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 

Examples are listed at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

InstantKnowledge Online Study Guides --- http://www.instantknowledge.com/ 

InstantKnowledge.com integrates the worlds of technology and education to help you study.

Our scholars create high quality, peer-reviewed educational materials, the first of which is the series of literary KnowledgeNotes now available on our site. Along with our technology partners, our team is developing Seek.Find. Seek.Find. will be a searchable database that gives you twenty-four hour access to over a million journal articles and textbooks.

Knowledge Portals
The many knowledge portals that are springing up like wildfire.  These databases contain vast databases of knowledge that can be accessed either for free or for fees ranging from cheap to very expensive.  --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm 


Comparative Advantages of Colleges and Universities
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm

Comparative Advantage

Year 2000
Importance

Year 2020
Importance

Prestige Logo and Ranking for Quality in Such Surveys as the U.S. News Rankings  Highly important in attracting top onsite and online students. Extremely important for attracting top students and partnerings with business firms and government.  

For example, the nearly $100,000 tuition for Duke's Virtual MBA is paid by corporate partners who pay to send one or more students per year.

For example, firms such as E&Y and PwC pay millions to have high ranking universities offer degree programs dedicated to their employees.

Alumni Base and Power Within Business Firms and Government Important when attracting new students such as children of alumni Highly increased if alumni work actively to promote online training and education programs of their alma maters

Comparative Advantage

Year 2000
Importance

Year 2020
Importance

Reputation for high quality preparatory, training, and education of minority students, handicapped students, and religious-affiliated students Highly important in attracting and retaining onsite and online students Extremely important for attracting top students and partnerings with business firms and government.

For example, the IRS will be paying millions to Jacksonville Community College to provide online accounting training and education courses to virtually all IRS employees, many of whom are minorities.

Gallaudet University for the hearing impaired has a reputation for dealing with the special needs for the hearing impaired.

Brigham Young University is the flagship university for the Mormon Church.

Residential and Athletic Participation Infrastructure
on Campus
Highly Important for Onsite Students Highly Important for Onsite Students,  
but there will be new developments in eDorms (University of Maryland)
Geographic Location Very important to virtually all onsite resident and commuting students within a region Greatly diminished except as an attraction to full-time resident students (e.g., the attraction of the mountains, the ocean, the urban attractions, foreign travel,  etc.)  HDTV may restore some importance to geography since TV stations broadcast locally.

Comparative Advantage

Year 2000
Importance

Year 2020
Importance

Language Very important to all onsite and online students Greatly diminished as language choices increase for online students.  

For example, language students may interact online and in teleconferencing with foreign businesses, cafes, schools, and homes.

Webcam shopping for a dress in Paris. 

Financial Endowment Very important for all onsite and online programs Highly important for physical plant and   onsite programs.  For online programs, equity capital markets will be more important

Comparative Advantage

Year 2000
Importance

Year 2020
Importance

Full-Line Curriculum Very important for onsite programs and less important for online programs Greatly diminished importance as highly specialized online programs begin to supplement both online and onsite curricula
Research Reputation Very important for attracting top faculty and funding Greatly diminished importance as online programs begin to provide better compensation packages and lifestyle choices to work at home where home happens to be located

Some corporate providers are partnering with colleges and universities and providing their own, possibly competing, programs.  For example, Ernst & Young created Intellinex for delivering its own training and education programs and partnered with Notre Dame University and the University of Virginia to deliver masters of accounting education to newly hired graduates in E&Y.

For its consulting division, PwC built a training campus in Tampa and contracted with the University of Georgia to deliver an online MBA program to PwC employees.


"Will the Internet Transform Higher Education?" by Walter S. Baer, The Emerging Internet, Annual Review of the Institute for Information Studies, Charles M. Firestone, Program Director. Copyright © 1998 Institute for Information Studies --- www.rand.org/publications/RP/RP685.pdf 

Walter S. Baer 
Senior Policy Analyst 
RAND Corporation 

American higher education faces formidable challenges caused by changing student demographics, severe financial constraints, and lingering institutional rigidities. (See Footnote 1) At the same time, increased demands are being placed on higher education to provide greater student access to education, better undergraduate programs, and increased productivity. To address both sets of issues, institutions of higher education are turning to new communications and information technologies that promise to increase access, improve the quality of instruction, and (perhaps) control costs. 

The use of older technologies for distance learning in post-secondary education (See Footnote 2) has already been shown to be cost-effective in such diverse settings as the Open University in the United Kingdom, four-year and community colleges in the United States, satellite-delivered video courses for engineers and other professionals, and corporate and military training. Now the Internet is being proposed as the preferred technology to improve instruction, increase access, and raise productivity in higher education. (See Footnote 3) College and university instructors now routinely post their syllabi and course readings to the World Wide Web. A few use lectures and other instructional materials available on the Web in their own courses. A growing number of schools offer at least some extension or degree- credit courses over the Internet. And more ambitious plans are in various stages of preparation or early implementation --- plans for entire virtual universities that use the Internet to reach geographically dispersed students.

Two distinct models guide current efforts to make use of the Internet in higher education. The first approach seeks to improve existing forms and structures of post-secondary instruction --- to create "better, faster, cheaper" versions of today's courses and curricula by means of the Internet. This model emphasizes building an on-campus information infrastructure that provides (or will provide) high-speed Internet connectivity to all students, faculty, administrators, and staff. Faculty then can use this infrastructure to improve and supplement traditional courses and degree programs. Library holdings can be digitized and made available both on-and off-campus. (See Footnote 4). Administrative processes can be speeded up and simplified. And although the focus remains on on-campus instruction, this new information infrastructure can facilitate distance learning for many categories of nontraditional, off-campus students. While this model of Internet use in higher education requires many changes among faculty, student, and administrative roles and functions, it keeps most existing institutional structures and faculty roles intact.

A different, more radical, model envisions the Internet as instrumental to a fundamental change in the processes and organizational structure of post- secondary teaching and learning. According to this view, the Internet can transform higher education into student-centered learning rather than institution- and faculty-centered instruction. It can allow agile institutions --- old and new --- to leapfrog existing academic structures and establish direct links to post-secondary students. It can encourage new collaborative arrangements between academic institutions and for-profit entrepreneurs and permit these partnerships to extend their reach nationally and internationally. It can accommodate student demand for post-secondary education in new ways that are basically campus-independent. If the markets for post-secondary education evolve in this manner, the Internet may well threaten existing institutions of higher education much more than it will support them. Taking this view, celebrated management consultant and social commentator Peter Drucker recently remarked:  "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. . . . The college won't survive as a residential institution."

Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


"THE HOTTEST CAMPUS ON THE INTERNET Duke's pricey online B-school program is winning raves from students and rivals," Business Week, October 27, 1997 --- http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549015.htm 

Update:  The Duke MBA --- Global Executive (formerly called GEMBA) --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html 

The Duke MBA - Global Executive is every bit as academically demanding as Duke's other two MBA programs. Global Executive uses the same faculty base, the same rigorous grading standards, and provides the same Duke degree. However, the content has been adjusted to include more global issues and strategies to serve a participant population that has far more global management experience.

For the class entering in May 2001, tuition is $95,000. Tuition includes all educational expenses, a state-of-the-art laptop computer, portable printer, academic books and other class materials, and lodging and meals during the five residential sessions. The tuition does not include travel to and from the residential sites.

You can learn a great deal about the extend of distance education in this program by looking at the academic calendar at http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/global_cal2001.htm

Cross-Continent MBA --- --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/cc/cc_home.html 
Following on the heels of its Global MBA online success, Duke introduced a second online program called the Cross-Continent MBA and located its headquarters in Frankfurt.  While in Germany in the Summer of 2001, I had dinner with Tom Keller, former Dean of Duke's Fuqua School of Business and Dean of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program.  Tom spent two years in the Frankfort headquarters of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program.  This program is quite different from the online Global Executive MBA Program, although both are asynchronous online programs and used some overlapping course materials.  

The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program allows high-potential managers to earn an internationally-focused MBA degree from Duke University in less than two years, utilizing a format that minimizes the disruption of careers and family life. It is designed for individuals with three to nine years professional work experience.

The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program will contain course work with a global emphasis in the subject areas of Management, Marketing, Operations, Economics, Finance, Accounting, Strategy and Decision Sciences.

Students will complete 11 core courses, four elective courses and one integrative capstone course to earn their MBA degree. Two courses will be completed during each of the eight terms of the program. Depending upon their choice of electives, students may choose to complete the one-week residency requirements for their sixth and seventh terms at either Fuqua School of Business location in North America or Europe.

The two classes - one on each continent - will be brought even closer together through a transfer requirement built into the program. During the third term, half of the class from Europe will attend the North American residential session and vice versa. In the fourth term, the other half of each class trades locations for one week of residential learning. After the transfer residencies, the students resume their coursework using the same Internet mediated learning methods as before, but with global virtual teams that have now met in a face-to-face setting

World-Class Resources 
When you're linked to Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, you're connected to a world of resources residing on a network with robust bandwidth capabilities. Duke MBA students have secure access to the Duke and Fuqua business library databases as well as a network of Duke faculty and outside experts.

World-Wide Content Delivery 
The virtual classroom can take on many different forms. Here, a faculty member prepares a macroeconomics lecture for distribution via CD ROM and/or the Internet. Students will download this lecture in a given week of study and follow up with discussion and team projects.

Bulletin Board Discussion 
Rich threads of conversation occur during this asynchronous mode of communication. Professors and guest lecturers can moderate the discussion to keep learning focused.

Real-Time Chat Session 
Occurs between students and classmates as well as faculty. Here, a student in Europe discusses an assignment with a professor in the United States
.


Online Degree Programs

Types of (Mostly Profitable) Prestige Partnerings

Also see Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Corporations and Universities Sign Partnership Pacts 
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm
Corporations Provide Universities Provide Leading Example Other Examples
Student Funding
Students
General Programs
Cause Management
Course Dev. Funding
Accreditation
Full Logos
Stanford's ADEPT

Asynchronous Distance Education Project with thousands of graduates and the first prestige degree program on the web

Duke's Online MBAs 
Globaal MBA GEMBA

Cross-Continent MBA 

Wharton/IBM

Harvard-Stanford Corp.

Student Funding
Students
Some Course Materials
Knowledge Bases
Full Logos
Dedicated Programs
Course Managements
Course Funding
Accreditation
Full Logos

E&Y Partners

PwC Partners
Course Consulting
Media & Delivery
Instructors
Course Management
Course Funding
Student Funding
Course Design
Academic Standards
Course Ownership
Full Logos
UNext

UNext Home Page
Company Overview
Cardean University
Focus is on Partnerships
Kirschenheiter Audio
K01 PhDs
K05 PB Learning
K10 Rewards
K20 Reviews

Pensare

Pensare Home Page
What They Offer

Knowledge Community

Instructors
Course Management
Course Funding
Cases
Videos
Knowledge Bases
Full Logos
Students
Student Funding
Full Logos
Academic Association Sponsorships

ACS

Harcourt University

Morningside Ventures
Columbia University's Undergraduate Core

 

University-Owned Corporations

Course Consulting
Media & Delivery
Instructors
Course Management
Course Funding
Student Funding

Course Design
Academic Standards
Course Ownership
Full Logos
Duke Corporate Ed.

Morningside Ventures

NYUonline

U. Maryland
University
College

Temple

Fathom

(See Below)

Knowledge@Wharton

 

A Distance Education Partnership Between the University of Akron and Kent State University
"Schools collaborate to create Online Learning," Syllabus, February 2003, pp. 21-33 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7259 

Two of Ohio's largest universities are teaming to create a collaborative online learning system that will dramatically expand their teaching and research opportunities, while reducing information technology costs. A 20-minute drive apart, these universities have combined enrollments of 60,000, with more than 400 programs and 1,400 faculty members. The University of Akron (UA) and Kent State University (KSU) are using WebCT's academic enterprise system, WebCT Vista, to create a "shared services model" for online learning. This model for online learning will allow the two universities to share technology, course content, research, and faculty, which could ultimately serve other Ohio universities and the K-12 community.

Especially beneficial for large, multi-institution deployments, WebCT Vista is an eLearning platform that includes a broad range of course development and delivery, content management, and learning information management capabilities. These are all supported by an extensible, enterprise-class architecture. WebCT Vista gives institutions of higher education first-time access to aggregate student learning data at the institutional level, extending the capacity for colleges and universities to access and strategically leverage learning information beyond an individual classroom.

Stretching Resources Currently, UA and KSU are in the process of Web-enhancing classroom courses that they have in common with interactive exercises, threaded discussion groups, chats, and virtual-classroom activities. The universities also hope to create pure distance learning courses, in which all activities take place over the Internet. The intent is to improve education and research, and to stretch scarce resources. Dr. Rosemary DuMont, Associate VP of Academic Technology Services for KSU, explains, "UA and KSU began this initiative because of concern about student success. Both universities are extremely student-focused. WebCT Vista provides research data for making decisions in the future regarding student retention." Over the next five years, UA and KSU could predictably save over one million dollars in software and hardware costs. The long-term goal is for UA and KSU to become a national eLearning provider by taking the shared services model to Internet2, a high-performance network that connects 200 universities. This could generate additional revenue and prestige for both universities.

Mike Giannone, Communications Officer at UA, says, "We will be able to develop an eLearning curriculum for any given program by splitting, rather than duplicating the effort. This collaboration will broaden students' exposure to programs they might otherwise miss, while exposing faculty to research and best practices from an expanded group of peers. It offers students at both schools more choices in the classes they take, and where and how they will take them. The two universities will also share grants, content, and the ability to analyze a combined pool of learning data collected by WebCT Vista." Dr. Paul L. Gaston, provost of KSU, exclaims, "We are excited to be able to offer an even broader range of educational opportunities to our students through this collaboration! We already share academic programs, so sharing online resources is a natural next step."

Collaborative Teaching and Research Shared services between UA and KSU are the brain child of Dr. Thomas Gaylord, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at UA. His vision initially created the project and continues to drive it. Dr. Gaylord explains, "The greatest paradigm shift for education is occurring now—it is a wonderful enlightenment. It is time to re-define what our students are; what our faculties are; what constitutes accredibility, and so forth. Partnerships are the ‘right' thing to do. For example, why do numerous individual universities produce Algebra I online … when collaboration makes sense? The University of Akron and Kent State University will have educational advantages over other universities in the region with probably the single, most important educational technology tool for enhancing their long-range instructional vitalities in the coming years." Because of the strategic impact of eLearning on both institutions, UA President, Dr. Luis M. Proenza and KSU President, Dr. Carol A. Cartwright, came together, with Dr. Gaylord, Dr. DuMont, and others, to drive this collaboration. Under the direction of Dr. Gaylord and Dr. DuMont, the two universities have installed a new high-speed fiber optic line, "GigaMAN," to connect their information technology systems and act as a bridge for collaborative teaching and research. Dr. Terry L Hickey, Senior Vice President and Provost at UA, explains, "In addition to partnering with Kent State, we eventually envision offering a shared resource for other northeastern Ohio schools as well as the private sector

Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7259 

The concept of knowledge trails was really exciting, and I am sorry that the effort had to be abandoned at Fathom.  Due to cash flow losses, Columbia University pulled the plug on Fathom.  But an older Knowledge Trails illustration indicates how exciting this could have been.

Knowledge Trails in Fathom --- http://www.fathom.com/index.jhtml 

 

 

Corporations Sign Pacts With Professors Affiliated With Prestige Universities 
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm
Corporations Provide Professors Provide Example 1 Example 2
Course Funding
Resources
Multimedia Development
Students
Cases
Videos
Knowledge Bases
Proxy Logos
Quisic

20 Courses for UNC

Courses for any School
Roman Weil - Chicago
Mark Albion - Harvard
J. Morgan Jones - UNC
Robert Connolly - UNC
R. Kipp Martin - Chicago

Concord School of Law

Harvard sues to stop others from following in Arthur Millers video steps

Ninth House Network buys up intellectual property rights of leading scholars http://www.ninthhouse.com/home.htm 
The new E-Learning Resource Site is described at http://www.ninthhouse.com/news/press/pr00/q3/august15.htm 

Ninth House Network™, the leading broadband e-learning environment for organizational development, today announced the launch of its new corporate web site at www.NinthHouse.com . The new web site, which highlights Ninth House Network’s e-learning solutions, features a comprehensive e-learning resource center available to the general public, providing tools, information, white papers, relevant articles and related links that help further the understanding of the role that e-learning plays in organizational transformation.

The Ninth House Network web site features insight from leading business minds on a wide range of topics, including change management, building successful alliances and partnerships, team building, building community, management, innovation and customer service. Using a combination of streaming video, readable interviews, interactive web casts and related articles and books, Ninth House Network provides visitor access to business leaders such as Tom Peters, Ken Blanchard, Larraine Segil, Peter Senge and Clifton Taulbert.

 

  Universities Partner With Each Other 
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm
The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan Business School, and the Darden School at the University of Virginia will offer each other's students classes specializing in e-business.

"So much of business education is the network-building between the students," said Haas Dean Laura Tyson. "What is nice here is that people in each location will now be able to have a new selection of classes to choose from, and a new selection of people to work with."

"In essence, this program is not only about sharing knowledge but about sharing communities,"

JEBNET:  Jesuit colleges  team up to offer onsite and online programs http://www.jebnet.org/ 
(Includes an MBA program in China.)

 

Virtual Universities and Online Education/Training

Degree and Certificate Programs Online 
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm
Type of Degree Scope of Service Accredited Non-accredited
Comprehensive Degree Programs Onsite and Online Open University
Penn State's World Campus

UCLA
Kentucky Commonwealth
Illinois Virtual
Hundreds of Others

?
Comprehensive Degree Programs Online Western Gov. Univ. (WGU)

Motorola University

At&T Virtual Acad.

?

 

Selected Degree Programs Online U.S. Army
University of Phoenix
ArsDigita University
Jones International
Duke's GEMBA
Wharton/IBM
Frederick Taylor Univ. - Regis University 
University of Asia
Hundreds of Others
Training Certificates Online Hundreds of Programs with Prestige Logo Certifications Such as Microsoft Certified CBOE
Barnes&Nobel Univ.
Thousands of Programs from Corporations and Extension Programs in Colleges and Universities
Military Online and Offline U.S. Military U.S. Military
Links to Online Accounting and Business Courses and Degree Programs

This section has been moved to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

 

Important Wall Street Journal Special Report, e-Commerce in Education, Section R, March 12, 2001 --- http://interactive.wsj.com/pages/ecommerce2001-2.htm 

This section should be read by all professionals in higher education.  It brings us up to date on trends in distance education both in private corporations and traditional colleges and universities.  It is a great source for updating my threads and road show on such topics at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

There is to much in this Special Report to summarize in one module of New Bookmarks.  The Table of Contents is as follows:

  • The Reality 

Big money is pouring into the business of education. But it's too soon to tell whether there will be any payoff.

  • The Old College Try 

Traditional universities are taking to the Net with a wide range of strategies.

  • Business Plan 

A look at all the different ways companies hope to make money from online education.

  • Something Ventured 

Venture capitalists have dramatically increased their investments in e-learning.

  • Off Campus 

Private virtual universities challenge many of the assumptions long held by educators. Their own challenge: survival.

  • New Chapter 

Libraries aren't going away. But they are going to be very different.

  • Teaching Old Dogs 

Traditional academic publishers are scrambling to adapt to the online world.

  • Spanish Lessons 

An entrepreneur wants to bring U.S. universities to Spaniards -- in their own language.

  • Expelled! 

The future of e-commerce will no doubt be littered with failed education companies.

  • A New Language 

Companies that teach English in Asia see their business quickly being transformed by the Web.

  • Going Mobile 

A Dutch university aims to teach students on the run, developing, in conjunction with several companies, Europe's first common wireless standard geared toward education applications.

  • Like Clockwork 

Switzerland is putting the Internet to work to relieve crowded universities and improve teaching practices -- both while keeping down costs.

  • Tools of the Future 

Thanks to technology, K-12 will never look the same. Companies are plying a host of new offerings -- from hardware and interactive software to Internet-related tools -- to schools.

  • His Own Story 

Novelist Reynolds Price talks about teaching, writing and the literary merits of e-mail.

  • The Leisure Class 

Online instruction gives people the chance to learn just about anything, from the comfort of their own home. Anybody want to be a beekeeper?

  • Tales Out of School 

Online classes can be tough to find, hard to sign up for -- and a bore once you get there.

  • All Dressed Up... 

Schools may find they have the computer equipment, but no way to use it. Here's how one school and a networking firm found an answer. Do's and Don'ts Of Web Classes How can first-time Web students succeed in the world of online education? See a list of tips to embrace and pitfalls to avoid.

  • Working Out Online Kinks 

Fettes College plans to start broadcasting live and recorded classroom lectures over the Internet to paid subscribers by year's end. Will it succeed?

  • WSJ.com Discussions:  Universities Online  

What was your online learning experience like? Can the online campus ever replace the real one? What improvements are needed? Join an online discussion.

  • Future Learning 

What do you think the classroom of the future will look like? How can educators, parents and students make the best use of new technology? Join an online discussion.

  • The Education Business 

Can online education companies be profitable and educate students at the same time? Which companies do you think will prosper in the online education field? Join an online discussion.

  • No Substitute 

The Internet does not change everything. Some of the world's foremost thinkers ponder the intersection of technology and education.

  • The Downside 

Why some critics give Web-based education less-than-stellar grades.

  • Campus Connected 

What will college look like in the not-so-distant future? Crookston, Minn., provides an early glimpse.

  • The Federal Case 

Sen. Kerrey and Rep. Isakson reflect on the government's role in fostering e-learning.

A few selected quotations are shown below:

Entrepreneurs and investors have jumped into the world of online education, pumping some $6 billion into the sector since 1990 -- almost half of it since 1999.

The knowledge-enterprise industry now measures some $735 billion, which includes spending on a host of things, such as textbooks, software and services, according to Merrill Lynch. Analysts there expect the online component of that to grow to $25.3 billion by 2003 from $3.6 billion in 1999. Within that, domestic online corporate learning is expected to grow fastest: from $1.1 billion in 1999 to $11.4 billion in 2003 -- a compounded annual growth rate of 79%. Two other key sectors -- kindergarten-through-12th grade and higher education -- anticipate annual growth rates of over 50%.

Consider what's happening at Westview High School in Poway, Calif. This time next year, classrooms there will be stocked with computers, and a wireless network will allow students to access the Internet through their laptops from anywhere on school grounds. In addition, hand-held devices will be ubiquitous, as will virtual classrooms, so students can log on to the Internet for assignments and participate in chat rooms with students from other schools across the globe

The potential for the K-12 e-learning market is huge, analysts say (shown in millions)

Segment Current Market Potential Market
Content $20 $4,000
E-commerce 175 657,000
Infrastructure 1,000 7,000
Supplemental services 10 5,000

February 7, 2012 message from Fabiola Esposito (Madrid University)

My name is Fabiola Esposito and I am writing to you on behalf of the Spanish School of the University of Madrid .
I
have found your website (http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm) while looking for web pages for the promotion of languages and culture and  have seen your reviews on different topics which I found very interesting, specially the one that speaks about the combination of synchronous and asynchronous methods when teaching and how close one can get to the students online.

Anyhow, the aim of this email is that on the University of Madrid Spanish School we have recently finished developing our new website for offering our Spanish courses to everyone who want to come to Madrid to study the Spanish language and immerse into the Spanish culture. We also offer classes focused on Spanish literature and culture; and we offer specialized courses in Spanish on different academic areas such as arts, history, business and politics too.
 

I have reviewed with much interest your section about cross-border training and educational alternatives and would like to know if you are interested in offering our website to your visitors in case they may be interested in spending a period learning or improving their Spanish skills abroad. It may be interesting either for the student community as for the educators' community, given that we also offer courses for proficient users who want to improve or review their knowledge on Hispanic studies and everything related to them; language, culture, sociology, literature, etc.

Our Madrid University Spanish School website is www.madrid-university.es, if you think this might be a useful resource for your users you can contact me or feel free to place it between your resources.
Thank you in advance for your time and consideration, and if you have any comments or questions please don't hesitate to contact me.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.


Best regards,
 

 

 


What schools and parents spend on education, versus their total online spending, in billions

  Education Products/Services Online Spending 1999 Online Spending 2003*
Schools $70.00 $0.075 $2.00
Parents 7.00 0.050 0.75

*estimates

Sources: Merrill Lynch estimates; International Data Corp.

Their strategies are as varied as the schools. Some institutions, such as Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, have formed partnerships with e-learning companies like UNext.com (www.unext.com) of Deerfield, Ill., or Pensare Inc., based in Los Altos, Calif., to bring their courses and professors online. Others have decided to go it alone, developing and offering their own online courses. Some schools, including New York University and Cornell University, have spun off their e-learning programs as for-profit ventures.

With the economic slowdown and the venture-capital spigot turned off, the question now is a simple one: Can these marriages of conventional education and e-commerce survive? Can these for-profit arms actually turn a profit? And if so, at what price?

"If you have a good product and figure out how to market it and deliver it, then you should be significantly competitive in the marketplace," says Michael Goldstein, head of the educational-institutions practice at Dow Lohnes & Albertson, a law firm in Washington, D.C. "That will be difficult to do, and there are no clear models yet in the marketplace."

Consider Fathom.com (www.fathom.com). Launched last year with a $20 million investment from Columbia, Fathom offers a mixture of free information -- articles, reference works and links to other sites -- and access to for-fee online courses, all aimed at the "lifelong learner." (Fathom takes a cut of the fee as its payment.) On the handsomely designed site, a surfer can search among about 600 online courses offered by a variety of schools, including the University of Washington and Michigan State University.

Surfers can also follow "knowledge trails" -- a series of related links on such topics as arts and architecture, business and finance or science and engineering, among others.

Here's a safe-and-steady business plan. The nation's for-profit higher-education companies have been around for years, and they are nothing like a typical football-obsessed college. Students who enroll in these institutions care about one thing: classes. They are in their mid-30s. They don't want frat parties. They want better jobs. These schools read the want ads closely, and they respond by offering courses in subjects such as finance, management, nursing and information technology.

In this business model, student tuition fees are the primary revenue source. The beauty of this for investors is that the students are locked into a series of courses over an extended period, giving the companies a reliable income stream.

These companies "know where their revenues are coming from way in advance," says Jay Tracey, chief investment officer at Berger Funds. In an unsteady stock market, he says, "predictability and visibility become more important to investors than the rate of growth." The Denver mutual-fund concern has invested in DeVry Inc. (www.devry.com), a for-profit degree-granting enterprise, as well as SmartForce, in corporate training.

The largest private (and accredited) institution of higher education:

To get investors to pay more attention to its Internet business, Apollo Group Inc. ( www.apollogroup.com ), a Phoenix-based education holding company, issued a tracking stock last year for its University of Phoenix Online unit, which has served students over the Web for more than a decade. While some tracking stocks haven't fared well, this one did. Thanks largely to the fact that it's a proven, profitable business in a sea of Internet red ink, the IPO finished the year at more than double its September initial offering price of $14. And the parent company's stock jumped 145% for the year.

In the offline world, Apollo operates sites around the country to conduct classes, often in rented facilities. Classes are held mostly at night, so students can attend after work. When students "enroll in a degree program, we are counting on them taking five or six courses or more -- so that's a repeat-revenue model for us," says Terri Heddegard, an Apollo vice president.

Apollo says the online unit's enrollment has surged to 19,000 students, up 65% from a year earlier, out of a total of 83,000 students in all forums including physical class sites. The online students take classes at home, using e-mail and Web message boards to work on group projects. The online-class tuition cost runs $400 to $495 a credit, about 20% more expensive than tuition for the brick-and-mortar classes, Apollo says.

For the fiscal first quarter, ended Nov. 30, the online institution reported net income of $5.6 million, or six cents a share, on revenue of $34 million. Including results from its online arm, Apollo posted profit of $25 million, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $177 million for the same period.


Shared Courseware

Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World:
OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing Universities


Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature, including free online textbooks and other learning materials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


Advances in Course Open Sharing for Free:  Yale is Added to the List of Prestigious Open Sharing Universities

"The Next Level of Open Source," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/20/yale

On Tuesday, Yale University announced that it would be starting a version of an open access online tool for those seeking to gain from its courses. But the basis of the Yale effort will be video of actual courses — every lecture of the course, to be combined with selected class materials. The money behind the Yale effort is coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was an early backer of MIT’s project, and which sees the Yale project as a way to take the open course idea to the next level.

“We want to add another dimension to open courseware,” said Catherine Casserly, a program officer at Hewlett. She said that video components used at MIT and elsewhere have been very popular with people all over the world. “We’re trying to make that bridge” to the audience for high quality American education, she said. Casserly said that Yale’s initiative — starting with seven courses this year, with plans to grow quickly — was the first open courseware effort based on lecture videos. “We hope to see this spread to other universities,” she said.

Richard Baraniuk, founder of Connexions, said he viewed Yale’s announcement as “a very positive development.” While projects at Rice and MIT “have been opening up access to educational materials and syllabi, the Yale project is opening up access to even more of the student experience, namely the in-class lecture environment,” he said.

Yale officials said that they view that in-class environment as crucial and so wanted to build their open courseware model around it. “Education is built on direct interaction, and face to face is ideal,” said Diana E.E. Kleiner, a professor of the history of art and classics who is directing the project. “That’s how we intend to teach on our campus, but also recognize that this kind of participation is not always possible, and many around the world could benefit from greater access to this kind of information we provide.

“Universities and colleges are the best keepers of that kind of information in the world, but it can be locked in a kind of vault” because only so many people can attend a given institution, or enroll in a given course, she said.

Kleiner said that Yale officers were “very admiring” of the model built by MIT, and she praised MIT as well for sharing extensive information about how its program was designed. But she said that Yale believes that course lectures “are the core content,” and need to be central. “We’re following in MIT’s footprints, but really taking a new step,” she said.

Continued in article


The Open-Sharing of Video Lectures Gains Momentum
The University of California at Berkeley announced Tuesday that it would put video of selected courses online — free to all — through a collaboration with Google Video. The move follows a similar move announced a week ago by Yale University.
Inside Higher Ed, September 27, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/27/qt


Professors Sharing Their Lectures on Video
Take Five from the University of Texas http://www.utexas.edu/inside_ut/take5/


Berkeley Open Sharing College Course Site

From the Scout Report on May 19, 2006

Webcast.Berkeley [iTunes, Real Player] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Over the past few years, a number of colleges and universities have created initiatives to place some of their course materials online for the general public. MIT was one of the first to do so, and Berkeley has also started to offer a number of webcasts and podcasts of select courses on this website.

Drawing on the strengths of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, they have begun to place some of these excellent materials on this site. On their well-designed homepage, visitors can either look at an archive of course webcasts and podcasts or take a gander at the archived webcasts that feature prominent speakers who have visited the campus. The events archive dates back to a January 2002 appearance by Bill Clinton, and includes dozens of interesting talks and lectures. Visitors can learn about each event in the information section, and for some, they have the option to download the audio portion of each event. The course section is equally delightful, as visitors can view webcasts here, and also download podcasts. The range of courses here is quite broad, and includes lectures on general chemistry, wildlife ecology, and surprise, surprise: foundations of American cyberculture. Finally, visitors can also subscribe to event and course podcasts.


Carnegie-Mellon University joins the open sharing initiative

A collection of "cognitively informed," openly available and free online courses and course materials that enact instruction for an entire course in an online format.
Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University --- http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index.html


Teaching Materials (especially video) from PBS

Teacher Source:  Arts and Literature --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm

Teacher Source:  Health & Fitness --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm

Teacher Source: Math --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm

Teacher Source:  Science --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm

Teacher Source:  PreK2 --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm

Teacher Source:  Library Media ---  http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm


May 3, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

RESOURCES FOR RESHAPING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

". . . the crisis in the scholarly communication system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens our academic faculty's ability to do world-class research. With current technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to scholarly articles."

Paul G. Haschak's webliography provides resources to help effect this change. "Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication -- Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations, Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items -- A Webliography" (E-JASL, vol. 7, no. 1, spring 2006) is available online at http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n01/haschak_p01.htm

E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship [ISSN 1704-8532] is an independent, professional, refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in the areas of academic and special librarianship. E-JASL is published by the Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP), Athabasca, Canada. For more information, contact: Paul Haschak, Executive Editor, Board President, and Founder, Linus A. Sims Memorial Library, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA USA;
email: phaschak@selu.edu 
Web:
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/


Connexions at Rice University --- http://cnx.rice.edu/
"Really Open Source," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, July 29, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/07/29/open

Few projects in academe have attracted the attention and praise in recent years of OpenCourseWare, a program in which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is making all of its course materials available online — free — for anyone to use.

In the four years since MIT launched the effort, use of the courseware has skyrocketed, and several other universities have created similar programs, assembling material from their own courses.

With less fanfare than MIT, Rice University has also been promoting a model for free, shared information that could be used by faculty members and students anywhere in the world. But the Rice program — Connexions — is different in key respects. It is assembling material from professors (and high school teachers) from anywhere, it is offering free software tools in addition to course materials, and it is trying to reshape the way academe uses both peer review and publishing. The project also has hopes of becoming a major curricular tool at community colleges.

“I was just frustrated with the status quo,” says Richard G. Baraniuk, in explaining how he started Connexions in 1999. “Peer review is severely broken. Publishing takes too long and then books are too expensive,” he says. “This is about cutting out the middlemen and truly making information free.”

“I was just frustrated with the status quo,” says Richard G. Baraniuk, in explaining how he started Connexions in 1999. “Peer review is severely broken. Publishing takes too long and then books are too expensive,” he says. “This is about cutting out the middlemen and truly making information free.”

Baraniuk is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, so many of the initial modules (which can either be materials for a course, a lecture or any other organizational unit) were in engineering and were submitted by Rice professors. But as Connexions has grown (from 200 modules in its second year to 2,300), it has attracted content in many disciplines and from many scholars.

There are materials for courses on art history, birds, business and graphic design. Offerings are particularly strong in music. And participating professors come from institutions including Cornell, Indiana State and Ohio State Universities, and the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Wisconsin at Madison. Professors from outside the United States have also started to use the site — it offers materials from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Cambridge.

Use of the materials has grown steadily — in May, more than 350,000 individuals used the site at some point, a mix of professors and students, about half of them on return visits.

Continued in article

 


Question
How popular are these open sharing sites?

June 26, 2006 message from Jagdish S. Gangolly [gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]

Bob,

I wanted to pitch for an article by my good friend and colleague, Terry Maxwell:

"Universities, Information Ownership, and Knowledge Communities"

The Journal of the Association of History and Computing http://www.mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/maxwell/maxwell.html

Here is the teaser:

_________________________________________

The recent decision by MIT to post the information from all its 2,000 courses free to the Web has generated tremendous excitement online, with more than 42 million hits recorded in the first month, according to MIT statistics 1.

The project, entitled OpenCourseWare, was initiated by MIT professors and funded by $11 million in grants from two foundations. As of March, 2004, 700 courses, encompassing all five schools and two-thirds of the faculty on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus, have been added to the site (ocw.mit.edu).

The project did not start as an effort to populate the information commons. On the contrary, in 1999, Robert Brown, MIT's provost, asked a faculty committee to study the idea for an online for-profit equivalent to the physical school.

However, after researching the issue, the faculty committee concluded that a profit-making venture was not viable, suggesting instead that the university and its faculty make its course material available for free online 2.

As reported by Charles Vest 2, the university's president, the OpenCourseWare initiative has had impacts both inside and outside the university. Within MIT, professors have begun using one another's materials to supplement their own teaching efforts, and are discovering interdisciplinary connections that could lead to new innovations inside the institution. Outside the university, MIT alumni, interested individuals, and other educators from around the world are using the courseware as a means to keep current in their fields and as models for new courses and curriculum.

The effort has generated interest in other areas, particularly among Intellectual Property legal commentators, who questioned the relationship between faculty-generated course notes and university property rights 3. Given the fact that the project is faculty-initiated and voluntary, intellectual property issues in the curricular area between the university and professors have not yet come to a head at MIT. However, the project has had to navigate the murky waters of copyright in other respects, particularly with regard to the negotiation for permissions with other information providers 4.

Nevertheless, the project still leaves open the question of the relative information rights of professors and universities.

In addition, it raises broader questions of the roles both of professional disciplines and the institutional structures developed to support them in a technological world in which traditional boundaries between information transformation, production, and dissemination are under strain. The following attempts to lay out some of the relevant issues, focusing particularly on the role of the university in an online world.

A Brief Look at the University in Society

Lying at the center of questions about university and academic information ownership is a deeply contested vision of the role of both scholarship and the institutions designed to support research. Do scholars labor primarily as individual authors and inventors, or are they members of what Enlightenment scholars termed a res publica, loosely defined as a republic of ideas operating beyond institutional and political boundaries? Are universities places of sanctuary for ideas, separated from the marketplace, or information dissemination institutions situated squarely in the market?

In her book "Who Owns Academic Work?," Corynne McSherry 5 traces the history of modern American universities and makes a strong case that these questions are largely unanswerable, because they assume a stability in self-conception that is historically missing. She argues that medieval universities and guilds were primarily envisioned as mechanisms for monopoly control over ideas, with the former focusing on professional control and the latter on control over invention. With the coming of the Enlightenment, voluntary academic societies sought to break down university monopolies on knowledge, constructing a meritocracy based on open communication and communal enquiry, and existing in cooperation with the growing commercial marketplace. At the institutional level, nineteenth-century German conceptions of the university, based on Kant's ideas in Conflict of the Faculties, envisioned the university as a place apart from the marketplace, yet poised to provide knowledge based on reason to political rulers. In the United States, German models of scholarly independence blended with the British tradition of liberal arts and informed citizenship, leading to a tension between disinterested scholarship and community. This admixture was further complicated by the presence of private schools funded through religious and other associations sitting cheek-and-jowl to land-grant public universities, developed to provide practical assistance in the development of new agricultural and mechanical techniques.

By the twentieth century, the split between theoretical and practical knowledge within universities was institutionalized through a separation of faculties of arts and science from engineering and professional school. At the same time, the continued compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines supported the rise of self-contained academic communities with different standards of scholarship and practice.

To support the engagement of the university in the marketplace, during the 1920's several American universities, particularly those with large engineering components, inaugurated small offices dedicated to technology transfer, particularly the processing of patent applications for professors. However, in a major shift, the end of the Second World War saw a major increase in government grant programs for basic research, insulating the academy from a necessity to rely on private funding sources and enhancing the traditional notion of universities as the preferred site for basic objective research separate from the commercial marketplace. At the same time, a greater integration of the university into public life occurred, with the provision of GI Bill grants to returning members of the military. University enrollments doubled during the next 15 years, doubling again within another 8 years.

By the 1990s, the position of universities within society began to shift again. Federal funding for research slowed, along with other public financing sources. Pressure developed to seek private financing through partnerships with foundations and corporations. Universities undertook attempts at more aggressive management of intellectual assets, often bringing them into conflict with academic communities. The rise of the Internet signaled the potential for developing new resource streams through the development of online courses and degrees, but no one was sure where the dividing line stood between individual and institutional ownership of course materials.

Academic publishing, long a backwater in the publishing industry, showed strong growth and consolidation as publishers embraced electronic dissemination and new models of product bundling.

Here is another Terry Maxwell piece:

Toward a Model of Information Policy Analysis: Speech as an Illustrative Example by Terrence A. Maxwell FM10 Openness http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/maxwell/

Jagdish

Jagdish S. Gangolly
email: gangolly@infotoc.com

Fax: 831-584-1896
skype: gangolly

URL: www.infotoc.com
Blog: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/gangolly

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on copyright issues and the horrible DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright


Educators who do not choose to freely share their course materials may try to sell them to other educators online --- http://teacherspayteachers.com/

And now we can harness the internet's strengths in order to bypass the educational publishing conglomerates and help ourselves. Here, we will pay each other for our teaching materials and evaluate one another's work with ratings and comments.

And the real winners will be our students. They deserve what our best can create -- you can post and find it here. Teachers paying teachers, an idea whose time has come.

June 29, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

TEACHERS SELL LESSON PLANS ONLINE

Entrepreneur and former public school teacher Paul Edelman has created Teacherspayteachers.com, an website where teachers can sell lesson plans that they have created. Sellers pay an annual fee, set their own prices, and 15% of each sale goes to Edelman. Currently, almost all of the lesson plans cover K-12-level subjects, but the site already includes some university-level materials covering math, history, and criminology. To view the site's lesson plan collection, go to http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/

For more information, read "High-School Teachers Can Buy and Sell Lessons at an eBay-Like Website." http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17043 

For critical comment on the service, see TeachBay. http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/2006/02/teachbay.html 

Jensen Comment
Capitalist that I am, I think there are too many externalities connected with education materials. I encourage that more consideration be given to free open-sharing of course materials.

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


OPEN ACCESS/SOURCE CONFERENCE PAPERS

The June 2006 issue of FIRST MONDAY features selected papers from "FM10 Openness: Code, Science, and Content," a conference held in May and sponsored by First Monday journal, the University of Illinois at Chicago University Library, and the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT). The theme of the conference was open access (in journals, communities, and science) and open source. Links to the online papers, along with citations to those not available online, are available at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/ 

First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA;
email: ejv@uic.edu ;
Web: http://firstmonday.dk/ 


June 27, 2006 tidbit from the Scholarly Communications Blog at the University of Illinois --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Academic Journal Trends

A survey of 400 academic journal publishers done by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers found that:

* 90 percent of the journals are now available online
* A fifth of the publishers are experimenting with open access journals
* 40 percent of publishers use previous print subscriptions as the base for pricing for bundles
* Most publishers make agreements for either one year or three years
* 91 percent of publishers make back volumes available online; 20 percent charge for access to back volumes
* 42 percent have established formal arrangements for the long-term preservation of their journals
* 83 percent require authors to transfer copyright in their articles to the publisher


Can History Be Open Source?

Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor at George Mason University and colleague of the institute, recently published a very good article on Wikipedia from the perspective of a historian. "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" as a historian's analysis complements the discussion from the important but different lens of journalists and scientists. Therefore, Rosenzweig focuses on, not just factual accuracy, but also the quality of prose and the historical context of entry subjects. He begins with in depth overview of how Wikipedia was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and describes their previous attempts to create a free online encyclopedia. Wales and Sanger's first attempt at a vetted resource, called Nupedia, sheds light on how from the very beginning of the project, vetting and reliability of authorship were at the forefront of the creators.

Rosenzweig adds to a growing body of research trying to determine the accuracy of Wikipedia, in his comparative analysis of it with other online history references, along similar lines of the Nature study. He compares entries in Wikipedia with Microsoft's online resource Encarta and American National Biography Online out of the Oxford University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies. Where Encarta is for a mass audience, American National Biography Online is a more specialized history resource. Rosenzweig takes a sample of 52 entries from the 18,000 found in ANBO and compares them with entries in Encarta and Wikipeida. In coverage, Wikipedia contain more of from the sample than Encarta. Although the length of the articles didn't reach the level of ANBO, Wikipedia articles were more lengthy than the entries than Encarta. Further, in terms of accuracy, Wikipedia and Encarta seem basically on par with each other, which confirms a similar conclusion (although debated) that the Nature study reached in its comparison of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The discussion gets more interesting when Rosenzweig discusses the effect of collaborative writing in more qualitative ways.


The Asian ambitious efforts on open courseware
September 9, 2005 message from Marc Jelitto [marc.jelitto@fernuni-hagen.de]

Dear Mister Jensen, searching for open courseware repositories, I found your article e-Education: The Shocking Future. http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI  . Maybe you are interested in the Asian ambitious efforts on open courseware. You find a collection on my (German) webpage: http://marcjelitto.de/lernobje/kursrep.htm 

Greetings from Germany Marc

-- Marc Jelitto, M.A.

Projekt CampusContent FernUniversitaet in Hagen Technologie und Gruenderzentrum (TGZ) Universitaetsstr. 11 58084 Hagen, Germany

Raum C05, 3. Stock, Block C

Tel.: (+49) 23 31 / 98 7 - 47 96 Fax: (+49) 23 31 / 98 7 - 3 97 Handy: 01 73 / 7 46 92 94 (D2)

http://www.campuscontent.org/ 

http://marcjelitto.de/    http://evaluieren.de/ 


Bravo MIT:  In the spirit of sharing in the academy:  Just proves once again that givers get in return
The gist is that four years into what was originally to be a 10-year, $100 million project, MIT has put nearly 1,000 of its 1,800 courses online, and is on track to finish the work of building the site by 2008 at a cost of $35 million. (The university is just beginning the work of estimating the costs of sustaining the OpenCourseWare project in a “steady state” once the buildout is finished, but expects, once the foundation money dries up, to absorb most of the annual costs in as its regular budget.) The site gets about 400,000 unique visits each month, or about 20,000 a day. The individual course pages contain items commonly available on other universities’ sites like syllabi and calendars, but also more unusual features like videotaped lectures, laboratory simulations, lecture notes (either provided by the instructor or taken by staff members of OpenCourseWare) and even exams — sometimes with answers. MIT “scrubs” the material to make sure that it either complies with its Creative Commons intellectual property license or is removed from the site.The university’s project has spawned sites in Spain and China that are providing native language versions of some MIT courses (with a third, still unendorsed by MIT, beginning in Taiwan, and another expected to be announced in Japan next month). 
Scott Jaschik, "Spreading the Wealth," Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/07/mit

Faculty participation in the MIT venture is voluntary, but about two-thirds of MIT professors have their courses online now. By offering to do much of the work for professors, the OpenCourseWare effort has managed to limit the time faculty members typically spend on getting materials for a course online to under five hours.

And peer pressure is building, Margulies says, not just to participate, but to bolster the look and content of their courses. “There has been a wholesale improvement of the materials,” she says. Some of that movement is driven by faculty members’ “own competitive pride of looking at what their colleagues are doing,” she said, and some results from other sources. “Students are asking faculty members why their courses aren’t up.”

Margulies gushes, and almost blushes, when she reads some of the ways users of the site have described it in e-mail messages to the OpenCourseWare staff: “Eighth wonder of the world,” “coolest thing on the Internet,” “worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize,” “like falling in love.”

“We’ve heard all of those hundreds of times,” Margulies says. “Well, except for ‘like falling in love’ — we’ve only gotten that one once. We’re a bit concerned about that person.”

It has also helped encourage dozens of other colleges in the United States and worldwide to join what Margulies calls “this new movement toward open sharing of knowledge and information.” Major efforts are under way at Utah State University, Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and Carnegie Mellon University, among others.


Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


Update January 11, 2005

Reminiscent of the kids in the back of the car on your family's vacation, the persistent question about this technology (Learning Management Systems seems to be, "Are we there yet?"
Ira Fuchs, "Learning Management Systems," Syllabus, July/August 2004 --- http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=9675 

Question
If you know what OKI is, do you also know what SAKAI stands for?

Answer
OKI stands for the Open Knowledge Initiative and DSpace spearheaded by MIT in conjunction with various leading universities (See below)

The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement, almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review some of the course materials, but not take the class.  And not just a few classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years. Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500 MIT courses had been posted on the Web.
Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718 

The main Open Knowledge Initiative site at MIT is at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 

In the first week on the Web, the OCW site received more than 13 million visits from users, about 52 percent from outside of the United States. The OCW team also processed more than 2,000 e-mails in those first days, more than 75 percent of them supportive of the project. The remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical questions, inquiries about specific course offerings, and questions about content. Less than 2 percent of those e-mails were negative.
"Open Access to World-Class Knowledge," by Anne H. Margulies, Syllabus, March 2003, pp. 16-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7360 

"SAKAI," The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, December 2003 --- http://juicy.mellon.org/RIT/MellonOSProjects/SAKAI/ 

SAKAI
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

A grant was made to the University of Michigan, for use by the SAKAI consortium to support the development of an open source, feature-rich course management system for higher education. Participating institutions have agreed to place the new learning management system into production when the system is completed.

Project Website

The University of Michigan, Indiana University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their enormous investments in educational software to create an integrated set of open source tools for the benefit of higher education. The new open source software, known as SAKAI, aims to draw the “best-of-breed” from among existing open source course management systems and related tools: uPortal, CHEF, Stellar, Encore, Course Tools, Navigo Assessment, OnCourse, OneStart, Eden Workflow, and Courseworks.

MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) produced a comprehensive framework for course management systems rather than a production system. The SAKAI effort is the logical next step: the creation of a comprehensive course management system and an underlying portal framework that draw from existing efforts and integrate the finest available modules and approaches.

The goal is an economically sustainable approach to high quality open source learning software for higher education. The approach promises to overcome two main barriers that have consistently impeded such collaborative efforts: (1) unique local architectures, including heterogeneous software, software interoperability requirements between systems, and diverse user interfaces that hinder the portability of software among institutions; and (2) timing differences in institutional funding and mobilization that reduce synergy and result in fragmented, often incomplete offerings and weak interoperability.

This consortium hopes to overcome these barriers by relying on OKI service definitions that integrate otherwise heterogeneous local architectures and enable the mobility of software. In addition, the advanced course management system will use as its core-building block an upgraded version of the Foundation-supported and highly successful uPortal software (Version 3), a powerful, open source portal environment that will integrate a portal specification needed for tool interoperability. The institutions are also committed to the “synchronization of institutional clocks,” essentially rolling out the new applications on the same schedule to maximize the synergy of the effort.

In concert with the development effort, SAKAI is creating a partners program that invites other institutions to contribute $10,000 per year for three years. Partner institutions will experiment with production versions of the software in 2004 and 2005 and investigate sustainability options. They will receive early access to project information; early code releases for the SAKAI framework, portal, services, and tools; invitations to partner meetings; and technical training workshops. Contributions from an expected minimum of 20 institutions will support a community development staff member to coordinate partner activities, a developer to interact with partner technical staff, another staff member to coordinate documentation, a support staff member to respond to inquiries, and an administrative staff member to coordinate partner activities and facilitate responses.

Continued in article


MIT's DSpace Explained
In 1978, Loren Kohnfelder invented digital certificates while working on his MIT undergraduate thesis. Today, digital certificates are widely used to distribute the public keys that are the basis of the Internet's encryption system. This is important stuff! But when I tried to find an online copy of Kohnfelder's 1978 manuscript, I came up blank. According to the MIT Libraries' catalog, there were just two copies in the system: a microfiche somewhere in Barker Engineering Library, and a "noncirculating" copy in the Institute Archives . . . DSpace is a long-term, searchable digital archive. It creates unchanging URLs for stored materials and automatically backs up one institution's archives to another's. Today, DSpace is being used by 79 institutions, with more on the way. But as my little story about Kohnfelder's thesis demonstrates, archiving data is only half the problem. In order to be useful, archives must also enable researchers to find what they are looking for. Sending e-mail to the author worked for me, but it's not a good solution for the masses. Long-term funding is another problem that DSpace needs to solve. "The libraries are seeking ways of stabilizing support for DSpace to make it easier to sustain as it gets bigger over time," says MacKenzie Smith, the Libraries' associate director for technology. Today, development on the DSpace system is funded by short-term grants. That's great for doing research, but it's not a good model for a facility that's destined to be the long-term memory of the Institute's research output. Says Smith: "We need to know how to support an operation like this in very lean times."
Simson Garfinkel, "MIT's DSpace Explained," MIT's Technology Review, July 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/feature_mit.asp?trk=nl


Open Courseware Initiative from University of the Western Cape ---
http://elearn.nettelafrica.org/index.php?module=splashscreen 

A Free Content and Free and Open Courseware implementation strategy for the University of the Western Cape

Tertiary institutions the world over are recognizing the value of freely sharing educational curricula and content, collaborating in their further development and extension, and doing so under the umbrella of free and unrestricted access to knowledge. The word “free” in this case refers to liberty, not to absence of price, although absence of direct price is a common side-benefit of liberty, just as it is in the software arena.

One of the more mature programs in this area is the Open Courseware Initiative (OCI) run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA, but many other institutions have similar initiatives and many more are now creating open courseware initiatives of their own.

UWC has been invited to join a global consortium of institutions involved in OCI, membership of which has no fees or requirements other than a commitment to OCI principles. Since the notion of Open Content features in our Integrated Information Strategy and our E-Learning Strategy, and UWC is widely known and respected for its work in Free and Open Source Software, the time is opportune for us to create this implementation strategy and to use it to build a UWC OCI-type of initiative.

The emphasis in philosophy of Free Content is on social good through promoting collaborative development and the adaptation and expansion of content whereas the philosophy of Open Content is access while protecting the author’s wishes to restrict access or usage to certain conditions. All Free Content is Open Content, but not all Open Content is Free Content.

Open Courseware: Open Content that is arranged in Courses and made available in a structured manner via the Internet. All Free Courseware is Open Courseware, but not all Open Courseware is Free Courseware.

 

For example, visit the NetTom Financial Analysis site at http://cbdd.wsu.edu/kewlcontent/cdoutput/TOM505/index.htm

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 Outcomes Chapter 2 [4]

Chapter 4 Outcomes Chapter 3 [10]

Chapter 5 Outcomes Chapter 5 [12]

Chapter 6 Outcomes Chapter 6 [16]

Chapter 7 Outcomes Chapter 7 [20]

Chapter 8 Outcomes Chapter 8 [23]

Chapter 9 Introduction to Part 2 [27]

Chapter 10 Outcomes Chapter 10 [28]

Chapter 11 Outcomes Chapter 11: Fundamental Concept in Financial Management [32]

Chapter 12 Outcomes Chapter 12: Sources of Funding for Transport Sector [35]

Chapter 13 Outcomes Chapter 13: Risk Analysis [40]

Other content Outcomes Readings Glossary


MathWorks at http://www.mathworks.com/
This software is not free, but there are many free helpers here.

Finance Helpers --- http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/finance/
Note the links to examples on the left side of the screen.


Question
How to computer present values with cash flows at regular or irregular time intervals with equal or unequal payments?

Answer --- http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/finance/fintut21113.html

The toolbox includes functions to compute the present or future value of cash flows at regular or irregular time intervals with equal or unequal payments: fvfix, fvvar, pvfix, and pvvar. The -fix functions assume equal cash flows at regular intervals, while the -var functions allow irregular cash flows at irregular periods.

Now compute the net present value of the sample income stream for which you computed the internal rate of return. This exercise also serves as a check on that calculation because the net present value of a cash stream at its internal rate of return should be zero.

Jensen Comment
Even if you do not have the MatLab Toolbox installed, you can program the illustrations in Excel.


From one of the leading law school advocates of open sharing
Many of Eben Moglen's papers on patents and copyrights can be downloaded from http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

My good friend John Howland, a professor of computer science, recommends these particular papers for starters:

Professor Moglen runs a blog called "Freedom Now" at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog
Entries are relatively infrequent and date back to April 2000
There are also a few links to audio and video presentations.

Bob Jensen's thread son copyright law and the evil DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright


Ira Fuchs, "Learning Management Systems," Syllabus, July/August 2004 --- http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=9675 
A dialog between Syllabus Magazine (S) and Ira Fuchs (IHF)

OKI focused on this framework and the delivery of a proof of concept, meaning a system or a pair of systems that could demonstrate this interoperability. And that’s in fact what MIT and Stanford achieved.

S: So OKI focused on the framework… how does the Sakai project build on that?

IHF: The Sakai project starts out where OKI left off by taking the architecture and the OSIDs [Open Services Interface Definitions] and fusing them with the best of breed development—learning management system development—from four major institutions: Stanford, MIT, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan. The purpose is to create a world-class production-ready system that will be open, extensible, and scalable. And, further, a very important aspect of Sakai is that the four institutions have agreed, in writing, as a condition of the grant, that they will bring this new system into production on each of their campuses at the same time, approximately a year from now. The goal is really nothing less than delivering an LMS that colleges and universities can use and extend with modules written at other schools, at their own school, or licensed from commercial vendors.

S: Do you think learning management systems will be considered a core technology for colleges and universities going forward? And will open, interoperable systems prevail and be in common use? Are we there yet?

IHF:I think learning management systems are a core technology already, and that fact is, I think, both good and bad. It’s good because learning management systems have helped the faculty and students enormously. They make course information and content available on the Web, and at the same time improve communication among students and faculty. But because the LMS is already so important to the functioning of many schools, it’s going to be hard to move away from the proprietary systems they may be running today and to begin using open, collaboratively developed and maintained systems. I think open systems are going to prevail, but it’s going to take time.

S: So, in a sense, we’re not really there yet…What are some of the steps that could move all of this forward?

IHF: That’s true, we’re not there yet. But Sakai is about to deliver a beta release. The concept is to leverage the work of many, many institutions to ultimately build a system that most, if not all, institutions will want to run. But that’s not the case yet. Today, you have a plethora of choices among learning management systems. There are sites on the Web listing dozens of them. But for institutions seeking to move away from their current LMS, there is a cost to change. The cost comes in many forms, not the least of which is that people grow accustomed to an interface. And often they’ve converted content to be used in that system. So whatever we come up with is going to have to account for and minimize those costs of change.

One way to minimize them is, for example, in the case of the user interface, to have what are commonly known as skins. These are modifiable user interfaces that are selectable by an institution, or sometimes even by the end user, to make the system look the way they want it to look. We’re also going to need to have tools to facilitate the transformation of content from one system to another, to export it and then import it into another system. So we’re going to have to do what we can to minimize the cost of converting from one system to another.

S: Is interoperability among installed systems a key goal for OKI?

IHF: Absolutely, that’s what OKI is all about. The basis for all of this is to have a set of standards, of common interfaces, APIs or OSIDs. I think this is the right time, because people have learned, first of all, that it’s too expensive to try to develop it all on their own. Even the biggest institutions—such as Michigan, the Indiana University, Stanford, and MIT—have decided that building and maintaining these complex systems on their own just doesn’t make sense any more. At the same time, the notable, visible success of some of the open source projects—the big ones like Linux, Apache, or MySQL—have proven that it’s possible to develop something in the open and get people to commit to maintain and enhance the software.

Perhaps the most important fact to remember is that the industry we represent, higher education, is unique in our willingness to collaborate and to share our labors, such as we have in this IT space. There are a lot of smart people in each of these institutions, and if we can harness them behind the same projects and use a set of standards, starting off with a good base piece of software such as I think Sakai will deliver, then we can do wonders.

S: What about standards for metadata? Is that something to consider along with the interface standards?

IHF: Sure it is, and that is something, of course, that the library community has been working on for a long time. What did someone once say?: “The wonderful thing about standards is there are always so many to choose from…” And we do have many metadata standards. But I think that they will converge, at least in limited domains. When it comes to learning object repositories, it’s going to lead to a set of metadata schema, metadata standards that will not satisfy everyone—that’s probably impossible—but will be good enough. Many of the Mellon-funded projects—OCW, Sakai, LionShare at Penn State, Chandler—are all trying to converge on a common standard for metadata.

S: Will learning management systems change significantly in the next few years? Have they been on the right track, and are they flexible enough to be used universally?

IHF: Learning management systems have come a long way, but there’s still much that can be done to improve usability in particular, especially to make it easier to publish or create new material. It still takes too much expertise to create attractive materials from the notes, images, and programs that faculty use to teach a course. The proliferation of learning management systems suggests that no one system is sufficiently feature-rich, or adequately flexible and extensible enough to meet everyone’s needs or even most institutions’ requirements. But I hope to see that change in the next couple of years with the advent of Sakai.

The proliferation of learning management systems suggests that no one system is sufficiently feature-rich, or adequately flexible and extensible enough to meet everyone’s needs or even most institutions’ requirements.

S: Are new development tools needed?

IHF: Yes, I think we need authoring tools that lower the effort threshold dramatically for faculty to take digitized materials and create something esthetically pleasing as well as effective for their teaching purposes. There are tools, but we have to make sure that they are going to be compatible with all of the other pieces that we’re putting together based on standards. Of course, they’re not yet very compatible, but how could they be? They were built at some point in the past when people weren’t worried about that.

S: What are the pieces needed so that learning management systems can become more easily or better integrated with other parts of the campus information system, either on the academic or on the administrative side?

IHF: We need the middleware layer that translates the standards, such as the OSIDs, for the actual campus infrastructures. For example, OKI defines a set of OSIDs for authentication and authorization, and we want developers to be able to use those OSIDs, so that the systems will be interoperable. However, just about every campus has some authentication system already in place, whether it’s User ID/Password, or Kerberos, or Shibboleth. So there needs to be code which translates the calls that use the OSIDs, to the actual campus mechanisms. This is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Why create the middleware unless developers are using the standards? Why should developers use the standards unless the systems they are writing for have implemented the necessary middleware? But I think it’s going to happen.

S: How do portals fit in with all of this?

IHF: There’s another project, which was funded by the Mellon Foundation at almost the same time as OKI that has been very, very successful—that’s uPortal. It’s in use at scores of institutions now. It is the primary enterprise portal at those institutions. So when you ask the question about how to make it easier to integrate the LMS with other parts of the campus information system, I think uPortal is going to play an important role—and Sakai is built on top of uPortal.

S: Will libraries become better integrated with the LMS?

IHF: I think they must become better integrated in-so-far as making it as transparent as possible to the end user—faculty or the student—as to where the information used by the LMS is coming from or how to search for it. And that’s a significant challenge since there are many potential sources for the data used in an LMS. A course can use data from online publishers, from the campus library, from another library, from the campus repository, or even from the faculty member’s local or server-based files. With the emergence of peer-to-peer tools, such as LionShare, the data could even come from the personal machines of individuals throughout the world. Somehow we need to make all of this distributed information available in the learning management system without the user having to learn so many different interfaces.


There are many of MIT's shared course materials (syllabi, lecture notes, etc.) that are available free on line in virtually all academic disciplines covered at MIT --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 
There are quite a few new and updated courses in the database.

The Sloan School of Management shares undergraduate and graduate course materials at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/index.htm 


 

Update on March 3, 2004

Knowledge Wants to Be Openly Shared:  One Day We Will Beat the Selfishness Out of Academe
"DSpace partners led by MIT have bet the farm." 
(See Below)

 

Why do some leading universities openly share knowledge while a few other leading universities go so far as to claim property rights over the notes students take in courses?  Why do some share instructor course notes, software, and  research papers without charge whereas others charge for every word written by a faculty member?

 

 

My really good friends in the Computer Science Department invited me to dinner on March 2 with our Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Hal Abelson from MIT --- http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/%7Ehal/hal.html 
The following are more-or-less footnotes to the above home page (note the free video lectures):

 

Trinity University was fortunate to be one of eight universities on this year's schedule for Professor Abelson --- http://www.pbk.org/advocacy/visitscholar/abelson.htm#schedule 

 

Hal Abelson is professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is winner of several teaching awards, including the IEEE's Booth Education Award, cited for his contributions to the teaching of undergraduate computer science. His research at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory focuses on "amorphous computing," an effort to create programming technologies that can harness the power of the new computing substrates emerging from advances in microfabrication and molecular biology. He is also engaged in the interaction of law, policy, and technology as they relate to societal tensions sparked by the growth of the Internet, and is active in projects at MIT and elsewhere to help bolster our intellectual commons.

 

A founding director of the Free Software Foundation and of Creative Commons, he serves as a consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology and co-head of MIT's Council on Educational Technology.

Professor Abelson is one of the founding fathers of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI/OCW) and DSpace knowledge sharing databases that are probably the leading programs for free and open sharing of knowledge and education materials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

 

He is also the Director of Public Knowledge --- http://www.publicknowledge.org/ 

 

OKI and DSpace

The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement, almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review some of the course materials, but not take the class.  And not just a few classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years. Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500 MIT courses had been posted on the Web.
Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718 

The main Open Knowledge Initiative site at MIT is at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 

In the first week on the Web, the OCW site received more than 13 million visits from users, about 52 percent from outside of the United States. The OCW team also processed more than 2,000 e-mails in those first days, more than 75 percent of them supportive of the project. The remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical questions, inquiries about specific course offerings, and questions about content. Less than 2 percent of those e-mails were negative.
"Open Access to World-Class Knowledge," by Anne H. Margulies, Syllabus, March 2003, pp. 16-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7360 

 

In another program for storage and sharing of knowledge, Professor Abelson and his colleagues have persuaded leading universities to participate in another program called DSpace or the Self-Managing Library.  The participating universities now include such giants as Stanford University, University of Chicago, and other leading research universities of the world --- https://hpds1.mit.edu/index.jsp 

 


John Schmitz from the University of Illinois writes as follows at http://web.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/john/kellogg.html 

 

All these can be subsumed by the biggest issue that does not seem to be more than a blip on the land grant radar, the highly visible trend called institutional repositories. For example, the DSpace project is building an institutional repository for public use, aiming at posting as much of their content as possible. Extension services and land grants routinely post free, online content, but the DSpace partners led by MIT have bet the farm. Will the extension service create institutional repositories too? How far do the land grants go? DSpace, Merlot, and other 'open content' efforts cannot help but appear as paradigmatic land grant projects. But we're apparently not at the table.

 


Student Derivatives and Course Notes:  The Gray Zone of Knowledge Sharing

 

"In the meantime, University of California faculty generally own their copyright-protected property (see the UC Policy on Copyright Ownership, August 19, 1992) and, if concerned about notes being distributed on the web, have rights to stop it." (See below)

 

 

 

"Student Notes on the Web," Business Contracts Office, UC Davis --- http://vcadmin.ucdavis.edu/contracts/Student%20Notes.html 

 

First, the October 1, 1999, issue of The Chronicle for Higher Education contains an article entitled "Putting Class Notes on the Web: Are Companies Stealing Lectures?" Interestingly, one of the companies discussed in the article is also the one prompting the current round of complaints - StudentU.com. If you do not have access to The Chronicle in your office you may wish to borrow this issue from a colleague. The article, while not going into depth on the legal issues involved, makes clear that many institutions of higher education across the nation are facing this same problem.

The issue of making individual student notes available to others is not new to the University of California, of course. Here at Davis ASUCD has provided the "Classical Notes" service to UCD students for some time, but authorization has not been a complaint as note-takers are required to obtain the written permission of the instructor. In 1969 a UCLA instructor sued a commercial publisher for hiring a student to take notes for publication without the instructor’s permission, and the court held that such action was a violation of the California common law copyright (California Civil Code 980 et. seq.) as well as an invasion of privacy, and both enjoined the company from continuing while ordering compensatory and punitive damages. (Williams v. Weisser (1969) 273 C.A.2d 726.) This settled the issue in California at the time.

However, the world-wide web and the value of E-commerce have brought the problem back to California in the last few years, likely because the individuals (often students) who are starting these nationwide companies are not aware of state laws, instead operating under the assumption that the federal copyright law governs all. I believe it is helpful to understand how federal law does not clearly protect instructors in this situation. Federal copyright protection of the rights to make copies, make derivative works, distribute, perform publicly, and display, applies to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, from which they can be perceived, reproduced or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." (17 USCA section 102.) Although the federal law was written long before the Internet was conceived, its application is no different whether applied to paper class notes or the Internet version posting of them.

Certainly, no one will dispute that federal law creates a copyright interest in the instructor’s written/printed lecture notes, to the extent they are original work. If an instructor is reading or reciting from his/her lecture notes, he/she is exercising his/her performance rights under copyright law, and a duplication of that performance by taking notes so accurate as to allow a repeat performance would be a copyright violation. However, most instructors do not lecture so precisely from their notes, although portions such as a poem or critical passage may be read. If the words being said in a lecture are not otherwise "fixed" the public performance does not of itself constitute publication (17 USCA section 101, definition of publication), so does not trigger federal copyright protection. Even if it did, in a federal court case that looked at the applicability of copyright to course lectures, the court held that most statements made in a lecture can be categorized as facts or ideas that do not belong to anyone, neither of which is copyrightable. (University of Florida v. KPB, Inc (d.b.a. "A Notes"), 89 F.3d 773; 1196 U.S. LEXIS 18778 (11th Cir. 1996)).

The argument being made by the web-based services, however, is that even if the lecture is protected by copyright under federal law, each note-taker is merely writing down his/her perceptions of the instructor’s exercise of his/her copyrights. Rather than violating the existing copyright, the note-taker is creating a new original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium, and, as the author, can exercise any of the rights provided by federal copyright law, including transferring ownership to a note-distribution service. The services have been very careful not to duplicate class handouts or syllabi, which would clearly be a copyright violation. The merit of this argument has not been tested in court. One response to this might be that the note-taker is creating a derivative work rather than a new work. However, if so, every college student who takes notes is creating a derivative work without express authorization of the instructor, leading some campus attorneys to advise instructors to begin expressly authorizing notes made for personal use to differentiate notes for personal use from notes for sale.

Fortunately, we don’t have to get into this can of federal worms so long as the California common law copyright continues to be good law and is not preempted by federal law to the contrary. In the meantime, UC faculty generally own their copyright-protected property (see the UC Policy on Copyright Ownership, August 19, 1992) and, if concerned about notes being distributed on the web, have rights to stop it. Since an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, instructors can announce at the first class, and put in every syllabus, on their course web-sites, and in/on any other teacher-student communication, a statement to the effect of:

Copyright (author’s name) (year). All federal and state copyrights reserved for all original material presented in this course through any medium, including lecture or print. Individuals are prohibited from being paid for taking, selling, or otherwise transferring for value, personal class notes made during this course to any entity without the express written permission of (author). In addition to legal sanctions, students found in violation of these prohibitions may be subject to University disciplinary action.

Bob Jensen's comments about sharing are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/AAAaward_files/AAAaward02.htm 


The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement, almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review some of the course materials, but not take the class.  And not just a few classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years. Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500 MIT courses had been posted on the Web.
Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718 

The main Open Knowledge Initiative site at MIT is at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 

Also see http://web.mit.edu/oki/specs/index.html 

OKI and OCW:  Free sharing of courseware from MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities.
"CourseWork: An Online Problem Set and Quizzing Tool," by Charles Kerns, Scott Stocker, and Evonne Schaeffer, Syllabus, June 2001, 27-29.  I don't think the article is available online, although archived table of contents for the June edition is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/magazine.asp?month=6&year=2001 

A Web-based learning support tool that helps faculty assess student understanding will soon be a component of the Open Knowledge infrastructure under the development at Stanford, MIT, and other universities.

THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE (OKI)

MIT, along with its principal partner Stanford University, has launched The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), an ambitious project to develop a modular, easy-to-use, Web-based teaching environment for assembling, delivering, and accessing educational resources and activities.  The initiative emerged from the realization that our institutions were repeatedly building specialized Web applications that shared common requirements for enterprise data and services.  Existing commercial products still require extensive customization to integrate into student information, authentication, and authorization systems, and related data stores.  Faculty using these tools frequently complain that while sometimes helpful, they require extra effort, forcing them to impose their style of teaching upon the rigidly structured course system format.  And changing the color of the screen or shape of the buttons isn't the level of customization that really supports different pedagogical approaches.

What is OKI?

OKI is about tools, a system, and a community.  It is not a new browser, document editor, or pre-packaged content.  OKI tools are the elements that enable basic teaching on the Web and that support specialized discipline-specific needs, pedagogical methods, or group logistics.

OKI is being developed with careful attention to IMS, SCORM, AICC, Dublin Core, and related standards efforts.  In keeping with another recently announced MIT project, the OpenCourseWare Initiative (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw-facts.html) which will make content from MIT courses available on the Web for free, OKI is based on an open source licensing model (there are  no proprietary components).  It allows the tools, no matter who creates them, to:

  • Save information about learners, subjects, and teaching methods in the same format
  • Share information
  • Access other systems like the library, the registrar, and authentication and authorization systems
  • Extend the system; anyone can add new features and new tools.

OKI is being built by institutions that have dealt with large open systems in academic settings.  Besides MIT and Stanford, core initial collaborating institutions include the Dartmouth College, North Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin.

Recalling the vitality and success of another open source effort, the development of the Linux operating system, OKI hopes to build a community of developers, teachers, educational technologists, librarians, and researchers who will collaborate to continually improve and extend the OKI learning management system.  OKI is committed to working with its partners and early adopters to establish a dynamic open source framework for continued development, support, and training.

Getting Involved

Information about the progress of OKI can be found on the OKI Web site:  http://web.mit.edu/oki .  For updates subscribe to the list oki-announce@mit.edu using the form on the OKI Web site.  If you'd like to contribute more directly to this effort, e-mail oki-suggest@mit.edu.

 


October 2003 update on shared course materials from the OKI project at MIT --- http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/index.htm 

Also see http://web.mit.edu/oki/specs/index.html 

Most business disciplines seem to be cooperating in this sharing effort except for accounting.  I can't find any shared course materials from financial accounting professors. However, there are two accounting courses:

15.518

Taxes and Business Strategy Fall 2002  (Plesko is an accounting prof.)

15.521

Management Accounting and Control Spring 2003  (Weber is an accounting prof

 

Bob Jensen's threads on OKI are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

Available Courses
MIT Course # Course Title
15.012 Applied Macro and International Economics Spring 2002
15.053 Introduction to Optimization Spring 2002
15.057 Systems Optimization Spring 2003
15.060 Data, Models, and Decisions Fall 2002
15.062 Data Mining Spring 2003
15.067 Competitive Decision-Making and Negotiation Spring 2003
15.073J Logistical and Transportation Planning Methods Fall 2001
15.081J Introduction to Mathematical Programming Fall 2002
15.084J Non-linear Programming Spring 2003
15.094 Systems Optimization: Models and Computation Spring 2002
15.224 Global Markets, National Politics and the Competitive Advantage of Firms Spring 2003
15.269A Literature, Ethics and Authority Spring 2003
15.269B Literature, Ethics and Authority Fall 2002
15.279 Management Communication for Undergraduates Fall 2002
15.280 Communication for Managers Fall 2002
15.289 Communication Skills for Academics Spring 2002
15.301 Managerial Psychology Laboratory Spring 2003
15.310 Managerial Psychology Laboratory Spring 2003
15.343 Managing Transformations in Work, Organizations, and Society Spring 2002
15.351 Managing the Innovation Process Fall 2002
15.389 Global Entrepreneurship Lab Fall 2002
15.394 Designing and Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization Spring 2003
15.426J Real Estate Finance and Investment Fall 2002
15.427J Real Estate Finance & Investments II: Macro-Level Analysis & Advanced Topics Spring 2003
15.433 Investments Spring 2003
15.518 Taxes and Business Strategy Fall 2002
15.521 Management Accounting and Control Spring 2003
15.565J Integrating eSystems & Global Information Systems Spring 2002
15.566 Information Technology as an Integrating Force in Manufacturing Spring 2003
15.568A Management Information Systems Spring 2003
15.578J Integrating eSystems & Global Information Systems Spring 2002
15.598 IT and Business Transformation Spring 2003
15.615 Law for the Entrepreneur and Manager Spring 2003
15.628 Patents, Copyrights, and the Law of Intellectual Property Spring 2003
15.647 Law for the Entrepreneur and Manager Spring 2003
15.649 The Law of Mergers and Acquisitions Spring 2003
15.660 Strategic HR Management Spring 2003
15.665B Power and Negotiation Fall 2002
15.678J Political Economy I: Theories of the State and the Economy Fall 2002
15.760A Operations Management Spring 2002
15.769 Operations Strategy Spring 2003
15.783J Product Design and Development Spring 2002
15.792J Proseminar in Manufacturing Fall 2002
15.795 Seminar in Operations Management Fall 2002
15.810 Introduction to Marketing Fall 2001
15.812 Marketing Management Fall 2002
15.821 Listening to the Customer Fall 2002
15.822 Strategic Marketing Measurement Fall 2002
15.834 Marketing Strategy Spring 2003
15.835 Entrepreneurial Marketing Spring 2002
15.902 Strategic Management I Fall 2002
15.912 Technology Strategy Spring 2003
15.928 Strategic Management and Consulting Proseminar: Theoretical Foundations Spring 2003
15.963 Organizations as Enacted Systems: Learning, Knowing and Change Fall 2002
15.974 Leadership Lab Spring 2003

From Syllabus News on October 7, 2003

WebCT Demonstrates Support for Open Knowledge Standards

Course management system firm WebCT said last week it had successfully prototyped an application using the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) to support interoperability among higher education applications. In the demo, the WebCT Vista academic enterprise system automatically synchronized calendars with Microsoft Outlook using the OKI authentication and scheduling OSIDs, or APIs, to exchange data. This would enable both calendars to be simultaneously updated by updating one.

The OKI aims to encourage local innovations that can be shared across campuses and facilitate the use of new technologies without destabilizing the overall environment.


Update September 2003

MIT's Open Source is becoming a huge academic sharing success 
From Ho Chi Minh City to Nashville, Tennessee, students are flocking to MIT's new program that posts about 2,000 classes on the Web, for free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open-source style.  See MIT Everywhere, Wired Magazine, September 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html 

Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style.


Update March 17, 2003

MIT OpenCourseWare (Open Knowledge Initiative OKI and DSpace) Shares Lessons from Pilot Project.

"Open Access to World-Class Knowledge," by Anne H. Margulies, Syllabus, March 2003, pp. 16-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7360 

A student in Johannesburg, South Africa. An educator in Wiesbaden, Germany. Ethiopian refugees trying to finish an engineering education cut short by civil war. These are just a few of the people who have tapped the potential of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, a two-year-old effort to make available original course materials from all five of MIT's schools to students around the world.

Started by an MIT faculty committee charged with providing guidance on how MIT should position itself in the distance and eLearning environment, the OCW project supports the university's interest in contributing to the "shared intellectual commons" in higher education. "OpenCourseWare combines two things: traditional openness and outreach, and the democratizing influence of American education, with the ability of the Web to make vast amounts of information instantly available," says MIT President Charles M. Vest.

On Sept. 30, 2002, the pilot site of OCW was launched. It offers users the opportunity to see and use course materials from 50 MIT subjects, representing 20 individual academic disciplines and MIT's schools of Architecture, Science, Engineering, the Sloan School of Management, and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

In the first week on the Web, the OCW site received more than 13 million visits from users, about 52 percent from outside of the United States. The OCW team also processed more than 2,000 e-mails in those first days, more than 75 percent of them supportive of the project. The remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical questions, inquiries about specific course offerings, and questions about content. Less than 2 percent of those e-mails were negative.

Govert van Drimmelen, a university student in Johannesburg, South Africa, found the video lectures of MIT Professor Gil Strang, in Course 18.06: Linear Algebra, compelling. "I have watched some of the video lectures from mathematics course 18.06. The lectures are wonderful and having these available over the Internet from South Africa is a great privilege," Van Drimmelen wrote the OCW team by e-mail. "Please continue with this excellent project and accept my sincere thanks for the efforts. Making the quality education of MIT more broadly available will be a valued contribution to global education."

Dorothee Gaile, an educator and trainer of teachers in Wiesbaden, Germany, wrote that as OCW continued to add more subjects, it would become a remarkable resource for educators around the world. "As a teacher of English at both high school and University of Applied Science level in Germany, I very much appreciate having free access to the tremendous amount of knowledge MIT is currently putting on the Web. Congratulations on this idea and a warm thank you."

And Timothy Choe, a volunteer with an organization called Project Detour in Africa, immediately recognized OCW's potential in developing countries: "I recently spent time with a group of Ethiopian refugees, living in Kenya, who will benefit greatly from this initiative. They are students in Project Detour, an effort initiated to encourage their continuing education while living in a country where they are not granted access to the educational system. Many are Ethiopian-trained engineers, whose academic pursuits were cut short by political turmoil. Just thought you might appreciate another example of how this initiative will benefit the world's community of knowledge seekers."

In people like these, OCW found its intended audience—educators from around the world who can adapt the course materials and learning objects embedded in online lecture notes into their own pedagogy, and self-learners who will be able to draw on the materials for self-study or supplementary use.

"I read about your initiative in the NY Times online and have to say this is one of the most exciting applications of the Internet to date," wrote Charles Bello. Based in Nigeria, Bello is the Web master for www.clickafrique.com, an African Web portal. "I look forward to taking advantage of this opportunity to ‘take a dip' in MIT's enormous reservoir of human intellect."

Building a Sustainable Platform
For the pilot phase, the pages were built using what Cecilia d'Oliveira, OCW's Technology Director, calls "brute-force HTML." Using Web content editors such as Macromedia Inc.'s DreamWeaver, a team of programmers from MIT and consulting firm Sapient Corp. built and designed the first 32 subjects. Over the course of summer 2002, templates were developed, sign-off was secured from faculty, and the site was prepared for the pilot release.

With course materials from 18 more subjects added to the site in December 2002, the total number of HTML pages supporting the initial 50 subjects rose to more than 2,000, together with more than 10,000 supporting files including PDFs of lecture notes, images, and video simulations.

The production model used for the pilot is not scalable for what by 2007 is estimated to be more than 2,000 individual MIT subjects published. Indeed, the OCW goals are not going to be achieved overnight: An aggressive timeline calls for about 500 subjects to be published by September 2003, and then 500 each year there after until the course materials from virtually all of MIT's subjects—undergraduate and graduate—are available to the world.

This first year of the OCW pilot is called the "Discover/ Build" mode, where the focus is on developing the technology, process, and organization to sustain OCW over the long term as an organization. Over the course of the next two years, the team hopes to be able to provide the entire curriculum track for certain MIT subject areas.

The project will take a big leap forward in April 2003 with the implementation of a content management system, which will manage the Web pages and embed learning objects. The content management system will also:

Tracking copyright status will be vital to the long-term success of OCW. During the pilot phase, we assembled a "SWAT team" of attorneys, graphic artists, researchers, and photo image specialists who were charged with obtaining copyright and intellectual property clearances for all the charts, quotes, images, and other items that were embedded in the lecture notes that MIT professors had been using for years.

It was an arduous process, but it has paid off. There has not been a single copyright or intellectual property infringement claim filed against OCW. The copyright permissions process was slow and labor-intensive, but I am confident we have developed a strong set of alternative strategies for acquisition of copyrighted content as the project moves toward publishing hundreds of courses in the coming years.

Reaction at Home
The faculty experience with OCW has been positive. Many professors who were once skeptics are now ready to participate. The project is particularly useful for courses involving intersecting disciplines. For example, while faculty often do not have time to explore the research of peers who might be right down the hall, one faculty member, Paul Sclavounos, has been contacted by another researcher at MIT who wants to explore cross-disciplinary work.

Where did that professor discover Sclavounos' work? On the site for Sclavounos' ocean engineering subject, Course 13.022: Surface Waves and their Interaction With Floating Bodies.

"This initiative is particularly valuable for courses covering emerging new areas of knowledge, as well as intersecting disciplines," says Jonathan A. King, an MIT professor of molecular biology. "Having spent many years developing a course on protein folding that served the needs of biochemists, chemists, chemical engineers, and computational biologists, I am delighted that this work will be made available to a far broader audience."

Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor of linguistics, serves on the OCW Faculty Advisory Board and has two subjects on the current site: Course 24.946: Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language and CMS.930/21F.034: Media, Education, and the Marketplace, a cross-listed course that explores a broad range of issues on new media and learning.

"OCW reflects the idea that, as scholars and teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our research and teaching," Miyagawa explains. "While MIT may be better known for our research, with OCW, we wish to showcase the quality of our teaching."

The OCW team hopes this will be the first of many open courseware initiatives. "This is about something bigger than MIT," states president Vest. "I hope other universities will see us as educational leaders in this arena, and we very much hope that OpenCourseWare will draw other universities to do the same. We would be delighted if—over time—we have a World Wide Web of knowledge that raises the quality of learning—and ultimately, the quality of life—around the globe."

 


Update January 25, 2003

Question:
Where can I check to see if MIT has some open share course materials in my discipline?

Answer:  
Go to MITOPENCOURSEWARE --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 

Unfortunately, there is not yet anything in accounting or business.  But there are economics materials, and new listings being put up frequently.

Find individual course listings on the following MIT OCW Department pages, or view a complete course list.
  Aeronautics & Astronautics
  Anthropology NEW
  Biology
  Chemical Engineering
  Chemistry
  Civil & Environmental
Engineering
  Comparative Media Studies NEW
  Earth, Atmospheric, &
Planetary Sciences
  Economics
  Electrical Engineering &
Computer Science
  Engineering Systems Division
  History NEW
  Linguistics & Philosophy
  Literature NEW
  Materials Science &
Engineering
NEW
  Mathematics
  Mechanical Engineering
  Nuclear Engineering NEW
  Ocean Engineering
  Physics
  Political Science
  Sloan School of Management
  Urban Studies & Planning

Bob Jensen's threads on the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 


Update on January 30, 2003

THE SELF-MANAGING LIBRARY Software prevents scholarly schisms The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Hewlett-Packard have implemented a new, Web-accessible system for storing, indexing, and disseminating the university's intellectual property. DSpace is an electronic, open source platform for storage and retrieval that lets MIT maintain its own virtual library of digitally rendered material. http://news.intelligententerprise.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eKcK0EWPTi0C3p0Bp8Z0At 


Update on January 1, 2003
Progress on the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI)

DSpace from MIT --- http://www.dspace.org/ 

Welcome to DSpace, a newly developed digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual output of MIT.

As a joint project of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, DSpace provides stable long-term storage needed to house the digital products of MIT faculty and researchers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


"MIT offers courses for free on the Web," by Linda Rosencrance, CompterWorld, October 11, 2002 --- http://computerworld.com/news/2002/story/0,11280,75085,00.html 
(I thank Stacy Kovar for pointing me toward this article.)

While MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project isn't quite a free education, it is a new approach to the open sharing of knowledge over the Internet.

Launched two weeks ago, anyone with an Internet connection and a Web browser can access the syllabus, assignments, exams and answers, reference materials and, in some cases, video lectures of MIT courses.

First announced in 2001, the idea behind OCW is to make course materials used in almost all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate subjects available online, free of charge, to users anywhere in the world, according to Jon Paul Potts, spokesman for the OCW project.

Potts said the goal of the project is to advance technology-enhanced education at MIT and to serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.

However, Potts said, MIT isn't putting its current semester course offerings online; rather, it is putting up course offerings from previous terms.

There are 32 MIT courses in 17 disciplines available on the Web, including Introduction to Experimental Biology, Problems of Philosophy, Linear Algebra and Macroeconomics Theory II.

Potts said MIT plans to put most of the materials from its 2,000 courses online by the 2006-07 academic year.

He said OCW will allow faculty from other institutions and other people to observe teaching methods and resources used by MIT's faculty. "This is not distance learning," Potts said. "The goal is to provide the content that supports an education."

Since the site went live, more than 130,000 users from around the world, including Africa, Algeria, Canada, Finland and Latvia, have accessed the site, and 1,700 of them have sent e-mails offering comments about the site, Potts said.

Currently, individual course sites and the course materials for the pilot phase of OCW use HTML. The course sites are static Web pages, he said, but they use a number of additional formats, including PDF files, Java Applets and video files.

Potts said OCW is still working on the technology infrastructure and studying other potential platforms to determine what the project will use in the long term. He said OCW is intended to be built using a full-featured content management and publication production system.

The initial phase of the project, which cost $11 million, was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.


Many educators, including me, have misinterpreted the concept of OpenCourseWare (OCW) as envisioned by MIT and some other major universities.  

"OpenCourseWare:  Simple Idea, Profound Implications," by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus Magazine, January 2002, pp. 12-16 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5913 

On April 4, 2001, Charles Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced the beginning of the OpenCourseWare project (OCW) in a press conference that was simultaneously Web cast. “As president of MIT, I have come to expect top-level innovative and intellectually entrepreneurial ideas from the MIT community.... I have to tell you that we went into this expecting that something creative, cutting-edge, and challenging would emerge. And, frankly, we also expected that it would be something based on a revenue-producing model—a project or program that took into account the power of the Internet and its potential for new applications in education. OpenCourseWare is not exactly what I had expected.” Frankly, neither did anyone else.

What is OCW?

Since its inception, OCW has been misunderstood. The academic world has seen one or another online degree program or commercial venture stake a claim to its part of cyberspace. OCW is not about online degree programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll. That’s what it isn’t. What, then, is it?

OCW is a process—not a set of classes. This process is intended to make the MIT course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available free online to any user in the world.

The goal of OCW is to provide the content that supports an MIT education. Ultimately, the OCW Web resource will host the materials for more than 2,000 classes taught at MIT, presented with a coherent interface that will include sophisticated search algorithms to explore additional concepts, pedagogies, and related attributes across the site as well as within a course.

The OCW announcement elicited varied reactions. Many wondered how this effort differs from any number of instances where universities have made their course Web sites available to the public, all or in part. The more cynical expressed admiration for the public relations success. The announcement made the front page of the New York Times, but skeptics asserted that OCW would be nothing more than a traditional Web site dressed up with a new acronym. But the elegance is in its simplicity. The closer one looks, the more one sees.

Still, an important and often overlooked implication of OCW is another aspect of what it is not—it is emphatically not an MIT education. This has been emphasized by Vest and other spokespeople for the initiative, but it bears repeating. It is the firm tenant of OCW that the core of an MIT education is the interaction between students and faculty in an environment that invites and supports inquiry and questioning. OCW makes no claim or effort to encapsulate this on the Web.

Competing Demands

Even given the support generally garnered on the MIT campus, some obstacles must be overcome if OCW is to be successfully implemented and maintained.

• Time. The prospect of putting up the content of some 2,000 courses in the next 10 years is daunting for anyone, even on a campus like MIT. This is all the more challenging given the one thing faculty members have least available—time. The enthusiasm and commitment toward the project is tempered by the uncertainty surrounding the level of effort faculty will be required to invest to make content suitable for OCW.

Teaching and research remain prime concerns for faculty throughout institutions of higher education nationwide and abroad. A project like this must not add significantly to the workload of already challenged faculty members, nor can it detract from their current commitments. A research question for such an effort is therefore: How can we assemble and distribute content with minimal faculty involvement?

• Reusable learning objects. A corollary to the time-constrained faculty member is the requirement that learning objects created for a course must be found suitable for other purposes, such as OCW. Faculty members cannot be expected to create content twice, once for teaching and again for presentation to the broader academic public. Thus, a second objective for the project is understanding the requirements for transformation of learning objects from their in-class instructional use to their representation as meaningful content for those interacting out of the context of the faculty/student/course/setting intersection.

• Production process. Putting together a Web site for a course is, despite current technologies to assist site designers, a significant effort. Currently, trade-offs are made in order to achieve some degree of scalability in the various systems used to aggregate content for teaching. For example, learning management systems may provide a limited suite of templates with form-based content uploading, designed to distribute the labor required to ingest and position the content within the site’s framework. The trade-off is often restricted pedagogical flexibility and relatively basic, cosmetic design choices for the reduction in the effort needed to auto-generate large numbers of course “shells.” A project such as that undertaken by OCW must incorporate new opportunities to achieve scalability for content development while not entirely sacrificing individuality in site design.

Courseware as Product

The higher education community has become subject to a new force in recent years. The trend has been referred to as “education as a good” (Schlais, 2001), describing the increasing trend toward the privatization of knowledge. Colleges and universities, in his view, are becoming more and more like vendors to students, who perceive themselves as customers of college education services. During the bloom of online distance education—curtailed only recently by the general economic recession—competition for students among universities led to increasing costs. Revenues were sought to replace declining public subsidies and to support competitive consumerism. Not-for-profit subsidiaries of traditional colleges, for-profit private universities, and corporations emerged, seeking to gain a larger share in what seemed an infinitely expanding demand for anywhere, anytime learning.

The privatization of knowledge has many manifestations. One is the frightening rise in the cost of scholarly journals. The pattern is familiar to anyone working in the academy. Schlais describes the conundrum like this: “A faculty member spends years of her life learning, researching, thinking, organizing, teaching, and writing. Her university invests substantially during this process. She publishes the fruits of her labor in a highly respected journal. And finally her library buys a subscription to the journal, sometimes costing in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.” Something is amiss, and our library colleagues have been painfully aware of it for years.

Copyright and legal interpretations deepen the concern. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the General Agreement on Trade in Services, education is an international commodity. In the United States, compliance with the WTO agreements was accomplished in part by the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Jessica Litman described the relevance of these changes in her book, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (2001):

“1. The use of digital works, including viewing, reading, listening, transporting, etc., requires a reproduction of the original of the work in a computer’s memory. 2. Copyright statutes give clear and exclusive control over reproduction (as defined above) to the copyright holder. 3. For each use of the copyrighted material, that is, each viewing, listening, transfer, the user needs to have the statutory privilege of the copyright holder.”

Faculty members at MIT, as well as other universities, are concerned that their intellectual property may be locked away from their peers, as well as potential students, behind proprietary barriers. Participating in OCW is a proactive statement that “reflects the idea that, as scholars and teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our research and teaching” (Miyagawa, 2001). As Vest noted, “OpenCourseWare looks counterintuitive in a market-driven world.” Indeed.

A New Model of Scholarly Sharing?

OCW is often thought of as the educational content equivalent to the open source software movement. The analogy is appealing and reflective of many, but not all, of its goals. Taking a closer look at what constitutes open source software might help.

Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5913


Stanford University shares course management software --- http://getcoursework.stanford.edu/news.html 

Stanford shares some Coursework Course Management Software --- http://getcoursework.stanford.edu/ 

CourseWork is a open source course management system based at Stanford University and developed by Academic Computing in the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources.


Using CourseWork, instructors and TAs can set up a course Web site that displays announcements, on-line readings, a dynamic syllabus and schedule, on-line assignments and quizzes, a discussion forum for students, and a grade book. CourseWork is designed both for faculty with little Web experience, who can use CourseWork to develop their Web site quickly, and for expert Web-users, who can use it to organize complex, Web-based materials and link them to Web communication tools.


The CourseWork source code is free and open, and can be downloaded from this site for any organization to use and modify to their own needs. You will need your own staff to install and manage the system, but the code is free and open.


Academic Computing developed CourseWork as part of the Open Knowledge Initiative. In this two-year project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a consortium of universities led by MIT are collaborating to build the next generation of teaching and learning tools.

For more information about CourseWork, please e-mail coursework-info@stanford.edu.

 A demo is available at http://getcoursework.stanford.edu/overview.html 

Also see http://teachtech.stanford.edu/Resources/main.htm 


Institutional Partners in the OKI initiative include the following universities --- http://www.cmi.cam.ac.uk/ncn/cmi-uksec-warwick-2001/kumar-slides.pdf 

•MIT 
• Stanford University 
• North Carolina State University 
• University of Michigan 
• University of Wisconsin 
• University of Pennsylvania 
• Dartmouth College
• Cambridge University 
• Harvard • University of Washington 
• Others

Carnegie Mellon University
Princeton 
UCB/LA
Johns Hopkins
George Washington University

None seem to have progressed as far as MIT in terms of sharing actual course materials across multiple disciplines on campus --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 


"LENS ON THE FUTURE:  Open-Source Learning," by Anne H. Moore, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2002, pp. 42-51 --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0253.pdf 

The Current Open-Source Movement

Underpinning the current open-source courseware and knowledgeware movement in higher education and elsewhere is a belief in the advantages to be gained through the open development and exchange of ideas.  For this discussion, open-source development falls into two categories: (1) open-source knowledgeware development (the tools); and (2) open-source courseware development (the content).  MIT's partnership with Stanford on the Open Knowledge Initiative ( http://web.mit.edu/oki/ ) is an example of a project designed to develop a learning management system, or open-source knowledgeware--Web-based tools for storing, retrieving, and disseminating educational resources and activities.  In contrast, projects such as MIT's OpenCourseWare effort ( http://web.mit.edu/ocw/ ), which aims to make instructional materials available free on the Web, and the MERLOT project ( http://www.merlot.org/Home.po ), which endeavors to place on the Web knowledge objects that have been evaluated for quality, represent variations on an open-source courseware-development process.

Open-source software development has traditions that date to the beginnings of the Internet nearly thirty years ago.  According to Eric S. Raymond, recent technical and market forces have drawn open-source software out of its niche role in Internet development to a larger role in defining the computing infrastructure of the twenty-first century.  Raymond also suggests that the idea of open-source development is pursued and sustained by "people who proudly call themselves 'hackers'--not as the term is now abused by journalists to mean a computer criminal, but in its true and original sense of an enthusiast, an artist, a tinkerer, a problem solver, an expert." Even among such rugged individualists as these, most abide by certain principles of good practice in development and an unwritten code of ethical development and dissemination behavior.

Similarly, many faculty who have developed course materials for the Web have done so in an open-source environment.  Frequently, faculty have shared technology-enhanced materials informally with colleagues, tailoring the material for each learning situation and improving on materials in the exchange.  The MERLOT project has sought, with some success, to build on faculty values that prize open exchanges and the peer review of materials.  Extending these values to a Web-based teaching environment, faculty from across the nation are participating in MERLOT by creating digitized knowledge objects (modularized materials that can be used in teaching and learning), peer-reviewing them, and storing them in a searchable repository that is organized by content areas and is easily accessible for use in teaching.  Like the software-development enthusiasts in the "hacker" community, most faculty abide by certain principles of good practice and an unwritten code of ethics.  Whether or not projects like MERLOT are long- or short-term phenomena, it is likely that faculty will continue in the long term to devise their own teaching materials, with and without technology, and to seek trusted colleagues' advice in the process.  Such practices are a historic tenet of academic culture.

MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project underscores this tenet.  Phillip Long notes that OCW is often viewed as "the educational content equivalent to the open-source software movement."  Long explains that the application of open-source principles has one intent: "to allow people to read, improve, adapt or modify, fix, redistribute, and use open-source software."  He adds, "The definition recognizes that improvements to complex code are made exponentially faster if more people can look at it and lend their intellectual input toward making it work better." And so it is with OCW.  In aiming for an ideal of open scholarship and free access to course materials and resources online, OCW formalizes the historic process of collegial interaction and review for a new age.  The technologies employed in this open-educational content process serve at once as catalysts and tools for expanding access to information in many new forms and for encouraging broad participation in the process.

The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), which provides the tools that underpin OCW, is a more direct application of the same open-source principles.  OKI developers are seeking to create a flexible, scalable knowledge management system that allows for innovative contributions from users in an advanced learning arena.  OKI includes collaborating institutions such as Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth College, North Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  These developers are taking aim at improving the technology-assisted teaching environment by providing tools that are modular and easy to use.  So when faculty, staff, or students seek to access, deliver, rearrange, or reassemble information, they can do so with the flexibility and customization required to support many approaches to teaching and to learning.3

Working in either of these open-source environments (tools or content) has several benefits for higher education institutions.  First, doing so results in products that supplement and compete in healthy ways with proprietary products, either in the learning management systems arena (knowledgeware) or in the publishing world (courseware).  Second, working in these environments encourages the use of standards so that users, whether institutions needing knowledgeware or individual faculty needing courseware, can adapt products to particular needs.  Finally, participation also creates and nurtures expertise in knowledgeware and courseware development in the academy, complementing commercial efforts and providing alternative models and materials.

Continued at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0253.pdf 
________________
NOTES

1   Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open-Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Cambridge, Mass.: O'Reilly, 1999), xii.

2   Phillip D. Long, "OpenCourseWare: Simple Idea, Profound Implications," Syllabus 15, no. 6 (January 2002): 16.

3   Charles Kerns, Scott Stocker, and Evonne Schaefer, "CourseWork: An Online Problem Set and Quizzing Tool," Syllabus 14, no. 11 (June 2001): 27-29.

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Bob Jensen's commentary on the importance of sharing is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/AAAaward_files/AAAaward02.htm 


From Syllabus News on May 28, 2002

Blackboard Announces Adoption Strategy for 'OKI' Specifications

Blackboard recently announced a broad strategy to adopt industry standard API's (Application Program Interfaces) from the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative within the Blackboard e-Education Suite. Blackboard's Building Blocks open architecture will base future releases on key OKI specifications, enabling a broader variety of third party applications to work with Blackboard. The announcement is expected to help accelerate OKI's status as an industry standard in the higher education market. Through their relationship as common mem- bers of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Blackboard and OKI institutional partners are working together with other IMS members to help define the next generation of interoperability standards for educational technology. For more information on the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative, visit http://web.mit.edu/ok

 


Accreditation Issues
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm

For general background on accreditation, you can enter the search term "Accreditation" at http://ifap.ed.gov/dev_csb/new/srchsite.nsf/Web+Search+Simple?OpenForm 

There are three sources of accreditation:


A Crystal Ball Look Into the Future
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm


March 3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

ENCOURAGING FACULTY ADOPTION OF TECHNOLOGY FOR TEACHING

"Some universities, some faculty, and even some students have increased their personal wealth by asserting ownership of the intellectual property created at the university. For many faculty, however, this new entrepreneurial orientation runs deeply counter to traditions of education and public service. Past campus debates about aspects of this cultural shift have created an environment of distrust and rancor." In a recent article Brian C. Donohue and Linda Howe-Steiger express their belief that this distrust has "spilled over into faculty attitudes toward the use of digital technologies for teaching" causing faculty to reject these technologies. This situation can be remedied if institutions "create incentives for faculty that balance public service goals with professional and entrepreneurial rewards, clarify ownership and usage rights of intellectual property generated by and for teaching, and generate additional funding for curriculum development at universities (possibly through tax credits)." They expand upon how to accomplish this in "Faculty and Administrators Collaborating for E-Learning Courseware" (EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 20-32). The article is available online, at no cost, at http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm05/eqm0513.asp .

EDUCAUSE Quarterly, The IT Practitioner's Journal [ISSN 1528-5324] is published by EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA. Current and past issues are available online at http://www.educause.edu/eq/ .


Concept Knowledge

June 18, 2006 message from Bob Kennelly [bob_kennelly@YAHOO.COM]

I am a data analyst with the Federal Government, recently assigned a project to integrate our accounting codes with XBRL accounting codes, primarily for the quarterly reporting of banking financial information.
 
For the past few weeks, i've been searching the WEB looking for educational materials that will help us map, rollup and orr olldown the data that we recieve from the banks that we regulate, to the more generic XBRL accounting codes.
 
Basically, i'm hoping to provide my team members with the tools to help them make more informed decisions on how to classify accounting codes and capture their findings for further review and discussion.
 
To my suprise there isn't the wealth of accounting information that i thought there would be on the WEB, but i am very relieved to have found Bob Jensen's site and in particular an article which refers to the kind of information gathering
approaches that i'm hoping to discover!
 
Here is the brief on that article:
"Using Hypertext in Instructional Material:  Helping Students Link Accounting Concept Knowledge to Case Applications," by Dickie Crandall and Fred Phillips, Issues in Accounting Education, May 2002, pp. 163-184
---
http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/pubs.htm
 
We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.
 
Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks. 
 
Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links. 
 
Could anyone be so kind as to please suggest other references, articles or tools that will help us better understand and classify the broad range of accounting terminologies and methodologies please?
 
For more information on XBRL, here is the XBRL link: http://xbrl.org
 
Thanks very much!
Bob Kennelly
OFHEO

June 19, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Bob,

You may find the following documents of related interest:

"Internet Financial Reporting: The Effects of Hyperlinks and Irrelevant Information on Investor Judgments," by Andrea S. Kelton (Ph.D. Dissertation at the University of Tennessee) --- http://www.mgt.ncsu.edu/pdfs/accounting/kelton_dissertation_1-19-06.pdf

Extendible Adaptive Hypermedia Courseware: Integrating Different Courses and Web Material
Lecture Notes in Computer Science,  Publisher: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg ISSN: 0302-9743 Subject: Computer Science Volume 1892 / 2000 Title: Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems: International Conference, AH 2000, Trento, Italy, August 2000. Proceedings Editors: P. Brusilovsky, O. Stock, C. Strapparava (Eds.) --- Click Here

"Concept, Knowledge, and Thought," G. C. Oden, Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 38: 203-227 (Volume publication date January 1987) --- Click Here

"A Framework for Organization and Representation of Concept Knowledge in Autonomous Agents," by Paul Davidsson,  Department of Computer Science, University of Lund, Box 118, S–221 00 Lund, Sweden email: Paul.Davidsson@dna.lth.se

"Active concept learning for image retrieval in dynamic databases," by Dong, A. Bhanu, B. Center for Res. in Intelligent Syst., California Univ., Riverside, CA, USA; This paper appears in: Computer Vision, 2003. Proceedings. Ninth IEEE International Conference on Publication Date: 13-16 Oct. 2003 On page(s): 90- 95 vol.1 ISSN: ISBN: 0-7695-1950-4 --- Click Here

"Types and qualities of knowledge," by Ton de Jong, ​‌Monica G.M. Ferguson-Hessler, Educational Psychologist 1996, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pages 105-113 --- Click Here

Also note http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#DownfallOfLecturing

Hope this helps
Bob Jensen

 


Babson College's experiments with "Tailor-Made Degrees"

"Tailor-Made Degrees: Customized Corporate Education," by Tom Moore, Syllabus, March 2002, pp. 30-33 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6135 

The popular notion of a new graduate entering "the real world" points to the fact that we commonly view academia and the corporate environment as two disparate, almost polarized communities. The perception may be that universities focus on theory while businesses concentrate on practice. And to combine the two—to influence academic curriculum on behalf of corporate needs—has traditionally been frowned upon as a corruption of pure academic purpose.

This is not to say that higher education has ignored the corporate community. Colleges and universities have long offered corporate training programs and customized courses. However, corporate offerings and traditional degree programs have fallen into two distinct categories, usually considered to be very separate: the graduate degree program, typically thought of as the more rigorous education experience designed exclusively by academics, and the executive education program, a shorter-term, not-for-credit alternative intended to serve the corporation’s needs.

Now, due in large part to the maturing nature and growing acceptance of distance learning, the wall that once stood between business and academia is beginning to crumble. Over the past few years, we’ve begun to see a blending of executive education and graduate degree programs. The result is a new model for professional education: the corporate-customized graduate degree program.

The Babson College Experience

In 2000, Babson College opened the doors of Babson Interactive, a school dedicated to applying e-learning to innovative management education programs. The goal was to create an e-learning/faceto- face hybrid that is both responsive to the needs of businesses and culminates in a degree from an established brick-andmortar university.

When I was first hired by Babson College, I held the titles of dean of the Babson School of Executive Education and dean of its Graduate School of Business. My responsibilities included overseeing Babson’s MBA programs and executive education courses at the same time. As I stepped into the position of CEO of Babson Interactive, I relinquished my role as dean of the Graduate School but retained my title and responsibilities as dean of Executive Education. It was clear from the start that e-learning offered high potential for an entirely new type of executive education, and that Babson Interactive was the place where we would explore the possibilities.

Babson had been watching the development of e-learning from the sidelines for quite some time before opening Babson Interactive. At first we were, frankly, not very interested. For the most part, the technologies appeared underdeveloped and unproven. We had great concern that the initial technology was not robust enough to provide the kind of insight and judgment building that we felt a good graduate program should offer.

In the past few years, however, we’ve seen the technology improve and have observed other institutions implement very successful e-learning programs. I now believe that a blended degree program—one that incorporates both elearning and face-to-face instruction— offers an education experience that can, in fact, be superior to the traditional classroom experience. The key is in the proper balancing of these two learning modes.

A number of corporations have come to Babson Interactive. In one example, Babson, along with Cenquest, an e-learning company with expertise in creating online courses, developed a oneof- a-kind company-customized MBA degree program for Intel Corp. By combining the foundational and theoretical knowledge included in a Babson graduate degree with the strategic intent of the company, the program provided Intel with a completely new employee education option.

The customization of the curriculum took several forms. The Intel team offered input into the class electives. They also provided real work projects to be used as examples and incorporated into the coursework. Through e-learning technology, Intel executives, partners, and even customers could be included as guest lecturers.

ROI and Student Benefits

Corporations have long viewed companyreimbursed education as a standard employee benefit alongside health care and bonus programs. U.S. businesses spend $58 billion annually on employee education. And in a market where there is always fierce competition for top employees, offering quality education programs is seen as essential to hiring and retaining the best and brightest.

Unfortunately, the return-on-investment for company-reimbursed degree programs has been less than easy to quantify. Corporations have had little influence over the schools being attended, much less the programs being offered and the curriculum being taught. Aside from reimbursement contingencies based on keeping a certain grade point average, businesses have had limited input into the nature of their employee’s for-credit education experience. The programs are typically funded more upon faith and hope then on real data showing that employees will learn skills that will increase their overall value to the company.

Perhaps a larger irony to these programs is that while they are seen as a necessary tool for hiring and retaining employees, they often have an opposite effect. It is not unusual for a company to pay for an employee’s graduate education only to have that employee leave once the degree is obtained. In such cases, the reimbursement program often becomes a company-sponsored training ground for its competition.

Since the programs at Babson Interactive are designed to increase an employee’s value to the company, chances are far better that graduates will continue their careers at the company once their degree is completed. And since employees work and study with other employees from various corporate locations, managers see the learning experience as providing a rare opportunity to build valuable employee relationships across company campuses.

Lessons Learned

In the final analysis, there is a real learning curve involved in maximizing both the instructional and business models for this type of program. Still, it is clear that corporate education is heading in a new direction. Companies like Intel are looking to this new corporate education model to provide higher quality assurances and overall increased value. By combining a traditional graduate degree curriculum with content tailored to the needs of a company, customized degree programs offer unprecedented benefits to both the employee and employer and stand to ultimately redefine the relationship between academia and the "real world."

 


Wireless Audio and Video Knowledge Portals --- BeVocal

Knowledge Portals --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm

Western Governors University, which was founded in 1997 as a collaboration of colleges in 19 states offering online programs, was for many years known for not meeting the ambitious goals of its founders. Projected to attract thousands of students within a few years, it initially attracted but scores of students. But the university has been growing lately, and on Wednesday announced that enrollment has hit 10,000, including students from all 50 states.
Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/05/qt

Jensen Comment
Some of the things that made WGU controversial were as follows:

WGU now has many undergraduate and graduate degree programs, including those in traditional fields of business such as accounting, marketing, etc.

Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

 

Judith Boettcher in Syllabus, June 1999, 18-24 Judith Boettcher is affiliated with CREN. She predicts the following scenarios (which appear to be heavily in line with the emerging WGU programs mentioned above):

1.  A "career university" sector will be in place (with important partnerships of major corporations with prestige universities).

2.  Most higher education institutions, perhaps 60 percent, will have teaching and learning management software systems linked to their back office administration systems.

3.  New career universities will focus on certifications, modular degrees, and skill sets.

4.  The link between courses and content for courses will be broken.

5.  Faculty work and roles will make a dramatic shift toward specialization (with less stress upon one person being responsible for the learning material in an entire course).
(Outsourcing Academics http://www.outsourcing-academics.com/ )

6.  Students will be savvy consumers of educational services (which is consistent with the Chronicle of Higher Education article at http://chronicle.com/free/99/05/99052701t.htm   ).

7.  The tools for teaching and learning will become as portable and ubiquitous as paper and books are today.

An abstract from On the Horizon http://horizon.unc.edu/horizon/online/login.asp  

Will Universities Be Relics? What Happens When an Irresistible Force Meets an Immovable Object? John W. Hibbs

Peter Drucker predicts that, in 30 years, the traditional university will be nothing more than a relic.    Should we listen or laugh? Hibbs examines Drucker's prophesy in the light of other unbelievable events, including the rapid transformation of the Soviet Union "from an invincible Evil Empire into just another meek door-knocker at International Monetary Fund headquarters." Given the mobility and cost concerns of today's students, as well as the growing tendency of employers to evaluate job-seekers' competencies rather than their institutional affiliations, Hibbs agrees that the brick-and-mortar university is doomed to extinction.

Jensen Comment
I think bricks and mortar will be around for a long time as long as young and naive students commencing adulthood need more than just course content in the process of becoming well-rounded adults. Behind the bricks and mortar there are some very inspiring and motivating scholars. Even those professors, however, must change with the times as asynchronous learning keeps becoming more superior on tough content items --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's advice for new faculty can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm

 


"Continued Growth for 2 Distance Ed Models," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/19/distance

Two unique models of providing distance education to mainly nontraditional students are coming into their own, each showing a healthy expansion of enrollments and growth in available course offerings. One, the Online Consortium of Independent Colleges & Universities, has been enlarging since its inception, while the other, Western Governors University, faced years of skepticism from critics who said its ambitious goals would never be met. Now, both are touting their success with fresh numbers and statistics, suggesting that online education needn’t only come from large for-profit companies or local community colleges.

In 2005, Regis University announced a consortium of colleges that would work together, rather than compete, to share each others’ online courses in a way that would in effect vastly expand the offerings of each of the group’s members. Since then, the 39 founding colleges of the OCICU have expanded to 68, with 1,784 course enrollments over the past year.

The model is unusual in that it allows colleges that are interested in offering courses online, but don’t necessarily have the resources to cover every conceivable topic, to supplement their catalog with classes that already exist — in the consortium and on the Web, but not on their campuses. So far, seven of the member colleges, including Regis, act as “providers,” essentially allowing other colleges in the group to pick and choose which courses to make available to their own students, with full institutional credit assigned through the student’s college.

“We’ve just experienced remarkable growth and great feedback from the schools participating,” said Thomas R. Kennedy, executive director of new ventures at Regis. “Especially as member schools ... they don’t have any online schools whatsoever, and overnight they have one. That’s one of the beauties of it.”

That near-instant capability can serve students in a number of ways. Do they need to fulfill a general elective requirement, like sociology or political science? The providers offer plenty of possibilities for students at colleges that don’t have the resources to fill every gap in the curriculum. What about students interested in a niche topic, like Irish studies? Some of the providers, as well as members that are planning on offering up courses to the rest of the consortium in the future, have such offerings as well.

Many, but not all, of the member colleges are religiously affiliated, and most fit the profile of small- or medium-sized institutions in the Council of Independent Colleges that may not have the resources to get into the distance education business on their own. Members pay a one-time fee of $3,500 to join the consortium plus an annual fee of $1,000, Kennedy said, to cover administrative costs. Of the approximately $1,350 in tuition for a three-credit course, he added, about $500 would go to the provider school per student — essentially extra cash for a course that was already being held, he pointed out — and $700 would remain at the student’s home college, which would incur no additional cost.

“All these provider schools are doing is opening up their classes ... to visiting students, in a way,” he said. The key difference, however, is that students receive credit as if they took the courses at their own institutions, rather than as transfer credits.

Kennedy said he’s been urging member colleges to pocket that extra tuition money “and start investing in your own online program.”

Some are doing just that. Keuka College, in upstate New York, administers degree completion programs by partnering with hospitals and community colleges across the state. To help students in its various programs who need to take a specific course or two to complete their degrees, the college can now send them to offerings available online through the consortium.

“We found that by using courses offered through the consortium, we could offer students more forms of access,” said Gary Smith, associate vice president for professional studies and international programs at Keuka, especially for the “general education or general elective pool that’s outside our major program offerings.”

This year, Keuka will ramp up its own online courses by playing to its strengths: If all goes according to plan, Smith said, the college will add classes in Asian studies to the consortium’s lineup.

A ‘Competency-Based’ University Takes Off

Another model that’s meeting or exceeding the expectations of its leaders is breathing a sigh of relief. Western Governors University, founded in 1997 by 19 state governors, started with ambitious plans to grow its enrollment and become a regional economic engine. But the initial plans faltered and the university found itself the object of criticism and even scorn — although that wasn’t necessarily confined to Western Governors.

“If you go back to the mid-’90s, when the idea for WGU bubbled up from among the conversations from the governors of the Western states, there was at that time no clear sense of whether or not online education would work, period, or would work with any level of success and any decent level of quality,” said Patrick Partridge, the university’s vice president of marketing and enrollment. But, he acknowledged, there was plenty of skepticism in academe as well. “I think that skepticism was both of a financial type and sort of an awareness ... of the kind of political hurdles in the higher-ed world.”

These days, the picture for both online education in general, and WGU in particular, seems quite a bit brighter. The nonprofit institution, which receives no state support and sustains itself primarily through tuition and private donations, announced this month that it had reached an enrollment of 10,000 students — up from 500 in 2003. That growth can be attributed to a number of factors, including regional accreditation, but the university also emphasizes two features that distinguish it from most of its peers: a “competency-based” approach to assessing students’ work, and its nationally accredited Teachers College.

From the outset, courses and curriculums are developed with input from senior faculty together with an “outside council” including practitioners from a given field. Course material is then assessed to a level that’s considered “highly competent,” Partridge said, by the developers of the course, effectively creating a standardized set of requirements in lieu of more independent assessments by individual instructors. Upon completion, employers can theoretically be assured that students are proficient in a specific set of skills and knowledge.

The university doesn’t give letter grades, and it allows students to take as long as they want in their course of study — which could be a mixed blessing, since they pay a flat fee (a bit under $3,000) every six months. All in all, Partridge said, “we are as different from the other online schools as they are from” traditional higher education. It’s a model not suited to everyone, he acknowledged, but especially tailored to students with a certain “impatience” or “determination” to complete in a timely manner.

Another significant draw for WGU is the Teachers College, which, unlike any other such online program, places graduates at schools in virtually every state. Now, at least half of WGU’s students are enrolled in the teaching program. “[W]e offer a path to initial teacher licensure for individuals all around the country who want to become teachers, often later in life where returning to a traditional school of education ... is just not that convenient,” Partridge said.

The university projects further growth in the coming years, with a predicted enrollment of up to 15,000 in the foreseeable future. “We really see the future as one in which the people of the United States and the adult audience need to have very good-quality and affordable options to either get a first bachelor’s degree or continue to pursue [a] master’s degree, in particular change careers and pursue dreams that will in the long run strengthen our economy, the citizenry and make our country, our states, etc., stronger,” said Partridge.


Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration ---  http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html 

Summer 2004 - Volume 7, Number 2

Spring 2004 - Volume 7, Number 1

Winter 2003 - Volume 6, Number 4

Fall 2003 - Volume 6, Issue 3

Summer 2003 - Volume 6, Issue 2

Spring 2003 - Volume 6, Issue 1

Winter 2002 - Volume 5, Issue 4

Fall 2002 - Volume 5, Issue 3

Summer 2002 - Volume 5, Issue 2 Spring 2002 - Volume 5, Issue 1 Winter 2001 - Volume 4, Issue 4 Fall 2001 - Volume 4, Issue 3 Summer 2001 - Volume 4, Issue 2 Spring 2001 - Volume 4, Issue 1 Winter 2000 - Volume 3, Issue 4 Fall 2000 - Volume 3, Issue 3

Question
What is the University of California's XLab?

Answer
From Syllabus News on July 27, 2004

Berkeley X-Lab to Test Social Science Theories in Biz-World

The University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business has opened the XLab –- short for Experimental Social Sciences Laboratory –- a high-tech facility to help economists, political scientists, and other social scientists test their theories to find whether they can be applied to real world problems in business and management.

Xlab is a part of the university’s Haas School of Business and uses the latest wireless and notebook computer technology. The facility, which can accommodate up to 40 participants as experimental subjects. consists of 50 battery-powered, wireless laptops that can be easily moved on mobile carts.

In one recent study, XLab director John Morgan, an economist and Haas School associate professor, used the facility to find out what produces greater revenue for sellers when a company is put up for sale - asking for payment in shares of stock, or in cash. The test supported the theory that shares bring in more revenue for the seller in a bidding contest. "This idea comes from the economics literature, but it hasn't really made its way out of the ivory tower," said Morgan. "With XLab, we assess whether the theory works in practice and whether it will have a big strategic payoff in the marketplace."

Read more: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=8738 


A Cloudy Crystal Ball
For details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thefuture.htm

I recommend "Technology, Higher Education, and a Very Foggy Crystal Ball," by Brian L. Hawkins, Educause Review, November/December, pp. 65-73.
  1. The New Market Will Be Smaller Than Often Predicted

  2. Residential Campuses Will Still Be Significant (but with eDorms).

  3. An Erosion of Traditional Markets Will Occur.

  4. Institutions Will Not Effectively Participate as Stand-Alone Entities.

  5. There Will Be a Significant Market Shakeout.

  6. New Extra-Institutional Solutions Will Likely Be Required.

  7. The New Marketplace Will Be Associated with New Models of Faculty Motivation.

  8. The Technology Will Transform College and University Operations.

  9. The Necessary Library Infrastructure Will Be Missing.

  10. There Will Be an Increase in Institutional Market Segmentation.


I expect to see more corporations and accounting firms forming their own learning corporations.

Intellinex
Ernst & Young claims to be the first Big 5 accounting firm to create a separate operating company to provide online multimedia training and education  --- http://www.ey.com/global/gcr.nsf/US/12-11-00_-_Release_-_News_Room_-_Ernst_%26_Young_LLP 

New York — December 11, 2000 — Intellinex LLC, one of the largest providers of eLearning solutions, has completed the previously announced acquisition of Teach.com, a leading provider of online PC and business skills training courseware. The acquisition of Teach.com furthers Intellinex's growth as a one-stop provider of eLearning solutions.

Teach.com offers scalable technology and off-the-shelf courseware including an extensive library of Web-delivered personal computer and business skills training and support courseware and the SmartTrainer(R) content delivery platform, a proprietary 32-bit, browser-based engine.

Including sales from Teach.com, Intellinex is targeting revenue of over $100 million in the first 12 months of operation. In 1999, Teach.com had $6.5 million in revenue. Its customers include General Electric, AT&T, Dell Computer, Sun Microsystems, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical and the Internal Revenue Service. Intellinex's customers include Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly and Ernst & Young.

"The completion of this acquisition strengthens Intellinex's position as a one-stop provider of corporate learning solutions in the rapidly growing global eLearning market," said Intellinex Chairman and CEO Michael Powers. "The acquisition of Teach.com enhances our product line and our ability to provide the highest quality products and services for our customers."

This was the first acquisition for Intellinex. Teach.com's 90 employees at facilities in Elk Grove Village, Ill. and Golden, Colo. have joined Intellinex and are expected to play an important role in supporting its future growth. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

About Intellinex Intellinex is one of the largest providers of customized eLearning solutions that deliver and transform the value of knowledge for companies and their customers. A new stand-alone business of Ernst & Young LLP, Intellinex integrates innovative technology, flexible content and learning services to help clients work smarter. The 500 employees of Intellinex are dedicated to providing eLearning products and services that are second to none to organizations around the world. Visit us at www.intellinex.com.

Intellinex refers to Intellinex LLC, an eLearning venture of Ernst & Young LLP. Ernst & Young refers to the U.S. firm of Ernst & Young LLP and other members of the global Ernst & Young organization.

Update
E&Y eventually sold Intellinex with contracts to continue to use Intellinex for training of E&Y employees --- http://www.allbusiness.com/services/educational-services/4285777-1.html


A Major Reference:  Higher Education in an Era of Digital Competition Edited by D.E. Hanna (Madison, WI:  Atwood Publishing, IBN 1-891859-32-3, 2000, pp. 73-74


"Reaching Across Boundaries:  The Bryant College-Belarus Connection," Syllabus, October 2001 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5088 

Using the Internet’s sphere of influence, one small college is making an impact on the education of students in Belarus, a country that has achieved only limited structural reform since its independence from the former Soviet Union. Despite the country’s economic isolation from the West, Belarusian institutions are reaching across traditional boundaries to forge new collaborative relationships.

Emerging national consciousness in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of Europe has produced dramatic alterations in business, politics, economics, technology, and culture, requiring innovative educational methodologies that better match the needs of these countries in transition. In 1996, in response to these challenges, Bryant College spearheaded the Collaborative Learning at a Distance (CLD) program between Bryant and Belarus. This comprehensive joint venture is an excellent model for using Internet technologies to advance collaborative learning, communication competencies, and policy making.

In implementing the CLD Program, we encountered many philosophical, logistical, and technical challenges. Two distinctly different Belarusian institutions, the Information Technologies Center (ITC) of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and the European Humanities University (EHU), bridged political boundaries to create a close working relationship between a state (government-owned) and non-state (private) institution. The shared enthusiasm of the ITC and EHU for the CLD Program enabled them to overcome their political differences.

A Non-Hierarchical Approach

The program uses a non-hierarchical model, emphasizing reciprocal, interactive learning across national and academic boundaries (see figure). It is based on our belief that learning is a collaborative process and that we learn better when we teach each other and learn in multiple ways. Our Internet-based CLD Program focuses on a small-scale, personalized interactive learning experience, which directly involves the teacher/mentor, student/learner, and all other stakeholders in the process.

This non-heirarchical pedagogical approach is relatively unfamiliar to university educators in the NIS. A history of centralized education and strong governmental control over curricula has resulted in a teaching environment that does not encourage the interactive exchange of ideas between faculty and students. At a time when funding for educational innovation in the NIS has been curtailed, cost-effective, collaborative distance learning projects can help address the problem of dwindling educational resources and compensate for the legacy of 70 years of communism.

Fostering Collaboration

Collaborative projects—including seminars for scientists and engineers who worked for the Soviet defense industry, distance learning courses, and the development of environmental policy initiatives with the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus—have been led by scholars representing diverse academic disciplines. These projects have utilized a wide array of information technologies, including International Virtual Roundtable Discussions via e-mail, seminars on Web site construction, Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing between the U.S. and Belarus, software training and development, and the use of the Internet to promote collaborative learning across diverse cultural and political boundaries. (The entire CLD Program is available at http://web.bryant.edu/~history/new/course.htm).

Using these technologies, faculty, students, and entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Belarus have formed strong ties. Faculty exchanges have permitted collaborators to teach at participating universities, conduct research, present training programs, lead trade missions, and deliver papers at international conferences. On-site visits, ranging in length from six days to six months, have played a critical role in our ability to develop trusting relationships and set the CLD Program in motion. We have learned that even sophisticated distance learning technologies cannot replace the power and intensity of human interactions.

Student-centered, collaborative group projects, standard on American campuses, are virtually unheard of in Belarus. The introduction of divergent points of view on controversial topics into classroom discussions is also largely absent. In fact, the educational system of Belarus, including all curricula issues, continues to be tightly controlled by the state. Still, the CLD Program’s use of Internet technologies has had a powerfully democratizing influence on Belarusian learners who have participated in this project.

Technology-enabled interactions between students from different cultures and with different expertise and skill sets have presented challenges. For instance, American students display an almost casual approach to e-mail correspondence, often failing to use proper punctuation or sentence structure. By contrast, Belarusians take particular care in constructing well-written messages, exacerbating the time constraints caused by limited computer laboratory access. Mentors in both countries encouraged collaborative techniques for negotiating these barriers to communication.

History professor David Lux noted that crucial pedagogical issues arose during the initial offering of his course, “The History of American Technology.” Viewing the course as an experiment to field-test technological and pedagogical issues associated with distance learning, Lux observed that cultural differences significantly affected how students approached the course. Belarusian students “proved voracious in their willingness to digest readings and engage in very sophisticated dialogue about the meaning and content of what they were reading.” Yet, Lux concluded that “the collaborative learning, student-project features of the course,” so popular with Bryant students, did not initially “translate meaningfully” into the educational culture of Belarus. With guidance and examples from Bryant faculty and students, however, Belarusian students gradually came to appreciate the value of collaborative projects.

In the course, “Cultures and Economies in Transition in the Post Soviet Era,” Professors Judy Barrett Litoff and Joseph Ilacqua described a high level of energy by students representing diverse countries. Heated debates often ensued as students tackled the difficult challenge of understanding societies in transition. However, their shared experiences as students helped them to negotiate their diverse perspectives. For example, during the Kosovo crisis in the spring of 1999, spirited e-mail exchanges of conflicting student perspectives took place. These discussions demonstrated the value of exploring cross-cultural and comparative political differences in order to better understand complex global problems.

Belarusian students enrolled in “Environmental Policy: Technology, Business & Government,” a course offered by Professor Gaytha Langlois, lacked a basic understanding of the governmental infrastructure necessary to implement well-designed environmental policy initiatives. Even Bryant students were poorly informed about how policies are actualized in the U.S., but in Belarus, the differences in governmental structure and practices further complicated this problem. The process of acquainting Belarusian students with the roles that government and non-governmental organizations play in crafting environmental and business policy has proved to be more cumbersome than expected. Through the use of structured International Virtual Roundtable Discussions, the ability of government and non-governmental organizations to formulate environmental policies became clearer.

Technical Considerations

Time differences, Internet delays, and the technological realities of Belarus presented challenges that limited the use of complex distance learning technologies. Consequently, we designed a relatively inexpensive and modest program. Since access to the Web in Belarus is often slow and unpredictable, we have provided CD-ROM versions of the CLD Web site to Belarusian students. CD-ROMs that are run on computers connected to the Web provide students with full entry to the CLD courses, including the ability to access hyperlinks. In addition, through the cooperation of information technology specialists at Bryant and EHU, a mirror Web site has been established to enhance connectivity.

Because of the seven-hour time difference between the east coast of the United States and Belarus, and because Belarusian students have limited access to e-mail and depend primarily on under-equipped (by U.S. standards) university computer laboratories for electronic communication, synchronous and asynchronous e-mail communication between the United States and Belarus has proved to be more difficult than we had originally anticipated. U.S. students are routinely assigned personal university e-mail addresses, but as a rule Belarusian students are rarely provided one. Even when students are assigned e-mail addresses, however, they often discover that access to university computer laboratories is limited to 2-3 hours a week. To encourage synchronous e-mail communication with students, Bryant faculty have adopted e-mail office hours between 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. in Belarus). By choosing these e-mail office hours, we are able to avoid the busy use of the Internet in Belarus during the mid- and late afternoon.

The most useful and successful distance learning technique that we have introduced is the International Virtual Roundtable Discussion (IVRD) via e-mail. This tool, utilizing the Internet to promote cross-cultural and comparative perspectives, has been incorporated into all CLD courses and has been enthusiastically embraced by learners. The IVRD features structured discussions that avoid the pitfalls of unmoderated chat rooms, yet it encourages learners to share informed opinions about specified topics that often result in lively exchanges of viewpoints.

On occasion, we utilize Microsoft’s NetMeeting program to provide live, two-way, global “see and talk” communication over the Internet. The Microsoft NetMeeting program, standard on new computers, uses simple computer accessories, including microphone, speakers, headset, and small video camera, that cost about $100. This inexpensive technology, although dependent upon a relatively new computer (about $1,000), replaces the high costs of long-distance telephone charges and video conferencing. Although two-way video and audio communications are exciting and hold great promise, they frequently require users to have great patience and perseverance in order to make them work properly.

The rest of the article is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5088


Accessibility in Distance Education

July 1, 2005 email message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/ 

"The Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) is an online legal publication that focuses on the evolving intersection of law and technology. This area of study draws on a number of legal specialties: intellectual property, business law, free speech and privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law -- each of which is undergoing doctrinal and practical changes as a result of new and emerging technologies. DLTR strives to be a 'review' in the classic sense of the word. We examine new developments, synthesize them around larger theoretical issues, and critically examine the implications. We also review and consolidate recent cases, proposed bills, and administrative policies."

"However, DLTR is unique among its sister journals at Duke, and indeed among all law journals. Unlike traditional journals, which focus primarily on lengthy scholarly articles, DLTR focuses on short, direct, and accessible pieces, called issue briefs or 'iBriefs.' In fact, the goal of an iBrief is to provide cutting edge legal insight both to lawyers and to non-legal professionals. In addition, DLTR strives to be the first legal publication to address breaking issues. To that end, we publish on the first and fifteenth of every month during the school year (September until April) and less frequently during the summer."

Duke Law & Technology Review is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet.

Bob Jensen's threads on the future of education technology and distance learning are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students?
Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

Accessibility in Distance Education A Resource for Faculty in Online Teaching --- http://www.umuc.edu/ade/ 

Common Questions
What does the word "accessibility" mean? (What is Accessibility?)

What disability laws should I know about if I teach online? (Legal Issues)

What do I need to consider if I have a student with a disability in my online course? (Understanding Disabilities)

How do I make my Web site accessible to everyone, including students with disabilities? (How-To)

What does an accessible Web site look like? Does it have to be text based? (Best Practices)

You can download the MP3 audio file of Susan Spencer's August 2002 presentation on this at one of my workshops --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002 


Although the following journal is not devoted to education per se, it needs to be mentioned somewhere.

New Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA) --- http://aaahq.org/ic/browse.htm
Abstracts are free.  Full articles are not free.


 

 

Links to Bob Jensen's Workshop Documents on Education and Learning

The Shocking Future of Education 

First File

Second File

Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
(Includes helpers for finding online training and education courses, certificate programs, and degree Programs)
Detail File

Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade

First File

Second File

The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education

 Detail File

Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research Detail File
History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies Detail File
Knowledge Portals and Vortals Detail File
Bob Jensen's Advice to New Faculty (and Resources) Detail File
Threads of Online Program Costs and Faculty Compensation Detail File
Bob Jensen's Helper Videos and Tutorials Detail File
Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher Education
(both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
Old Book

Some Earlier Papers

 

Additional Links and Threads Threads



Education Technology Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's Homepage is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/

 

 

 

A Serious New Commercial Advance for Online Training and Education

"Opening Up Online Learning," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge

This has not exactly been a season of peace, love and harmony on the higher education technology landscape. A patent fight has broken out among major developers of course management systems. Academic publishers and university officials are warring over open access to federally sponsored research. And textbook makers are taking a pounding for — among other things — the ways in which digital enhancements are running up the prices of their products.

In that context, many may be heartened by the announcement later today at the Educause meeting in Dallas that three dozen academic publishers, providers of learning management software, and others have agreed on a common, open standard that will make it possible to move digital content into and out of widely divergent online education systems without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The agreement by the diverse group of publishers and software companies, who compete intensely with one another, is being heralded as an important breakthrough that could expand the array of digital content available to professors and students and make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of learning systems.

Of course, that’s only if the new standard, known as the “Common Cartridge,” becomes widely adopted, which is always the question with developments deemed to be potential technological advances.

Many observers believe this one has promise, especially because so many of the key players have been involved in it. Working through the IMS Global Learning Consortium, leading publishers like Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system makers such as Blackboard, ANGEL Learning and open-source Sakai have worked to develop the technical specifications for the common cartridge, and all of them have vowed to begin incorporating the new standard into their products by next spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually, but has not set a timeline for when.

What exactly is the Common Cartridge? In lay terms, it is a set of specifications and standards, commonly agreed to by an IMS working group, that would allow digitally produced content — supplements to textbooks such as assessments or secondary readings, say, or faculty-produced course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or appear, the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones like Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems like Moodle and Sakai.

“It is essentially a common ‘container,’ so you can import it and load it and have it look similar when you get it inside” your local course system, says Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL, who helped conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital publishing unit at Pearson.

The Common Cartridge approach is designed to deal with two major issues: (1) the significant cost and time that publishers now must spend (or others, if the costs are passed along) to produce the material they produce for multiple, differing learning management systems, and (2) the inability to move courses produced in one course platform to another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their courses from one college to another and for campuses to consider switching course management providers.

The clearest and surest upside of the new standard, most observers agree, is that it could help lower publishers’ production costs and, in turn, allow them to focus their energies on producing more and better content. David O’Connor, senior vice president for product development at Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company and other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year effectively moving content around” so that ancillary material for textbooks can work in multiple course management systems.

Because Blackboard and Web CT together own in the neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management market, Pearson and other publishers produce virtually all of their materials to work in those proprietary systems. Materials are typically produced on demand for smaller players like ANGEL, Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find usable materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that can, when they choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify digital content for selected textbooks, “small publishers often have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a result, “there are just fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard and WebCT, and more hurdles to getting it.”

Supporters hope that adoption of the common cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and money adapting one textbook’s digital content for multiple course platforms and more time producing more and better content. “This should have the result of broadening choice in content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an analyst at Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS platform, but could now go out and choose the best content that aligns with what’s happening in their curriculum.”

Less clear is how successful the effort will be at improving the portability of course materials from one learning management system to another. If all the major providers introduce “export capability,” there is significant promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog e-Literate and is assistant director of the State University of New York Learning Network. “This has the potential to be one of the most important standards to come out in a while, particularly for faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that his comments here represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much easier for them to take rich course content and course designs and migrate them from one system to another with far less pain.”

But while easier transferability would obviously benefit the smaller players in the course management market — and ANGEL and Sakai plan to announce today that their systems will soon allow professors to create Common Cartridges for export out of their systems — such a system would only take off if the dominant player in the market, the combined Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how excited Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty to migrate out of their product and into one of their competitors,” says Feldstein.

Chris Vento, senior vice president of technology and product development at Blackboard, was a leading proponent of the IMS Common Cartridge concept when he was a leading official at WebCT before last year’s merger. In an interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others are asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock up the format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he says, is that by helping the entire industry, he says, the project cannot help but benefit its biggest player, too.

“This will enable publishers to really do the best job of producing their content, making it richer and better for students and faculty, and more lucrative for publishers from the business perspective,” says Vento. “Anything we can do to enable that content to be built, and more of it and better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”

Blackboard is fully behind the project, Vento says. Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter, Blackboard has also committed to incorporating the new standard into its products, and that Blackboard intends to make export of course materials possible out of its platform. “Exactly how that maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he said, “but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures to do this.”

That pressure is likely to be intensified because of the public relations pounding Blackboard has taken among many in the academic technology world because of its attempt to patent technology that many people believe is fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of Pearson says he believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in the Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player, to be someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds: “There is an opportunity for them to mend some of the damage from the patent issue.”

Like virtually all technological advances — or would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will ultimately rise and fall, says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether Blackboard and others embrace it. “Everything comes down to adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every standard is the adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve too early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers decide not to support it for various reasons.”

Those behind the Common Cartridge believe it’s off to a good start with the large number of disparate parties not only involved in creating it, but already committing to incorporate it into their offerings.

Yet even as they launch this standard, some of them are already looking ahead to the next challenge. While the Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, will allow for easier movement of digital course materials into and out of course management systems, it does not ensure that users will be able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools (like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of course management systems, or with the next generation of tools that may emerge down the road. For that, the same parties would have to reach a similar agreement on a standard for “tool interoperability,” which is next on the IMS agenda.

“This is only one step,” Pearson’s O’Connor says of the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an important one.

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance education are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Free Public Affairs Case Teaching Materials and Sometimes Entire Course Materials from the University of Washington
The Electronic Hallway --- https://hallway.org/

The Electronic Hallway is pleased to announce a unique and progressive new product— Integrated Management: A Complete Core Curriculum — a previously untested venture in presenting an entire course package using online technology. This package represents a 30 week integrated core management curriculum.

Bob Jensen's threads on free online textbooks and learning materials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks


Bob Jensen's threads about the popularity of online courses are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineVersusOnsite


June 29, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

A REPORT ON THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE EDUCATION

Each year the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) conducts an annual survey on the state of U.S. higher education online learning. This year, the Consortium published its first annual special edition, "Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 - Southern Edition." Some of the findings reported include:

"Online learning is thriving in the southern states. The patterns of growth and acceptance of online education among the 16 southern states in this report are very similar to that observed for the national sample, with one clear difference: online learning has made greater inroads in the southern states than in the nation as a whole."

"[S]chools are offering a large number of online courses, and there is great diversity in the courses and programs being offered:

-- Sixty-two percent of southern schools offering graduate face-to-face courses also offer graduate courses online.

-- Sixty-eight percent of southern schools offering undergraduate face-to-face courses also offer undergraduate courses online."

"Staffing for online courses does not come at the expense of core faculty. Institutions use about the same mixture of core and adjunct faculty to staff their online courses as they do for their face-to-face courses. Instead of more adjunct faculty teaching online courses, the opposite is found; overall, there is a slightly greater use of core faculty for teaching online than for face-to-face."

You can download the complete report at http://www.sloan-c.org/ 

Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information go to http://www.aln.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


March 5, 2003 message from B. Loveless [info@careeradvantage.org

Dear Professor Jensen,

I would like to know if it would be possible to place a link on your website linking to my websites, www.community-college.org  and www.university-directory.org . Both are free non-profit websites that provide visitors with a current and comprehensive directory of community colleges and universities throughout the United States. Updates to these websites are made on a regular basis to ensure site visitors the most current and accurate directory of community colleges and universities in their respective geographies. If it would be at all possible to place a link from your website to community-college.org and university-directory.org it would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Becton Loveless

http://www.community-college.org 
http://www.university-directory.org 

 

 

Introductory Quotations


 

Video: A Scenario of Higher Education in 2020 (or thereabouts)---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ

A report on people who attended for-profit colleges in Florida in the past decade concluded that the education they received was superficial and not worth the amount of debt they accumulated ---
Click Here

Can a Huge Online College Solve California’s Work-Force Problems?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-a-Huge-Online-College/244054?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=f80ba3e869f84decb4965e602626b579&elq=fe9f9bb29c1f407097558d58d6c15b2f&elqaid=19912&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9243

Jerry Brown was taking a victory lap.

The call went out to reporters early on a recent Monday morning: The governor would attend that day’s meeting of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors. A few minutes after 11, tieless and relaxed, Brown slid into a seat on the dais. He was just in time — and not coincidentally — for a discussion of the state’s newest, and wholly online, community college.

The virtual college, the 115th institution in California’s two-year system, is Brown’s baby, its approval in June the capstone to his sunset year in office. The college is meant to serve a population too often left behind by higher education: under- or unemployed adults who need new skills to land a job, secure a raise, nab a promotion, just to maintain a toehold in a swiftly changing workplace. An online institution, its advocates say, will allow so-called stranded workers — there are 2.5 million Californians without a postsecondary degree or credential between the ages of 25 and 34 alone — to take short-term courses whenever, wherever.

Reaching those workers will be necessary for the world’s fifth-largest economy to continue to grow and thrive. And if the online college enrolls even a fraction of its target audience, it would become the largest provider of distance education, public or private, in the nation. The scale — and the potential for innovation — has people across the country looking West.

Given the floor at the Board of Governors meeting, Brown, a Democrat, couldn’t help crowing. "This is a no-brainer, it is obvious, it is inevitable, it is a juggernaut that cannot be stopped," he said. "California is a leader, it will lead in this. And I say, hallelujah."

For all the governor’s certitude, it may be premature to declare the online college a sure fix to the state’s yawning gaps in educational and economic opportunity. The unknowns are many: Will job seekers or employers find value in an institution that offers only certificates and credentials, as is the plan for new college, not the degrees so frequently required for middle-class work?

Digital learning promises convenience, but will harried parents and overburdened breadwinners be any more likely to log onto a computer than set foot in a classroom? If they do register for an online course, will they flourish? After all, studies consistently show that students — low-income and first-generation students most especially — do better in face-to-face or hybrid courses.

Backers of the new college, like Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the community-college system, pledge to consult with employers and unions to make sure the competency-based credentials offered are prized in the workplace. Research has identified interventions that can help online course takers perform well; starting from scratch, such strategies can be baked in. "We will do as much as possible," Oakley says, "to give them the best opportunity for success."

Continued in article

"A Future Full of Badges," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Future-Full-of-Badges/131455/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's Threads on Competency-Based Learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

More than six million USA people take online courses each year, including one of every four undergraduates ---
http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/gradeincrease.pdf?elqTrackId=8a97109446ab42f4a6d1dd82378a5d42&elq=f017428740324fe9851503671bdc6dcc&elqaid=19259&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8759

Fee-based and free distance education training and education alternatives ---
Scroll down this document
Many employers will pay all or part of the fees, including Starbucks, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, etc. For example, Starbucks will pay Arizona State University tuition even for part-time employees. McDonalds will pay tuition for onsite as well as online courses.

Free MOOCs and other high-quality online learning alternatives (there may be fees for certificates and transcript credits but the MOOC learning is free for thousands of courses from prestigious universities around the world) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Department of Education in March 2014:  17,374 online higher education distance education and training programs altogether

Jensen Comment
Note that the hundreds of free MOOC courses from prestigious universities are not the same as fee-based distance education degree and certificate programs that are more like on-campus programs in terms in student-instructor interactions, graded assignments, and examinations. Some campuses like the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee even treat online programs as cash cows where the tuition is higher for online programs than identical on-campus programs.

The (Department of Education Report in March 2014) report says that American colleges now offer 17,374 online programs altogether, 29 percent of which are master’s-degree programs, with bachelor’s and certificate programs making up 23 percent each. Business and management programs are the most popular, at 29 percent of the total, followed by health and medicine programs (16 percent), education programs (14 percent), and information technology and computers (10 percent) ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-there-may-be-fewer-online-programs-than-you-think/51163?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"‘Volatile’ but Growing Online Ed Market," by Carl Straumsheim, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2017 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/02/report-finds-growth-volatility-online-education-market?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=50cc6fd192-DNU20170502&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-50cc6fd192-197565045&mc_cid=50cc6fd192&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Online enrollment continues to grow as the total number of students in college shrinks. The growth is particularly strong at private nonprofit colleges, report finds.

Continued in article

US News 2017 Ranking of the Best Nonprofit Online Colleges ---
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Note that US News has a new service for comparing programs side-by-side on various criteria, including their US News Rankings ---
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/compare
For example, compare the online programs of Indiana University with Texas A&M University

NYT:  The for-profit-college industry continues to cheat students while the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress do nothing ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/opinion/predatory-colleges-students-devos.html?elqTrackId=5dc95869b80045dc96a6648f05c9c2bd&elq=8199fd0e47494950a55cdf9dbcbbfc9a&elqaid=19193&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8711

US News:  2015 Best Colleges and Universities ---
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges

       Frequently Asked Questions about US News Rankings ---
      
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

. . .

19. How does U.S. News handle for-profits in the rankings?

All regionally accredited for-profit institutions are included in U.S. News' data collection efforts. Among them are many schools that have large online bachelor's degree programs.

Any for-profit college or university that grants bachelor's degrees, is regionally accredited and meets the specific U.S. News ranking criteria to be included in the Best Colleges rankings can be ranked. However, as a result of the U.S. News eligibility standards, almost all of the for-profit institutions have been grouped with the unranked schools.

Why? Their bachelor's degree candidates are largely nontraditional students in degree completion programs, for example, or they don't use SAT or ACT test scores in admissions decisions – both of which are factors U.S. News uses to decide if a school is eligible to be ranked.

20. How does U.S. News handle schools that refuse to respond to the U.S. News annual statistical survey, given that many of them are still included in the rankings?

Nonresponders are still included in the rankings if they are eligible to be ranked. For schools that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey in the spring and summer of 2015, we have made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were required to report to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. That includes such factors as SAT and ACT scores, acceptance rates, number of faculty, and graduation and retention rates. We also use data from other sources, such as the Council for Aid to Education (for alumni giving rates) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (for graduation rates).

How to Use the Rankings

1. What is the best way for students and their parents to use the rankings?

Students can use the rankings to create an initial list of schools to consider, to narrow down that list and to compare overall academic quality. Students can also use the data underlying the rankings to identify schools with specific characteristics that they value.

However, the editors of U.S. News believe rankings are only one of many criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one school over another. 

A prospective student's academic and professional ambitions, personal preferences, financial resources and scholastic record, as well as a school's size, cost, programs, atmosphere and location, should play major roles in determining a college choice.

Moreover, it is crucial to remember that schools separated by only a few places in the rankings are extremely close in academic quality.

[Get more information on how to use the rankings.]

2. How can I find the rank of a particular school?

U.S. News publishes the rankings in two places: in a college guidebook, "Best Colleges 2016,'' and on this website, which also offers the U.S. News College Compasshome to the most complete rankings and data. The guidebook is available for purchase at newsstands, by calling 1-800-836-6397 or by visiting the U.S. News store. For discounts on bulk orders of 50 or more copies, please contact booksales@usnews.com.

Continued at  http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

 

US News 2017 Ranking of the Best Nonprofit Online Colleges ---
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Note that US News has a new service for comparing programs side-by-side on various criteria, including their US News Rankings ---
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/compare
For example, compare the online programs of Indiana University with Texas A&M University

US News:  2015 Best Online Bachelor's Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

  1. Penn State University World Campus
  2. Daytona State College
  3. University of Illinois Chicago
  4. Western Kentucky University
  5. Embry-​Riddle Aeronautical University—​Worldwide
  6. Oregon State University
  7. Colorado State University Global Campus
  8. Arizona State University
  9. Ohio State University --- Columbus
  10. Pace University
  11. Others --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

US News:  2015 Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

    1. University of Houston
    2 .Florida State University
    3. Northern Illinois University
    4. Penn State University World Campus
    5. Central Michigan University
        Graceland University
        University of Nebraska --- Lincoln

    8. Auburn University
        Ball State University
        George Washington University

  11. Creighton Unversity
        Emporia State University
        Michigan State University
        Others ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

 US News:  2015 Best Online MBA Programs
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba

    1.  Indiana University (Kelly)
        Temple (Fox)
        University of North Carolina --- Chapel Hill

    4.  Arizona State University (Carey)
         University of Florida (Hough)

    6 . University of Texas --- Dallas

    7.  Carnegie-Mellon University (Tepper)
         Penn State University World Campus

    9.  North Carolina State University (Jenkins)

    10. Auburn University

US News:  2015 Online Higher Education Search Engine ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

 

 

From US News in 2014
Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
Central Michigan is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
Indiana University is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
Northern Illinois is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
Columbia University is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
The University of Southern California is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
St. Xavier University is the big winner

US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

 

Ms. Salin is part of a new wave of outsourcing to India: the tutoring of American students. Twice a week for a month now, Ms. Salin, who grew up speaking the Indian language Malayalam at home, has been tutoring Daniela in English grammar, comprehension and writing. Using a simulated whiteboard on their computers, connected by the Internet, and a copy of Daniela's textbook in front of her, she guides the teenager through the intricacies of nouns, adjectives and verbs.
Saritha Rai, "A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard," The New York Times, September 7, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/education/07tutor.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1126191549-1Ydu+7CY89CpuVeaJbJ4XA
 

Overall, about 1.5 million out of 19 million postsecondary students (in the U.S.) took at least one distance education course in the 1999-2000 school year. These 1.5 million distance education students differ from other postsecondary students in a number of respects. Compared to other students, they tend to be older and are more likely to be employed full-time and attending school part-time. They also have higher incomes and are more likely to be married. Most students take distance education courses at public institutions, with more taking courses from two-year schools than from four-year schools.  The Internet is the most common mode of delivery for providing distance education.
Testimony of Cornelia M. Ashby, Growth in Distance Education Programs and Implications for Federal Education Policy, GAO, September 26, 2002 --- http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d021125t.pdf 

Canada's Open University
Athabasca University, in Edmonton, Alberta,
said Monday (August 15, 2005) that it had become the first Canadian university to become accredited by a regional agency in the United States. The distance education institution, which bills itself as “Canada’s Open University,” said it had been granted accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/16/qt

The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.
Chis Werry notes that this quote is cited by Thomas Friedman in "Next, It's E-ducation," The New York Times, November 17, 1999, p. A29.  (See the Werry citation below)

The number of online classes offered by universities and colleges has grown rapidly. In 1999 one in three U.S. colleges offered some sort of accredited degree online, and approximately one million students took online classes (13 million take traditional classes only)
Chis Werry notes that this quote is cited by P.J. Huffstutter and Robin Fields in "A Virtual Revolution in Teaching," The Lost Angeles Times, March 3, 2000 and Alessandra Bianchi, "E is for E-school:  Dot-com start-ups go to the head of the class," INC., Juley1, 2000.   (See the Werry citation below)

More nonprofit colleges may be purchased by for-profit institutions
Sean Gallagher, a senior analyst at Eduventures, which does research on the education industry for investors and colleges, said he is not surprised to see an institution like Saint Mary’s turn to a place like Regis to take over adult education programs. “Higher education is scalable and larger providers have a huge advantage in marketing and online education,” he said.  “It’s just very difficult to develop a curriculum and manage and market it” in adult education, when you are a small college, Gallagher said.  Eduventures — which counts both Regis and Phoenix among its clients — has predicted that more nonprofit colleges may be purchased by for-profit institutions. That happened this month when Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit higher education company, bought the Franciscan University of the Prairies.  But he said the same factors that prompt that prediction may also apply to places like Regis that are big enough to compete with the larger for-profit institutions.  Officials at Saint Mary’s said they were drawn to Regis because it is a nonprofit institution. And Husson, the Regis administrator, said that the university’s traditional emphasis on values and ethics shapes all its programs.
Scott Jaschik, "How to Compete," Inside Higher Ed, March 18, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/18/regis 

You guys are in trouble and we are going to eat your lunch.
Michael Milken, on the future of higher education

Three hallmarks of our time: 

1. Technology that brings people together; 
2. The fact that we are REALLY becoming ONE world; the coming together of our global economy; 
3. The power of free markets not only is clearly demonstrated but actually increasing in importance.

Lawrence Summers, the President-elect of Harvard University and former Secretary of Treasury

Online you get to know your students' minds, not just their faces.
Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L., and Turoff, M. (1995). Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
As quoted at http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/tid_report.html 

     Rather than technology destroying borders, the tendency seems to be to establish ‘traditional’ international campuses. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is partnering with two Singapore universities to set up a branch campus, and several of Australia’s universities, especially Monash and RMIT, have also pursued this approach. Other institutions combine distance education with block teaching as the basis of their international efforts. This strategy may be considered high risk for all but a few brand name universities.
     Nevertheless, there are some estimates that the number of online higher education subjects available worldwide will be more than a million within a few years (Hibbs 1999). Indeed, the US Education Department’s America’s Learning Exchange already lists nearly one million online subjects. The 1999 Campus Computing Survey of 557 two-and four-year colleges and universities shows that the percentage of college courses using Web resources in the syllabus rose from 10.9 per cent in 1995 to 33.1 per cent in 1998 and 38.9 per cent in 1999, and that more than one quarter of all college courses (28.1 per cent) have a Web page, compared to 22.5 per cent in 1998 and 9.2 per cent in 1996 (Green 1999). Harvard University now spends $US8 million per year to maintain the online delivery of programs in its Business School alone (MacColl 1999). Various US-based web sites exist, with names implying global reach , such as the Globewide Network Academy and the World Lecture Hall,  providing gateways to many online college and university subjects. However, Web pages are not subjects, and subjects are not coherent courses.  Many of these online subjects are only accessible to students enrolled in the particular institution.

Quoted from Page 78 of The Business of Borderless Education, by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000). Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1

One anecdotal indicator of how global the accounting world has become is the fact that the top two performers on the  November 2000 United States CPA examination are both from overseas (they were also educated and work overseas) --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jun2001/inside.htm 

German, Austrians Get Top Exam Honors

Werner Ellmauer of Munich, Germany, won the Elijah Watt Sells gold medal by earning the highest overall score on the November 2000 Uniform CPA Examination, conducted by the AICPA. A total of 62,000 candidates took the exam.

Ellmauer, who graduated from Johannes Kepler University with a master’s degree in social and economic sciences, works in the audit practice division of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Munich.

Andreas Poelzelbauer and Erich Ploechl, both of Vienna, Austria, won the silver and bronze awards for taking second and third place, respectively.

Poelzelbauer, who has a master’s in business administration from the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna, works as a senior manager at Moore Stephens City Treuhand GMBH. Ploechl, who graduated with a master’s degree from the Vienna University of Economics, is an audit manager with Ernst & Young, Vienna.

The Sells award, created in 1923, recognizes the contributions to the accounting profession made by Elijah Watt Sells, a founding partner of Haskins & Sells (a predecessor to Deloitte & Touche). Sells, who was one of the first CPAs licensed under a New York state law enacted in 1896, was active in the establishment of the AICPA.


The top flagship state universities in the USA are under increasing pressures from their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees. The question is whether the most prestigious private universities like Stanford and Harvard will join in the competition.

The Top MBA Programs in the World according to the Financial Times ---
http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-ranking-2014

The Top MBA Programs in the USA according to US News
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools

"Half of U.S. Business Schools Might Be Gone by 2020," by Patrick Clark, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 14, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-programs-could-erase-half-of-u-dot-s-dot-business-schools-by-2020

Richard Lyons, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has a dire forecast for business education: “Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years—or five,” he says.

The threat, says Lyons, is that more top MBA programs will start to offer degrees online. That will imperil the industry’s business model. For most business schools, students pursuing part-time and executive MBAs generate crucial revenue. Those programs, geared toward working professionals, will soon have to compete with elite online alternatives for the same population.

. . .

Online MBA programs aren’t siphoning choice students from campuses yet, says Ash Soni, executive associate dean at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. Kelley ranks 15th on Bloomberg Businessweek’s list of full-time programs and was an early player in online MBAs. The school draws students from across the country, but it is more likely to compete with online MBA programs offered by the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Arizona State’s Carey School of Business. Says Soni: “If you’re a dean from a regional school and you’re asking, ‘Are these online guys tapping into my space?’ The answer is: maybe in the future, but not yet.”

Michael Desiderio, the executive director of the Executive MBA Council, says change is coming, but his group isn’t panicking. “We’re not saying it’s a threat or this is the end of the EMBA space,” he says. “It’s stimulating a discussion: How do we adapt to continue to serve a population that has changing needs?”

Online education is sure to shift the ways schools compete for students. For-profit MBA programs such as DeVry’s Keller School of Management have been the early losers as more traditional universities go online, says Robert Lytle, a partner in the education practice at consultancy Parthenon Group. That trend could extend to lower-ranked schools as the big-name brands follow.

When Lytle talks to directors at schools who are debating the merits of online learning, he tells them to stop dallying and start building programs. “Once you get out of the top tier of schools, you’re either already online, on your way there, or dead in the water,” he says. It isn’t clear which online models will be most successful, but many schools are feeling pressure to get on board. When Villanova School of Business announced a new online MBA program earlier this year, Dean Patrick Maggitti said there has never been a more uncertain time in higher education. “I think it’s smart strategy to be looking at options in this market.”

 

Jensen Comment --- Where I Disagree
Firstly, this is not so much a threat to undergraduate business schools, because most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs do not even offer undergraduate business degrees. It's not likely that Harvard and Stanford and the London Business School will commence to offer undergraduate business degrees online.

Secondly, this is not so much a threat to masters of accounting programs, because most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs do not even offer masters of accounting degrees and do not have enough accounting courses to meet the minimal requirements to take the CPA examination in most states. . It's not likely that Harvard and Stanford and the London Business School will commence to offer masters of accounting degrees online.

Thirdly, this is not so much of a threat even at the MBA level to universities who admit graduate students with lower admissions credentials. The US News Top MBA programs currently pick off the cream of the crop in terms of GMAT and gpa credentials. The top flagship state universities like the the Haas School at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois pick off the top students who cannot afford prestigious private universities. By the time all these universities skim the cream of the crop the second-tier public and private universities struggle with more marginal students applying for MBA programs.

It would be both dangerous and sad if the very top MBA programs introduced lower admissions standards for online programs vis-a-vis on-campus programs. In order to maintain the highest standards the most prestigious universities will have to cater to the highest quality foreign students and herein lies a huge problem. Some nations like China are notorious for fraud and cheating on admissions credentials like the GMAT. In Russia such credentials are for sale to the highest bidders.

The name of the game in business education is placement of graduates. Prestigious university MBA programs are at the top of the heap in terms of placement largely because of their successful alumni and strong alumni networks that actively seek MBA graduates from their alma maters. This will not work as well for online programs, especially since many of the online graduates of prestigious university online programs will live outside the USA.

However, top flagship state universities are under increasing pressures from their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees. This is already happening as is reflected in the following rankings of online programs by US News:

US News 2017 Ranking of the Best Nonprofit Online Colleges ---
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Note that US News has a new service for comparing programs side-by-side on various criteria, including their US News Rankings ---
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/compare
For example, compare the online programs of Indiana University with Texas A&M University

I don't anticipate that the highest-prestige MBA programs will have online degree programs anytime soon. They may have more and more free MOOCs, but that is an entirely different ballgame if no credit is given for the MOOCs. The highly prestigious Wharton is now offering its first-year MBA courses as free MOOCs ---
http://www.topmba.com/blog/wharton-steps-experimentation-moocs-mba-news
Also see http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-13/wharton-puts-first-year-mba-courses-online-for-free

Who are these students taking free first-year MOOC courses from Wharton?
Some are college professors who adding what they learn in MOOCs to the courses they themselves teach. Most MOOCs, by the way, are advanced courses on highly specialized topics like the literature of both famous and obscure writers. Others are basic courses that contribute to career advancement.


"Change.org Petition Calls for Kaplan U. to Be Shut Down," Inside Higher Ed, January 28, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/28/qt#249482

More than 8,500 Change.org members have signed an online petition addressed to the chairman of the Washington Post Company, Donald Graham, calling for a freeze on all Kaplan University admissions until the online university changes how it attracts its students. Shannon Croteau, a mother of three and a former Kaplan student, led the petition drive along with a group of other former students. "They told me they were accredited the same as Ivy League schools were," Croteau said. "They lie and cheat. It has ruined me." The petition title says: "Tell Kaplan and The Washington Post to Stop Cashing In On Low-Income Students." The group is asking for Kaplan to "end unethical business practices," which it deems predatory. The petition also cites the GAO report that investigated 16 for-profit universities and is at the center of debate over whether to regulate the for-profit education sector, and calls for the Washington Post to stop denying "wrong-doing." Post officials could not be reached for a response.

For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


"Do Online MBAs Make the Grade? Their popularity is soaring, but some are diploma mills, making recruiters wary of virtual degrees. Here are tips for picking a good program," by Jeffry Gangemi, Business Week, August 18, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/Gangemy 

"RIPE" FOR FRAUD.  Many of the online MBA programs are well-regarded and offer a way for busy people, such as Bolger, to get advanced education without having to sidetrack a career for a year or two. But, as in many growing fields, cautions abound. Concerns about "diploma mills," or substandard institutions without proper accreditation that offer degrees with little or no serious work, are growing.

"There are now more fake online MBA programs in the U.S. than real ones," says Vicky Phillips, founder and CEO of
GetEducated.com, a Web site that evaluates accredited online degree programs and educates consumers about them. "It's an area that's ripe for consumer fraud."

Diploma mills range from those practising outright deceit -- like St. Regis University, which falsely asserted Liberian government approval and was closed by court order in June, 2005 -- to organizations that require only a modicum of work for a degree, says Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization, a state organization that approves individual degree programs. "In the case of diploma mills, I call the schools 'suppliers' and the degree-holders 'users' because the educational component is often minimal," notes Contreras.

CORPORATE SKEPTICS.  Even with the best programs, online students lack the means to build their professional network or even interact in person with classmates. But the schools say that isn't a problem.

"There's a really strong, off-the-radar network building up on its own," says Michael Goess, chairman of the Division of Business for Graduate Programs at
Regis University in Denver. (Regis University is not connected with the shuttered St. Regis school.) Goess points out that students often arrange to meet on their own time, as well as trade e-mails and network electronically.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


"Enrollment in Online Courses Increases at the Highest Rate Ever," by Tavis Kaya, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/enrollment-in-online-courses-increases-at-the-highest-rate-ever/28204?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Despite predictions that the growth of online education would begin to level off, colleges reported the highest-ever annual increase in online enrollment—more than 21 percent—last year, according to a report on an annual survey of 2,600 higher-education institutions from the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group.

In fall 2009, colleges—including public, nonprofit private, and for-profit private institutions—reported that one million more students were enrolled in at least one Web-based course, bringing the total number of online students to 5.6 million. That unexpected increase—which topped the previous year’s 17-percent rise—may have been helped by higher demand for education in a rocky economy and an uptick in the number of colleges adopting online courses.

Although the survey found sustained interest in online courses across all sectors, there was a spike in the number of for-profit institutions—a 20-percent increase over last year—that said online education is critical to their long-term strategies. However, more public colleges than  private for-profits—74.9 percent versus 60.5 percent—say it’s part of their long-term plans.

Elaine Allen, associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship at Babson College and co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, said that the disproportionate increase in the for-profit sector may mean that online programs are becoming their “bread and butter.” Colleges are telling themselves that “if we want to grow and have profits, we need to be in the online sector,” she said.

Increased government scrutiny of the for-profit sector has complicated plans for expansion online. Approximately 32 percent of for-profit institutions—compared with about 17 percent of public colleges—said it will be difficult to comply with government regulations on financial aid. Those new regulations include a pending “gainful employmentrule that could cut off federal aid to programs with high levels of student debt relative to what students make after graduation—a move that could slash revenue for institutions dependent on student-aid money. “For the first time, we saw the government regulate financial aid and some kind of return on investment,” Ms. Allen said. “The for-profits are feeling the pressure there.”

Administrators also continue to wrestle with the question of quality in online education. According to the survey report, “Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010,” 66 percent of college administrators say that online education is the same as or better than face-to-face classes—a slight decline from last year. Still, Ms. Allen said it appears that more faculty members are warming up to online education as a quality alternative to face-to-face learning and are finding new ways to use the technology.

Ms. Allen expects Web enrollment to plateau as more competitors—whether they are Web programs from established universities or from new for-profit institutions—hit the market. And for-profit colleges will probably take advantage of their more-nimble business models to expand much more rapidly online than will their government-reliant public competitors. As more budget cuts loom, public institutions are already beginning to “feel competition from the for-profits,” she said.




First Consider Learning on Your Own

How to Learn Accounting On Your Own

Education and Learning Tutorials

Education --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education

ALISON (free vocational skills courses) --- https://alison.com/

Video:  Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 (and beyond)---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards is a "microcredential."

Credential (Certificate, Badge, License, and Apprenticeship) Count Approaches 1 Million ---
Click Here
For example, credentials for computer programming skills are becoming more popular. Some certificates supplement college diplomas, whereas others are earned by students who did not enroll in college.

 

Free Book:  Learning to Learn Online ---: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/learningtolearnonline/

Homeroom: The Official Blog of the U.S. Department of Education --- http://www.ed.gov/blog/

Khan Academy and YouTube Channels offer free tutorials. Learners can cherry pick topics and watch basic and advanced learning videos that vary in length form a few minutes to longer but usually much less than an hour for each module. These were never intended to be anything more than self-learning alternatives for highly motivated students. Some leading universities like the University of Wisconsin now over limited choices for taking competency examinations for college credit, but the distance between a few learning videos and college credit is a very long distance indeed.

More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu
Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”

Khan Academy --- https://www.khanacademy.org/

School of Open (Creative Commons) --- http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org

IBM Certificate Badges Available
Free Analytics, Big Data, and Data Science Courses ---
https://bigdatauniversity.com/

YouTube: 3Blue1Brown (video tutorials on math, bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, etc.) --- www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/featured

Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information ---
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU

California Community Colleges: Online Student Readiness Tutorials ---
https://apps.3cmediasolutions.org/oei/students.html

The Open Syllabus Project Visualizes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Frequently Assigned in College Courses ---
https://www.openculture.com/2021/02/the-open-syllabus-project-visualizes-the-1000000-books-frequently-assigned-in-college-courses.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education --
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of Our Trade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free distance education and training courses (most from prestigious universities) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education and training courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm


Ten Best YouTube Channels to Learn Web Development ---
https://readwrite.com/2019/12/17/10-best-youtube-channels-to-learn-web-development/


NCES: Distance Learning Dataset Training ---
https://nces.ed.gov/training/datauser/
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


The Dartmouth (Student) E-Guide to Academic Success (free book) ---
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/learning/free-study-skills-e-book/


A Master List of 1,200 Free Courses From Top Universities: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures  ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/a-master-list-of-1200-free-courses-from-top-universities.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses from top universities (transcript credits are not free and entail taking competency tests from credit providers) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Medical Education Online --- http://med-ed-online.net/index.php/meo


The best way to teach yourself to code and land a 6-figure job, from 5 people who've done it ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-teach-yourself-code-and-land-6-figure-job-2019-7?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BIPrime_select&utm_campaign=BI Prime 2020-06-25&utm_term=BI Prime Select

Over two-thirds of software developers are actually self-taught. A 2016 survey conducted by Stack Overflow on more than 56,000 coders also found that less than half have a computer science degree. 

One reason that people are so keen to teach themselves how to create and engineer software is that it's a career path that can quickly pay off — to the tune of $100,000 or more after just a few years of experience. While coding itself may be considered an entry-level tech skill, it's a basic building block that can open the door to a wide range of higher-paying positions, from tech lead or software architect all the way up to CTO.

There has perhaps never been a better time to take an independent approach to learning how to code — for a couple of good reasons. First, as the pandemic continues to lead to wide-scale layoffs, it can help to have a reliable, in-demand skill like coding to fall back on. Second, because you can develop code remotely and many employers need this skill, it's a perfect recession-proof solution for what to do next in a world where office-based work faces new challenges.

If you want to join the ranks of six-figure tech stars who taught themselves to code, take a page from the playbooks of people who've done it. Business Insider spoke with a panel of self-taught coders who leveraged their hard-won knowledge into enviable salaries and shared the following guidance for others who would like to follow in their footsteps.

. . .

Start by doing — and do it online

. . .

Don't get overwhelmed

. . .

Take advantage of developer communities

. . .

Leverage free resources

. . .

Try video tutorials

 Continued in article

Jensen Comment
And remember that a computer science degree (even a Ph.D.) does not teach you all the many coding/scriotung languages. Even as a computer science graduate you may want to self-teach yourself some coding you did not master as a formal student.

Bob Jensen's links to free coding tutorials and videos ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet


Lynda.com charges users between $250 to $375 a year to access content hosted on the platform ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynda_Weinman#Lynda.com

"Lynda.com Announces $186 Million Investment," Inside Higher Ed,  January 15, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/01/15/lyndacom-announces-186-million-investment

The online learning platform Lynda.com has set an early tone for the ed-tech venture capital and equity market in 2015 with a $186 million investment. The private equity company TPG Capital led the investment, while firms Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and Spectrum Equity -- as well as some of Lynda.com's earlier investors -- also participated. Lynda.com charges users between $250 to $375 a year to access content hosted on the platform, and will use the investment for acquisitions and growth, the company said in a press release.

Lynda.com has became a huge learning site with over 500 instructors --- http://www.lynda.com/

Jensen Comment
Because of the high price for each student (in addition to textbook prices) I would look first to see if there are good free tutorials for what you need such as in the tens of thousands of tutorials in hundreds of learning channels now on YouTube, the thousands of free tutorials at the Khan Academy, and the hundreds of thousands of free learning tutorials linked at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Open Campus is a large provider of learning certificates. This site also has a substantial amount of free learning resources ---
http://www.greycampus.com/opencampus

More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu
Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting

Khan Academy --- https://www.khanacademy.org

YouTube: 3Blue1Brown (video tutorials on math, bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, etc.) --- www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/featured

Harvard Extension School: Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Open Learning Course --- 
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/intensive-introduction-computer-science

Links to Free Computer and Coding Courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet

Also see the free learning materials, video tutorials, and even complete MOOC courses listed at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women And Minorities ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-free-coding-lessons-to-women-2014-6#ixzz35qMerq6C

Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance, economics, and statistics --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Warning:
Free textbooks are usually not updated often if at all. This is more problematic in some disciplines (e.g., accounting and tax rule changes) than other disciplines like mathematics, statistics, and languages

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

Learn 46 Languages for Free Online: A Big Update to Our Master List ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/learn_46_languages_for_free_online_a_big_update.html

Learn Psychology --- http://www.learnpsychology.org/

THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS  ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=76319&PK=N1S1009


Coursera --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

August 25, 2016 Message from Glen Gray

Collaborating with Coursera

Empowering people through learning

At PwC, our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. We think there's an opportunity to do this by sharing our experience and expertise with anyone who wants to learn. We’re joining forces with Coursera to create a series of courses designed around topics that address big global issues, drawing on the real-world knowledge and experience of PwC experts from around the globe from multiple disciplines. Our first course is focused on data and analytics, one of the biggest areas of opportunity to help solve problems in an increasingly complex world.

All course materials can be accessed at no charge. (Those who want to take the assessments and get a certification will pay a small charge). As instructors, you may identify portions of the courses which you wish to incorporate into your classes as assignments to help demonstrate concepts you are teaching. We hope you will agree that this will be a valuable resource. To learn more about and access Coursera, click here.

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Professor Emeritus
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
David Nazarian College of Business & Economics
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372

http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f


Harvard Business School hopes to fundamentally change online education with its new $1,500 pre-MBA program (only three non-credit courses for openers)

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wharton_School_of_the_University_of_Pennsylvania

Harvard Business School --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School

Jensen Comment
The Wharton School shocked the world when it commenced to provide free (non-credit) MOOCs of its actual MBA core courses. Aside from curiosity seekers and business faculty around the world wondering how the prestigious Wharton School teaches its core courses, many of the students taking these MOOCs are prospective MBA students who want to get an edge before entering MBA programs of their choice ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/moocs-upend-traditional-business-education/

Although Harvard provides hundreds of MOOCs in various disciplines, the Harvard Business School has not been providing MOOCs. Now the HBS is proposing a pre-MBA distance education program with a relatively low fee that may also shake up the MBA world. Since it is not free and has admission standards it cannot be called a MOOC.

"Harvard Business School hopes to fundamentally change online education with its new $1,500 pre-MBA program," by Richard Feloni, Business Insider, February 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-business-school-hbx-1500-online-program-2015-2

This week, Harvard Business School launched an innovative new online education program to the public that it thinks is so far ahead of free online courses that it's worthy of a $1,500 price tag.

The 11-week pre-MBA program called CORe accepts about 500 students and is taught in the school's signature case-study method. The first official session started on Feb. 25, and applications are open for spring and summer sessions.

CORe is the flagship offering from HBS's new digital platform, HBX, which aims to become a full-fledged branch of the school rather than a place to dump video recordings of classroom lectures.

CORe is made up of three courses — economics for managers, business analytics, and financial accounting — and primarily targets young professionals with liberal arts backgrounds who aspire to rise to management or are considering getting an MBA.

Students who pass the program receive a certificate that carries the weight of one from HBS's executive education program.

HBX chair Bharat Anand tells Business Insider that most online course offerings are still in their infancy, where long video lectures posted alongside multiple choice questions is the norm.

Conversely, HBX CORe is built on a proprietary platform that uses the case-study technique that distinguishes HBS. "This has some very interesting and exciting potential for education," Anand says.

It started as a way to find an online tool to address the "non trivial" 20% to 30% of students accepted to HBS's MBA program who lacked the necessary background in "the language of business": accounting, economics, and data analysis. These students always had access to a two-week primer before matriculating in the fall, but Anand says the short time was insufficient for achieving a thorough understanding, and traveling to HBS's campus before the school year officially starts could be an inconvenience for many students.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-business-school-hbx-1500-online-program-2015-2#ixzz3T3D8uxau

Jensen Comment
The Wharton set of free MOOCs will probably be a better choice for students wanting to learn a wider spectrum of business knowledge that includes things like marketing and finance that Harvard's pre-MBA program will not offer, at least not initially.

But there are advantages of Harvard's pre-MBA distance education program relative to MOOCs. Firstly, there's the prestige of being one of only 500 admitted to the program. Secondly, there will be more student-to-student learning interactions in Harvard's fee-based program. Unlike the HBS MBA program itself I doubt if there are writing assignments and examinations that are graded by faculty.

Given the low price and limited enrollments, I suspect that this pre-MBA program is not (at least not yet) intended to be a cash cow program relative to the massive cash cow MBA program and Executive MBA programs at the HBS.

"18 Free Online Business Courses That Will Boost Your Career," by John A. Byrne, Business Insider, December 18, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-free-online-business-courses-in-january-2014-12

. . .

To learn more about these courses — and register for them — click on the links below.

Gamification / Wharton / January 26

Globalization of Business Enterprise / IESE / January 19

Entrepreneurship 101 and Entrepreneurship 102 / MIT / January 9

ContractsX: From Trust to Promise to Contract / Harvard / January 8

Technology Entrepreneurship / Stanford / January 6

Asset Pricing – Part One / University of Chicago / January 18

Innovation and Commercialization / MIT / January 13

Grow To Greatness: Smart Growth For Private Businesses – Part II / University of Virginia / January 12

Financial Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ideas / Babson College / January or February

Time to Reorganize! Understand Organizations, Act, and Build a Meaningful World / HEC Paris / January 13

Game Theory II: Advanced Applications / Stanford / January 11

U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self / MIT / January 7

Make An Impact: Sustainability for Professionals / University of Bath / January 12

Managing People: Engaging Your Workforce / University of Reading / January 12

Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain World / University of Groningen / January 19

Project Management for Business Professionals / January 26

Subsistence Marketplaces / University of Illinois / January 26

DQ 101: Introduction to Decision Quality / Strategic Decisions Group / January 15

More from John A. Byrne:

This article originally appeared at LinkedIn. Copyright 2014. Follow LinkedIn on Twitter.

Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-mooc-courses-business-john-a.-byrne#ixzz3MLx1WEeQ

Most MOOCs are college courses that comprise part of the curriculum at a university, usually a leading university. The typical MOOC is the filmed version of a complete  live course on campus where onsite students get credits for taking the course in a campus classroom.

Online MOOC viewers usually watch the videos of an onsite course and may even get together in online learning teams, but viewers typically do not pay for or receive transcript credit unless they take competency examinations that are usually not administered by the MOOC professors. Prestigious universities created EdX and Udacity for purposes of competency testing and granting of transcript credits.

 
Most Webinars are much shorter training modules conducted live that were never intended to provide college course credits. They may be replayed as videos, but viewers can usually ask questions online and interact with the Webinar leaders only when the Webinar was first filmed.

Business firms like KPMG usually provide Webinars. Webinars are not commonly provided by colleges and universities. Typically Webinars are intended for employees, customers, or clients, but these Webinars may be shared freely with college faculty and students worldwide. Organizations like the FASB also conduct Webinars bit do not offer MOOCs. Webinars may also be conducted for continuing education (CEP) credits.

 
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of MOOC courses and instructions on how to sigh up for (free) MOOCs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 
Contrary to popular belief, the typical MOOC is not an introductory course in a discipline. More commonly a MOOC is an advanced specialty course in a college. For example, MOOCs are available on the writings of great poets but not introductory courses how to write compositions or poems. There are exceptions of course and often the most popular MOOCs are less advanced such as an introductory MOOC in social psychology versus an advanced MOOC on memory and metacognition.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of free MOOCs from prestigious universities around the world ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on tens of thousands of fee-based distance education courses around the world ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

 

 


Advanced Technological Education Television (over 200 videos) --- http://www.atetv.org

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/themes/icts/m4ed/mobile-learning-resources/unescomobilelearningseries/ 

350 Free Online Courses from Top Universities --- http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
Note that students may often take the courses for learning purposes, but without a grading process there is no transcript credit.

Thousands of  Open Sharing "Tutorials" On YouTube from a Harvard Business School Graduate
Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)

"How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education," by Clive Thompson, Wired News, July 15, 2011 ---
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and the Khan Academy (a free, non-credit site with hundreds of learning modules) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/a_master_list_of_500_free_courses_from_great_universities.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

Open University in the United Kingdom --- http://www.open.ac.uk/

Open Courses, Tutorials, Videos, and Course Materials from Prestigious Universities in the USA ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Fee-Based Distance Education Alternatives Around the World ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

 


"Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Spinoff Team Up on Remedial Math," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Carnegie-Foundation-and/141839/?cid=wc

A Stanford University spinoff and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching plan to announce a partnership on Tuesday to expand the distribution of online remedial-mathematics courses that so far have tripled students' success rates in half the time.

NovoEd, an online-learning start-up company that encourages students to work in small groups and to learn from one another, teamed up with the foundation to tackle what is widely considered a nationwide crisis in remedial math.

More than 60 percent of students entering community college require at least one remedial-math course before they can progress to credit-bearing courses. Fewer than a third of those students complete it, according to the foundation.

Over the past two years, the Carnegie Foundation has been trying to improve those numbers through a remedial-math program involving more than 40 community colleges and universities in at least 10 states.

Statway and Quantway, which together make up Carnegie's Pathways Program, have allowed students to complete in one year remedial-math sequences that used to take two years.

A Carnegie spokeswoman said that 17 percent of remedial-math students in the colleges that make up the Statway network historically have achieved math credit within three years, but 49 percent of those in the Statway program did so within a single year. Results were similar with the Quantway program.

The program's director and a senior managing partner at Carnegie, Bernadine Chuck Fong, said in an e-mail on Monday that NovoEd's focus on "student-centered, collaborative learning and pedagogy" meshed with the foundation's collaborative strategies.

A Focus on Collaborative Learning

Amin Saberi, co-founder and chief executive officer of NovoEd, agreed. "By combining forces, we can scale up the curriculum and address this national challenge head-on," he said, also in an interview on Monday. He is on leave from Stanford, where he is an associate professor of management science and engineering.

NovoEd started in January 2013 as an in-house program at Stanford called Venture Lab. Its massive open online courses have reached about 500,000 people in more than 150 countries, Mr. Saberi said.

NovoEd differs from Coursera and Udacity, two MOOC spinoffs that were also started by Stanford professors, in its focus on collaborative learning, Mr. Saberi said.

In NovoEd courses, students are typically assigned to groups of four to seven, based on their experiences and locations, to work on problems and projects together. They're also encouraged to discuss roadblocks they've faced in their own learning and how they've overcome the obstacles.

In the courses, students rate one another as team members, which gives them incentives to be active participants.

Mr. Saberi said the approach the partnership will take, which includes studying in contexts that are relevant to students, is particularly effective with first-generation and underprepared students who often struggle in online courses. Remedial-math students might, for instance, study how a 20-percent interest rate on a credit card adds up over time.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Also don't forget the wonderful free remedial and advanced math videos at the Khan Academy ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/


"Don’t Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Learning," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, May 13, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/13/dont-go-back-to-school-kio-stark/

“The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work. So Brain Pickings became the record of my alternative learning, of that cross-disciplinary curiosity that took me from art to psychology to history to science, by way of the myriad pieces of knowledge I discovered — and connected — on my own. I didn’t live up to the entrepreneurial ideal of the college drop-out and begrudgingly graduated “with honors,” but refused to go to my own graduation and decided never to go back to school. Years later, I’ve learned more in the course of writing and researching the thousands of articles to date than in all the years of my formal education combined.

So, in 2012, when I found out that writer Kio Stark was crowdfunding a book that would serve as a manifesto for learning outside formal education, I eagerly chipped in. Now, Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything is out and is everything I could’ve wished for when I was in college, an essential piece of cultural literacy, at once tantalizing and practically grounded assurance that success doesn’t lie at the end of a single highway but is sprinkled along a thousand alternative paths. Stark describes it as “a radical project, the opposite of reform … not about fixing school [but] about transforming learning — and making traditional school one among many options rather than the only option.” Through a series of interviews with independent learners who have reached success and happiness in fields as diverse as journalism, illustration, and molecular biology, Stark — who herself dropped out of a graduate program at Yale, despite being offered a prestigious fellowship — cracks open the secret to defining your own success and finding your purpose outside the factory model of formal education. She notes the patterns that emerge:

Continued in article


Khan Academy --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

The Trouble With Derek Muller
The trouble with Robert Talbot is that he relies on Derek Muller's superficial experiments on undergraduates and then extrapolates the findings to the entire world. He's Exhibit A about what we warn doctoral students about when they are learning how to conduct research and write up results of research.

In my viewpoint learning efficiency and effectiveness of any pedagogy is so complicated in a multivariate sense that no studies, including Muller's experiments, can be extrapolated to the something as vast as the Khan Academy.

For example, the learning from a given tutorial depends immensely on the aptitude of the learner and the intensity of concentration and replay of the tutorial.

For example, learning varies over time such as when a student is really bad at math until a point is reached where that student suddenly blossoms in math.

For example, the learning from a given tutorial depends upon the ultimate testing expected.
What they learn depends upon how we test:

It all boils down to how badly a student wants to learn something like how to take the derivative of a polynomial. Chances are that if a student is totally motivated and intent on learning this process, he or she can keep studying and re-studying Khan Academy videos for mastery learning far beyond what most any other pedagogy on this subject can offer.

The writings of Derek Muller are too superficial for my liking. Of course, learning from the Khan Academy can be superficial if the students are not intently focused on really, really wanting to learn. So what does that prove about the students who are intently focused on really, really wanting to learn?

The Kahn Academy is really intended for students who really, really want to learn. Don't knock it just because it doesn't work as well for unmotivated students used in superficial experiments.

A Really, Really Misleading Video
Do Khan Academy Videos Promote “Meaningful Learning”?   Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/expert_gently_asks_whether_khan_academy_videos_promote_meaningful_learning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

A Really Misleading Article
"The trouble with Khan Academy," by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 3, 2012
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/07/03/the-trouble-with-khan-academy/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Competency-Based Programs (where instructors do not assign the grades) Can Work Well But Do Not Always Work Well

A Research Report
"Competency-Based Degree Programs in the U.S. Postsecondary Credentials for Measurable Student Learning and Performance," Council on Adult and Experiential Learning," 2012 ---
http://www.cael.org/pdfs/2012_CompetencyBasedPrograms


MOOC --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc

"Who Takes MOOCs?" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2012 ---
 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hints-what-type-student-takes-mooc


"What You Need to Know About MOOC's," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/

. . .

Who are the major players?

Several start-up companies are working with universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:

edX

A nonprofit effort run jointly by MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.

Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone can use it to run MOOC’s.

Coursera

A for-profit company founded by two computer-science professors from Stanford.

The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue. More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U. of Virginia, have joined.

Udacity

Another for-profit company founded by a Stanford computer-science professor.

The company, which works with individual professors rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars. Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its courses on computer science and related fields.

Udemy

A for-profit platform that lets anyone set up a course.

The company encourages its instructors to charge a small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many of the courses.

"The Future Is Now?" by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, August 13, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-future-is-now.html

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, MITx, and Courses from Prestigious Universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm


"Coursera Tops 1 Million Students," Inside Higher Ed, August 10, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/10/coursera-tops-1-million-students

Coursera, the company that provides support and Web hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses. The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116 courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about 385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to 60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.

Bob Jensen's threads on educating the masses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Started by Two Economics Professors from George Mason University --- Click Here
Marginal Revolution University Launches, Bringing Free Courses in Economics to the Web --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/marginal_revolution_university_launches_bringing_free_courses_in_economics_to_the_web.html

A great year for open education got even better with the launch of Marginal Revolution University. Founded by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two econ professors at George Mason University, MRUniversity promises to deliver free, interactive courses in the economics space. And they’re getting started with a course on Development Economics, a subdiscipline that explores why some countries grow rich and others remain poor. In short, issues that have real meaning for everyday people worldwide.

In an announcement on the Marginal Revolution blog last month, Cowen outlined a few of the principles guiding the project:

1. The product is free, and we offer more material in less time.

2. Most of our videos are short, so you can view and listen between tasks, rather than needing to schedule time for them.  The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long.  When needed, more videos are used to explain complex topics.

3. No talking heads and no long, boring lectures.  We have tried to reconceptualize every aspect of the educational experience to be friendly to the on-line world.

4. It is low bandwidth and mobile-friendly.  No ads.

5. We offer tests and quizzes.

6. We have plans to subtitle the videos in major languages.  Our reach will be global, and in doing so we are building upon the global emphasis of our home institution, George Mason University.

7. We invite users to submit content.

8. It is a flexible learning module.  It is not a “MOOC” per se, although it can be used to create a MOOC, namely a massive, open on-line course.

9. It is designed to grow rapidly and flexibly, absorbing new content in modular fashion — note the beehive structure to our logo.  But we are starting with plenty of material.

10. We are pleased to announce that our first course will begin on October 1.

Bookmark MRUniversity and look out for its curriculum to expand. In the meantime, you can find more courses in the Economics section of our big list of 530 Free Courses Online.

Marginal Revolution University Launches, Bringing Free Courses in Economics to the Web is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities and MOOCs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


Steve Keen in Australia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Keen

They're Great!!!
Steve Keen: Behavioral Finance Lectures 2012  --- Click Here
http://www.valueinvestingworld.com/2012/09/steve-keen-behavioral-finance-lectures.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ValueInvestingWorld+%28Value+Investing+World%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I’ve just uploaded the first 8 lectures in my Behavioral Finance class for 2012. The first few lectures are very similar to last year’s, but the content changes substantially by about lecture 5 when I start to focus more on Schumpeter’s approach to endogenous money ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

Related book: Debunking Economics

Jensen Comment
These are quite good slide show lectures.

 
"Video:  Behavioral Finance from PBS Nova," by Jim Mahar, Finance Professor Blog, March 27, 2011---
 http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/behavioarl-finance-from-pbs-nova.html

Bob Jensen's Threads on Behavioral and Cultural Economics and Finance ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Behavioral

Bob Jensen's threads on tutorials, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

Bob Jensen's threads on tutorials, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

 


"Score One for the Robo-Tutors," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, May 22, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/22/report-robots-stack-human-professors-teaching-intro-stats

Without diminishing learning outcomes, automated teaching software can reduce the amount of time professors spend with students and could substantially reduce the cost of instruction, according to new research.

In experiments at six public universities, students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on “machine-guided learning” software -- with reduced face time with instructors -- did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses. This largely held true regardless of the race, gender, age, enrollment status and family background of the students.

The study comes at a time when “smart” teaching software is being increasingly included in conversations about redrawing the economics of higher education. Recent investments by high-profile universities in “massively open online courses,” or MOOCs, has elevated the notion that technology has reached a tipping point: with the right design, an online education platform, under the direction of a single professor, might be capable of delivering meaningful education to hundreds of thousands of students at once.

The new research from the nonprofit organization Ithaka was seeking to prove the viability of a less expansive application of “machine-guided learning” than the new MOOCs are attempting -- though one that nevertheless could have real implications for the costs of higher education.

The study, called “Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities,” involved students taking introductory statistics courses at six (unnamed) public universities. A total of 605 students were randomly assigned to take the course in a “hybrid” format: they met in person with their instructors for one hour a week; otherwise, they worked through lessons and exercises using an artificially intelligent learning platform developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative.

Researchers compared these students against their peers in the traditional-format courses, for which students met with a live instructor for three hours per week, using several measuring sticks: whether they passed the course, their performance on a standardized test (the Comprehensive Assessment of Statistics), and the final exam for the course, which was the same for both sections of the course at each of the universities.

The results will provoke science-fiction doomsayers, and perhaps some higher-ed traditionalists. “Our results indicate that hybrid-format students took about one-quarter less time to achieve essentially the same learning outcomes as traditional-format students,” report the Ithaka researchers.

The robotic software did have disadvantages, the researchers found. For one, students found it duller than listening to a live instructor. Some felt as though they had learned less, even if they scored just as well on tests. Engaging students, such as professors might by sprinkling their lectures with personal anecdotes and entertaining asides, remains one area where humans have the upper hand.

But on straight teaching the machines were judged to be as effective, and more efficient, than their personality-having counterparts.

It is not the first time the software used in the experiment, developed over the last five years or so by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, has been proven capable of teaching students statistics in less time than a traditional course while maintaining learning outcomes. So far that research has failed to persuade many traditional institutions to deploy the software -- ostensibly for fear of shortchanging students and alienating faculty with what is liable to be seen as an attempt to use technology as a smokescreen for draconian personnel cuts.

But the authors of the new report, led by William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, hope their study -- which is the largest and perhaps the most rigorous to date on the effectiveness of machine-guided learning -- will change minds.

“As several leaders of higher education made clear to us in preliminary conversations, absent real evidence about learning outcomes there is no possibility of persuading most traditional colleges and universities, and especially those regarded as thought leaders, to push hard for the introduction of [machine-guided] instruction” on their campuses.

Continued in article

"‘Free-Range Learners’: Study Opens Window Into How Students Hunt for Educational Content Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-range-learners-study-opens-window-into-how-students-hunt-for-educational-content-online/36137?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Concept Knowledge, Competency Testing, and Assessment of Deep Understanding ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the explosion of distance education and training ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation


The MOOC Model Revisited
"Massive Open Online Courses: How: 'The Social” Alters the Relationship Between Learners and Facilitators'," by Bonnie Stewart, Inside Higher Ed, April 30, 2012 --- Click Here
 http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/massive-open-online-courses-how-%E2%80%9C-social%E2%80%9D-alters-relationship-between

We're getting close to the tail end of the 36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”

How can I tell?

First, I'm getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital Identities. I'm second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I'm on deck means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.

But it's also clear we're winding down because the #change11 conversation hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns.  Once there were lively debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.

Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week #35.

Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a stop over the last month or two.

I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I've been? Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?

I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm a teacher at heart. I'll put the work into developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or 300. But as I'm preparing, I'm thinking about what it means to facilitate in a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.

Or the internet.

As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.

The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the facilitator.

On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of completed learning objectives.

Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is content-focused, not connection-focused.

If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I'd have a very different module ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.

I've been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course I've taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and grading backing me in the classroom.

In the connectivist MOOC model, I don't.

There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They won't get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they completed anything. There's nothing specific for them to complete, unless I design an exit goal as part of the week's activities. But that would be MY exit goal: not theirs. They don't get to put the word MIT on their CV. And while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold, Pierre Levy – I'm among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in the year's lineup. They won't even get the relational perk of engaging with somebody famous.

Continued in article

April 29, 2012 message from Mark Lewis
This is an interview with Sebastian Thrun, formerly of Stanford and still associated with Google. In my ideal world, every faculty member and a large fraction of the administration and staff would watch the last half of this video. The first half is worth watching if you have an interest in Google Glass, autonomous cars, or Google X projects in general. The second half talks about his views and what he is doing in education. He is the person who taught an AI course online that had 160,000 students enroll and had 23,000 students complete it. In this interview he describes how this impacted him so much that he left his tenured position at Stanford. The lack of personal contact he talks about in his classroom does not apply in most Trinity classrooms, however, a cost of $0 for something that many students find as more personal than a large lecture hall does have the potential to change the economics of higher education.

 
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12321
 
Mark

 

Bob Jensen's threads on these issues are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Especially note
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MITx


Higher Education Bubble --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_bubble

Educating the Masses:  From MITx to EDX
Harvard and MIT Create EDX to Offer Free Online Courses Worldwide --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/05/harvard_and_mit_create_edx_to_offer_free_online_courses_worldwide.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

It all started early last fall. Sebastian Thrun went a little rogue (oh the audacity!) and started offering free online courses under Stanford’s banner to mass audiences, with each course promising a “statement of accomplishment” at the end. Hundreds of thousands of students signed up, and universities everywhere took notice.

Since then we have witnessed universities and startups scrambling fairly madly to create their own MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), hoping to gain a foothold in a new area that could eventually disrupt education in a major way. In December, MIT announced the creation of MITx, promising free courses and a “certificate of completion” to students worldwide. Sebastian Thrun left Stanford to create Udacity, and another Stanford spinoff, Coursera, gained instant traction when it announced in April that it had raised $16 million in venture capital and signed partnerships with Princeton, Penn and U Michigan.

Now comes the latest news. MIT has teamed up with its Cambridge neighbor, Harvard, to create a new non profit venture, EDX. To date, Harvard has barely dabbled in open education. But it’s now throwing $30 million behind EDX (M.I.T. will do the same), and together they will offer free digital courses worldwide, with students receiving the obligatory certificate of mastery at the end. The EDX platform will be open source, meaning it will be open to other universities. Whether EDX will replace MITx, or sit uncomfortably beside it, we’re not entirely sure (though it looks like it’s the former).

Classes will begin next fall. And when they do, we’ll let you know … and, of course, we’ll add them to our massive collection of 450 Free Online Courses.

For more information, you can watch the EDX press conference here and read an FAQ here.

"Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education?" by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 20, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/20/will-mitx-disrupt-higher-education/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

 

"Innovations in Higher Education? Hah! College leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation before it's too late," by Ann Kirschner, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Innovations-in-Higher/131424/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, lectures, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


MOOC --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc

"Who Takes MOOCs?" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2012 ---
 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hints-what-type-student-takes-mooc

"Coursera Tops 1 Million Students," Inside Higher Ed, August 10, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/10/coursera-tops-1-million-students

Coursera, the company that provides support and Web hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses. The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116 courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about 385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to 60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.

Bob Jensen's threads on educating the masses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 


"Purdue Kicks Off Global Online-Education Project," by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-kicks-off-global-online-education-project/36339

Purdue University today joined the group of universities that have recently announced plans to experiment with online courses aimed at a global audience.

The new effort, called PurdueHUB-U, will serve up modular online courses with video lectures, interactive visualizations, and tools for students to interact with their peers and the professor. The project’s leaders hope it will improve face-to-face classes and bring in revenue by attracting students around the world.

PurdueHUB-U grew out of a course taught this year on Purdue’s nanoHUB, a collaborative platform for nanotechnology research. The course, on the fundamentals of nanoelectronics, was broken into two parts that lasted a few weeks each. It attracted 900 students from 27 countries, most of whom paid $30 for the class and a certificate of completion. Students also had the option to turn their certificates into continuing-education credits for an additional $195.

Timothy D. Sands, Purdue’s provost, called that pricing model a “low outer paywall” that was much cheaper than traditional credit-hour charges, but not quite free. He added that the project will first focus on developing online course materials to transform the university’s face-to-face classes. Mr. Sands said the course modules could also be offered to Purdue alumni, allowing them to continue their education after they graduate.

Continued in article

Educating the Masses:  From MITx to EDX
Harvard and MIT Create EDX to Offer Free Online Courses Worldwide --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/05/harvard_and_mit_create_edx_to_offer_free_online_courses_worldwide.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on MITx and other free courses, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 


"‘Free-Range Learners’: Study Opens Window Into How Students Hunt for Educational Content Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-range-learners-study-opens-window-into-how-students-hunt-for-educational-content-online/36137?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Milwaukee — Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class.

Not quite. The preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.

“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,” Ms. Morgan said in an interview after her talk, which took place in a packed room at the 9th Annual Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference & Workshop.

It’s nothing new to hear that students supplement their studies with other universities’ online lecture videos. But Ms. Morgan’s research—backed by the National Science Foundation, based on 14 focus-group interviews at a range of colleges, and buttressed by a large online survey going on now—paints a broader picture of how they’re finding content, where they’re getting it, and why they’re using it.

Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says. If they’re on a pre-med or health-science track, they prefer recognized “brands” like the Mayo Clinic. Students often seek this outside content due to dissatisfaction with their own professors, Ms. Morgan says.

The study should be welcome news for government agencies, universities, and others in the business of publishing online libraries of educational content—although students tend to access these sources from the “side door,” like via a Google search for a very specific piece of information.

But the study also highlights the challenge facing professors and librarians. Students report relying on friends to get help and share resources, Ms. Morgan says, whereas their responses suggest “much less of a role” for “conventional authority figures.”

They “don’t want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,” she says. “It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”

Ms. Morgan confesses to some concerns about her own data. She wonders how much students are “telling me what I want to hear.” She also worries that she’s tapping into a disproportionate slice of successful students.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities and Kahn Academy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 


Thousands of Open Sharing "Tutorials" On YouTube from a Harvard Business School Graduate
Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)

Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)

"How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education," by Clive Thompson, Wired News, July 15, 2011 ---
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and the Khan Academy (a free, non-credit site with hundreds of learning modules) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

2,300+ YouTube Free Educational Videos from Salman Khan
"Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math:  Can an ex-hedge fund guy and his nonprofit Khan Academy make American school kids competitive again?" by Bryant Urstadt, Business Week, May 19, 2011 ---
 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_22/b4230072816925.htm?link_position=link3

In August 2004, Salman Khan agreed to help his niece, Nadia, with her math homework. Nadia was headed into seventh grade in New Orleans, where Khan had grown up, but she hadn't been placed in her private school's advanced math track, which to a motivated parent these days is a little bit like hearing your child has just been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. In particular, Nadia was having trouble with unit conversion, turning gallons into liters and ounces into grams.

Math was something Khan, then 28, understood. It was one of his majors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with computer science and electrical engineering. He had gone on to get a master's in computer science and electrical engineering, also at MIT, and then an MBA from Harvard. He was working in Boston at the time for Daniel Wohl, who ran a hedge fund called Wohl Capital Management. Khan, an analyst, was the only employee.

Being a bit of a geek, Khan put Yahoo!'s (YHOO) Messenger to work to help Nadia, using the Doodle function to let him illustrate concepts for his niece as they spoke on the phone. Then he wrote some code that generated problems she could do on a website. With Khan's help, Nadia made it into the fast track, and her younger brothers Arman and Ali signed on for Khan's tutoring as well. Then they brought in some of their friends. Khan built his site out a little more, grouping the concepts into "modules" and creating a database that would keep track of how many problems the kids had tried and how they had fared, so he'd know how each of his charges was progressing.

Messenger didn't make sense with multiple viewers, so he started creating videos that he could upload to YouTube. This required a Wacom tablet with an electronic pen, which cost about $80. The videos were each about 10 minutes long and contained two elements: his blackboard-style diagrams—Khan happens to be an excellent sketcher—and his voice-over explaining things like greatest common divisors and equivalent fractions. He posted the first video on Nov. 16, 2006; in it, he explained the basics of least common multiples. Soon other students, not all children, were checking out his videos, then watching them all, then sending him notes telling him that he had saved their math careers, too.

Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April, he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons.

His program has also spread from the homes of online learners to classrooms around the world, to the point that, in at least a few classrooms, it has supplanted textbooks. (Students often write Khan that they aced a course without opening their texts, though Khan doesn't post these notes on his site.) Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher and Stanford University PhD candidate in education, puts it this way: "If you're teaching math in this country right now, then there's pretty much no way you haven't heard of Salman Khan."

Continued in article

"Video: Salman Khan @ Google 'Free World Class Virtual School(s)'," Simoleon Sense, March 28, 2011 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-salman-khan-google-free-world-class-virtual-schools/

"A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube:  Are his 10-minute lectures the future?" by Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Self-Appointed-Teacher-Runs/65793/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.

This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.

The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short—about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates.

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube's education section.

Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

He started with subject matter he knows best—math and engineering, which he studied as an undergraduate at MIT. But lately he has added history lectures about the French Revolution and biology lectures on "Embryonic Stem Cells" and "Introduction to Cellular Respiration."

If Mr. Khan is unfamiliar with a subject he wants to teach, he gives himself a crash course first. In a recent talk he explained how he prepared for his lecture on entropy: "I took two weeks off and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and everyone I could talk to and I said, Let's go have a glass of wine about entropy. After about two weeks it clicked in my brain, and I said, now I'm willing to make a video about entropy."

Some critics have blogged that this learn-as-you-go approach is no way to run an educational project—and they worry that the videos may contain errors or lead students astray.

But to Mr. Khan, occasional mistakes are part of his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the process better, he argues. Sometimes they correct him in comments on his YouTube videos, and he says this makes students more engaged with the material. "Sometimes when it's a little rough, it's going to be a better product than when you overprepare," he says.

The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of higher-education's most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make the best teachers; that hourlong lectures are the best way to relate material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Mr. Khan argues that his little lectures disprove all of that.

Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.

The Khan Academy raises the question: What if colleges could be retooled with new technologies in mind?

College From Scratch Mr. Khan is not the only one asking that question these days.

Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University and a popular Internet guru, recently challenged his more than 50,000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise:

"If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?"

Bursts of creativity quickly Twittered in, and Mr. Shirky collected and organized the responses on a Web site. The resulting visions are either dreams of an education future or nightmares, depending on your viewpoint:

All students should be required to teach as well, said @djstrouse. Limit tenure to eight years, argued @jakewk. Have every high-school senior take a year before college to work in some kind of service project away from his or her hometown, said @alicebarr. Some Twittering brainstormers even named their fictional campuses. One was called FailureCollege, where every grade is an F to desensitize students to failure and encourage creativity. Another was dubbed LifeCollege, where only life lessons are taught.

When I caught up with Mr. Shirky recently, he described the overall tone of the responses as "bloody-minded." Did that surprise him?

"I was surprised—by the range of responses, but also partly by the heat of the responses," he said. "People were mad when they think about the gap between what is possible and what happened in their own educations."

Mr. Shirky declined to endorse any of the Twitter models or to offer his prediction of how soon or how much colleges will change. But he did argue that higher education is ripe for revolution.

For him the biggest question is not whether a new high-tech model of higher education will emerge, but whether the alternative will come from inside traditional higher education or from some new upstart.

Voting With Their Checkbooks Lately, several prominent technology entrepreneurs have taken an interest in Mr. Khan's model and have made generous contributions to the academy, which is now a nonprofit entity.

Mr. Khan said that several people he had never met have made $10,000 contributions. And last month, Ann and John Doerr, well-known venture capitalists, gave $100,000, making it possible for Mr. Khan to give himself a small salary for the academy so he can spend less of his time doing consulting projects to pay his mortgage. Over all, he said, he's collected about $150,000 in donations and makes $2,000 a month from ads on his Web site.

I called up one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief executive of 37signals, a hip business-services company, who recently gave an undisclosed amount to Khan Academy, to find out what the attraction was.

"The next bubble to burst is higher education," he said. "It's too expensive for people—there's no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching."

No one I talked to saw Khan Academy as an alternative to traditional colleges (for one thing, it doesn't grant degrees). When I called a couple of students who posted enthusiastic posts to Facebook, they said they saw it as a helpful supplement to the classroom experience.

Mr. Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have watched certain videos and passed related tests. "This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever," he said.

The Khan Academy is a concrete answer to Mr. Shirky's challenge to create a school from scratch, and it's an example of something new in the education landscape that wasn't possible before. And it serves as a reminder to be less reverent about those long-held assumptions.

Jensen Comment

The YouTube Education Link --- http://www.youtube.com/education?lg=EN&b=400&s=pop
I could not find Khan Academy tutorials linked at the above site.

The Khan Academy YouTube Channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
The above site also links to a PBS News item about Khan Academy

Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)

Although Khan Academy has many general education tutorials and quite a few things in economics and finance, I could not find much on accounting.  One strength of the site seems to be in mathematics. There is also a category on Valuation and Investing which might be useful for personal finance.

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing lectures, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on free tutorials and videos in various academic disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


"MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project," OpenCulture.com, January 13, 2011 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2011/01/mit_opencourseware_introduces_complete_courses.html

This week, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project launched OCW Scholar, a new series of courses “designed for independent learners who have few additional resources available to them.” To date, MIT has given students access to isolated materials from MIT courses. Now, with this new initiative, lifelong learners can work with a more rounded set of resources. OWC Scholar takes video lectures, homework problems, problem solving videos, simulations, readings, etc., and stitches them into a structured curriculum. Perfect for the self-disciplined student.

Below we have listed the first five courses in the OWC Scholar collection. (They’re entirely free.) Fast forward three years and you will find 20 courses online, says MIT. All will be added to our big list of Free Online Courses.

Physics 1: Classical Mechanics
Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism
Introduction to Solid State Chemistry
Single Variable Calculus
Multivariable Calculus

  • Audio & Podcasts

    Business School Podcast Collection – Download MBA Podcasts and other Business Podcasts ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2007/02/business_school.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on the sharing of course materials and videos from various prestigious universities are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Video:  Open Education for an Open World
    45-minute Video from the Long-Time President of MIT --- http://18.9.60.136/video/816

    About the Series of Lectures on Complex Systems from MIT ---
    http://esd.mit.edu/resources/brunel.html

    The Brunel Lecture Series on Complex Systems, presented by MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD), was made possible by funds assembled and underwritten by Frank P. Davidson, convener of the Channel Tunnel Study Group (1957). It was this group's design, accomplished by agreement with Bechtel Corporation, Brown & Root, Inc. and Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc. in 1959, that formed the basis of the subsea railway link now in service between England and France.

    Brunel Lectures 2001 – Present:

    The Financial Crisis, the Recession, and America’s Future: A Systemic Perspective (2010)
    by Charles Ferguson
    filmmaker, Inside Job

    Liberty by Design: An Internet Practitioner's Perspective (2009)
    by Alan Davidson
    Director of Goverment Relations and Public Policy for Google
    View on MIT World

    From IT to Cleantech: New Sources of Innovation (2008)
    by Shai Agassi
    Founder and CEO, Better Place
    View on MIT World

    Process Improvement in the Rarified Environment of Academic Medicine (2007)
    by Paul F. Levy
    President and Chief Executive Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
    View on MIT World

    Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond (2006)
    by Dr. Charles M. Vest
    President Emeritus and Professor of Mechanical Engineering
    View on MIT World

    The 21st Century is about Engineering, Systems, and Society (2005)
    by Dr. A. Richard Newton
    Dean of the College of Engineering at University of California at Berkeley; Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering; Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

    Engineering Engineering Systems (2004)
    by Thomas L. Magnanti
    Institute Professor
    Dean, MIT School of Engineering
    View on MIT World

    The Columbia Tragedy: System-Level Issues for Engineering (2003)
    by Sheila Widnall
    Member, Columbia Accident Investigation Board
    Member, National Women's Hall of Fame
    Institute Professor, Professor of Aeronautics, Astronautics, and Engineering Systems, Engineering Systems Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    View on MIT World

    Living with Catastrophic Terrorism: Can Science and Technology Make the U.S. Safer? (2002)
    by Lewis M. Branscomb
    Co-chair, Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism, National Research Council and Professor Emeritus, Public Policy and Corporate Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
    View on MIT World

    Simple Systems and Other Myths (2001)
    by Norman R. Augustine
    Former President, CEO, and Chairman and Current Chairman, Executive Committee, Lockheed Martin Corporatio


    Graduates Who Are Happy to Land Minimum Wage Careers
    "Little-Known (usually unaccredited) Colleges Exploit Visa Loopholes to Make Millions Off Foreign Students," by Tom Bartlett, Karin Fischer, and Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Little-Known-Colleges-Make/126822/

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges working in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges working in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill

     


    June 19, 2010 message from Tom Hood [tom@MACPA.ORG]

    Greetings Colleagues,

    I have two sons home for the summer asking if I know of any great resources to help them get ahead of Intermediate Accounting as they approach the fall semester. I figured I would go to the best source I know of to help them out – these two listservs.

    So can you direct me to any on-line and other resources that may get them studying for Intermediate Accounting I and Intermediate Accounting II?

    Also, what advice would you give them on how to approach these courses (one is in I and the older in II)?

    I will also be sharing this on our student site…

    On another note – we are working in an International Pavilion on CPA Island in Second Life and our Accounting Eductaion Pavilion (see details at www.cpaisland.com  and www.slacpa.org  ). We continue to offer free kiosks with links to your colleges and universities and free areas to meet as classes. We have an interne working this summer who can give you a demo and show you around – just send an e-mail to my attention ad mention the CPA Island.

    Thanks,

    Warmest regards,

    Tom

    Tom Hood, CPA.CITP CEO & Executive Director Maryland Association of CPAs Business Learning Institute
    www.macpa.org
    www.bizlearning.net 

     

    June 20, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi Tom,

    First of all consider video alternatives. More than 100 universities have set up channels on YouTube ---
    http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400

    Next take a topic list from a typical intermediate accounting textbook, some of which are free (not necessarily completely up to date for rapidly changing standards) at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

    Then search for the term "accounting" at http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400 
    Scroll down to find videos that might be relevant to intermediate accounting topics. Some of these videos are more up to date than even the latest textbooks.
    Some of these videos are from the top teachers or top CPA firm leaders (like Jim Turley's videos) in the world.
    Also note that if you search out the instructor (usually found at her/his university) you will often find more course materials available for downloading. Also email messages to these instructors may result in more shared learning materials.

    But more importantly, Tom, consider the goals of your two sons in studying for intermediate accounting. The overriding goal of an intermediate accounting student is to eventually pass the CPA examination. For studying intermediate accounting I would have your sons dig directly into a CPA examination review course and focus on the answers to CPA examination questions in the topical areas identified above in intermediate accounting textbooks. They have to pick and chose topics found in an intermediate accounting textbook, because many CPA examination questions come from other courses such as advanced accounting and governmental accounting and tax accounting and managerial accounting.

    A free CPA examination review package, complete with practice questions, answers, and examinations, is available at
    http://cpareviewforfree.com/
    If you want more video review modules for the CPA examination, then a commercial package is probably better ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010303CPAExam

    There are some topics that are probably not totally up to date in even the latest available intermediate accounting textbooks. One is IFRS although, unless your sons will be taking intermediate accounting from an IFRS nut, I would probably not worry too much about technical IFRS problems on the CPA examination in the near future. However, great free materials for learning IFRS are available at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#IFRSlearning

    In a typical intermediate accounting two semester sequence, much of the first semester is spent reviewing basic accounting (especially in universities that receive a large number of community college transfer students). If your sons need video reviews of basic accounting, I highly recommend Susan Crosson's video lectures. The links are at the bottom of the page at http://www.youtube.com/SusanCrosson
    Look for "Financial Videos Organized by Topic."

    Members of the American Accounting Association, including student members, can find some instructional helper materials at the AAA Commons ---
    http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
    Click on the menu choice "Teaching" and then "Browse resources."

    Implied in all the above recommendations is a learning pedagogy that pretty much entails memory aiding and abetting in a traditional manner (study the problems and then study the textbook answers). At the other extreme there is better and longer-lasting metacognitive learning such as the award-winning BAM pedagogy (for an intermediate accounting two-course sequence) invented by Catanach, Croll, and Grinacker --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
    This pedagogy is more like the real world where your supervisor gives you a problem to solve and you go out and solve it any way you can. You can study BAM's problems, but there are no answers provided to study. Students have to teach themselves by seeking out the answers from anywhere in the world.

    Although the BAM pedagogy would be much more time consuming for your sons, you can probably get the Hydromate Case and some of the instructional support materials from Tony Catanach --- anthony.catanach@villanova.edu
    If Tony is not available, Noah Barsky can help --- noah.barsky@villanova.edu

    By the way, at the University of Virginia, where the BAM pedagogy was born, the passage rate on the CPA examination rose dramatically after switching to the BAM pedagogy in intermediate accounting, This is not surprising since you remember best those things you had to learn on your own. Of course many students looking for an easy way out hate the BAM pedagogy.

    Bob Jensen

     




    Readings and Printed References of Possible Interest


    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment and accreditation --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

    Distance Education Websites --- http://ejw.i8.com/distweb.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the shocking future of distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and education technology are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

    Portal to Asian Internet Resources --- http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:3200/PAIR/index.html 

    U.S. Department of Education  --- http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml

    Department of Education: Office of Vocational and Adult Education ---
    http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ovae/index.html?src=oc

    European Centre for Higher Education --- http://www.cepes.ro/

    The Physical Sciences Resources Center --- http://www.psrc-online.org/

    A collection of information and resources for physical sciences education is just a mouse-click away! You may search the collection by keyword or name, or browse the collection by topic, object type, or grade level.

    General Chemistry Online --- http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/index.shtml

    League for Innovation in the Community College --- http://www.league.org/

    "Help Site for the Poor," Wired News, June 9, 2006 ---
    http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71116-0.html?tw=wn_index_17

    The site would provide information about such basics as public safety, emergency services, education, health care and jobs. U.S. Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, serve as honorary co-chairmen of the group.

    Continued in article

    The One Economy homepage is at http://www.one-economy.com/

    Distance Learning Today will be a quarterly supplement to USA Today newspaper
    Dr. John G. Flores, CEO of The United States Distance Learning Association, today announced his organization's sponsorship of "Distance Learning Today," a quarterly supplement in USA TODAY. "Distance learning is transforming the American educational landscape, through on-line technology, video conferencing systems, satellite delivery and other media," Flores said. "We expect this supplement to be an invaluable guide for millions of present and potential distance learners as well as a means for our member institutions and corporate sponsors to reach them." The first supplement will appear in September and is expected to exceed twenty pages. Editorial will include features on the distance learning revolution, financing a distance education, increasing acceptance of distance learning degrees among employers, technology requirements and, importantly, how to evaluate the quality of a distance learning offering. "Today, there are thousands of institutions offering degrees and certifications for distance learners," Flores said. "It's timely to provide the public with a reliable information resource concerning this dynamic educational alternative." Formed in 1987, the United States Distance Learning Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs of the distance learning community by promoting the development and application of distance learning for education and training and by providing advocacy, information, networking and distance learning opportunities.
    PRWeb, June 9, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb396750.htm

    Jensen Comment
    PRWeb is a tremendous (overwhelming?) source of news in a huge set of categories --- http://www.prweb.com/newsbycategory/index.htm


    The Dark Side of the 21st Century:  
    Concerns About Technologies in Education
    The main navigation page is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen at Trinity University

    Table of Contents
    ALN is defined as Asynchronous Learning Network(s) or Networking

    "A Virtual Revolution: Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education"

    The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing 
    (Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)

    Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

    Shrinking Customer Base for eLearning?

    Millions of Web Documents are Not Being Archived for Future Scholars

    Are Universities Becoming EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organizations)?

    Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics and Student Ethics 

    Barriers to Distance Education 

    How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change and Mutation  
    Teachers Must Adapt to Changed Mindsets of Incoming Students Who Grew Up With Computers

    Concerns About Faculty Workloads and Burnout 

    Online Cheating and Reduced Social Interaction 

    Legal Concerns 

    Email and Teaching Evaluations Place Heavy Burdens on Teachers

    Student Concerns  

    Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students? 
    Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

    The Digital Divide is Real

    Lots of Hype and Not Much Profit 

    Institutions, Reward Structures, and Traditions That Defy Changes in Higher Education

    Websites Failing Disabled and Handicapped Users 

    Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education

    Concerns About High Attrition Rates in Distance Education

    Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus

    Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian

    Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Easy

    Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Hard

    Concerns About Corporate Influences on Traditional Missions

    Concerns About Library Services 

    Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics and Student Ethics 

    Concerns About Messaging Overload

    Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout

    Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites

    Concerns About CyberPsychology

    Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability

    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

    Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes

    Other Concerns  

    Students’ Distress with a Web-based Distance Education Course: An Ethnographic Study of Participants' Experiences

    New Foes 

    A Message from Peter Kenyon on November 18, 1999

    The Force and the Darkside

    The Sanford Report in the Stanford Report 

    David Noble's Articles on Digital Diploma Mills

    David Noble's Concerns for Students' Privacy Rights 

    Update Messages on Trends in Corporate Education

    Daring Professors

    Growing Up is More Anxiety-Provoking/Stressful

    Generation Gaps, Collegial Apathy or Hostility, and Loneliness --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DarkSide

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

    The Downside of Electronic Commerce and Technology:  Psychological Implications --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#Psychology 

    The main navigation page is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Other Documents

    Starting Page

    Education

    Learning

    Table of Contents


    Note from Bob Jensen:  This article delves rather deeply into the pedagogies of online programs such as programs at the University of Phoenix and UNext's Cardian University.

    "A Virtual Revolution:  Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education," by Thomas J. Kriger, USDLA Journal (a refereed journal of the United States Distance Learning Association," November 2001 --- http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html 

    This report describes four major trends leading the growth of distance education. The purpose is not to cover every provider but to draw a picture of the types of organizational structures and educational activities that are on the rise. These include:

    Corporate-university joint ventures. those that provide course management systems such as Blackboard, Campus Pipeline, eCollege and Web CT, as well as those who package and distribute courses or content from existing institutions such as UNext.com, Cenquest, Fathom, Global Education Network, Quisic and Universitas 21;

    What do we learn from these descriptions? First, we learn that the variety of new ways to organize DE and reach new students is enormous, as is the talent that can be brought to bear in making education attractive in the new medium. But we also find that the way distance education is being organized and conducted often poses serious questions.

    Much of the distance education under study here, whether non-profit or for-profit, is built on corporate ideas about consumer focus, product standardization, tight personnel control and cost effectiveness (maximizing course taking while minimizing the "inputs" of faculty and development time). These concepts are contrary to the traditional model of higher education decision-making which emphasizes faculty independence in teaching and research, academic control of the curriculum, academic freedom in the classroom and collegial decision-making.

    While traditional practices are not sacrosanct, academic decision making processes have been very successful in producing quality higher education the best in the world. Our concern is that some of the new trends and practices described in this report may inhibit rather than promote good education. A number of specific concerns arose:

    It is appropriate, indeed essential, to present information for the DE marketplace in an attractive, computer-friendly fashion. But over-attention to drawing "customers" may result in technology driving the way teaching is conducted-leading, for example, to models centered around bite-size, "point and click" accumulations of facts rather than a more reflective, less easily measured search for knowledge.

    In the year 2000, AFT published Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. The guidelines lay out 14 specific standards which, if observed, ensure high quality distance education. (A synopsis of the guidelines appears in the report's conclusion.) The guidelines advance AFT's belief that broad academic content, high standards, personal interaction and professional control are the key elements of educational quality. College faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions.

    Education, among other things, is about broadening intellectual horizons, relying on facts and reason when confronting life issues and learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. That is why education is the foundation of a working democracy. Because distance education is ubiquitous and offers so much promise, faculty are obligated to carry the banner for quality and good practice while recognizing that this will sometimes require challenging current trends and practices

    Continued at  http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html  

    Bob Jensen's documents on distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
    Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

    From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

    Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

    WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

    The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

    2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     


    Online Pedagogy at the University of Phoenix

    Phoenix faculty work in a highly structured environment. Course facilitators in traditional classes are forbidden to lecture. Faculty are, instead, expected to closely follow Phoenix's "teaching/ learning model," which begins with course syllabi and detailed teaching modules developed by fulltime faculty on the main campus. In this way, faculty responsibilities are broken down into a series of discrete steps, such as when course development is detached from teaching. Phoenix course modules "include guidelines for weekly assignments, group activities and grading."  Some course modules contain classroom time-management guidelines broken down into 15-minute intervals.

    Phoenix defends its practice of using these restrictive guidelines in the name of standardization. The university's online catalog declares: "The standardized curriculum for each degree program provides students with specified levels of knowledge and skills regardless of the delivery method or classroom location."

    Critics argue, however, that Phoenix's course modules violate academic freedom because they don't allow faculty members sufficient discretion. Milton R. Blood, managing director of the American Assembly of the Collegiate Schools of Business, has characterized Phoenix's standardized curriculum as "McEducation." He explained, "It's a redefinition of how we go about delivering higher education. The question is whether it's really higher education when it's delivered in a franchised way."

    Thomas J. Kriger, quoted from the article cited above.


    Dark side questions about distance education from the Kriger article cited above.

    Evaluation of Distance Coursework Should Be Undertaken at all Levels:

    Questions about DE trends and practices

    1. The marketplace and the curriculum: Most of the models outlined in this report emphasize meeting immediate market demands for coursework as well as treating students primarily as "customers." It is entirely appropriate to consider student and industry preferences in designing curricula, particularly in the corporate training arena. However, we believe that the pre-eminent perspective should be that of academic professionals rather than the marketplace. One concern is that the pure "student as consumer" model rests on the questionable assumption that student-consumers know what they want when they begin an educational program and can confidently decide what courses will lead to the desired educational "product." Another concern is that broad-based liberal arts coursework, as well as high academic standards, could take a back seat if market models become dominant.

    2. Technological capabilities and the curriculum: In one of the stories cited earlier, a distance education advocate explained that professors will have to curb their lectures in order to fit their ideas into a 256-character dialogue box. This raises serious questions. Technological capabilities and limitations should not be the primary factor driving the curriculum and research required of distance education students, rather than the rich interplay among research, curriculum and good pedagogy.

    3. Faculty decision-making: To ensure that academic decisions are made for academic reasons, a key characteristic of quality in distance education is ensuring that faculty are in control of shaping and approving courses and integrating them into a coherent curriculum. This is the number one item in AFT's Guidelines for Good Practice. Another basic precept is academic freedom; an individual faculty member should have the authority to determine how the class will be taught.

    We are concerned, however, that many of the programs described above appear to keep authority to develop course content confined to a very narrow circle. Some models directly challenge the idea of academic freedom in the classroom. For example, at

    the University of Phoenix, we saw that course "facilitators" (they are not called teachers) not only are forbidden to lecture, but also must follow detailed teaching modules.

    4. Disaggregation: Many of the institutions reviewed here are moving to a model of curriculum development and teaching that "unbundles" the many roles of the faculty member. A process that has traditionally been maintained from start to finish by the individual faculty member is being parted into specializations-curriculum developers, content deliverers, assessment specialists, etc. This can be seen most starkly in movements such as "The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative" (NLII) created in 1994 by Educom (now Educause), a coalition of technology corporations, public and private colleges and universities and higher education organizations.

    Specifically, the NLII would increase student access through the construction of a broadband network modeled on the Internet. The program would be characterized by self-paced study instead of academic calendars, fixed class meetings or a traditional curriculum. Students would pursue their studies via new instructional software that breaks down complex subjects into individual components or modules.

    In 1996, Educom released a report on "The Virtual University," which envisions the resulting new role for faculty and the benefits for the institution.

    [In the virtual university], the many roles previously combined in a single faculty member are now disaggregated. Faculty may specialize as developers of courses and courseware wherein they move from being content experts to being a combination of content expert, learning-process design expert, and process-implementation manager; as presenters of that material; as expert assessors of learning and competencies; as advisors; or as specialists in other evolving roles.[43]

    In this view, one of the main advantages of the NLII is that it would "reduce faculty intervention, thereby containing costs."[44] As Massy and Zemsky explain:

    Workstations don't get tenure, and delegations are less likely to wait on the provost when particular equipment items are "laid off." The "retraining" of IT equipment (for example, reprogramming), while not inexpensive, is easier and more predictable than training a tenured professor .[45]

    As our report indicates, many providers in all four categories have embraced this vision to differing extents, but the AFT believes this is not the best route to quality. Quoting directly from the AFT Guidelines. A number of studies have demonstrated the importance to student learning of establishing a feedback loop between classroom teaching, curriculum development and scholarly research. That loop becomes inoperative when teaching faculty operate from workbooks based on a prefabricated curriculum that the faculty member has little role in developing, a curriculum that was not shaped directly by the practitioner's experience in teaching these classes or conducting research on these subjects. Students deserve teachers who know all the nuances of what they are teaching and who can exercise professional judgment and academic freedom in doing so.

    5. Course standardization: Many of the providers outlined above are attracted to the idea of creating consistent and transferable courses by utilizing course management software and course development specialists. The idea is that an institution or set of institutions can make all of their courses have the same look and feel, and that courses can and should be designed for longevity and transferability. If course management software such as Web CT or Blackboard simply provide faculty with greater technical support and facilitate the faculty member's pedagogy, then they will be powerful teaching aids. But standardization in programming and teaching is the wrong way to go; academic good practice requires a faculty with differing points of view and presentation styles, freewheeling discussion and academic freedom.

    6. Class Size: AFT's distance education practitioners report that good DE generally requires more teacher preparation time than a traditional class as well as more time devoted to interacting with students (through e-mail, chat rooms, etc.) Therefore, it is important to maintain a workable class size. The concern, however, is that commercially minded DE will expand class sizes too greatly in order to maximize enrollments. The move on the part of some providers to concentrate on offering high-enrollment introductory courses (such as introductory psychology) is of particular concern because DE practitioners tell us the students best suited to succeed in a distance education environment are not the newcomers but those who are more mature, better prepared and able to work independently.

    Increasing class size is an integral part of the Pew grants at Rio Salado College cited earlier. Introductory algebra, which had the third highest enrollment of the top 25 courses in the district, was selected for redesign. Course content was delivered via interactive software. The restructuring increased the student/faculty ratio from 35 to 100 students per instructor, although each faculty member was assigned teaching assistants to help with technology questions, and students had access to a help desk.[46] AFT's Guidelines recommend that class size be established through normal faculty channels, with a view to maintaining a high level of interactivity. "Given the time commitment involved in teaching through distance education," say the Guidelines, "smaller class size should be considered, particularly at the inception of a new course."

    7. "Outcomes" and Class Time: Some providers cited in the previous chapter shift more of the educational assessment to "outcomes." The Western Governors University emphasis on "proficiencies" is the most extreme version of this shift. A greater emphasis on outcomes may be warranted, but a critical question remains: Will an exclusive focus on measurable outputs shortchange the importance of process and interactivity in higher education?

    Distance education advocates often deride what they call "seat time"-the practice of requiring students to be together and work together for periods of time before passing their courses. Under their theory, if a student can demonstrate "competencies," it should not matter how much time is spent achieving these competencies. The AFT, however, believes that deep knowledge of a subject is not simply a matter of passing a competency test. It does in fact require time-time in the same room or in cyberspace-with teachers and other students chewing over ideas, hearing contrary points of view and defending conclusions. There is reason for concern if time on task comes to be viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity in DE on the corporate model.

    8. Same-time, same-place interaction: There is no denying that rich interaction can take place in distance education classes, but we believe it is equally untenable to argue that same-time, sameplace interaction has no legitimate role in an undergraduate education. We believe distance education should utilize every available opportunity to bring students and faculty together at some time during an academic program. Our concern is that providing such opportunities does not appear to be a consideration for most of the providers we have stud-

    led. It is particularly troubling to have no sametime, same-place interchange through an entire undergraduate program. AFT faculty who teach by distance education have reported to the union that they believe same-time, same-place interaction should be part of any undergraduate program. In fact, more than 70 percent say that no more than half of a full undergraduate program should be delivered via distance education.

    In conclusion, it is proper, even necessary, for higher education faculty to make distance education work, but that may often mean contradicting current DE practice to affirm academic values. Faculty must mobilize behind the principle that democratic governance rather than top-down management produces better, more credible education. Faculty must ensure that college degrees are awarded in the context of a coordinated curriculum with broad-based content. Faculty must see to it that students have the equipment, training and support to succeed in the distance education environment and that they have appropriate academic counseling. Faculty must make the case that time does matter-that education is not simply a matter of passing a competency test but, whether in the same room or far apart, being with other teachers and students chewing over ideas, hearing contrary points of view and defending conclusions. Faculty must assert and find ways to implement the notion that same-time, same-place interchange is an important part of a college education. Faculty must always affirm the importance of free exchange of ideas.

    In short, faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions the things that can be easily "sold." Education is about broadening one's intellectual horizons, learning to rely on facts and reason rather than on prejudices when confronting life issues. It is about learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. It is about learning respect and acquiring open mindedness, and as such, education is the foundation of a working democracy.

    Distance education can make an important contribution toward achieving these goals if it is organized around practices such as those in AFT's Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. However, no one should imagine that implementing these guidelines will be easy in a world where the promise of big dollars and big enrollments constantly beckons. AFT and its members, other organizations representing the faculty and, of course, individual faculty members themselves, will have to be prepared to take up

     


    The U.S Digital Millennium Copyright Act  (DMCA)
     Undermines Public Access and Sharing
    DMCA Link:  http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf 


    Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

    Harvard Study:  Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools
    Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools in schools and colleges, according to a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University.
    Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt

    From the AAUP (with higher education in mind)
    Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations --- http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/Campus_Copyright.pdf

    New Guidelines for Copyright Policies in Universities
    Four associations have released a guide for colleges to use in reviewing whether their copyright policies reflect recent legal and technological developments. The guide notes that colleges and their faculty members are major producers of copyrighted material, and that professors and students also are big users of such material — sometimes in ways that create legal difficulties. The groups that prepared the guide are the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers.
    Inside Higher Ed, December 7, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/07/qt

    A report released yesterday by a pair of free-expression advocates at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice claims Web site owners and remix artists alike are finding free-expression rights squelched because of ambiguities in copyright law. The study argues that so-called "fair use" rights are under attack. It suggests six major steps for change, including reducing penalties for infringement and making a greater number of pro-bono lawyers available to defend alleged fair users. BNA's Internet Law News (ILN) - 12/6/2005
    Coverage at http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-5983072.html"> 
    Report at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/WillFairUseSurvive.pdf">a>
    From the University of Illinois Scholarly Communication Blog on December 7, 2005 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/ 


    Patents can be obtained for most inventions and DNA discoveries,
    but patenting tax plans borders on being rediculous

    August 15, 2006 message from Scott Bonacker [aecm@BONACKER.US]

    "Widgets, soft-drink formulas, new drugs: They can all be protected by patents. But did you ever think the clever tax-saving strategy your financial adviser is offering up could be patented as well? Don't dismiss the notion. Unauthorized use of a patented method might get you into hot water.

    John Rowe, executive chairman of health insurer Aetna, knows that all too well. Within the past three years, at the suggestion of his advisers, Rowe set up two trusts and funded them with nonqualified stock options. An independent options valuation expert estimated their value for BusinessWeek at $28.5 million. Rowe's so-called grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) would pay him an annual income for a specific time and reserve whatever is left for family members. Plus, he could achieve dramatic gift-tax savings, says Carlyn McCaffrey, a lawyer with Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York who is an expert on GRATs, though not involved in the case.

    But in January, Rowe was sued in U.S. District Court in New Haven for patent infringement by Wealth Transfer Group, an Altamonte Springs (Fla.) firm that obtained a patent on this strategy in 2003. Apparently, the plaintiff learned of Rowe's GRATs when, as a corporate insider, he reported the transfer of the options.

    Read the rest at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20060727/bs_bw/id20060726214792 

    or when size matters:  http://tinyurl.com/qrnf8 

    My impression is that as a matter of public policy patents on things like this shouldn't be granted, if indeed the underlying tax laws are worthy of passage by our legislators.

    Scott Bonacker, CPA
    Springfield, MO

     

    Question
    Are you confused by the nuances of the "Fair Use" section of U.S. Copyright Law under the DMCA?

    From the Scholarly Communications Blog at the University of Illinois on June 19, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

    New Fair Use Site

    The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has created a Web site on fair use.

    Called The Fair Use Network, the site says it attempts to alleviate the "mass of confusion for artists, scholars, journalists, bloggers, and everyone else who contributes to culture and political debate."

    The site guides people on what to do if they get a letter from a copyright owner demanding that they cease and desist from making use of the owner's work. And the site also explains how much people can borrow, quote or copy from another's work.

    Jensen Comment
    The Fair Use safe harbors are frequently violated by professors who really do not want to know the limitations of these provisions in the law.


    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Question
    How popular are these open sharing sites and what are the issues of copyrights?

    June 26, 2006 message from Jagdish S. Gangolly [gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]

    Bob,

    I wanted to pitch for an article by my good friend and colleague, Terry Maxwell:

    "Universities, Information Ownership, and Knowledge Communities"

    The Journal of the Association of History and Computing http://www.mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/maxwell/maxwell.html

    Here is the teaser:

    _________________________________________

    The recent decision by MIT to post the information from all its 2,000 courses free to the Web has generated tremendous excitement online, with more than 42 million hits recorded in the first month, according to MIT statistics 1.

    The project, entitled OpenCourseWare, was initiated by MIT professors and funded by $11 million in grants from two foundations. As of March, 2004, 700 courses, encompassing all five schools and two-thirds of the faculty on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus, have been added to the site (ocw.mit.edu).

    The project did not start as an effort to populate the information commons. On the contrary, in 1999, Robert Brown, MIT's provost, asked a faculty committee to study the idea for an online for-profit equivalent to the physical school.

    However, after researching the issue, the faculty committee concluded that a profit-making venture was not viable, suggesting instead that the university and its faculty make its course material available for free online 2.

    As reported by Charles Vest 2, the university's president, the OpenCourseWare initiative has had impacts both inside and outside the university. Within MIT, professors have begun using one another's materials to supplement their own teaching efforts, and are discovering interdisciplinary connections that could lead to new innovations inside the institution. Outside the university, MIT alumni, interested individuals, and other educators from around the world are using the courseware as a means to keep current in their fields and as models for new courses and curriculum.

    The effort has generated interest in other areas, particularly among Intellectual Property legal commentators, who questioned the relationship between faculty-generated course notes and university property rights 3. Given the fact that the project is faculty-initiated and voluntary, intellectual property issues in the curricular area between the university and professors have not yet come to a head at MIT. However, the project has had to navigate the murky waters of copyright in other respects, particularly with regard to the negotiation for permissions with other information providers 4.

    Nevertheless, the project still leaves open the question of the relative information rights of professors and universities.

    In addition, it raises broader questions of the roles both of professional disciplines and the institutional structures developed to support them in a technological world in which traditional boundaries between information transformation, production, and dissemination are under strain. The following attempts to lay out some of the relevant issues, focusing particularly on the role of the university in an online world.

    A Brief Look at the University in Society

    Lying at the center of questions about university and academic information ownership is a deeply contested vision of the role of both scholarship and the institutions designed to support research. Do scholars labor primarily as individual authors and inventors, or are they members of what Enlightenment scholars termed a res publica, loosely defined as a republic of ideas operating beyond institutional and political boundaries? Are universities places of sanctuary for ideas, separated from the marketplace, or information dissemination institutions situated squarely in the market?

    In her book "Who Owns Academic Work?," Corynne McSherry 5 traces the history of modern American universities and makes a strong case that these questions are largely unanswerable, because they assume a stability in self-conception that is historically missing. She argues that medieval universities and guilds were primarily envisioned as mechanisms for monopoly control over ideas, with the former focusing on professional control and the latter on control over invention. With the coming of the Enlightenment, voluntary academic societies sought to break down university monopolies on knowledge, constructing a meritocracy based on open communication and communal enquiry, and existing in cooperation with the growing commercial marketplace. At the institutional level, nineteenth-century German conceptions of the university, based on Kant's ideas in Conflict of the Faculties, envisioned the university as a place apart from the marketplace, yet poised to provide knowledge based on reason to political rulers. In the United States, German models of scholarly independence blended with the British tradition of liberal arts and informed citizenship, leading to a tension between disinterested scholarship and community. This admixture was further complicated by the presence of private schools funded through religious and other associations sitting cheek-and-jowl to land-grant public universities, developed to provide practical assistance in the development of new agricultural and mechanical techniques.

    By the twentieth century, the split between theoretical and practical knowledge within universities was institutionalized through a separation of faculties of arts and science from engineering and professional school. At the same time, the continued compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines supported the rise of self-contained academic communities with different standards of scholarship and practice.

    To support the engagement of the university in the marketplace, during the 1920's several American universities, particularly those with large engineering components, inaugurated small offices dedicated to technology transfer, particularly the processing of patent applications for professors. However, in a major shift, the end of the Second World War saw a major increase in government grant programs for basic research, insulating the academy from a necessity to rely on private funding sources and enhancing the traditional notion of universities as the preferred site for basic objective research separate from the commercial marketplace. At the same time, a greater integration of the university into public life occurred, with the provision of GI Bill grants to returning members of the military. University enrollments doubled during the next 15 years, doubling again within another 8 years.

    By the 1990s, the position of universities within society began to shift again. Federal funding for research slowed, along with other public financing sources. Pressure developed to seek private financing through partnerships with foundations and corporations. Universities undertook attempts at more aggressive management of intellectual assets, often bringing them into conflict with academic communities. The rise of the Internet signaled the potential for developing new resource streams through the development of online courses and degrees, but no one was sure where the dividing line stood between individual and institutional ownership of course materials.

    Academic publishing, long a backwater in the publishing industry, showed strong growth and consolidation as publishers embraced electronic dissemination and new models of product bundling.

    Here is another Terry Maxwell piece:

    Toward a Model of Information Policy Analysis: Speech as an Illustrative Example by Terrence A. Maxwell FM10 Openness http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/maxwell/

    Jagdish

    Jagdish S. Gangolly
    email: gangolly@infotoc.com

    Fax: 831-584-1896
    skype: gangolly

    URL: www.infotoc.com
    Blog: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/gangolly

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


    "Your Photos, Your Rights, and the Law: Answers to questions about copyright and your rights as a photographer," by Dave Johnson, PC World via The Washington Post, May 31, 2006 --- Click Here

    Ironically, the answer to this simple question is not so simple anymore. But for almost any digital photo you take today, you can count on the copyright lasting for 70 years.

    Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has pioneered a new way to share creative works. The group offers a number of licenses with names like Attribution, NoDerivs, NonCommercial, and ShareAlike.

    If you choose to share your photos with a Creative Commons license, you're telling the world that you're offering to let other people use your photos in ways that are traditionally not supported by standard copyright law. Using an Attribution license, for example, is like releasing your photo in the public domain, though it requires anyone using your photo to give you credit. Attribution-NonCommercial is similar, but specifically prohibits people from using your photo for commercial use.

    While using a Creative Commons license is a nice idea, and you'll find a lot of people using them on sites like Flickr.com, keep in mind that Creative Commons has no legal teeth. Only copyright law has that.

    There are three ways to copyright a photo (or any other creative work).

    Here's the easy way: Any work you create is automatically copyrighted. In other words, you don't need to do anything at all to receive some protection under copyright law.

    However, there are copyrights--and then there are copyrights. While technically you never have to take action to copyright a creative work, simply putting a copyright notice on your work strengthens your copyright protection. To assert your claim to a digital photo, for example, just place a copyright notice somewhere on the picture. Commonly, photographers use the text tool in a photo editing program to do this in the lower-right corner.

    The most aggressive copyright action you can take is to register your photo with the Registrar of Copyrights in Washington, DC. There is a form to fill out and a $30 fee to pay, but this approach provides you with the highest level of protection available. For more info go to the U.S. Copyright Office's Web site.

    Continued in article


    From Duke University
    Arts Project:  Comics about video, academe, and the law --- http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

    “Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine... restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor?” -Paul Bonner, The Herald-Sun

    “Bound By Law lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield.” -Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

    “Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic's heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean 'Rights Monster' - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.”

    I learned about this from the Scholarly Communications blog at the University of Illinois on March 16, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

    Bound by Law Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has just released "BOUND BY LAW?" - a comic book on copyright and creativity -- specifically, documentary film. It is being published today under a Creative Commons License. The comic, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins explores the benefits of copyright in a digital age, but also the threats to cultural history posed by a “permissions culture,” and the erosion of “fair use” and the public domain. Berkman Blog 3/15/06

    Free digital versions are available here. http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.html 

     


    The Access Principle’
    The book reviews the various models to bring the dissemination of knowledge online and to make it free, and along the way, the book criticizes plenty of publishing practices, copyright interpretations and scholarly traditions. John Willinsky, professor of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia, has devoted much of his scholarship to the ideas behind the book. Among other things, he directs the Public Knowledge Project, which is financed by the Canadian government to promote the free exchange of information. Willinsky responded to questions about the themes of his book.
    Scott Jaschik, "‘The Access Principle’," Inside Higher Ed, December 20, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/20/access


    A computer scientist at Trinity University told me that a great source for legal studies of copyright and patent law is Eben Moglen at Columbia University --- http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

    He runs a blog called "Freedom Now" at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog
    Entries are relatively infrequent and date back to April 2000
    There are also a few links to audio and video presentations.

    Here's a March 7, 2005 entry at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog 
    The United States Department of Justice announced today that it would be making a radical purchasing decision: stop dealing with the firm it considers an illegal monopoly. No more Microsoft Word at Main Justice. So they will spend $13 million to acquire Word Perfect licenses from Corel. Did they consider OpenOffice at $0? Why bother—Let’s just cut Social Security benefits instead.

    The February 16, 2005 entry contains the following quote from "Freedom and the Robot Army"
    The twenty-first century will be different. The United States will lead the way.
    The Pentagon is investing heavily in the development of robot infantry. Given the resources it will bring to bear, within two decades we will see the introduction of machines that remove all sense of consequences, personal and social, from the business of killing. Robot infantry may or may not prove valuable battlefield soldiers. In specialized roles they will probably succeed in being more cost-effective than human combatants. But at the violent suppression of political unrest they will be unparalleled. A brigade or two will be within the budget of every autocrat faced with a green or orange or red revolution. We won’t need them to be torturers, however. For that, as we have learned, human volunteers are always available.

    From one of the leading law school advocates of open sharing
    Many of Eben Moglen's papers on patents and copyrights can be downloaded from http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

    My good friend John Howland, a professor of computer science, recommends these particular papers for starters:

    Bob Jensen's threads on OKI ,DSpace, and SAKAI: Free sharing of courseware from MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Duke Law & Technology Review --- http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/


    Copyright Information and Dead Links

    Copyright Information --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm 

    Journals Associations, 
    Councils and Organizations 
    Education 
    General Issues 
    Permission 
    Intellectual Property 
    Government Law 
    Publishing Concerns 
    Libraries and Copyright 
    Mega Sites Music 
    Dead Link Archive --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm#dead 

    DEAD LINK ARCHIVE 
    For Dead Links, use Internet Archive to find a version of these sites. Highlight and copy the URL, then go to the Way Back Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.html  and then paste the URL into the web address box. Often icons are not available and the most recent listed version may not bring up the page. Go to an earlier date on the archive list for that site. Also, if you do not find it archived, try the Google Search Engine at http://www.google.com  and check their archive. Songwriter and Music Copyright Resources, http://www.npsai.com/resources.htm 

    Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 


    This message is from the Director of the Trinity University Library.

    Bob Jensen

    -----Original Message----- 
    From: Graves, Diane J. 
    Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 9:22 AM 
    To: Trinity Faculty 

    A number of you have asked about the legal use of copyrighted material on your websites and Blackboard courses. I just learned about this site, prepared at the CUNY Baruch College, which will help. It’s an interactive guide in a flow chart format that shows the steps you need to take to use copyrighted media in teaching. It’s very easy to follow.

    http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/copyright/ 

    Both the library and IMS are providing links to this guide from our sites, but you might find it helpful to review it now and bookmark it for later use.

    Diane

    Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
    Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
    One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212

    February 2, 2005 reply from Dr. Jagdish Pathak [jagdish@UWINDSOR.CA

    I liked the presentation. It opened in my lotus notes browser without any problem. It is knowledge enhancing and equally enjoyable stuff!

    Jagdish Pathak, PhD 
    Guest Editor- Managerial Auditing Journal (Special Issue) 
    Accounting Systems & IT Auditing Faculty 
    Accounting & Audit Area 
    Odette School of Business 
    University of Windsor 
    401 Sunset Windsor, N9B 3P4, ON Canada


    February 3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    COPYRIGHT AND LEARNING

    "Like evil trolls guarding the gates, the copyright controllers are trying to hold sway over our actions and create walled gardens around knowledge repositories so that they can maintain full control over who uses applications or accesses content and when, where, and how they use it."

    In "Stealing the Goose: Copyright and Learning" (IRRODL, November 2004) Rory McGreal calls for taking back education's "fair use" and "fair dealing" rights that are in jeopardy as some intellectual property owners seek to tighten control and maximize profits. The article is available online at http://www.irrodl.org/content/v5.3/mcgreal.html 

    International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. 

    For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672; email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ; Web: http://www.irrodl.org/ 


    Money Can Buy You Anything You Want in the U.S. Senate
    You May Go to Jail for Taping and Skipping
    No Fair Going to the Refrigerator During Commercials

    As early as this week, the Senate may try to quickly pass a bill that would radically change copyright law in favor of Hollywood and the music industry. One provision: Skipping commercials would be illegal. Michael Grebb reports from Washington.
    Wired News, November 16, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 

    A number of influential lawyers, scholars and activists are increasingly concerned that copyright law is curbing our freedoms and making it harder to create anything new. This could be the first new social movement of the century.

    "The Tyranny of Copyright?" by Robert S. Boynton, New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004 ---  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html 

    Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.

    Continued in the article


    Dentists in Canada discover they have to pay fees to Canadian music publishers for the right to play copyright music in their offices. U.S. dentists may be surprised to find out that similar rules apply in their country.
    Katie Dean, Wired News, August 2, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64397,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 
    Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 


    November 29, 2004 message from Diane Graves

    You may have already heard of the Creative Commons licenses, but if not, take a look at this site: http://creativecommons.org/  Creative Commons licenses allow the author/creator to retain some rights, but don’t lock down the rights the way the traditional copyright agreements do. Here is how the site describes the options: “With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit -- and only on the conditions you specify here. If you want to offer your work with no conditions, choose the public domain.” You may want to look at the EDUCATION section on the site: http://creativecommons.org/education/ 

    The Creative Commons has been enormously successful since it debuted in 2001. It has the potential to be very helpful in the higher education arena; it is already in use at MIT’s Open CourseWare and DSpace projects and at Rice University’s Connexions Project.

    I encourage you to browse through the Creative Commons site and think about how you could use their licensing options with your own work. It’s an exciting development with the potential to revolutionize the way we share information in higher education.

    Diane

    P.S. Here are two short videos that describe the philosophy behind the Creative Commons: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/ 

    Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
    Elizabeth M. Coates Library,
    Trinity University
    One Trinity Place
    , San Antonio , TX 78212
    email: diane.graves@trinity.edu

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 

     


    Customer Base

    The Shining Star in the Beleaguered World of  For-Profit Educational Corporations
    "Will Apollo Hold On to Medals, by Jesse Eisinger, The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2004, Page C1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,long_and_short,00.html 
    (Note that Among other schools, Apollo owns the University of Phoenix.)

    Last week, Apollo Group saved the for-profit education sector. At least for the moment.

    Other big companies in the group -- ITT Educational Services, Career Education and Corinthian Colleges -- have been battling lawsuits and dealing with various investigations into their recruitment and placement practices, sending their stocks plummeting. Apollo Group, which has skirted such problems thus far, has nevertheless skidded about 20% from a June high of $98.

    But a week ago today, the company shined. It said online-enrollment growth for the fiscal year ending August 2005 would top 40%, relieving investors who had been worried the toll of the investigations and lawsuits were slowing growth across the sector.

    The fight between the longs and the shorts in education stocks has been one of the market's fiercest, with some of the most influential and sophisticated investors taking opposing sides. Apollo hasn't been targeted by shorts as much -- until recently. Its short interest rose almost two million shares in the most recent month, but is still relatively low compared with other education stocks.

    Apollo, which declined to make executives available to comment, has been a stunning success story. The stock is up 9,800% since December 1994 and now has just under a $14 billion market capitalization. It trades at a nosebleed 32.5 times next year's earnings estimate of $2.40 a share.

    Apollo sells education at bricks-and-mortar campuses and online. To date, the company has mainly focused on thirty-somethings, most of whom already are earning salaries of around $55,000 to $60,000 a year. The compelling growth story is online, so enrollment figures are watched closely.

    In giving its upbeat outlook last week, Apollo also completed the conversion of its online-division tracking stock, University of Phoenix Online, into parent company shares. The move, while welcome by good-governance types, could also obscure what the true growth rate for the University of Phoenix Online will be.

    Apollo will report that UOP online had 118,000 students by the end of fiscal 2004, which ended yesterday, analysts forecast. The company, which often underpromises and overdelivers, said last week it expected "online degree enrollments to grow in excess of 40%" in fiscal 2005. At a 40% growth rate, the online enrollment would be 165,000 by the end of next August. However, that figure isn't only for UOP online. The company has launched a pilot effort to go after 18- to 21-year-olds through its Western International University online unit.

    WIU online growth is included in that 40% growth figure, according to Credit Suisse analyst Greg Cappelli. Apollo declined to break out its expectations for WIU online enrollment.

    Continued in the article


    Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
    How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college in Fall 2005?

    More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . . ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’
    Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online

    More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.

    Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term, the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in 2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.

    The report, a joint partnership between the group and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent of the content is delivered via the Internet.

    The Sloan Survey of Online Learning, “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,” shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.” Both numbers are up from a year ago.

    Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack of survey responses from those institutions.)

    Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served by face-to-face programs.

    What stands out is the number of faculty who still don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the programs.

    Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers are striking.

    “As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said. “It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”

    Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in class).

    She said she isn’t surprised to see data illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.

    “Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.

    The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.

    Nearly all institutions with total enrollments exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment totals and not looking to expand into the online market.

    The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be involved in online learning.

    “Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges. The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.

    Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said she plans to include that in next year’s edition.

    Few survey respondents said acceptance of online degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm


    July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?

    "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 complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf.

    The Learning Alliance is "a provider of educational research and leadership support services to presidents of accredited, non-profit

    two- and four-year colleges and universities. The Learning Alliance serves the mission of higher education institutions by providing its senior administrators with timely access to expertise, current research, and market data." For more information, contact: The Learning Alliance, 1398 Wilmington Pike, West Chester, PA 19382 USA; tel: 610-399-6601; fax: 815-550-8892; Web: http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/index.php.

    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."

     

    In my opinion, the Weatherstation Project is biased from the start by skeptics who do not balance the successes against the failures to date --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 
    For example, the report fails to even mention one of the world's most successful e-Learning endeavors in his own institution, the Master's of Engineering (ADEPT) distance learning program at Stanford University even though one of the two authors is a long-time faculty member and top administrator at Stanford.

    Here are some counter examples.

    New and Expanding Market Motivations
    Example 1 --- Stanford University --- http://ww.stanford.edu/history/fulldesc.html 

    Stanford University shook up the stuffy Ivy League and other prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge when it demonstrated to the world that its online training programs and its online Masters of Engineering (ADEPT) asynchronous learning degree program became enormous cash cows with nearly infinite growth potentials relative to relatively fixed-size onsite programs.  In a few short years, revenues from online programs in engineering and computer science exploded to over $100 million per year.

    The combined present value of the Stanford University logo and the logos of other highly prestigious universities are worth trillions.  Any prestigious university that ignores online growth opportunities is probably wasting billions of dollars of potential cash flow from its logo.  

    Virtually all universities of highest prestige and name recognition are realizing this and now offer a vast array of online training and education courses directly or in partnership with corporations and government agencies seeking the mark of distinction on diplomas.


    Example 2 --- University of Wisconsin --- http://webct.wisc.edu/ 
    Over 100,000 Registered Online Students in The University of Wisconsin System of State-Supported Universities

    Having a long history of extension programs largely aimed at part-time adult learners, it made a lot of sense for the UW System to try to train and educate adult learners and other learners who were not likely to become onsite students.

    The UW System is typical of many other large state-supported universities that have an established adult learning infrastructure and a long history of interactive television courses delivered to remote sites within the state.  Online Internet courses were a logical extension and in many instances a cost-efficient extension relative to televised delivery.


    Example 3 --- Harvard University

    In light of new online learning technologies, Harvard University changed its long-standing residency requirement in anticipation of expanding markets for "mid-career professionals" according to Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2002, Page 4.  Harvard has various distance education programs, including those in the Harvard Business School that currently cost over $4 million per year to maintain.


    Example 4
    From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002

    Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program

    Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a "fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees. The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and access interactive multimedia course content.

    For more information, visit: http://www.babson.edu/mba/fasttrac


    Example 5 --- Texas A&M Online MBA Program in Mexico --- http://olap.tamu.edu/mexico/tamumxctr.pdf 

    Some universities view online technologies as a tremendous opportunity to expand training and education courses into foreign countries.  One such effort was undertaken by the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University in partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico.  For example, Professor John Parnell at Texas A&M has been delivering a course for several semesters in which students in Mexico City take the online course in their homes.  However, once each month the students meet face-to-face on a weekend when Dr. Parnell travels to Mexico City to hold live classes and administer examinations.

    You probably won't have much difficulty making a guess as to what many students say is the major reason they prefer online courses to onsite courses in Mexico City?


    Example 6 --- The University of Phoenix --- http://www.phoenix.edu/index_open.html 

    The University of Phoenix became the largest private university in the world.  Growth came largely from adult learning onsite programs in urban centers across the U.S. and Canada.  

    The popular CBS television show called Sixty Minutes ran a feature on the growth and future of the newer online training and education programs at the University of Phoenix. You can download this video from http://online.uophx.edu/onl_nav_2.asp# 

    The University of Phoenix contends that online success in education depends upon intense communications day-to-day between instructors and students.  This, in turn, means that online classes must be relatively small and synchronized in terms of assignments and projects.


    Example 7 --- Partnerships 
    Lucrative partnerships between universities and corporations seeking to train and educate employees.

    The highly successful Global Executive MBA Program at Duke University (formerly called GEMBA) where corporations from around the world pay nearly $100,000 for one or two employees to earn a prestigious online MBA degree --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html

    UNext Corporation has an exclusive partnership with General Motors Corporation that provides online executive training and education programs to 88,000 GM managers.  GM pays the fees.  See http://www.unext.com/ 

    Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 
    This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.   The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 

    Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation.  It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000 more students in 2002.  It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities.  The consulting arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system. 

    The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a program for online training and education for all IRS employees.  The IRS pays the fees for all employees.  The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 

    Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an online MBA program for Deere employees.  Deere pays the fees.  See "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html 

    The University of Georgia partnered with the consulting division of PwC to deliver a totally online MBA degree.  The program is only taken by PwC employees.  PwC paid the development and delivery fees.  See http://www.coe.uga.edu./coenews/2000/UGAusnews.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the bright and the dark side of education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    "Your Right to X-Rated Sites"
    The ACLU and the government butt heads over privacy, free speech, and protecting kids online--again
    By Anush Yegyazarian, PC World, April 7, 2004 --- http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115531,00.asp 

    In early March, the Supreme Court again heard arguments concerning the 1998 Child Online Protection Act. That act was intended to protect children from viewing online what the law calls "material that is harmful to minors."

    There are qualifications about how such material must also lack any redeeming scientific, artistic, political or literary value for minors. In other words, this shouldn't affect a teen's ability to see full-frontal pictures of Michelangelo's David or the armless and topless Venus de Milo, or even to read explicit excerpts from anatomy texts.

    What COPA intends to target is pornography. We all know that the Web is full of it, and that it's fairly easy to access.

    Aside from what's truly obscene--which the law and the courts have sort of, kind of, defined--what's classified as porn or material harmful to minors tends to differ depending on whom you ask and the age of the minor in question. But no matter how you define it, according to the First Amendment, adults have the right to create and to view sexually explicit material--even if that material may be deemed pornographic or harmful to minors.

    So the question before the Supreme Court, lawmakers, and every parent is: How do we keep sexually explicit material available to adults but away from children?

    Burden on Creators or Consumers?

    Let me get a couple of disclaimers out of the way first: I'm not a parent; I'm also not a consumer of so-called adult entertainment.

    But I like the HBO show Sex in the City, and discussing it is a lot of fun. There are chat rooms and sites devoted to the show, some of which may at various times include commentary that's naughty at best and harmful to minors at worst, offering little or no redeeming value for those minors. Do such sites have to require proof of age for access? You can argue that they do, according to COPA.

    In large part, it's the proof-of-age requirement that has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and other like-minded organizations to oppose COPA before the Supreme Court. Under the act, sites that have "prurient" (legalese for sexually explicit material that lacks redeeming value) material harmful to minors must require some form of ID--such as a credit card, an adult ID, a digital certificate, and so on--to prove that the person who wants access to the content is over 17 years old.

    So what's the problem? Well, there are a couple issues.

    First, requiring an ID removes anonymity, which would deter at least some people from going to a site. They may be concerned about the potential stigma because they don't trust the site to protect their privacy, or they may want to limit the number of sites that have personal information about them. COPA does include some privacy provisions, but whether they're sufficient is debatable.

    Second, the people running such a site may decide to self-censor, avoiding a subject--even something they're legally allowed to discuss--because they don't want to risk running afoul of COPA or don't want to shoulder the additional cost of implementing an age-verification method.

    The ACLU and other groups have persuaded lower federal courts (most recently the Third Circuit Court of Appeals) that reasons such as these are enough to shelve COPA or send it back to the congressional drawing board. And let's not forget that a too-broad definition of indecency helped in striking down the 1996 Computer Decency Act.

    But most importantly, adult IDs are not the only way to protect children online. Other methods could be just as effective without triggering self-censorship or creating problems with free speech or privacy rights.

    Other Methods of Protection

    COPA required the creation of a commission to investigate and evaluate various child-protection methods, and to assess any adverse impact on adults who want to access adult materials. That commission made its report in October 2000.

    Guess what? According to the report, no single protection method is best. And requiring IDs has a negative impact on adult access, our First Amendment rights, and privacy, among other things. However, user- and ISP-based filtering and "greenspaces" (domains or sites that are specifically kid-friendly, such as the recently approved .kid domains) scored better as protection mechanisms, while avoiding many of the negatives of requiring adult IDs.

    Continued in the article


    We may have to wave goodbye to streaming media.

    "Colleges That Transmit Sound and Video Online Reluctantly Discuss Strategy for Answering Patent Claim, by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 2004, Page A27.

    Colleges, along with pornography distributors and mainstream businesses, are struggling for ways to refute claims by Acacia Research Corporation, which says it owns patents on the streaming technology that allows Web users to transmit and play sound and video.  In letters to companies and to many colleges, Acacia is seeking licensing deals that would pay it 2 percent of the gross revenue the recipients derive from such online media.

    Acacia has had some successes recently.  It was just granted another patent for streaming technology in Europe.  It signed up a hotel pay-per-view company and, in a coup, a pornography company that had been part of a small group of adult-entertainment sites fighting the patent claims in court.

    Acacia has also started sending letters to major corporations.  General Dynamics, the billion-dollar aerospace-and-defense contractor, signed a licensing deal in late December.

    Meanwhile, colleges are reluctantly trying to decide whether to band together to challenge Acacia's claims.  Among higher-education providers, only 24/7 University, a for-profit distance-learning company based in Dallas, is known to have agreed to a deal.

    Robert A Berman, senior vice president for business development at Acacia, said colleges had "panicked" and "assumed that we're asking for more than we're really asking for."

    Acacia, he said, is seeking royalties from colleges only on revenues from their distance-learning courses.  The company is willing to waive royalties on revenue from other classes that use streaming technology.  "We're talking about licenses in the $5,000-to-$10,000-a-year range--at least for now," he said.

    Acacia officials won't say how many colleges, or which ones, they have written to.  Institutions of all sizes have received the letters, but it is unclear what criteria the company used in choosing them.

    'BUSINESS DECISION'

    24/7 University struck an agreement with Acacia early this month.  Delwin Hinkle, chief executive officer of the university, called the deal "simply a business decision."

    "They tell you that they have $55-million in the bank and that they are willing to spend that to enforce their patents," he said.  "We looked at it and said it's just another tweak to our cost structure, and we don't have the money, the time, or the inclination to mess with them."

    Mr. Hinkle said he had tried to contact major universities to discuss a collective defense but never got a response.  He did not consider joining in the pornography companies' litigation.  "You're known by the company you keep," he said.  "No disrespect to their business, but I'm a Baptist deacon, and I can't hang with those boys."

    E. Michael (Spike) Goldberg, chief executive of HomegrownVideo.com, is leading the pornographers' fight against Acacia.  He has been frustrated by higher education's unwillingness to work with him or join his case.

     Continued in the article.


    February 12, 2004 message from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU

    Bob, 

    In the IT circles, my experience has been that Acacia has the same reputation as a shirtless, tattooed, multi-pierced skinhead who walks up to your car at a stoplight, splashes Coke on your windshield, wipes it off with a paper towel and demands $5 for cleaning your car.

    According to what I've heard at a lot of IT conferences, Acacia is a firm of sleazebag lawyers whose only claim to business legitimacy is the buying of semi-worthless patents which are vague enough to be stretched and convoluted and contorted to cover some activity that the general population is already engaged in (such as breathing, eating, etc.) and then doing a lot of research to find a hapless victim who is too clueless or too poor to afford a decent lawyer to find knowledgable expert witnesses so the Acacia team can snow-job a clueless jury into believing that the vague patent has been infringed. Then, Acacia uses their "success" to scare (e.g., legal extortion?) a lot of other clueless companies into settling for "licensing fees", which they then hold up in other court cases as "legitimizing" their claim to the vague patent covering the activity. They only take an interest in activities which have become such an integral part of society as to cause great hardship if they cease, since Acacia's goal is not to stop patent infringement as much as it is to extort licensing fees from others who are doing all the work.

    Acacia's streaming video claim is based on a patent issued to an individual in 1992 for transmitting music electronically. But MP3 (the Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Level 3) file format was invented in 1989 and released to the public in 1991. The Acacia claim is that any file which can be used to reconstruct any music or video image is covered by their patent and cannot be transmitted electronically (e.g., like a CD player playing in your living room while you are talking to your grandma on the phone!) unless Acacia receives royalties. In other words, if you sing a jingle on your digital answering machine, you are violating the same Acacia patent which Acacia is using to sue college and universities.

    From the scuttlebutt at IT conferences, Acacia's only business is filing lawsuits. They do not invent anything, they don't manufacture anything, they only file lawsuits and collect royalties and fees.

    I don't have any first-hand knowledge of any of this, but I have heard many times of their questionable business practices at conferences, and several of my student groups over the last few years have done some research and reported on this phenomenon. One of them described Acacia's relationship to the IT industry as the "Nigerian Treasure Scam" is to the banking industry.

    Although Acacia may have some institutions cowed, I'm not sure based on what I've read, that it is much more than a paper tiger that was able to snow-job some juries. (Having served on five juries, I have positively no confidence in a jury to make a good decision on something like this, and the judges of my experience are only marginally better!) I know our legal people here have turned up their nose at Acacia's "success", and aren't the least bit worried.

    Check out: http://www.streamingmedia.com/patent/ 

    My reference to "Acacia's Flying Circus" was a reference to Monte Python's antics, shenanigans, and sheer ludicrousness, engaging in activities which are so bizarre as to be almost beyond belief. (The dead parrot sketch, for example -- involving the Acacia pet store, and their customer, the very first gullible jury they snowed.)

    David R. Fordham 
    PBGH Faculty Fellow 
    James Madison University


    July 2004 Update on the Fair Use Controversy in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law

    Unlike many other countries such as Canada, educators have the luxury of "fair use" in copyright law, although some aspects of this safe harbor are in question under the "new" DMCA copyright law --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

    Under fair use provisions in the DMCA, educators can keep one photocopy of a journal article and large portions of a book even though they did not purchase those items. What I think is less clear is how to interpret the spontaneity test for sharings with other colleagues and students.  If three colleagues want to each have copy of an article from your private library, they can do so under the fair use safe harbor statutes provided there is not sufficient time to get the item from the publisher.  There is a spontaneity test discussed below.  Probably the most violated part of the fair use statute arises when educators share their photocopied journal articles, magazine articles, and multimedia files with other educators or place these items on library reserve or in Blackboard/WebCT online files for students without regard to the spontaneity test. 

    You can read more about fair use and the spontaneity test at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

    July14, 2004 Update
    Colloquy Live from The Chronicle of Higher Education --- http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2004/07/copyright/ 

    "Fair Use and Academic Publishing Wednesday, July 14, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

    Indiana University Press's withdrawal of a scholarly book is just the latest example of copyright claims trumping scholarship. Just what use are "fair use" provisions in copyright law if presses lack the wherewithal to challenge such claims? What steps can be taken by scholars to protect fair use?

    Richard Byrne (Moderator):
        Good afternoon. Welcome to this week's Colloquy Live. My name is Richard Byrne. I am the editor of the Chronicle's research and publication section. Our chat today concerns Fair Use and Academic Publishing.

    Copyright laws protect the rights of authors, but at times they also have bedeviled scholars' research efforts. The "fair use" provisions of copyright law should provide scope for scholars to do their work and stay on the right side of the law, but changes to copyright law and strong challenges to fair use have made both scholars and academic presses skittish about asserting fair use.

    Our guest today, Wendy Seltzer, is a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She will be answering questions today about the uses that fair use can be put to in an academic setting, and she will also discuss a few ideas that she has been kicking around about how scholars and academic presses might assert fair use provisions of copyright law in a more active fashion.

    Thank you, Wendy, for agreeing to appear on our chat today. Welcome.




    Wendy Seltzer:
        Thanks for inviting me to join you.

    First let me give a few notes about fair use, an important part of the public-private balance of copyright. It is now codified at Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act as a limitation on the exclusive rights of copyright holders. Fair uses are fair without the permission of the copyright holder, even against that permission.

    The law sets out a four-factor test:
    1) the purpose and character of the use (non-commercial or commercial; transformative or mere duplication)
    2) the nature of the copyrighted work (fiction or nonfiction, published or unpublished)
    3) the amount used in proportion to the whole
    4) the effect on the market for the work
    (See http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html )

    More factors in your favor makes a finding of fair use more likely, but the law gives us no bright lines or percentages. That's part of the reason why Lawrence Lessig has been saying that "fair use is merely the right to hire a lawyer."

    I should also note that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other public interest organizations do try to make it easier to hire a pro bono lawyer in fair use cases. We think it's critically important to preserve fair use as an actual, not merely hypothetical defense.

    Continued in the Transcript


    Under the fair use safe harbor, campus libraries do not have to own subscriptions to journal articles placed on reserve. U.S. educators can make photocopies from their private collections and make copies of just about anything for reserve reading purposes. They can also put their own books on reserve whether they are hard-copy (paper) or electronic copies.  Things  they can never place on reserve are original copies of items (such as books) that are borrowed via Interlibrary Loan (ILL).  The ILL code dictates that libraries may not lend or borrow for this purpose. There also is a timing spontaneity test under fair use statutes that is commonly violated by educators and libraries.

    Fair Use statutes allow educators to share multimedia, such as video tapes of television shows, for educational purposes. However, these items must also pass the spontaneity test, which requires that there wasn't a great deal of time to obtain copyright permissions. . For example, I may make a home-recorded segment from last night's television broadcast available to students, but fair use safe harbor does not allow me to share with other students or educators after the network makes copies available for sale.

    For practical purposes, the Trinity University library interprets the  spontaneity test to mean that, the first semester a copy of an item (journal article, chapter from a book, videotape, CD, etc.) is placed on reserve, the library will not seek copyright permissions. Virtually all materials used in subsequent semesters will need those permissions unless there are blanket permissions by the publisher. For example, all publications of the American Accounting Association can be used for non-commercial education purposes at any point in time without getting express copyright permissions.

    In a November 18, 2003 message, the Director of the library at Trinity University (Diane Graves) wrote the following:

    The other test we must apply deals with how much of the material used. In the case of a book, for example, we can't copy in its entirety a full book, or even ½ of one, if it is still in print. Even if the book is out of print, we must be able to show that we did everything possible to find an out-of-print dealer to sell it to us. If that fails, we can make a full copy. In the case of copies made from journal articles, we can most certainly make copies of articles from our originals, your originals, or even copies we have obtained from other libraries. Any of those can be placed on reserve. 

    Keep in mind that the law makes it pretty easy for active educators to go outside the fences of "fair use."  For example, suppose an educator ignores the spontaneity test and shares materials with other educators and students term after term.  The copyright holder must first file a complaint with that educator cease and desist. . In theory, the educator cannot be sued for damages until receiving a warning from the copyright holder.   Also monetary damages for this educator's free sharing are probably too small to warrant a lawsuit.  If the educator or the educator's employer profits from this sharing, however, then lawsuits may come crashing down.  It is unlikely, however, that The Wall Street Journal will come crashing down on Professor X who puts a copy of a Wall Street Journal article on reserve every semester.  Her/his employer, however, will object if this act violates the employer's policy of requiring that permissions be received after the spontaneity period has passed.  

    Actually, most publishers of journals and magazines have made it quite easy for educators to obtain permissions online.  Also keep in mind that some things do not require permissions.  These include quotations of reasonable length (I generally take liberties here) and up to thirty seconds of an audio or video recording.  These safe harbors apply to all persons and not just educators.  The purpose is to allow the works to be evaluated and criticized in public.  For example, if a publisher would not allow even a short quotation to be published, this denial could deny critics to effectively air their criticisms.  For example, recall the furor over the CBS Reagan Movie.  Selected lines from that movie were published by critics (e.g., in Time Magazine) before the movie became public.  It is my understanding that those critics need not obtain permission to quote small portions of the dialog of the movie.  Of course there are limits to most anything in U.S. courts.  Television news stations that aired 20 seconds of the knock out scene from a Mike Tyson Pay-for-View prize fight a few minutes after the loser hit the deck got  into trouble.


    November 23, 2003 message from Bob Woodward [rsw@WUBIOS.WUSTL.EDU

    One of the issues relating to self publishing is how to protect your intellectual property.

    Based on his battles with record industry, Larry Lessig has proposed Creative Commons, an alternative to Copyright.

    http://creativecommons.org 

    While his computer seems to be off or disconnected or something this Sun eve, Larry's blog is usually found at

    http://www.lessig.org/blog/  

    Bob Woodward


    Critics fear consumers may be shortchanged by an agreement between the technology and recording industries over the future of digital copyright policy.
    "Downside to Digital Rights Pact," by Katie Dean, Wired News, Janaury 15, 2002 ---  http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57211,00.html 

    A new agreement between the technology and recording industries -- touted as a boon for consumers and businesses -- is not as rosy as it sounds, say some digital rights groups.

    On Tuesday, the Business Software Alliance, Computer Systems Policy Project and the Recording Industry Association of America pledged to follow a set of principles that address digital content issues like piracy and copy protection while rejecting government technology mandates.

    "It's sort of a guidebook for how we all want to act in the public policy arena," said Hilary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA.

    The agreement calls for technology and record companies to promote consumer awareness about Internet usage and digital copying issues. It also pledges support for technical measures that limit the illegal distribution of copyrighted material and opposes government-imposed technical mandates.

    The agreement "minimizes the distracting public rhetoric and needless legislative battles," she said. "Our industries need to work together for the consumer to benefit and for our respective businesses to grow."

    "There will be continued investment in new products and new music delivery methods," she said. "Consumers' interest in music is served if the investment in creativity can be protected."

    But some digital rights groups said the agreement attempts leave the public without much input on crucial issues about digital content rights.

    "It is not good news for the consumer," said Wendy Seltzer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    "They are trying to take the legislative process out of the legislature and put it in the hands of a few industry groups," Seltzer said. "There's a lot of public debate that has to go on and we do need Congress to step in and undo the mess that has been created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

    Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57211,00.html 

    Also see http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57205,00.html 


    "New Ways to Skirt DMCA … Legally!" by Katie Dean, Wired News, October 29, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60996,00.html 

    Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions.

    The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, prohibits, among other things, bypassing any technology that controls access to copyright material. This provision is criticized frequently by digital-rights groups because they say it stifles many legitimate activities in the process, including academic research, competition and innovation.

    the controversial law also recognizes that there are certain cases when circumvention should be permitted. Thus, it mandates that every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress review and grant exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision.

    Those who are exempt from the rule are those who are "adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make non-infringing uses of that particular class of works," according to the DMCA.

    Basically, those who have a non-infringing, fair-use reason to circumvent copy protections should be allowed to do so.

    On Tuesday, the U.S. Copyright Office released the four "classes of works" exempted from the anti-circumvention rule. People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

    One programmer who testified at the Copyright Office rule-making proceedings in April was jubilant that the filtering exemption was renewed.

    "How sweet it is," said Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and anticensorship activist. "Without the exemption, the DMCA would make it a violation to decrypt the blacklist to find out what (filtering companies) are actually censoring. The actual contents of these blacklists are an important censorship issue.

    "The Copyright Office has recognized the importance of fair use in this area affected by the DMCA," Finkelstein said. "It's not a blanket declaration of being legal, but it's an ability to argue fair use."

    Filtering advocates had hoped the exemption would be dropped.

    "I'm disappointed because I thought we had made it clear that the exemption is unnecessary to conduct meaningful evaluations of filters," said David Burt, a spokesman for Secure Computing, which purchased N2H2, a filtering company.

    He cited extensive studies from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Consumer Reports and the Department of Justice, among others, in his testimony and said that "these methods are adequate for evaluating filters."

    Gwen Hinze, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the group was pleased that the Librarian of Congress renewed and granted important exemptions, but was disappointed that exemptions the EFF proposed on behalf of consumers were not granted.

    Continued in the article.


    Question
    What do garage door openers and copyright law have in common?

    Answer

    "Garage Doors Raise DMCA Questions," by Katie Dean, Wired News, September 17, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60383,00.html 

    Manufacturers of a seemingly innocuous product -- a garage door opener -- are embroiled in a battle that tests the limits of a controversial copyright law.

    Skylink Technologies manufactures a universal garage door opener that can be used to open and shut any type of garage door. Its competitor, the Chamberlain Group, claims that Skylink violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, by selling such a product.

    Chamberlain alleges Skylink's handheld portable transmitter can activate Chamberlain's garage door openers and, in doing so, unlawfully bypasses a technology-protection measure built into the device's software.

    Skylink disagrees, and recently filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois for summary judgment, whereby a judge decides the case instead of going to trial.

    "When Chamberlain sells (its) garage door openers, there is no restriction prohibiting the consumer from operating the garage door with a third-party transmitter," said David Djavaherian, an attorney for Skylink. "For a violation to occur under the DMCA, access to the copyright work must be unauthorized."

    Neither representatives of Chamberlain nor its lawyers returned repeated calls for comment.

    The case has been closely monitored by digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has argued that the DMCA is being abused by companies that want to stifle their competitors. The DMCA, the groups contend, also impedes innovation.

    Continued in the article.


    In using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an excuse to sue third parties that dare to make inexpensive consumables, tech equipment makers also cheat consumers. It's reminiscent of the telcos' fight for dominance in the '50s --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57268,00.html 


    January 15, 2003
    The Supreme Court rules that the 20-year extension on copyrights included in a 1998 law is not unconstitutional. It's a big win for media corporations --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57220,00.html 

    Also see http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,830856,00.asp 

    The result of the ruling is that works copyrighted by creators are extended until 70 years after the death of the creator, which protects heirs of the creators. Corporations who own copyrighted works have most of their copyrights protected for 95 years. The ruling is already being referred to as "the Eldred decision" because Eric Eldred, who owns a public Web library, had challenged the decision by Congress to uphold copyright extension.


    December 17, 2002 message from Davidson, Dee (Dawn) [dgd@MARSHALL.USC.EDU

    An article in yesterday's LA Times describes another approach to the Copyright laws debate. A new company, comprised mostly of academics, proposes there be several copyright laws that loosen the rules for some uses of published material while strengthening the rules for other uses. Board members of the company include Eric Elder, an Internet publisher who was outraged by the 1998 copyright extension ruling, Lawrence Lessig, who was at Harvard in 1998, Hal Abelson of MIT, James Boyle of Duke, and Eric Saltzman, a former filmmaker.

    Excerpts from the article, which is quite long, are below. I have the web link at the bottom, but if anyone can't get to the site and wants the article, I can copy and paste.

    **************************
    "Into this messy and acid-edged situation comes Creative Commons, a new nonprofit organization that will launch its first projects today. Based at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, Creative Commons has a high-profile board and an ambitious mission. The goal is to promote creativity and collaboration by developing new forms of copyright while reinvigorating the ever-shrinking sphere of copyright-free works: the public domain.

    "Using the copyright system, we will make a wider, richer public domain for creators to build upon and individuals to share," said Stanford law professor and Creative Commons Chairman Lawrence Lessig. "Walt Disney built an empire from the riches of the public domain. We'd like to support a hundred thousand more Walt Disneys."

    As a first step, Creative Commons has developed a group of licenses that will allow copyright holders to surrender some rights to works while keeping others.

    One license, for instance, allows people to copy or distribute a work as long as they give the owner credit. Another allows a work to be copied, distributed or displayed as long as it is for a noncommercial purpose. A third license permits copying but forbids using the work to make another, derivative work. (The licenses are legal documents, although that doesn't guarantee that people will honor them.) .......... The notion of loosening the bounds of copyright isn't new. For more than a decade, the Free Software Foundation has used for its own programs and offered others a license that guarantees the freedom to share and change software. O'Reilly & Associates, a leading computer manual publisher, uses the Web to publish a number of books under open-publication licenses.

    Still, the notion that creation confers ownership and that ownership is practically eternal is embedded in the system.

    Since 1978, copyright protection has been automatic on any new work -- which has made it very hard to purposely free it. 

    In response, Creative Commons has developed what it is calling the Founders' Copyright. A creator agrees to a contract with Creative Commons to guarantee that a work will enter the public domain after just 14 years, which was the span granted by the first copyright law in 1790. O'Reilly said it will be the first to publish under these terms. ........ 

    Another license puts work into the public domain immediately. One of the first works to have a public domain license will be "The Cluetrain Manifesto," an influential book on Internet marketing that was published three years ago. It was a natural evolution, considering that the text of "Cluetrain" was posted on the Web awhile ago by the authors. .......... 

    Critics already are wondering why a creator would donate anything to the public domain beyond, for example, an unpublished or unpublishable novel. Are people so altruistic as to create things for free? "The same thing was said about the whole Internet a few years ago," Eldred observed. "The existence of the Web is the answer."

    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-copyright16dec16.story 

    http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2Dfi%2Dcopyright16dec16&section=%2Fbusiness 

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


    December 2002
    The U.S. Copyright Office asked for public comment on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it got it. Critics worry about everything from losing great art to restricting blind people's access to information --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56963,00.html 

    The responses are available at http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2003/comments/index.html 

    Also see http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978497.html?tag=fd_lede1_hed 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dreadful DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 


    Some Good News From CIT Infobits on October 31, 2002

    ONLINE TEACHING AND COPYRIGHT

    The provisions of the Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH), which are likely to be passed this fall, would amend the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 to give schools and higher education institutions new rights to use copyrighted materials for distance education. The bill would give educators "fair use" rights that are already in place for regular classroom use.

    New rights covered include:

    -- "Expanding the range of works that may be transmitted over electronic systems to nearly all types of materials -- although only portions of some works could be transmitted."

    -- "Allowing the content to be transmitted to students at any location, rather than just to classrooms, as is legal under current law."

    -- "Allowing educators to store transmitted content and give students access to it, if only for short periods."

    -- "Allowing the conversion to digital form of analog works, such as printed or videotaped material, but only in cases where the material is not already available in digital form, such as on DVD."

    For more information about TEACH, read Andrew Trotter's article, "Bill Would Ease Copyright Limits For E-Learning" (EDUCATION WEEK, October 30, 2002), available online at http://edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=09copyright.h22 


    Really Bad News from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

    "EFF Whitepaper: Unintended Consequences Three Years under the DMCA --- http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.html  

    1.  Executive Summary

    Since they were enacted in 1998, the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright pirates from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works, and to ban “black box” devices intended for that purpose.1

    In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright piracy. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to three important public policy priorities:

    Section 1201 Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research.

    Experience with section 1201 demonstrates that it is being used to stifle free speech and scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten’s team of researchers, and prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have chilled the legitimate activities of journalists, publishers, scientists, students, program­mers, and members of the public.

    Section 1201 Jeopardizes Fair Use.

    By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, section 1201 grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public’s fair use rights. Already, the music industry has begun deploying “copy-protected CDs” that promise to curtail consumers’ ability to make legitimate, personal copies of music they have purchased.

    Section 1201 Impedes Competition and Innovation.

    Rather than focusing on pirates, many copyright owners have chosen to use the DMCA to hinder their legitimate competitors. For example, Sony has invoked section 1201 to protect their monopoly on Playstation video game consoles, as well as their “regionalization” system limiting users in one country from playing games legitimately purchased in another.

    This document collects a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate comp­etitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. The latest version can always be obtained at www.eff.org.

    2.  DMCA Legislative Background

    Congress enacted section 1201 in response to two pressures. First, Congress was responding to the perceived need to implement obligations imposed on the U.S. by the 1996 World Intellectual Property Or­ganization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty. Section 1201, however, went further than the WIPO treaty required.2 The details of section 1201, then, were a response not just to U.S. treaty obligations, but also to the concerns of copyright owners that their works would be widely pirated in the networked digital world.3

    Section 1201 contains two distinct prohibitions: a ban on acts of circumvention, as well as a ban on the distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention.

    The first prohibition, set out in section 1201(a)(1), prohibits the act of circumventing a technological measure used by copyright owners to control access to their works (“access controls”). So, for example, this provision makes it unlawful to defeat the encryption system used on DVD movies. This ban on acts of circumvention applies even where the purpose for decrypting the movie would otherwise be legitimate. As a result, if a Disney DVD prevents you from fast-forwarding through the commercials that preface the feature presentation, efforts to circumvent this restriction would be unlawful.

    Second, sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b) outlaw the manufacture, sale, distribution or trafficking of tools and technologies that make circumvention possible. These provisions ban not only technologies that defeat access controls, but also technologies that defeat use restrictions imposed by copyright owners, such as copy controls. These provisions prevent technology vendors from taking steps to defeat the “copy-protection” now appearing on many music CDs, for example.

    Section 1201 also includes a number of exceptions for certain limited classes of activities, including security testing, reverse engineering of software, encryption research, and law enforcement. These exceptions have been extensively criticized as being too narrow to be of real use to the constituencies who they were intended to assist.4

    A violation of any of the “act” or “tools” prohibitions is subject to significant civil and, in some circumstances, criminal penalties.

    3.  Free Expression and Scientific Research

    Section 1201 is being used by a number of copyright owners to stifle free speech and legitimate scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten’s team of researchers, and prosecution of the Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have imposed a chill on a variety of legitimate activities.

    For example, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research on existing security protocols. Foreign scientists are also increasingly uneasy about traveling to the United States out of fear of possible DMCA liability, and certain technical conferences have begun to relocate overseas.

    These developments will ultimately result in weakened security for all computer users (including, ironically, for copyright owners counting on technical measures to protect their works), as security researchers shy away from research that might run afoul of section 1201.5

    Professor Felten’s Research Team Threatened

    In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music. Princeton Professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks.

    When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however, SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA. The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers’ employers, as well as the conference organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn and a portion of the research published at a subsequent conference, but only after the researchers filed a lawsuit in federal court.

    After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided to forgo further research efforts in this field.

    Pamela Samuelson, “Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science,” 293 Science 2028, Sept. 14, 2001.
    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/293/5537/2028

    Letter from Matthew Oppenheim, SDMI General Counsel, to Prof. Edward Felten, April 9, 2001.
    http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm

    Dmitry Sklyarov Arrested

    Beginning in July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States after speaking at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas.

    Prosecutors, prompted by software goliath Adobe Systems Inc., alleged that Sklyarov had worked on a software program known as the Advanced e-Book Processor, which was distributed over the Internet by his Russian employer, ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. The software allowed owners of Adobe electronic books (“e-books”) to convert them from Adobe’s e-Book format into Adobe Portable Document Format (“pdf”) files, thereby removing restrictions embedded into the files by e-Book publishers.

    Sklyarov was never accused of infringing any copyrighted e-Book, nor of assisting anyone else to infringe copyrights. His alleged crime was working on a software tool with many legitimate uses, simply because third parties he has never met might use the tool to copy an e-Book without the publisher’s permission.

    In December 2001, under an agreement with the Department of Justice, Sklyarov was allowed to return home. The Department of Justice, however, is continuing to prosecute his employer, ElcomSoft, under the criminal provisions of the DMCA.

    Lawrence Lessig, “Jail Time in the Digital Age,” N.Y. Times at A7, July 30, 2001.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/opinion/30LESS.html

    Jennifer 8 Lee, “U.S. Arrests Russian Cryptographer as Copyright Violator,” N.Y. Times at C8, July 18, 2001.

    Scientists and Programmers Withhold Research

    Following the legal threat against Professor Felten’s research team and the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, a number of prominent computer security experts have curtailed their legitimate research activities out of fear of potential DMCA liability.

    For example, prominent Dutch cryptographer and security systems analyst Neils Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in an Intel video encryption system known as High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). He declined to publish his results and removed all references on his website relating to flaws in HDCP, on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of “prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law.”

    Neils Ferguson, “Censorship in Action: Why I Don’t Publish My HDCP Results,” Aug. 15, 2001.
    http://www.macfergus.com/niels/dmca/cia.html

    Neils Ferguson, Declaration in Felten & Ors v R.I.A.A. case, Aug. 13, 2001.
    http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20010813_ferguson_decl.html

    Lisa M. Bowman, “Researchers Weigh Publication, Prosecution,” CNET News, Aug. 15, 2001.
    http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6886574.html

    Following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, Fred Cohen, a professor of digital forensics and respected security consultant, removed his “Forensix” evidence-gathering software from his website, citing fear of potential DMCA liability.

    Another respected network security protection expert, Dug Song, also removed content from his website for the same reason. Mr. Song is the author of several security papers, including a paper describing a common vulnerability in many firewalls.

    Robert Lemos, “Security Workers: Copyright Law Stifles,” CNET News, Sept. 6, 2001.
    http://news.com.com/2100-1001-272716.html

    In mid-2001 an anonymous programmer discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft’s proprietary e-Book digital rights management code, but refused to publish the results, citing DMCA liability concerns.

    Wade Roush, “Breaking Microsoft's e-Book Code,” Technology Review at 24, November 2001.
    http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation11101.asp

    Foreign Scientists Avoid U.S.

    Foreign scientists have expressed concerns about traveling to the U.S. following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. Some foreign scientists have advocated boycotting conferences held in the U.S. and a number of conference bodies have decided to move their conferences to non-U.S. locations. Russia has issued a travel warning to Russian programmers traveling to the U.S.

    Highly respected British Linux programmer Alan Cox resigned from the USENIX committee of the Advanced Computing Systems Association, the committee that organizes many of the U.S. com­puting conferences, because of his concerns about traveling to the U.S. Cox has urged USENIX to hold its annual conference offshore. The International Information Hiding Workshop Conference, the conference at which Professor Felten’s team intended to present its original paper, has chosen to hold all of its future conferences outside of the U.S. following the SDMI threat to Professor Felten and his team.

    Will Knight, “Computer Scientists boycott US over digital copyright law,” New Scientist, July 23, 2001.
    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns00001063

    Alan Cox of Red Hat UK Ltd, declaration in Felten v. RIAA, Aug. 13, 2001. http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20010813_cox_decl.html

    Jennifer 8 Lee, “Travel Advisory for Russian Programmers,” N.Y. Times at C4, Sept.10, 2001.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/10/technology/10WARN.html?searchpv=past7days

    IEEE Wrestles with DMCA

    The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which publishes 30 per cent of all computer science journals worldwide, recently was drawn into the controversy surrounding science and the DMCA. Apparently concerned about possible liability under Section 1201, the IEEE in November 2001 instituted a policy requiring all authors to indemnify IEEE for any liabilities incurred should a submission result in legal action under the DCMA.

    After an outcry from IEEE members, the organization ultimately revised its submission policies, removing mention of the DMCA. According to Bill Hagen, manager of IEEE Intellectual Property Rights, “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has become a very sensitive subject among our authors. It’s intended to protect digital content, but its application in some specific cases appears to have alienated large segments of the research community.”

    IEEE press release, “IEEE to Revise New Copyright Form to Address Author Concerns,” April 22, 2002.
    http://www.ieee.org/newsinfo/dmca.html

    Will Knight, “Controversial Copyright Clause Abandoned,” New Scientist, April 15, 2002.
    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992169

    2600 Magazine Censored

    The Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes case6 illustrates the chilling effect that section 1201 has had on the freedom of the press.

    In that case, eight major motion picture companies brought a DMCA suit against 2600 magazine seeking to block it from publishing the DeCSS software program, which defeats the encryption used on DVD movies. 2600 had made the program available on its web site in the course of ongoing coverage of the controversy surrounding the DMCA. The magazine was not involved in the development of software, nor was it accused of having used the software for any copyright infringement.

    Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, the district court permanently barred 2600 from publishing, or even linking to, the DeCSS software code. In November 2001, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision.

    In essence, the movie studios effectively obtained a “stop the presses” order banning the publication of truthful information by a news publication concerning a matter of public concern—an unprecedented curtailment of well-established First Amendment prin­ciples.

    Carl S. Kaplan, “Questioning Continues in Copyright Suit,” N.Y. Times, May 4, 2001.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/04/technology/04CYBERLAW.html

    Simson Garfinkel, “The Net Effect: The DVD Rebellion,” Technology Review at 25, July/Aug. 2001.
    http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/garfinkel0701.asp

    Xenia P. Kobylarz, “DVD Case Clash—Free Speech Advocates Say Copyright Owners Want to Lock Up Ideas; Encryption Code is Key,” S.F. Daily Journal, May 1, 2001.

    Continued at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.html 


    Question
    Murat Tanju (with respect to one-time fair use under U.S. copyright law) asked the following question:
    >>"Isn't first time fair use applicable to the reader (students) who change each time a course is given rather than the faculty who put it on reserve every time?">>

    Answer
    The answer is no. Diane Graves explains this below. Long-term use of full articles in repeated courses without copyright holder permission is definitely not allowed. I did, however, remind all of you that the American Accounting Association and many other academic associations does not require written permission for articles used in education courses. See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

    Of course, fair use still allows quotations and excerpts without permission, and the gray zone centers upon what proportion is fair. The real issue concerns whether revenues of the copyright holder are seriously impaired by unfair use. For example, I often take liberties with large cited quotations, but some of my citations probably generate more revenues for the copyright holders if users adopt the original works in courses. For example, if I place a long quote from Magazine X in my New Bookmarks or messages on the AECM, professors who would never have otherwise have known about the article and/or would not purchase the article for themselves are not depriving the copyright holder of revenue. If they freely distribute the article or even my long quotation to an entire class of students, however, they are depriving the copyright holder of revenue. Loss of revenue is the real issue! The revenue market for many publishers is the student market. Fair use was placed into copyright law for education speed and convenience, but it was not put there for long-term damages to publishers.

    For example, I serve up a short "teaser" clip from one of my favorite segments of in the CBS show called Sixty Minutes. My teaser video clip is at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000overview/mp3/133summ.htm#Introduction   I also have my downloaded entire segment that I played in class soon after I downloaded a live broadcast. However, for use in subsequent semesters, I used a purchased segment exactly like the segment I already had on my shelves.

    Bob Jensen

    -----Original Message----- 
    From: Graves, Diane J. 
    Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 4:07 PM 
    To: Jensen, Robert 
    Subject: RE: Re: Copyright Compliance Service

    Bob, 

    Your understanding is correct. Our interpretation of Fair Use (which is fairly common in the academic library world) is this: the first time (first semester) a copy of an item is placed on Reserve, it falls within the Fair Use category, so there is no need to seek permission for its use. However, if the item is used for subsequent courses in other semesters, we will require evidence that permission has been requested. So if you have any items on reserve this fall semester that you intend to use again in the spring, we'll call it fair use for the fall and seek copyright permission for any use you'll have in subsequent semesters for those same items. The Fair Use designation has to do with spontaneity--if you find something you just HAVE to use in your class this term, you don't need to ask permission to assign it. If you choose to use it again, it's premeditated, in effect. You have time to plan to use it, and must request permission to do so from the copyright holder. There is a good guide to thinking through this process at IUPUI's website. You might want to look at it: http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/fuchecklist.htm l Lately, the focus in the courts has been on the economic impact of repeated, long term use of the same item, and the availability of permissions. (See under Effect on the IUPUI site). The fact that new students cycle through the course doesn't seem to be a factor in the eyes of the courts. Does that answer your question? Roger Horky is our new Manager of Copyright and Reserves. He can answer any additional questions you have. He's at x8189; rhorky@trinity.edu . Thanks for your interest!

    Diane J. Graves


    Written Permission to Use Some Articles in Courses is Not Required

    I thought that the following message from the Director of the Trinity University Library might be of more general interest in this era of uncertainty over the DMCA mess.

    She does not go into issues of material placed by instructors under courses in the Blackboard server, but I assume the same policies extend to the Blackboard server. I do remind you that many academic associations have policies that allow distributions of their journal articles to students. For example, all American Accounting Association journals are subject to the following policy statement:

    ***************************************

    Permission is hereby granted to reproduce any of the contents of _[Name of the AAA Journal] ___ for use in courses of instruction, as long as the source and the American Accounting Association copyright are indicated in any such reproductions.

    Written application must me made to the American Accounting Association, 5717 Bessie Drive, Sarasota, FL 34233-2399, for permission to reproduce any of the contents for use other than courses of instruction.
    ***************************************

    I suspect that all we must do is notify our library and/or our Blackboard master of the above policy that is printed in the back of all AAA journals. Check with other academic associations for similar policies.

    But then again, who can trust an accountant these days?

    Bob Jensen

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Graves, Diane J.
    Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 2:30 PM
    To: Trinity Faculty/Staff
    Subject: Copyright Compliance Service

    To all Trinity faculty and departmental secretaries:

    Trinity has recently reviewed its compliance with current copyright guidelines, particularly as they relate to the library’s course reserves service. In the past, the library accepted any and all materials faculty members wished to place on reserve without regard for copyright compliance issues, often in violation of copyright. Beginning this year, we have resolved to meet our obligations to intellectual property rights holders and the law more diligently.

    Trinity’s need to abide by copyright laws will affect the teaching faculty in many ways, the most significant of which will be that we are changing library procedures for placing items on reserve.

    Library staff have composed a new and formal copyright compliance policy. Please take the time to read it; at http://lib.trinity.edu/servcols/circ/cpyrghtp.shtml . Some of its more important elements are:

    1. When an item is placed on reserve for the first time (ever) copyright compliance will usually not be necessary. First-time use of an item is generally considered to be “fair use” of that item as permitted by the US Copyright Code. However, the library will require copyright permission for all items placed on reserve a second or later time.

    2. Faculty members are welcome to seek copyright permissions for their reserve materials themselves. If you obtain permission on your own, you will need to provide proof of that permission to the reserves manager before the material can be placed on reserve. Be aware, however, that library resources—time and money—are limited. Please plan ahead so you have time to identify alternatives.

    3. The library has set aside a small fund for royalty payments. At the present time, this amounts to just $50 per instructor. We suspect that this will not be sufficient; this is a new experience for us and we may have grossly underestimated the budgetary requirements of full copyright compliance. Any royalty fees beyond this amount will be charged to the appropriate department.

    4. Because the library’s resources are so limited, instructors should designate the maximum royalty payment they are willing to incur on each reserve item. They should also rank their reserve requests in order of importance to the class so that the library staff charged with obtaining copyright permissions can prioritize the processing of their requests.

    5. Any item submitted without proof of copyright permission will not be placed on reserve for two weeks, to permit time to process copyright permission requests. At the end of the two-week period, the item will be placed on reserve with the understanding that it will be removed if permission to use it is denied. Please take into account this two-week delay when submitting reserves.

    6. To expedite the process of securing copyright permissions, we will need as much bibliographic information about the item as is possible. We have designed a new reserves submission form that asks for the pertinent information. The more complete the citation, the more quickly we can process the reserve item.

    Please note that the library now offers an electronic reserves capability, which will affect how we process reserves materials. We will be sending you all a short message describing some of the more significant changes.

    If you have any questions, please contact . . [Deleted]

    Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
    Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
    715 Stadium Drive, San Antonio, TX 78212


    "FAIR USE" IS GETTING UNFAIR TREATMENT 
    Two recent federal court rulings in Hollywood's favor could undermine consumers' historical rights to use the content they buy http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2002/tc20020514_1528.htm?c=bwtechmay17&n=link13&t=email 

    To hear the entertainment industry tell it, a wave of digital piracy threatens to destroy the future of movies, records, and other media. While the danger of piracy is real, the other side of the story is that Hollywood has been on a remarkable legislative and legal winning streak in its campaign to win increased protections (see BW Online, 4/18/02, "High Tech vs. Hollywood on Capitol Hill"). Along the way, some long-established consumer rights may disappear. And the message from the courts so far seems to be "Get used to it." 

    The invention of digital media has made it possible for people without any special skills or equipment to make copies that are essentially indistinguishable from the originals. It has also given the creators of media the technical means not only to prevent copies from being made but to limit the ways consumers use products they have purchased, for example, by blocking the playing of U.S. DVD movies in Europe or preventing certain music CDs from being played in computers.

    Copyright law has always tried to strike a delicate balance between the rights of content creators to be compensated for their work and the rights of consumers to use what they have paid for. But the development of digital media and Big Media's attempt to completely control it have destroyed the delicate equilibrium that is copyright law.

    UNDER ASSAULT.  Two legal doctrines, called "first sale" and "fair use" are threatened by these technical changes. Under first sale, the buyers of copyrighted works in the U.S. may dispose of their purchases as they see fit (this isn't true in all countries). If you own a book, record, or DVD, you can sell it, lend it, or give it away. Fair use is a broader and vaguer concept, but it covers such things as quoting from a book in a review, copying part of a work for classroom use, or, most relevantly, making a copy of a music recording for personal use.

    Both doctrines are now under assault. The most recent blow came in a May 8 ruling by U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte in San Jose, Calif., in which he upheld the constitutionality of key provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

    This criminal case, U.S. v. Elcom Ltd., is a curious one. It began last July when FBI agents, acting on a complaint from software maker Adobe Systems, arrested Elcom employee Dmitry Skylarov at a hackers conference in Las Vegas. He was charged with "trafficking" in software designed to circumvent copy protections in Adobe's eBook Reader software, a criminal violation of the DMCA. The case against Skylarov were eventually dropped, and he returned to Russia, but the charges against Elcom are moving forward.


    Continued at  http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2002/tc20020514_1528.htm?c=bwtechmay17&n=link13&t=email 


    David Takes on Goliath

    "'Politics of Control' Leads a Law Student to Challenge Digital-Copyright Act," by Andrea L. Foster, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2, 2002 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2002/08/2002080201t.htm 

    Benjamin G. Edelman, a first-year student at Harvard University's law school, is the latest academic researcher to challenge the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

    The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Edelman, last month filed a lawsuit against N2H2 Inc., a Seattle-based Internet filtering company, in U.S. District Court in Boston. The suit asks a judge to prevent N2H2 from suing Mr. Edelman under the digital-copyright law should he decide to bypass the company's encryption, which prevents him from discovering its complete list of blocked Web sites. (See an article from The Chronicle, July 26.)

    Q. How did you become interested in Internet filtering?

    A. I had been aware of it generally for some years. It's hard to say when it all started. But the ACLU contacted me two years ago as they were preparing to challenge a variety of state laws requiring the use of filtering software in libraries. Alaska, for example, had such a law, and there were some other states. ...

    These laws were unconstitutional and they were preparing to bring challenges to various state courts. Then the Children's Internet Protection Act was passed, mandating the use of such software nationally in all libraries and public schools receiving federal funding. And that became the ACLU's priority and mine.

    Q. How did the ACLU hear about you?

    A. I had done some expert work in at least one, maybe a few other cases prior to that time. I had been working at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society here at Harvard Law School, where I guess my name had gotten some exposure. Two years ago, of course, I was a sophomore in college. But nonetheless, I guess they called up and asked for me by name.

    Q. Were you already interested in computers before you came to Harvard?

    A. I had been interested in computers for about as long as I can remember. I had been doing some computer-related work in junior high school and high school, helping people choose computers, putting them together, designing databases and networks. And so I came to Harvard with a particular interest in that subject.

    Q. When the lawsuit was filed, you talked about how it concerned "technology and the politics of control." What did you mean by that?

    A. First, I should credit the phrase to Professor [Jonathan] Zittrain of the law school, who used it as a subtitle of his course, "Internet and Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control." And I think he would say it's his research interest, and it certainly is mine.

    The core idea is roughly as follows: The Internet has a certain appearance to it, when you first connect to it, when people were first learning about it. And I suppose in 1996, 1997, 1998, it seems like the Internet could be whatever you wanted it to be, that no one could particularly change what it was, and no one could stop you from doing what you wanted to do. If you wanted to put a death threat on the Internet about your neighbor or your enemy, you could do that, and no one could really get you. If you wanted to steal music using the Internet, you could do that, and no one could get you. ...

    The later idea -- my idea, and Zittrain's -- was that, in fact, there were a variety of forces that for economic gain, for political gain, for other reasons, might seek to restrict what people could and couldn't do on the Internet.

    Continued at http://chronicle.com/free/2002/08/2002080201t.htm 


    Take a quiz on your knowledge of the changes in fair use and copyright laws?

    "The Educator's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use," by Hall Davidson, Tech-Learning, October 16, 2002 --- http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright.html 
    The summary chart is at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_chart.pdf 

    This is the way it happens: You're a teacher. You find the perfect resource for a lesson you're building for your class. It's a picture from the Internet, or a piece of a song, or a page or two from a book in the library or from your own collection. There's no time to ask for permission from who owns it. There isn't even time to figure who or what exactly does own it. You use the resource anyway, and then you worry. Have you violated copyright law? What kind of example are you setting for students?

    Or you're the principal. You visit a classroom and see an outstanding lesson that involves a videotape, or an MP3 audio file from the Web, or photocopies from a book you know your school doesn't own. Do you make a comment?

    The Original Intent Were the framers of the Constitution or the barons of Old English law able to look over your shoulder, they would be puzzled by your doubts because all of the above uses are legal. Intellectual property was created to promote the public good. In old England, if you wanted to copyright a book, you gave copies to the universities. According to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors...but encourage others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work." In other words, copyright was created to benefit society at large, not to protect commercial interests.

    Nowhere is this statement truer than in the educational arena. In fact, educators fall under a special category under the law known as "fair use." The concept, which first formally appeared in the 1976 Copyright Act, allows certain groups to use intellectual property deemed to benefit society as a whole, e.g., in schools for instructional use. However, it deliberately did not spell out the details. Over the years, fair use guidelines have been created by a number of groups-usually a combination of educators, intellectual property holders, and other interested parties. These are not actual laws, but widely accepted "deals" the educational community and companies have struck and expect each other to follow.

    What follows is a new version of "The Educators' Lean and Mean No FAT Guide to Fair Use," published in Technology & Learning three years ago. As you take the quiz on page 28, you will learn that no matter the technology-photocopying, downloads, file sharing, video duplication-there are times when copying is not only acceptable, it is encouraged for the purposes of teaching and learning. And you will learn that the rights are strongest and longest at the place where educators need them most: in the classroom. However, schools need to monitor and enforce fair use. If they don't, as the Los Angeles Unified School District found out in a six-figure settlement, they may find themselves on the losing end of a copyright question.

    Know Your Limitations-and Rights It has never been a more important time to know the rules. As a result of laws written and passed by Congress, companies are now creating technologies that block users from fair use of intellectual property-for example, teachers can't pull DVD files into video projects, and some computers now block users from inputting VCRs and other devices. In addition to helping schools steer clear of legal trouble, understanding the principles of fair use will allow educators to aggressively pursue new areas where technology and learning are ahead of the law, and to speak out when they feel their rights to copyright material have been violated.

    Now, take a quiz that will assess your knowledge of what is allowable-and what isn't-under fair use copyright principles and guidelines. There's also a handy chart that outlines teachers' fair use rights and responsibilities. Good luck.

    The quiz is at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_quiz.html 

    The chart is at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_chart.pdf 


    From Syllabus News on October 18, 2002

    MIT, Elsevier, Wiley Sue Coursepack Producer

    MIT Press, Elsevier Science Inc., and John Wiley & Sons Inc., three major publishers of scientific, technical, and medical materials, filed suit against Gainsville, Fla.-based Custom Copies Inc., charging the company with unauthorized mass photocopying of material from the publishers' books and journals. The complaint alleges that Custom Copy produces coursepacks for sale on the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville, without authorization from the copyright holders. "When a coursepack producer engages in mass photocopying of rightsholders' materials for its own profit, without clearing rights … [it] severely harms both the creators and the publishers of those materials," said Mark Seeley, general counsel of Elsevier Science. The suit is being coordinated by Copyright Clearance Center Inc., a licenser of text reproduction rights.

    For more information, visit: http://www.copyright.com 


    Powerful commercial interests and tort lawyers combined forces in engineering the DMCA legislation in the U.S that throws education and information use into a turmoil of risk and uncertainty.  An article with frightening examples is provided by Georgia Harper, "Copyright Endurance and Change," Educause Review, November/December 2000, pp. 20-26.  She states the following on Page 21"

    Some of these changes --- licenses, access controls, certain provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) --- have the potential to drastically undermine the public right to access information, to comment on events, and even to share information with others.

    Section 107 on "fair use" continues to, with increased ambiguity, provide safe harbors for use of small amounts of material, material not yet available for purchase when needed for students, and material that should be open to criticism and review without fear of reprisals in copyright infringement lawsuits.  Nevertheless, the DMCA has provisions that erode Section 107.  Georgia Harber states the following on Page 24:

    Even though fair use is a key "stress point," there has been no change to Section 107.  The stresses on fair use result from other things:  technological "fixes" that control dissemination of copyrighted works; legal frameworks, established to control dissemination, that marginalize fair use; and license terms that ignore fair use as well as other public rights protected in the Copyright Act.  Ultimately, I am concerned that the basic goal of copyright --- to improve our society by fostering creativity, encouraging the dissemination of information, and supporting the development of knowledge --- is endangered by the erosion of fair use in the digital environment.

    Remember, fair use embodies a balance between the competing interests of owners and users, between control and access, between control and the First Amendment, and it bridges the gap between a willing seller and a willing buyer of rights to use.  A diminishing role for fair use may well mean less public access and less ability to speak, to criticize, and to comment.

    An ERIC Digest from the ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education (ERIC-HE) addresses some complex copyright questions related to distance education. "Copyright Concerns in the Age of Distance Education," by law librarian James H. Walther, is available online at http://www.eriche.org/digests/2000-9.pdf 


    Things are not a whole lot better on the international scene.  An international copyright treaty proposal is stirring up U.S. opposition from open-source developers to ISPs --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,43820,00.html 

    It appears disastrous for program developers," Stallman said. "Many countries have laws about what kinds of software can be developed.... Everything relating to information should be taken out of this convention."

    The treaty in question is a heretofore obscure proposal known as the Hague Convention, which European nations generally support, but the U.S. State Department has criticized. If countries agree to the convention, they'd be required to enforce judgments in certain type of civil lawsuits brought in another jurisdiction.

    That prospect lightens the hearts of entertainment lobbyists, who fear increasingly widespread piracy and the possibility of Napster clones arising in countries that don't have laws restricting online file-sharing.

    Currently the Hague Convention includes copyright offenses in a section that Stallman, Internet providers, and consumer groups are lobbying to remove. Stallman, for instance, claims countries that are even more permissive about awarding software patents could sue U.S. programmers for violating them -- and thereby wreak havoc on the free software movement.

    But Robert Raben, who spoke on Tuesday as a representative of the recording industry, warned that excluding copyright from the draft convention would be a mistake: "Its intentional exclusion at this point would be a terrible message to send to the world."

    This dispute eerily mirrors a similar spat between the entertainment industry and open source and hacking groups that also involves copyright law. At the behest of business lobbyists, Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which limits programmers' ability to circumvent copy protection schemes and was the recent subject of an appeals court hearing.

    Other speakers cautioned that it's too late to perform radical surgery on the Hague Convention, which has been under discussion since 1992 and was tentatively adopted by the 49 member nations of the Hague Convention in June 1999. A two-stage diplomatic summit is scheduled to begin in June 2001 and resume in 2002.

    "You can't take it out of the convention, you just can't do it," said Marc Hankin, of Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal, a law firm that deals with intellectual property disputes.

    Only recently, however, have American businesses and nonprofit groups appeared to realize the sweeping scope of the treaty. (A U.S. Patent and Trademark Office request for comments last year went largely unheeded.)

    Sarah Deutsch of Verizon said her employer opposed the Hague Convention. "I do think the convention is an expansion of the rights of copyright holders," she said. In an earlier letter, Verizon said it had "significant concerns" with the measure.


    Millions of Web Documents are Not Being Archived for Future Scholars

    I find this to be an enormous problem in scholarship and research.  I download and store almost any article that I deem important in my work and teaching.  For example, I have some really important FASB documents on FAS 133 that are no longer available at the FASB Website.  It becomes discouraging to quote and cite works that are not longer available to readers.  This is a real bummer modern scholarship.

    "A crisis for Web preservation Fugitive documents published on the Web are not being preserved." by Florence Olsen, FCW.com, June 21, 2004 --- http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0621/pol-crisis-06-21-04.asp 

    A crisis for Web preservation Fugitive documents published on the Web are not being preserved — From FCW.com The Federal Depository Library Program has fallen behind in cataloging and preserving access to government documents published only on the Web. As a result, public access to those publications is spotty at best.

    "This is not a problem; this is a crisis," said Daniel Greenstein, head of the California Digital Library, which serves the 10 universities in the University of California system. He said information is disappearing from government Web sites at an alarming rate.

    At the Government Printing Office, which runs the depository library program, officials are struggling with the problem, known as fugitive documents, said Judith Russell, superintendent of documents. Fugitive documents are electronic publications that remain outside the federal depository collections in 1,300 libraries nationwide.

    To capture those publications automatically, GPO officials may turn to Web-harvesting technologies. In May, agency officials published a notice asking vendors to submit information about Web-crawler and data-mining technologies that could assist in locating fugitive government publications…

    Continued in the article

     

    Are Universities Becoming EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organisations)?

    Some of us may be interested in these two fascinating sites that address questions such as:

    Are universities becoming EMOs (educational Maintenance Organisations)? Are faculty being reduced to hired help? Are university administrators becoming vendor-agents and corporate managers (rather than Scholar-administrators?) Are faculty losing control of the product of their labour? ... ...

    http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/  

    http://www.coolclass.com/newsletter/vol01no02-clarke.html 

    While I did not get into teaching to get rich (in fact I got out of the rich corporate world and into teaching, to escape intellectual drudgery), and I am glad that I am not at the beginning of my career, I do feel sad about the passing of an era.

    The society has to clarify what our rights as academics are just as it is grappling with the issues of intellectual property rights in this electronic age. Nowadays I find that school administrators smell money a lot faster than they do intellectually stimulating ideas. What a pity the age of scholar-administrators is coming to an end, supplanted by that of pencil-pushing career manager-bureaucratic education merchants. Is this the intellectual equivalent of the supplanting of the age of chivalry by that of book-keepers?

    Respectfully submitted,

    Jagdish 
    Jagdish S. Gangolly, 
    Associate Professor
    (j.gangolly@albany.edu ) State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222. Phone: (518) 442-4949 Fax: (707) 897-0601 URL: http://www.albany.edu/acc/gangolly 

    An Editorial by Bob Jensen

    HMOs and health clinics often deliver inferior medicine because there is no competition or very little competition in a geographic market.  EMOs (see above) will not have such advantages of geographic monopoly.  Education, unlike heath care, is no longer bound by geography.  EMOs face exploding global competition to a point where only the best can thrive.  To date this is not the case with HMOs.

    I tend to disagree with the EMO doom and gloom outlook for the future of online education programs.  In my opinion, such claims as "redundant faculty" are not rooted in communications with faculty in experimenting in quality distance education --- faculty that are nearly burned out by the increased communications between themselves and students in respected online programs.  Online faculty in major universities are biting their knuckles because of the increased intensity of communication in online courses and the demands of being more creative and more of an expert to online students seeking something akin to one-on-one tutorials with instructors.  In a sense, the distance education courses are reverting to the Oxford tutorial system.  Many of the online courses are highly Socratic.

    Of course it is possible to put up an online course of the EMO variety that has virtually no communication between instructors and students. But it is also possible to put up a high quality, prestigious distance education course in which the communications between faculty and students and the communications between students and other students are much greater than in traditional courses.  This is what the SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois try to study in much greater rigor than the off-the-wall doom and gloom soothsayers  seem to ever discover or comprehend.  For links to the SCALE experiments and an audio commentary by Dan Stone, go to MP3 audio presentation at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    I predict that the problem of online education is that the eventual rewards from great online teaching will draw the brightest and the best of our new educators into more teaching and less research.  In the past 50 years, major universities have placed the highest rewards and honors on research and publication performances.  It is not surprising that teaching and learning are not focused upon in doctoral programs that center 100% on research skills and experience.  It is not surprising that the American Accounting Association Doctoral Consortium virtually ignores education technologies and the changing times in online education.  It is not surprising that researchers strive to teach only researchers (i.e., doctoral students) and not have to face the great unwashed (undergraduate students).  It is not surprising that researchers tend to avoid teaching undergraduates whenever possible.  It is not surprising that great teaching is not a priority for researchers who are assigned (punished?) to teach undergraduate courses.  It is not surprising that researchers are often the least skilled in education technologies and the least interested in taking on online courses that are very demanding in terms of time and creativity and will draw them away from their research and publication in top journals.

    Times will be changing with respect to corporate education and online delivery of courses.  Corporations will soon be offering up compensation packages and lifestyle packages that will attract the brightest and the best of new talent, including newly minted doctoral students.  At the moment, Sarah Supercharged with her new Stanford University diploma in hand places highest priority on going to a prestige university to conduct research and minimize teaching.  In was and still is a great honor for her to get her new assistant professorship at Rochester and only have to teach one course a year.  

    But there will soon be a new employer on the block.  Rather than endure the strains of tenure uncertainty and stress of research and publication at the University of Rochester, Sarah Supercharged will soon have an alternative of making ten times as much in earnings (due to stock options and other compensation incentives) to focus on online creativity, student communication, and quality delivery of courses in executive education from some education corporation (possible a corporation owned by a prestige university).  And she will be able to deliver the courses from her ocean front home in Big Sur (California) or her horse ranch in Idaho or cattle farm in New Zealand rather than have to endure a daily grind to her research lab in Rochester, NY.  Her students around the world will receive a wonderful ("Supercharged") education, because she is so motivated and talented.  She brings to each of them her very best, partly because the value of her stock options depend upon her online performance. 

    My worry is not that the "EMOs" will be worse than our present prestige universities.  My worry is that they will be much better, in part because they will draw away the top talent and change priorities from research to teaching.  Research will suffer in the long run, because it will be much more difficult to fund and to subsidize with large undergraduate lectures on campus that in the 20th Century were the cash cows that fed research.  Education corporations will start milking those cash cows, and for-profit corporations will be less inclined to fund basic research not tied to the bottom line of profit.

    I repeat what I said at the beginning of this editorial.  HMOs and health clinics often deliver inferior medicine because there is no competition or very little competition in a geographic market.  EMOs  will not have such advantages of geographic monopoly.  Education, unlike heath care, is no longer bound by geography.  EMOs face exploding global competition to a point where only the best can thrive.  To date this is not the case with HMOs.


    Institutions, Reward Structures, and Traditions 
    That Defy Changes in Higher Education

    The military has a chain of command and a tradition for carrying out orders promptly throughout the system.  A university is the antithesis of the military.  There is very little chain of command in a tenure system that allows faculty to ignore many edicts from their "superiors" in the administrative chain of command.  Probably more at fault than tenure is the tradition of allowing faculty to make independent decisions concerning what they put into "their" courses and what topics they will pursue in "their" research.

    Funds are rewarding innovation and change are scarce in university budgets.  Even more constraining is the comfort a faculty member takes in student evaluations at present and the risk and fear that hovers over innovation and risk taking.

    Be assured that most faculty members in universities are not lazy.  It may appear to be a cushy job with only nine or twelve contact hours in the classroom, but it is not at all uncommon for faculty to put in sixty hour weeks staying abreast of the new knowledge of their disciplines and contributing to this new knowledge with research and writing.  A huge effort is made to build and maintain a reputation for scholarship and research.  This means that there is precious little time to carve out for learning new educational technologies.

    Universities seeking to offer online courses must often hire new faculty or attempt to make deals with existing faculty by providing release time, summer grants, and other incentives that often fail to have a lasting impact on genuine commitment to change and genuine long-term contributions to innovation and online education.

    University policies, resource constraints, and promotion and tenure traditions stand in the way of competing with corporations such as UNext that will treat instructors more like professional employees.  The salaries and benefits will be greater in the corporations, but there will not likely be any tenure or job security.  Indeed the reward packages may be so great as to provide very real competition to universities seeking to hire the best new faculty or retain the best tenured faculty.


    Barriers to Distance Education

    Students surf to class, but there's no online deluge
    — From the Los Angeles Daily News

    Once expected to revolutionize higher education as the Internet transformed mass media, online education has disappointed its early enthusiasts but has found a valuable niche serving working adults, educators say.

    "Once upon a time, in the go-go '90s, the thought was that online education would eventually supplant (traditional university education)," said David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

    "But it's hard to replicate some of the things a real classroom can offer -- those face-to-face interchanges that people often want."

    Nearly a decade after the Internet became a household fixture, the University of California system does not offer a single online course for undergraduates during the regular school year…

    For the full story, visit:
    http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2266845,00.html


    July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?

    "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 complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf.

    The Learning Alliance is "a provider of educational research and leadership support services to presidents of accredited, non-profit

    two- and four-year colleges and universities. The Learning Alliance serves the mission of higher education institutions by providing its senior administrators with timely access to expertise, current research, and market data." For more information, contact: The Learning Alliance, 1398 Wilmington Pike, West Chester, PA 19382 USA; tel: 610-399-6601; fax: 815-550-8892; Web: http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/index.php.

    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."


    From Syllabus News on July 20, 2004

    For-Profit Institution Popularity Slipping, Says Online Consortium

    Job candidates from traditional universities with online programs are more likely to be hired and promoted by corporations than candidates from for-profit providers of online education and degree programs. That’s the conclusion of a study by the Online University Consortium, a group of traditional universities which describes its mission as providing “access to reputable universities that have online degree programs you can trust.”

    The OUC looked at data compiled over a recent 12-month period, gathered through surveys of corporate decision-makers attending major trade events such as Society for Human Resource Management and American Society for Training & Development. When compared to the previous year's findings, OEC said it found the number of companies preferring traditional universities is up 15 percent, with 65 percent selecting traditional schools compared to 50 percent in 2003. OUC said it also found that the number of companies choosing for-profit businesses declined, with 14.3 percent now indicating they would select a for-profit compared to 22 percent in 2003.

    Deborah Besemer, president and CEO of recruitment services provider BrassRing, said employers are avoiding schools that have flooded the market with online degree programs and which have questionable regard for quality. "We see this when they search for candidates and specifically eliminate certain schools from their search. Reputation of the educational institution is what matters the most," said Besemer. "Employers want to hire students who have a full college experience whether online or in the classroom. They are looking for well-educated individuals to join their companies."

    For more information on the OUC’s findings, visit http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=8543 


    In my opinion, the Weatherstation Project is biased from the start by skeptics who do not balance the successes against the failures to date --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 
    For example, the report fails to even mention one of the world's most successful e-Learning endeavors in his own institution, the Master's of Engineering (ADEPT) distance learning program at Stanford University even though one of the two authors is a long-time faculty member and top administrator at Stanford.

    Here are some counter examples.

    New and Expanding Market Motivations
    Example 1 --- Stanford University --- http://ww.stanford.edu/history/fulldesc.html 

    Stanford University shook up the stuffy Ivy League and other prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge when it demonstrated to the world that its online training programs and its online Masters of Engineering (ADEPT) asynchronous learning degree program became enormous cash cows with nearly infinite growth potentials relative to relatively fixed-size onsite programs.  In a few short years, revenues from online programs in engineering and computer science exploded to over $100 million per year.

    The combined present value of the Stanford University logo and the logos of other highly prestigious universities are worth trillions.  Any prestigious university that ignores online growth opportunities is probably wasting billions of dollars of potential cash flow from its logo.  

    Virtually all universities of highest prestige and name recognition are realizing this and now offer a vast array of online training and education courses directly or in partnership with corporations and government agencies seeking the mark of distinction on diplomas.


    Example 2 --- University of Wisconsin --- http://webct.wisc.edu/ 
    Over 100,000 Registered Online Students in The University of Wisconsin System of State-Supported Universities

    Having a long history of extension programs largely aimed at part-time adult learners, it made a lot of sense for the UW System to try to train and educate adult learners and other learners who were not likely to become onsite students.

    The UW System is typical of many other large state-supported universities that have an established adult learning infrastructure and a long history of interactive television courses delivered to remote sites within the state.  Online Internet courses were a logical extension and in many instances a cost-efficient extension relative to televised delivery.


    Example 3 --- Harvard University

    In light of new online learning technologies, Harvard University changed its long-standing residency requirement in anticipation of expanding markets for "mid-career professionals" according to Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2002, Page 4.  Harvard has various distance education programs, including those in the Harvard Business School that currently cost over $4 million per year to maintain.


    Example 4
    From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002

    Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program

    Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a "fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees. The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and access interactive multimedia course content.

    For more information, visit: http://www.babson.edu/mba/fasttrac


    Example 5 --- Texas A&M Online MBA Program in Mexico --- http://olap.tamu.edu/mexico/tamumxctr.pdf 

    Some universities view online technologies as a tremendous opportunity to expand training and education courses into foreign countries.  One such effort was undertaken by the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University in partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico.  For example, Professor John Parnell at Texas A&M has been delivering a course for several semesters in which students in Mexico City take the online course in their homes.  However, once each month the students meet face-to-face on a weekend when Dr. Parnell travels to Mexico City to hold live classes and administer examinations.

    You probably won't have much difficulty making a guess as to what many students say is the major reason they prefer online courses to onsite courses in Mexico City?


    Example 6 --- The University of Phoenix --- http://www.phoenix.edu/index_open.html 

    The University of Phoenix became the largest private university in the world.  Growth came largely from adult learning onsite programs in urban centers across the U.S. and Canada.  

    The popular CBS television show called Sixty Minutes ran a feature on the growth and future of the newer online training and education programs at the University of Phoenix. You can download this video from http://online.uophx.edu/onl_nav_2.asp# 

    The University of Phoenix contends that online success in education depends upon intense communications day-to-day between instructors and students.  This, in turn, means that online classes must be relatively small and synchronized in terms of assignments and projects.


    Example 7 --- Partnerships 
    Lucrative partnerships between universities and corporations seeking to train and educate employees.

    The highly successful Global Executive MBA Program at Duke University (formerly called GEMBA) where corporations from around the world pay nearly $100,000 for one or two employees to earn a prestigious online MBA degree --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html

    UNext Corporation has an exclusive partnership with General Motors Corporation that provides online executive training and education programs to 88,000 GM managers.  GM pays the fees.  See http://www.unext.com/ 

    Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 
    This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.   The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 

    Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation.  It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000 more students in 2002.  It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities.  The consulting arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system. 

    The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a program for online training and education for all IRS employees.  The IRS pays the fees for all employees.  The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 

    Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an online MBA program for Deere employees.  Deere pays the fees.  See "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html 

    The University of Georgia partnered with the consulting division of PwC to deliver a totally online MBA degree.  The program is only taken by PwC employees.  PwC paid the development and delivery fees.  See http://www.coe.uga.edu./coenews/2000/UGAusnews.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the bright and the dark side of education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    Barriers to Distance Education --- http://www.emoderators.com/barriers/index.shtml 
    Principal Investigator: Zane L. Berge

    Cho, S.K. & Berge, Z.L. (2002). Overcoming Barriers to Distance Training and Education. Education at a Distance [USDLA Journal] (16)1. Retrieved February 8, 2002 from http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/JAN02_Issue/article01.html

    When people within an organization plan for using distance training and education, there are several barriers to their efforts that they are likely to encounter. Consideration of barriers faced by other organizations may help leaders find solutions to reduce or to minimize obstacles in their own organization. Using a content analysis of thirty-two, in-depth case studies of leading organizations, this study begins to explore solutions to the barriers faced by organizations when they use distance education.

    Berge, Z.L. & Muilenburg, L.Y. (2001). Obstacles faced at various stages of capability regarding distance education in institutions of higher learning. Tech Trends 46(4): pp. 40-45.

    While distance education is on a fast growth curve right now, there are many barriers that must be overcome. The results reported here are from persons working in higher education (n=1276). The perspective taken is that various organizations are at different stages or levels of capabilities with regard to distance education-from never using distance education to other organizations in which distance education is how they do business.

    The research questions reported on in this article are:

    1. do educators perceive different barriers depending upon the maturity of their organization's capabilities in distance education, and
    2. as the organization' distance education competency as a whole matures, will the overall number or intensity of perceived barriers to distance education be reduced? There are additional observations included.

    Muilenburg, L.Y. and Berge, Z.L. (2001). Barriers to distance education: A factor-analytic study. The American Journal of Distance Education. 15(2): 7-22.

    While numerous studies have discussed barriers to the successful implementation of distance education, many are based on the examination of one instructor’s experience, one distance learning environment, or one type of distance learning program. The findings provide useful information, but it is difficult to piece these studies together to create a holistic picture of the barriers to distance education.

    Some quantitative studies have been conducted (Berge 1998; Cegles 1998; Dickinson et al. 1999; Rockwell et al. 1999; Yap 1996), but they tap a small or very focused population group. A larger-scale study was still needed to consider simultaneously the many dimensions of barriers to distance education as perceived by people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

    The survey study reported in the following presentations and articles sought to represent the perceptions of people who differed on six demographic variables: (1) workplace (e.g., community college, government, nonprofit organization, K–12 education); (2) job function (e.g., support staff, manager, researcher, student); (3) type of delivery system used (e.g., audiotape, computer conferencing, interactive television [ITV]); (4) expertise regarding distance education; (5) the stage of the respondent’s organization with regard to capabilities in delivering distance education (from no distance education activity to distance education being the way the organization does business); and (6) the area in which the respondent primarily works (e.g., fine arts, engineering, education). These studies represent the responses of over 2500 persons.

    Berge, Z.L. and Muilenburg L.Y. (2000). Barriers to distance education as perceived by managers and administrators: Results of a survey. In Melanie Clay (Ed.), Distance Learning Administration Annual 2000.

    A survey was conducted to help better understand and more systematically study barriers to distance education. The survey addressed six demographic variables: 1) work place (e.g., community college, government); 2) job function (e.g., support staff; manager, researcher, student); 3) type of delivery system used (e.g., audio-tape, computer conferencing, ITV); 4) expertise of the individual regarding distance education; 5) the stage of the respondents organization with regard to capabilities in delivering distance education; and 6) the area in which the respondent primarily works (e.g., fine arts, engineering, education). The focus of this presentation is on barriers to distance education as perceived by managers and administrators.

    Berge, Z.L. & Mrozowski, S. (1999) Barriers to Online Teaching in Elementary, Secondary, And Teacher Education. Canadian Journal of Educational Communication, 27(2): 59-72.

    A review of the literature regarding the barriers to the use of educational technology in primary and secondary education was conducted. An emphasis was placed on the diffusion of computers in the schools, since the focus of this study is to determine what should be expected as computer-mediated communication (CMC) is used in schools to teach in online environments. A categorical framework, similar to one used by the first author for analysis of barriers to the use of CMC in higher education, was used (Berge, 1998).

    The nine categories of barriers are: academic, fiscal, geographic, governance, labor-management, legal, student support, technical, and cultural. The literature review of barriers to the use of educational technology in K-12 using this framework suggested the primary areas of concern are academic, cultural, and technical. Secondary areas of concern are labor-management and fiscal issues, with little or no mention of geographic, governance, student support, or legal aspects of diffusion of technology.

    To test whether the use of CMC as one important area of educational technology entering K-12 teaching and learning, a recently published four volume series of books titled, "Wired Together: Computer-Mediated Communication in K-12" was analyzed. Taken together, the seventy-two (72) chapters in these four books, mostly case studies, represent a considerable body of experience in online teaching and learning in K-12, pre- and in-service teacher training.

    This content analysis was conducted:

    1. to determine how many different barriers to online teaching were mentioned across all the contributors, i.e., to indicate the range of the obstacles, and,
    2. to determine how often each particular category of barriers was mentioned, i.e., to indicate the perceived severity of these issues. The results are quite consistent when compared to the more general review of literature regarding educational technology.

    Berge, Z.L. (1998). Barriers to online teaching in post-secondary institutions. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration. 1(2). Summer. Retreived February 8, 2002 from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/Berge12.html

    Combined with demographic trends, political forces, economic factors, the need for lifelong learning, and the changing emphases in teaching and learning, there is a resurgence of interest in distance education both at traditional institutions of higher education and in organizations whose sole mission is distance education. Can higher education at "traditional" universities change to meet the new student demands and the intense competition among education providers that distance education brings?


    Just a couple of years ago, every major game company was developing a massively multiplayer online game, based on the attractive business premise. But after many disappointments in recent months, the industry is realizing these games can become tar pits.

    "Online Games a Massive Pain," by Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, July 16, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,64153,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

    Electronic Arts' decision to shut down development of Ultima X: Odyssey -- the sequel to its long-running online game Ultima Online -- may force the game industry to re-examine what it takes to be a successful developer of massively multiplayer online games.

    Electronic Arts joins a growing list of companies -- Cyan Worlds, Games Workshop, There Inc. -- that invested millions of dollars in online games, only to see disappointing sales or unfinished projects. But what's surprising about EA's setback is that it is the world's biggest video-game software company, with plenty of cash, talent, marketing muscle and patience to develop a franchise. Despite that, it pulled the plug on UXO.

    What's more, over the past few years EA has pulled the plug, or announced plans to pull the plug, on a string of MMO games: Ultima Online II, Motor City Online, an online Harry Potter adventure game and Earth & Beyond. Most surprising of all, The Sims Online -- an online version of the biggest video-game franchise in history -- has been a disappointment for the company, by most accounts.

    MMO games are notoriously hard to develop, much harder than traditional shrink-wrapped, single-player video games. Most MMOs create huge online worlds where thousands of players, each sitting in their homes, interact with each other -- exploring, trading and pillaging. The business premise to game companies is enticing: Players have to buy a copy of the game for about $50 at a retailer, then pay an additional monthly charge of $10 to $15 to gain entrance to the virtual world. But the companies have to pay a lot of attention to keep the online environments compelling and the players interested. And things that single-player games don't need as much -- like customer support and service -- are key to keeping subscriptions active.

    "Maybe what we're learning is that (a traditional game company) is not going to be set up perfectly to run big online games," said Ed Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University, and a moderator of Terra Nova, a blog that discusses virtual worlds.

    In contrast to EA, Sony set up an independent division, Sony Online Entertainment, to focus exclusively on virtual worlds, Castronova pointed out. The result: Sony Online has had huge success with its EverQuest franchise, with at least half a million subscribers, and its Star Wars Galaxies world has had more than 300,000 players.

    Of course, EA is not the only company that has had problems keeping MMOs afloat. For example, Games Workshop recently announced plans to close down Warhammer Online, as did Cyan Worlds with Uru Live. And There Inc. is on the verge of abandoning its metaverse in favor of becoming a platform builder, some speculate.

    For its part, EA disputes the notion that it has had problems developing MMOs. Instead, it said the UXO move was a strategic realignment of resources.

    Continued in the article

    Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment 


    How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

    Question
    How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

    "Going Hybrid," by Kristin L. Greene, Inside Higher Ed, July 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/20/strategist

    Too many college and university leaders think, “We have an online program and we have a campus program, so we can probably just combine the two to create a hybrid program.” This usually doesn’t work well because online and on-campus programs often appeal to different people for different reasons, and the delivery challenges for each are also quite different.

    We’ve seen some great successes, and a few spectacular failures, in the hybrid market model (in which 20-80 percent of content is delivered online). From these examples, we’ve learned that planning up front and being clear about objectives are preconditions for success. Institutions considering hybrid models for a program, or even several courses, must first create a “business plan” and clearly state what they want to achieve, which students they plan to serve, and how they plan to compete. When building this plan for your institution, you should keep the following in mind:

    The Goal. Why are you considering a hybrid model? What is the business rationale? Are you trying to reach different, or more, students, or trying to solve space constraints? Are you doing it because you see an unmet need in your marketplace or because your competitors are going hybrid and you feel the need to keep up? Are you looking for a local, regional, or national audience? The national market is becoming quite competitive, and programs in this space are becoming more commodity like, so a program focusing on the regional or local market may position your program for success.

    Philosophy. A program with 20 percent of delivery online and 80 percent on-campus is quite different from a program with 80 percent online and 20 percent on-campus, yet they both qualify as hybrid. Will you use the online component only for communication purposes or for content delivery as well? How will you use adjunct faculty members — to create the content, deliver it, or both? The philosophy you choose should provide a blueprint or roadmap for how you will achieve your goals. Too often in our work, we have seen institutions miss this step — they did not identify their philosophy before jumping into the hybrid model, and later found that it significantly impeded success. Without a philosophy, it is difficult to communicate the value proposition internally or externally, and it becomes challenging to make some of the difficult trade-offs inherent in any new venture.

    Target Consumer. What type of consumer is your hybrid offering designed to attract? Adult learners tend to be more open to an online experience because it allows them to balance their professional and personal lives with their educational pursuits. Traditional students — those aged 18 to 24 – tend to want face-to-face, classroom-based learning. Corporations may prefer a little of both, to allow employees to work and study at the same time. Segmenting the market by consumer types and needs — adult, traditional, current, new, credit, non-credit — and designing programs that fit these segments and needs are important early steps.

    Integration. Integrating between bricks and clicks is probably the single biggest point of failure for institutions pursuing a hybrid model. Where does campus-based learning begin and end relative to the online component? How do student services coordinate with these components? What do you need to change about your student information system? The challenges range from technology and training, to content design and delivery, to student services. Be sure to prepare by thinking through the entire system and how it will affect the students, the faculty, and the staff.

    Programs. Some courses and programs have done very well online and would be logical candidates for a hybrid model (e.g., business, IT, education), but not every course or program is well-suited to a hybrid approach. It’s best to begin with an audit of existing programs, dissecting the curriculum to determine how a hybrid model might be applied. At the same time, you should do an external evaluation of market demand and supply to determine where the best opportunities are for introducing new programs. Again, if you consider local versus national distribution, you may find that, on a local level, a particular hybrid program may provide a competitive advantage in attracting students.

    Core Competencies. What is your institution known for? What do you do better than most of your peer schools? Focus your efforts on maximizing the benefit of these core competencies and consider outsourcing those areas that are not strengths, such as marketing, lead management, student services, or technology.

    Faculty Buy-In. Faculty members have a large stake in content delivery because most of the time they supply the curriculum. Whether you plan to offer incentives for faculty to adapt content to a hybrid model or to outsource this function, faculty should be involved in the discussions.

    Hybrid courses and programs represent more of an evolution than a revolution in educational content delivery. Hybrid delivery represents a natural progression for many campus-based institutions to investigate and perhaps pursue, and often can serve as a competitive advantage in reaching a wider student population. Rigorously thinking through process design and delivery components and planning carefully for implementation will make the difference between those programs that succeed in the hybrid arena and those that invest a lot of resources with little to show for it.

     


    Online Cheating and Reduced Social Interaction

    July 30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    NEW BOOK OF ONLINE EDUCATION CASE STUDIES

    ELEMENTS OF QUALITY ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C. Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness, blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp. You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.

    The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.


    COMBATING CHEATING IN ONLINE STUDENT ASSESSMENT

    In "Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VII, no. II, Summer

    2004) Neil C. Rowe identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously" and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:

    -- Getting assessment answers in advance

    It is hard to ensure that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.

    -- Unfair retaking of assessments

    While course management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.

    -- Unauthorized help during the assessment

    It may not be possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online test.

    You can read the entire article, including Rowe's suggestions to counteract the problems, at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/summer72/rowe72.html.

    The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.


    SOCIAL INTERACTION IN ONLINE LEARNING

    Among the reasons Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that "students often have less commitment to the integrity of distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education. In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online learners:

    1. The use of synchronous communication

    "Chat-rooms and other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."

    2. The introduction of a forming stage

    "Discussion on almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,

    etc.) can be utilized by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is essential to any successful online experience."

    3. The adherence to effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course web site."

    The complete article is online at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/7_3/8.html.

    Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.

    The International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.

    ......................................................................

    ONLINE COURSES: COSTS AND CAPS

    Two articles in the July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and "How many students can we have in a class?"

    In "Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.

     

    In "Online Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.

    Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/ for more information.

    Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education in general are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

     

    Legal Concerns

    July 1, 2005 email message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/ 

    "The Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) is an online legal publication that focuses on the evolving intersection of law and technology. This area of study draws on a number of legal specialties: intellectual property, business law, free speech and privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law -- each of which is undergoing doctrinal and practical changes as a result of new and emerging technologies. DLTR strives to be a 'review' in the classic sense of the word. We examine new developments, synthesize them around larger theoretical issues, and critically examine the implications. We also review and consolidate recent cases, proposed bills, and administrative policies."

    "However, DLTR is unique among its sister journals at Duke, and indeed among all law journals. Unlike traditional journals, which focus primarily on lengthy scholarly articles, DLTR focuses on short, direct, and accessible pieces, called issue briefs or 'iBriefs.' In fact, the goal of an iBrief is to provide cutting edge legal insight both to lawyers and to non-legal professionals. In addition, DLTR strives to be the first legal publication to address breaking issues. To that end, we publish on the first and fifteenth of every month during the school year (September until April) and less frequently during the summer."

    Duke Law & Technology Review is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet.

    Bob Jensen's threads on the future of education technology and distance learning are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

     


    Email and Teaching Evaluuations Place Heavy Burdens on Teachers

    Fearing your student evaluations, how much time and trouble should you devote to email questions from your students?
    For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility. The stakes are different for professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick, chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts, explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com  and describe their impressions of their professors on blogs.
    Jonathan D. Glater, "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me," The New York Times, February 21, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on controversies over student evaluations are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation


    "Email Etiquette an Oxymoron? Perhaps Not," by Sanford Pinsker, The Irascible Professor, March 1, 2006 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-01-06.htm

    It is no secret that technology has had its impact on teaching, but it is also no secret that there are times when the "impact" is unwelcome, if not downright unpleasant. I am referring to the habit, by now well established, in which students email their professors at the click of a mouse -- and then expect the professor to respond in a heartbeat. No request is too outlandish, as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrated: One first-year student emailed a calculus professor asking "If I should buy a binder or a subject notebook?"; another explained that she was late for Monday's class because she "was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party." The war stories rattled on and on as the article explored the ways in which student e-mail have made professors not only "approachable" but also "on call" 24/7.

    Untenured professors have good reason to worry if students perceive them as not responding swiftly enough -- no matter how inappropriate or downright outlandish student requests might be. After all, most students fill out evaluation forms at the end of the semester and woe to the professor who is perceived as dragging his or her heels when replying to student email. As a person who was once chided for not returning student papers promptly -- this, long before email became a fact of academic life -- I was glad that there was room on the form for the student to explain that he expected his paper returned at the end of the class in which he had turned it in. That, for him, defined "promptly," and I didn't meet his definition.

    No doubt every professor who skimmed the New York Times article had an example or two drawn from personal experience. I am hardly an exception. I remember, for example, the first-year student who email me -- this, before our first meeting -- that she was a member of the field hockey team and that she would be leaving class early on a number of occasions (they were listed) and missing class altogether for away games. No doubt she thought this was thoughtful of her and only thought otherwise when I informed her that, at the college she was now attending, academic work took precedence over athletics, and that we ought to discuss the matter further in my office. I am happy to report that my reply got her thinking but unhappy to report that her "solution" to the problem was "make-up classes," ones I'd teach her privately during moments when she wasn't chasing a ball with a stick.

    Ironically enough, the last email I received from a student had to do with the grade he got on a term paper (B-) that was headed “A Grave Injustice.” I resisted the opportunity to tell him that, if this was the largest 'grave injustice ' the world handed him, he was a fortunate young man indeed. Instead, I began with the formulaic, "I'm sorry you're upset but. . ." and went on to explain that it is my job to assign grades and that is what I'd done, to the best of my ability, in his case -- as my typed, half-page comments made clear. My point in relaying this exasperating tale is to remind professors not to get exasperated themselves. Volleying emails back and back is, well, unseemly, something that immature students do but that professional teachers don't.

    My hunch is that the student email problem will only get worse. That's why it will, I believe, become crucial to establish an email policy -- call them guidelines, rules of etiquette, whatever you will -- and add it to course syllabi. I was hardly alone in making it clear on my syllabi that "Adults do not like to be called after 10 PM" (some prefer 7), and if I were still teaching I would add email to the mix.

    Further, I would discourage students from emailing me drafts of papers not only the night before they are due, but also two or three nights before they are due. My policy, one that usually worked well, was to inform students that, under normal circumstances, I would be happy to comment on a one-page summary that included a working title, abstract, and up to three paragraphs -- if the single page document were turned in a week before the paper itself was due. "Unusual cases" (papers with grades below a C-) were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes I would require that the paper be rewritten after an office conference, sometimes I would ask that a draft of the next paper be submitted at a mutually agreeable time.

    Moreover, I think my etiquette rules would vary depending on the class. First-year students are often nervous Nellies; they want to do well but they lack confidence, sometime for good reason. My advice would be to cut them some slack, at the same time that you make it clear, in class, that some behavior is cheesy rather than classy. Because I'm something of a ham, I'd ham it up from time to time in my first-year seminar with tales, some real, some just made up, about what I called "students from hell." Everybody laughed but got the point about what not to do. If I were still teaching, I'd probably borrow the example about the student who emailed about what binder to buy.

    Continued in article

     


    Student Concerns

    "Three Criticisms of the Online Classroom: An examination of a higher education online course in computer-mediated communication,"
    by Jennifer A. Minotti Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) Newton, Massachusetts, USA  --- 
    http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/october2002/index.html#3
     

    Learning Technology [ISSN 1438-0625] is published quarterly by the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available at no cost in HTML and PDF formats at http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/ 

    Technological expertise, access to technology, additional time associated with participation, and the changing role of the instructor a just a few of the many issues the online classroom has changed (and often times inhibited) the ways students learn (Baym, 1995, Berge & Collins, 1996, Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1996). The three largest issues found to affect the way students participated in a single graduate level online course, are described below.

    1.  Large Time Commitment

    Too much time was the biggest complaint heard by students. Nearly every participant in the class commented about the large time commitment the course required. Most all of the students also seemed surprised at how much more time the online class took up over traditional face-to-face courses. In addition, I observed that nearly every participant was late in completing at least one assignment. In fact, many students were late multiple assignments.

    "Having taken previous online courses in addition to this one, I definitely feel that online courses, though they provide access otherwise not available, require much more of a time commitment than face-to-face classes. Not only do we have weekly assignments, but the added 'checking in,' dialoguing through the week, and often troubleshooting our technology is much more demanding than in a traditional classroom setting, where the class meets once or twice per week."

    "…We might think it would be more convenient to participate in class wherever and whenever we wanted by means of the Internet. However…we are not free of having a location in learing--in fact we are more hinged to one spot (in front of the computer), because it is there that we must do all of our work for the class (course exploration of web sites, class projects, particpation in the newsgroup, reading of submissions to newsgroup). It does also seem to take more time to accomplish all that needs doing for an on-line course."

    2. Dealing with Technical Problems

    Technical and access issues remained the second largest criticism and a major challenge to students, despite the best laid plans for designing this course. In this class, students knowledge of and access to technology varied greatly. This presented huge obstacles to students, some of whom experienced trouble accessing the course right from the beginning. Other students experienced problems at different points in the class, which often made their learning experience frustrating.

    "I'm a bit frustrated and caught by the technical setup and requirements. Feedback on the process of the course to date: We could have used the month of February to get this behind us. I have allocated 10 hours a week to this course, using a formula of three times the amount of face time, assuming a typical three hour per week class. My time has been eaten up by the technical setup. I'm having a technical glitch with my company firewall."

    "Ugh…I feel like I have overcome some HUGE obstacles just by getting into this newsgroup. The frustration and anger levels have been high and I have recently caught myself yelling at my computer."

    3. Lack of Facilitation by the Instructor

    Lastly, a lot has been written about the critical role the instructor plays in ensuring online courses are successful (Baym, 1995, Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1996, Jones, 1995). In this class, students really wanted, needed, and valued an active instructor, one who was visible online providing feedback to their work, supporting and questioning their statements, encouraging participation, and keeping the class on track. When not online for several weeks at a time, several classmates become disheartened. In response to the survey question, "What were you most disappointed/surprised by?" two students wrote:

    "The lack of interaction from the professor. We really only got 'guidelines' twice this semester which was odd. Given the topic of our class, computer-mediated communication with the professor should have been examined. …I never knew if I was 'wrong' or totally off-base."

    "…It's lonely out here in VirtualLand. …I am missing our teacher in this space. I understand his desire for a logos however I'm not exactly sure that this group in in syn and heading toward the same goal."

    Conclusion

    Indeed, we have a long way to go before the higher education online classroom is as successful as our face-to-face classroom. This will of course take time and perseverance. It will also take a critical evaluation of what is working and not working in each course we design, deliver, and participate in.

    References

    Baym, N. (1995). The emergence of community in computer-mediated communication. In S. Jones, CyberSociety: Computer-mediated communication and community. California: Sage.

    Berge, Z.L., & Collins, M.P. (Eds.) (1996). Computer mediated communiation and the online classroom, Volume III: Distance learning. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

    Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L., Turoff, M. 1996). Learn/ing networks: A field guide to teaching and learning online. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    Jones, S.G. (1995). CyberSociety: Computer-mediated communication and community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Jennifer A. Minotti Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) Newton, Massachusetts, USA jminotti@edc.org 

    Student Technology Assessment at the Global Level

    Executive Summary

    The goal of the Computer Literacy Project is to gain a better understanding of student perceptions on the nature of computer literacy. The Computer Literacy Project Survey was developed over the last three years as the foundation of research into advanced technology use in education research. I have been particularly interested in the nature of computer literacy at the university level and in differential notions of computer literacy across disciplines. The survey has been electronically distributed to universities in nine states in the U.S and five countries outside the U.S., see Table 1. This is the first time in the history of education research that such a systematic study on computer literacy has been carried out using the Internet and web-based technology that has reached international proportions. Reported here are preliminary results from two Australian universities, one university in Hong Kong and one university in the US.

    Continued at http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/october2002/index.html#3  


    "What's wrong with PowerPoint--and how to fix it," by David Coursey, Executive Editor, AnchorDesk September 10, 2003 --- http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2914637,00.html 
    (Thank you Ed Scibner for pointing to this link.)

    Are PowerPoint slides making us stupid? Are all problems really just a few bullet points away from their solutions? Or is the medium having a bad effect on the message? I'm no Marshall McLuhan or Edward Tufte (I will pause here to let you all shout, "Damn straight!"), but I do know something about business presentations and how they're put together. And I know that PowerPoint too often gets in the way of the message, replacing clear thought with unnecessary animations, serious ideas with 10-word bullet points, substance with tacky, confusing style.

    I DON'T KNOW what McLuhan would think about PowerPoint, him being dead and all. But Tufte is very much alive and, in an essay appearing in the September issue of Wired, minces no words: "PowerPoint is evil," says the Yale professor whose books have set the standard for graphic presentation in the computer age.

    Tufte says that slideware programs like PowerPoint (there aren't many others left) "may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for speakers can be punishing to both content and audience." The standard PowerPoint deck, he says, "elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."

    This is especially true given that many presenters--who really shouldn't be presenting in the first place--use PowerPoint as a crutch. PowerPoint becomes a tool to separate the presenter from the audience and from the message.

    But it doesn't have to be this way. It's possible to use PowerPoint as a tool (just like the projector you probably use to display your presentation), and as a real complement to what you're saying, without dumbing down your ideas. Today I'd like to offer some advice to help you do just that.

     

    • Do the presentation first, then the slides. Many people draft and write their presentation in PowerPoint itself. It's far better to prepare the presentation in Word (or whatever other tool you use to write)--including all the detail you want to present--and then transfer the highlights to PowerPoint. The one problem with using Word for this: It doesn't have a very good outlining tool.

       

    • Artwork has killed more presentations than it's saved. You're not a graphic artist, and neither am I. PowerPoint makes it too easy to add confusing graphics to presentations. Use restraint.

       

    • Animation is for cartoons. Animation tends to take over the presentation, which then becomes more about the presenter trying to make all the builds and transitions work properly than actually presenting the content.

       

    • Present more than the slide. Don't you hate it when presenters stand at the front of a room and read their slides ?  Slides are supposed to convey the major points of the presentation, reinforcing the speaker's points. Use them as prompts to talk about specific topics, as an outline, not as the substance of the presentation itself.

       

    • Use the notes pages. Many people are unaware that PowerPoint lets you attach notes to slides, which can then be printed and used to guide you or to give to the audience. Search for "notes" in the Help file to find out more about this feature.

       

    • Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. No, you don't have to stand in front of a mirror and do your entire presentation. But a sit-down with some colleagues can answer the questions, "Do these slides make sense?" and "Is this the information people care about?"--before you find out the hard way.
    My point here is that PowerPoint glitz alone does not an effective presentation make. While your decks shouldn't be boring, they aren't entertainment, either. A few staging and showbiz skills help, but most presentations are won or lost in the actual content. Your job is to control PowerPoint. If you don't, PowerPoint will control your presentation.

    The Digital Divide is Real

    In the 15th Century when the printing press was invented, the majority of the world's population was illiterate and could not make use of the books that poured forth.  Six hundred years later, a large proportion of the world's population still can neither read nor write.  In the 21st Century when the printing press gives way to digital storage and networked distribution, the hardcore illiterate will not benefit by virtue of being illiterate.  An even larger number who can read and write will still not have access anywhere close to the privileged populace having access to modern technologies.

    One day, modern technologies will be the main agent in eradicating illiteracy and ignorance.  But in the interim decades, or even centuries, these technologies will exacerbate the divide between those who can benefit directly from technologies and those who are denied access for one reason or another (poverty, isolation, religious constraints, cultural constraints, etc.)


    Websites Failing Disabled Users

    "Websites 'failing' disabled users," by Geoff Adams-Spink, BBC News Online, April 14, 2004 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3623407.stm 

    An investigation by the Disability Rights Commission shows that most websites are unusable by disabled people.

    This means that many everyday activities carried out on the internet - booking a holiday, managing a bank account, buying theatre tickets or finding a cheaper credit card - are difficult or impossible for many disabled people.

    Bert Massie, DRC Chairman described the situation as "unacceptable", and said the organisation was determined not to allow disabled people to be left behind by technology

    A thousand websites were tested for the survey using automated software, and detailed user testing was carried out on 100 sites, including government, business, e-commerce, leisure and web services such as search engines.

    The results showed that the worst affected group were those with visual impairments.

    Blind people involved in testing websites were unable to perform nearly all of the tasks required of them despite using devices such as screen readers.

    "The web has been around for 10 years, yet within this short space of time it has managed to throw up the same hurdles to access and participation by disabled people as the physical world," said Mr Massie.

    "It is an environment that could be made more accommodating to disabled people at a relatively modest expense."

    Mr Massie warned website owners to improve accessibility or be prepared to face legal action.

    The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act requires information providers to make their services accessible.

    The problems most commonly encountered by the disabled website testers were cluttered pages, confusing navigation, failure to describe images and poor colour contrast between background and text.

    Researchers at London's City University, who carried out the study for the DRC, also found that many web developers were unaware of what needed to be done to make sites accessible.

    Continued in the article

    Good Website Design Checklist

    • Provide text equivalence for non-text elements 
    • Ensure good color contrast between foreground and background 
    • Pages must be usable when scripts and applets are turned off or not supported 
    • Avoid movement in pages 
    • Avoid pop-ups and don't change window without telling user 
    • Divide large blocks of information into manageable chunks 
    • Clearly identify the target of each link 
    • Use the clearest and simplest language possible

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    DRC

     


    Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students?
    Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

    Accessibility in Distance Education A Resource for Faculty in Online Teaching --- http://www.umuc.edu/ade/ 

    Common Questions
    What does the word "accessibility" mean? (What is Accessibility?)

    What disability laws should I know about if I teach online? (Legal Issues)

    What do I need to consider if I have a student with a disability in my online course? (Understanding Disabilities)

    How do I make my Web site accessible to everyone, including students with disabilities? (How-To)

    What does an accessible Web site look like? Does it have to be text based? (Best Practices)

    You can download the MP3 audio file of Susan Spencer's August 2002 presentation on this at one of my workshops --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002 

     


    Lots of Hype and Not Much Profit

    From customer to analyst to investor, the consensus is that E-learning still has a few things of its own to learn. Until last month, the online-training sector wasn't as hard hit by the IT spending slump as most of the tech industry because it lets companies with tight travel and training budgets train workers inexpensively. But all that's changed. http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eHIP0BcUEY04e0Bcm70A1 

    "E-Learning Struggles To Make The Grade," by Elisabeth Goodridge, Information, May 13, 2002 --- http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020509S0011 

    From customer to analyst to investor, the consensus is that E-learning still has a few things of its own to learn. It's a technology that's being re-evaluated across the board. There are plenty of problems, as early adopters discovered. "Many people have been burned," Meta Group analyst Jennifer Vollmer says. "And they're advising others to hold off if it isn't necessary."

    Some of the stumbling blocks that trip up users of E-learning technologies are integration and interoperability problems among elements of E-learning systems; product limitations; inadequate support services; and vendors' financial woes.

    But until last month, the online-training sector wasn't as hard-hit by the IT-spending slump as most of the technology industry. What E-learning had going for it was an ability to let companies with tight travel and training budgets train workers inexpensively.

    For about a year and a half, many providers saw double-digit revenue growth, and several quickly became leaders in a field of hundreds. Docent, Plateau Systems, and Saba Software emerged as top developers of learning-management systems. Centra Software and Interwise became known for live-collaboration software, and NetG, SmartForce, and SkillSoft gained popularity as course-content designers.

    Now, weakening demand is evident. Centra, SmartForce, and learning-management system makers Click2learn and DigitalThink warned in April of revenue shortfalls. On Wall Street, many suppliers' shares have lost more than 50% of their value since January.

    Still, E-learning has a future; what it lacks is maturity. So, while there are businesses seeking the E-learning advantage, many are taking their time doing so. Before investing in these systems, they want to make sure they fully understand their own training needs, what works and doesn't in an E-learning format, and their product options. "People are slowing down on jumping into E-learning with both feet," says Larry Carlile, E-learning manager at consulting firm A.T. Kearney. "From cost savings to effectiveness, there's a better analysis these days."

    Companies know that E-learning is no longer just about immediate cost savings but about increasing worker productivity, driving operational efficiencies, and streamlining corporate training. "With all of these benefits, E-learning is going to work, but we haven't found the best way to go about it," says Giga Information Group analyst Claire Schooley.

    A number of deals in recent weeks show that many companies still believe they can make E-learning work. The American Red Cross and learning-management system supplier Plateau Systems cut a seven-year deal worth more than $10 million; Pathlore Software Corp. implemented a system for Delta Air Lines Inc.; and Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. said last month that its use of the Vuepoint Learning System to consolidate training departments will save the automaker more than $11.9 million in five years.

    Continued at  http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020509S0011  


    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change and Mutation

    Fearing your student evaluations, how much time and trouble should you devote to email questions from your students?
    For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility. The stakes are different for professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick, chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts, explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com  and describe their impressions of their professors on blogs.
    Jonathan D. Glater, "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me," The New York Times, February 21, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on controversies over student evaluations are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation


    "Fulfilling Technology's Broken Promise: A Perspective on Educational Technology,"
    by Robert Bilyk, co-founder of lodeStar Learning Inc. and Cyber Village Academy, T.H.E. Journal, February 2006 ---
    http://www.thejournal.com/articles/17933/

    The Broken Promise of Technology
    The one inarguable difference between now and then has been the promise that technology holds for the classroom teacher. In the early 1980s, I worked with stand-alone machines that could render stick figures on the screen and display text and numbers. The state of the art in audio was a few timely beeps. Nevertheless, I could envision the promise and began creating things that I could use in the classroom to help kids.

    Over the course of time, more and more educators have turned to technology to help kids—but only to be disappointed time and again. Computers were expensive, they broke or became obsolete, they didn’t talk to one another, and they divided teachers’ allegiance through the great schism of Macs vs. PCs. Then there was the software that sat in shrink-wrapped packages unused. Integrated Learning Systems (ILS) were also expensive and inflexible. If a teacher didn’t like the pedagogy or content of a particular lesson, she could do little to change, add, or delete content. Teachers had to accept the bad with the good: ILS perpetuated the existence of the stick figure; computers threatened the existence of the teacher. At least, that was a common apprehension.

    And despite the greater use of technology, studies such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study from the National Center for Education Statistics have shown that our students still weren’t achieving well in math and science compared to their European and Asian counterparts. Fortunately, today’s educators are on the cusp of a tremendous realization: The promise that computers held for increased student achievement are finally being realized.

    The New Promise of Technology
    A teacher today who dares to imagine the possibilities that current technology affords won’t be disappointed: The total cost of ownership of a computer continues to decrease. Software is cheap and oftentimes free. Access to the Internet and all of the educational content that it holds is practically ubiquitous in American schools. Standards permit dissimilar computers to communicate with one another, and for educational content to be searched and shared. Therefore, technology needs to be met halfway. Lead teachers, mentor teachers, curriculum directors and administrators—teachers in general—must dare to dream again. Schools must place networked computers in classrooms, libraries, lobbies, and wherever else they can be safely accessed. Accessibility to computers is essential. Teachers need to be trained—not once but often. Professional development is also essential because teachers need to support each another. Ideally, teachers from common disciplines would network with one another. The use of instructional technology by teachers to improve student achievement must become habitual. And finally, all roads must lead to the teacher. That is, all student performance data must flow effortlessly to the teacher.

    To fulfill the promise, computer use by teachers must become habitual, and computer use to improve student achievement must become habitual. The advent of learning management systems like Microsoft Class Server, Blackboard and Desire2Learn has enabled teachers to manage the student online learning experience. Often, school districts direct this usage to the exception—offering activities to children who are ill, replacing snow days with online days, and providing a class to a home-schooled child.

    The snow day example was my favorite. The online snow day was designed by well-intentioned educators, but it had its flaws. In this example, the school trained its entire staff on an LMS so that one day, when it snowed, students could access their courses online. On the day it snowed, the untested system failed; staff were out of practice in creating, assigning, and grading; and students could hardly remember how to log on. This example might seem a little extraordinary, yet variations on this same theme are commonplace. Rather than integrating online curriculum into the example, schools flirt with technology at the edges, addressing the “unusual situation” so that the business of integrating the class with technology does not become “habitual” and second nature for teachers.

    Continued in article

    February 24, 2006 reply from Robert Holmes Glendale College [rcholmes@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]

    I have spent time in these classes reflecting on the role of the teacher. (I am mostly retired and teach one accounting class online.) The most effective classes are those that invlove two way communication with the students. Technology and lectures are poor substitutes for this dialogue. The electricity that sparks in the classes as the students offer ideas, the instructor says give me more, other students say "I never thought about that" is something to behold. I feel sorry for those (including my students) who have to try to get an education without this kind of enriching excitement.


    One damaging effect of the clash between the academic and IT cultures is that teaching and scholarship have remained relatively untouched by the new information technologies.
    Edward L. Ayers (, "The Academic Culture and the IT Culture: Their Effect on Teaching and Scholarship," EDUCAUSE Review, December 2004 --- http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm04/erm0462.asp 
    Edward L. Ayers is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and is Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

    A year ago, my colleague Charles Grisham and I wrote an EDUCAUSE Review article entitled "Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Hoped (Yet)." In short, we argued that information technology has not yet transformed higher education because the areas of teaching and scholarship, the "heart" of colleges and universities, have remained relatively untouched by the new technologies. In this article, I’d like to continue the discussion and also go further, exploring not only why these two areas continue to be, for the most part, resistant to the changes but also how technology can successfully address these core missions of higher education.1

    The Invisible Success of IT Those of us who have been involved for a while in the long courtship between higher education and information technology can recall many ups and downs in the last thirty years or so.2 We remember when we first saw Mosaic, Netscape, and the World Wide Web. At each step along the way, some of the more impressionable among us thought that one innovation or another would push us over the top, that we would have finally gained the critical mass that would channel the undeniable power of information technology into higher education. We watched as commerce was transformed, as entertainment was transformed, as personal communication was transformed, and we kept waiting for the moment when higher education would be transformed in the same way.

    In particular, we waited for the time when the very heart of education—the classroom and the scholarship taught in that classroom—would be transformed. Yet despite the tremendous investment that all institutions of higher education have made in information technology, despite the number of classrooms wired and the number of laptops mandated, the vast majority of classes proceed as they have for generations—isolated, even insulated, from the powerful technologies we use in the rest of our lives. Moreover, the form in which scholarship appears has barely changed. Across almost every field, researchers, no matter how sophisticated the technology they use in discovery, translate their discoveries into simple word-processed documents. Sure, they sometimes add JPEG images and other illustrations; and in the sciences, pre-prints rush around the world long before print journals would be able to publish the articles. But producing scholarly discourse in HTML and PDF formats has not changed scholarship in any significant manner. The nature of argument has remained remarkably resistant to innovation in rhetoric or form in every field of scholarly endeavor.

    Very real technological accomplishments have tended to become invisible because they have been so successful. If you had told people a decade ago that card catalogs would virtually disappear within ten years and would be replaced by our current information-management systems, they would not have believed you. Librarians have been the real heroes of the digital revolution in higher education. They are the ones who have seen the farthest, done the most, accepted the hardest challenges, and demonstrated most clearly the benefits of digital information. In the process, they have turned their own field upside down and have revolutionized their professional training. It is testimony to their success that we take their achievement—and their information-management systems—for granted.

    Similarly, college and university IT professionals have done more than anyone has asked them to do. The speed with which they have built networks and infrastructure, trained people, and created new student-registration and fiscal-management systems has been remarkable. And again, their success is taken for granted, with IT becoming almost as invisible as the electricity on which it runs. In a cruel irony, few faculty think "Ah, I will now use technology" whenever they check to see whether a book is in the library, or whether a student is enrolled, or whether their paycheck has been posted. And yet many do think: "I don’t want to use technology, or I can’t use technology, to teach in the classroom or to disseminate my scholarship." Those faculty who have ignored all the excitement up to this point have decided that they can withstand whatever else is put before them until the end of their careers. They go to their professional scholarly meetings and see only a few workshops and talks on the new technologies; they read the job ads and see that the jobs require exactly the same credentials as were required a quarter century ago.

    The bottom line is that despite all the work and successes of IT professionals, teaching and scholarship at leading institutions of higher education remain relatively resistant to the possibilities of information technology.

    The Academic and IT Cultures From the viewpoint of a dean who would love to see the transformation of higher education accelerated, and from the viewpoint of a long-time laborer in the technology vineyard who would love to see some of the fruit come to harvest, I’m struck by many faculty members’ resistance to the obvious benefits of the maturing technologies. From the viewpoint of a professor, however, I understand some of the more obvious reasons for this resistance: shortages of time, money, and energy. In addition, I see more systemic reasons, ones that we might call "cultural": deeply patterned, deeply entrenched habits of thoughts and behavior. The problem is that the academic culture and the IT culture simply do not mix together well.

    Nobody seems to like the word academic. "That’s merely academic" is used as a dismissive description of something irrelevant to real life, something as pointless as counting angels on the head of a pin or writing an English composition paper on Beowulf. Any mention of the word academic in a book review is a kiss of death. In a particularly cruel twist, even when a nonacademic praises a book by a professor, the reviewer often dismisses the academy in the process: "Not the boring, self-indulgent, impenetrable, dithering book we always expect from an academic, this book is almost as good as one written by someone who knows a lot less about the subject."

    When asked to identify ourselves, almost no professors choose "academic" as their first choice. "College teacher" can sometimes sound good, with its shades of the movie Dead Poets Society. "Professor" can be OK on occasion, bringing to mind John Houseman in the movie The Paper Chase. Saying that you work "at the college" or "over at the university" can usually get you through a casual conversation without too much loss of status at the tire store or supermarket.

    But being more specific can often cause problems. When I’m on an airplane and tell someone that I teach history, all too often the response is: "Boy, I always hated history—all those names and dates." I got some notion of this when I started to work on the subject of the Civil War, and my mother-in-law, a very sweet woman, introduced me to one of her friends as a "Civil War buff." I carefully tried to explain the difference between a historian and a buff, with the main difference seeming to be that I don’t have another job from which the Civil War is merely a hobby.

    As problematic as disciplinary nomenclature can be, adding "academic" makes it even more toxic. The title of "dean" sounds imposing, if faintly scary (satisfyingly enough), since so few people, including deans, know exactly what a dean does. But even I cringe when I think about defining myself as what I actually am during most of my waking hours: an "academic administrator." It’s hard to think of many job descriptions (for legally paying work) that have more negative connotations than that. The title conjures up all the mustiness of "academic" along with all the bureaucratic, paper-pushing, rubber stamp–wielding, red tape–entangling connotations of "administration."

    On the other hand, as someone who has served on IT committees dominated by IT staff, I know how IT people speak about academics. I’ve seen the eye-rolling and heard the chuckling at some of the more clueless of my academic colleagues who can’t figure out how to empty the trashbin on their desktop computer. Still, my friends in information technology have their own struggles. You know the stereotypes. You’ve heard the whispers: "geek." As for me, I represent the worst of all worlds: I’m both a lifelong academic and a longtime IT geek. But perhaps this does give me the credentials to delve into the nomenclature of both the academic culture and the IT culture.

    For a definition of geek, I turn to a very convenient authority, the dictionary function of Microsoft Word:

    geek (n.): 
    1. somebody who is considered unattractive and socially awkward (insult) 
    2. a carnival performer whose act consists of outrageous feats such as biting the heads off live animals 
    3. somebody who enjoys or takes pride in using computers or other technology, often to what others consider an excessive degree (informal disapproving) 

    Leaving aside "biting the heads off live animals"—an activity that, in my experience, is indulged in by only a few academic administrators, and usually in private—I rest my case. When your own computer program tells you that by using that very program to "an excessive degree," you are becoming increasingly "unattractive and socially awkward," you might suspect that you’re in trouble. If you brush that warning aside to finish writing an article with that same program, you really are a geek.

    As is often the case with oppressed groups, the disdain faced by those in the IT arena and those in the academic arena has not always brought the two together in a shared bond. The two cultures have so much to offer one another, so much to teach one another, if they would only look past the tweed and elbow patches on the one hand and the pocket protectors on the other. The IT industry and the academy share some obvious and important characteristics. Both deal with intangibles, especially ideas. Both are focused on networks and on the information those networks carry. Both are dedicated to innovation and competition. Both are extensible structures: build something once, and you can apply it everywhere.

    But taking a clear-eyed view reveals that there’s more to the story. As shown in Table 1, information technology and the academy display competing characteristics.

    Table 1.
    Competing Characteristics

    Information Technology The Academy
    • everywhere and nowhere
    • strongly identified with a very specific location
    • brash young industry
    • a self-consciously ancient institution
    • highly unstable
    • the most stable institution across the world
    • new competitors continually emerge
    • impossible to break into top ranks
    • possibility of great profits
    • no possibility of profit at all
    • work performed by anonymous teams
    • centered on scholarly stars
    • obsolescence built in
    • designed to deny obsolescence
    • virtually instant results necessary     
    • patience a central virtue
    • designed to be transparent
    • opaque and labyrinth

    Since information technology has infiltrated every nook and cranny of other parts of life, it seems to me that it must be the academy that resists. That is because several basic paradoxes lie at the heart of the modern American university—basic conflicts that make the academy a fascinating place to live and a hard place to administer:

    Continued in the article


    Teachers Must Adapt to Changed Mindsets of Incoming Students Who Grew Up With Computers

    "How do you communicate with students who have grown up with technology? Schools are looking to technology for the answer," by Kevin Delaney, The Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2005, Page R4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110556110781524378,00.html?mod=todays_us_the_journal_report 

    Forget the computer lab. To hold the attention of the tech-savvy PlayStation 2 generation, educators are working digital technology into every corner of the curriculum.

    Pioneering teachers are getting their classes to post writing assignments online so other students can easily read and critique them. They're letting kids practice foreign languages in electronic forums instead of pen-and-paper journals. They're passing out PDAs to use in scientific experiments and infrared gadgets that let students answer questions in class with the touch of a button. And in the process, the educators are beginning to interact with students, parents and each other in ways they never have before.

    The issue is, "how do we communicate with students today who have grown up with technology from the beginning?" says Tim Wilson, a technology-integration specialist at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, Minn. "The traditional linear approach...often seems too slow and boring to students used to MTV, instant messaging and MP3s."

    Permanent Record

    Boosting this grass-roots tech effort is a new wave of free and low-cost technologies and services. Online forums and Web logs, or blogs, are simple to set up and free to use. So are "wikis" -- Web pages that can be written on as well as read, making it easy for teachers to make notes in the digital margins. Hardware, too, is getting cheaper: Prices have fallen for everything from wireless-networking equipment to hand-held gadgets to personal computers. And thanks to a computerization drive of the past decade or so, 99% of public schools now have Internet access, with an average of one computer for every five students, according to the Department of Education.

    The department recently concluded that schools on the whole aren't doing enough with that infrastructure. But in schools across the country, a corps of tech-savvy educators are showing how to get the job done. Students in journalism classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J., for example, never turn in hard-copy assignments. They post them on blogs -- which allows their teacher, Will Richardson, and their fellow students to read and post comments about the articles.

    Mr. Richardson says students like the blogs especially as an organizing tool, letting them easily search through past assignments. More broadly, he believes the blogs have "really profound implications" for education: Students discuss each other's work in new ways, such as linking to relevant information on the Web to support their comments. In some cases, people outside the school can access the blogs, providing students with a platform for disseminating their views. The blogs also let parents keep up to date on their kids' assignments more easily than ever before.

    Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., also uses Web-based publishing technology to open up new possibilities in communication. Fifth-graders send classwork, and essays and articles for their monthly newspaper, to a wiki over the school's network. Teacher Kathy Gould goes to the Web page and writes corrections and comments directly into the text -- instead of posting a note in a separate "comments" section, as with a blog. Students can then access the wiki to read and respond to her comments.

    Meanwhile, students in John Unruh-Friesen's advanced-placement government class at Hopkins High School conduct running debates on an online forum outside of the classroom. The students, mostly 12th-graders, tackle issues including the presidential election, the possibility of a military draft and the Middle East conflict.

    "Some students are reluctant to participate in class discussions," says Mr. Wilson, the technology-integration specialist at Hopkins. "Some of those kids feel much more comfortable interacting when they have time to craft a response."

    Students in advanced foreign-language classes at Hopkins use forums to keep online journals and interact with each other. For example, the instructor of the fifth-year French course, Molly Wieland, used to require students to keep paper journals in French. Since moving those to an online forum, she says the students write more than they did before.

    The fact that they're writing for an audience larger than just their teacher makes a difference, and what they're saying tends to be more conversational and relevant to the students' lives. A recent exchange between the students involved college choices and the wisdom of rooming with your best friend in the dorm -- all in French.

    Continued in the article

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    Concerns About Faculty Workloads and Burnout

    Question
    Why should teaching a course online take "twice as much time" as teaching it onsite?

    Answer
    Introduction to Economics:  Experiences of teaching this course online versus onsite

    With a growing number of courses offered online and degrees offered through the Internet, there is a considerable interest in online education, particularly as it relates to the quality of online instruction. The major concerns are centering on the following questions: What will be the new role for instructors in online education? How will students' learning outcomes be assured and improved in online learning environment? How will effective communication and interaction be established with students in the absence of face-to-face instruction? How will instructors motivate students to learn in the online learning environment? This paper will examine new challenges and barriers for online instructors, highlight major themes prevalent in the literature related to “quality control or assurance” in online education, and provide practical strategies for instructors to design and deliver effective online instruction. Recommendations will be made on how to prepare instructors for quality online instruction.
    Yi Yang and Linda F. Cornelious, "Preparing Instructors for Quality Online Instruction, Working Paper --- http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/spring81/yang81.htm

    Jensen Comment:  The bottom line is that teaching the course online took twice as much time because "largely from increased student contact and individualized instruction and not from the use of technology per se." 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the positive side are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    SURVEY ON QUALITY AND EXTENT OF ONLINE EDUCATION

    The Sloan Consortium's 2003 Survey of Online Learning wanted to know would students, faculty, and institutions embrace online education as a delivery method and would the quality of online education match that of face-to-face instruction. The survey found strong evidence that students are willing to sign up for online courses and that institutions consider online courses part of a "critical long-term strategy for their institution." It is less clear that faculty have embraced online teaching with the same degree of enthusiasm. The survey's findings are available in "Sizing the Opportunity: The Quality & Extent of Online Education in the U.S., 2002 and 2003" by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, Sloan Center for Online Education at Olin and Babson Colleges. The complete report is online at http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/sizing_opportunity.pdf 

    The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/ 

     

    July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    STUDY OF ONLINE TEACHING WORKLOAD

    In "Faculty Self-Study Research Project: Examining the Online Workload" (JOURNAL OF ASYNCHRONOUS LEARNING NETWORKS, vol. 8, issue 3, June 2004), Melody M. Thompson, Director of the American Center for the Study of Distance Education at Penn State, reports on a workload study that was designed to go beyond anecdotal testimony. In the project six faculty who were teaching online courses "strove to identify those tasks that consumed a disproportionate amount of faculty time -- particularly time taken away from actual teaching/learning interactions with students." The study indicated that their workload "as measured by time on task, was comparable to or somewhat less than that for face-to-face courses." The article is available online at http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v8n3/v8n3_thompson.asp .

    The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) [ISSN 1092-8235] is an electronic publication of The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C). Current and back issues are available at http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln .

    Accounting professors who teach online discuss their workloads at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/cepSanAntonio.htm 

    "Teaching Courses Online:  How Much Time Does It Take," by Belinda Davis Lazarus, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, September 2003 --- http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v7n3/v7n3_lazarus.asp 

    ABSTRACT 
    Studies show that temporal factors like workload and lack of release time inhibit faculty participation in developing and teaching online courses; however, few studies exist to gauge the time commitment. This longitudinal case study, presented at the Seventh Annual Sloan-C International Conference on ALN, examined the amount of time needed to teach three asynchronous online courses at The University of Michigan-Dearborn from Winter 1999 through Winter 2000. Twenty-five students were enrolled in each course. Self-monitoring was used to measure the amount of time required to complete the following activities: 1) reading and responding to emails; 2) reading, participating in, and grading 10 online discussions; and 3) grading 15 assignments. Using a stopwatch, the investigator timed and recorded the number of minutes needed for each activity. Also, all messages and assignments were archived and frequency counts were recorded. The weekly, mean number of minutes and assignments was entered on line graphs for analysis. The data showed that teaching each online course required 3 to 7 hours per week, with the greatest number of emails and amount of time required during the first and last 2-weeks of the semesters. Participation in and grading of the discussions took the greatest amount of time and remained steady across the semester. However unlike many live courses, the students participated more in the discussions than the instructor did. The number of assignments that were submitted each week steadily increased over each semester. This case study indicates that the time needed to teach online courses falls within the range of reasonable expectations for teaching either live or online courses and represents the beginning of this area of inquiry. Consequently, additional studies are needed with a variety of instructors across a variety of courses and disciplines to further pinpoint faculty time commitment.

    KEYWORDS Online Courses, Longitudinal Experiment, Faculty Workload, Teaching Online Courses


    Personal E-mails Can Overwhelm

    "Please Learn From My Mistakes," by David G. Brown, Syllabus, August 2002 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6592 

    I have come to the sad realization that many of the innovations designed to keep my course fresh have failed. My memories of failures are so poignant that it may be constructive to share them here. They can serve as warnings to others.

    Unstructured chat room discussions don’t work. Chats lack depth. Someone new is always interrupting the online conversation with his or her own topic just when the discussion is getting interesting.

    Ungraded assignments are usually ignored. I used to ask two students to search the Web for two or three sites that provided alternative ways to learn the “topic of the day.” They shared information on these sites in annotated bibliographies. An end-of-the-course evaluation, however, revealed that their classmates never went to these sites.

    My current practice is to require each student to e-mail me with an evaluative comment regarding the sites. They know that their comments will factor into the participation portion of their course grades. A recent end-of-the-course evaluation now shows that the students regard the alternate Web sites as important and useful components of the course.

    Personal e-mails can overwhelm. One semester, I asked all of my students to send me an e-mail answer to an assigned question each time we reached the end of a textbook chapter. The responsibility for reading and evaluating all those submissions just about ruined my family life. Now I have Student A e-mail a proposed answer to Students B and C. Students A, B, and C must settle on a single answer. They teach one another, and I have only one-third as much grading to do.

    Students need to know in advance what their responsibilities are if the computer network goes down on the eve of an important deadline. Networks do go down. Students will panic, unless there are instructions in the syllabus that anticipate forgiveness or outline their alternatives.

    Another semester, several weeks before the final, I accidentally deleted all my students’ grades from the electronic grade book. Fortunately, the syllabus stressed that each student is expected to keep a copy of every assignment submitted and also of every grade-related message sent to him or her. With help from the class and substantial effort, I was able to reconstruct the gradebook. Now I print out a backup copy of grades about every two weeks.

    I’ve come to realize that students accessing materials from course Web sites using a dial-up modem from a shared apartment off campus cannot, or will not, wait for long downloads. I had the bright—and well-received—idea of personalizing the list of course assignments. For each of our 34 assignment days I added thumbnail photos of the students responsible for presenting their special reports. Although student reaction to this personalization was quite positive, I noticed that they were consulting the list of assignments less frequently. A focus group session revealed that the list was now taking longer than a minute to open. Consulting the list was an increased burden.

    My students bring their laptops to class everyday. Even so, I’ve learned that it’s wise to exchange e-mail messages before class when anything out of the ordinary is to occur. If, for example, my plan for the day requires that every student have their computer, I send the class an e-mail message.

    I suspect that others have made mistakes from which we can all learn. If you have a brief story you’d like me to share in a future column, please e-mail me. Let me know if it’s OK to mention your name or if you’d prefer to remain anonymous.


    Online Faculty Workloads

    The CIT Infobits May 2002 article "Online Teaching and the 24-Hour Professor" ( http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitmay02.html#1 ) described how the Internet is changing professors' workdays and workloads. John Messing, Director of the Research Centre for Innovation in Telelearning Environments at Charles Sturt University, continues this topic in "Can Academics Afford to Use E-mail?" (E-JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 5, no. 2, August 2002). Messing reports on a study that began as "an attempt to quantify what many educators have suspected . . . that the workload associated with the use of online tools is considerably higher than with conventional technologies. In the process of trying to make sense of the data, it became clear that there are a number of issues such as increased expectations on the part of students and the disproportionate load that administrative use of e-mail places on academics that are rarely, if ever, considered as part of the debate.

    he study analyzed the author's administrative and course-related email messages from 1991-2001. Some of his observations:

    Regarding course-related email: "While the number of students in [his Graduate Diploma of Applied Science] course has doubled, the volume of communication has increased 11 fold. . . ."

    Regarding administrative email: "It might take a secretary 10 to 15 minutes to duplicate and distribute meeting papers to 20 people [via email]. If it takes each recipient just 5 minutes to read, extract, print and collect the meeting papers, that represents a total of 100 minutes. The secretary saves 10 minutes but the recipients collectively lose 100 minutes."

    He concludes, "Just how much extra time an individual is prepared to sacrifice in order to also receive the benefits of the use of such tools is debatable. From a personal perspective, the limit has been reached. With well over 3000 e-mails to contend with in one semester, the system has become a scourge rather than a blessing."

    The article is available online at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol6No_1/messing_frame.html  (HTML format) and http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol6No_1/Messing%20-%20Final.pdf (PDF format).

    e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is published by the Distance Education Centre, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland 4350, Australia; Web: http://www.usq.edu.au/dec/  Current and back issues of e-JIST are available at no cost at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/ 


    Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout

    Barbara Brown wrote the following:

    There are many myths and tacit assumptions about computer-mediated learning that can be explored in the Fielding context. Much has been written about technological efficiency and the potential of the Internet as an educational medium to save time and money or increase productivity. The author’s experience inspires a healthy skepticism in this regard. Having taught students in conventional classrooms for two decades, I experienced the computer-mediated mode of instruction as more time-consuming, at least initially, both from the standpoint of up-front course design and later, painstaking, labor intensive hours online - designing messages for the classroom forum, reading and downloading from the screen, posting new material, providing feedback, checking community bulletin boards, e-mailing student comments and grade reports, etc. In fact, there were many times when I felt torn between my real life and my virtual life on-screen, in an identity challenging  [Turkle, Sherry (1995), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.] sort of way, simply because there did not seem to exist enough hours in the day to do justice to both. This was the case even in an "asynchronous" environment where I had the flexibility to conduct electronic office hours in my bathrobe over morning coffee or post feedback in the dead of night.

    Moreover, absent face-to-face contact and ordinary non-verbal clues, even very mature students on the Internet demand more frequent interaction and reassurance in dialogue with their professors, an observation confirmed in student course evaluations. Students demand more feedback; and the more feedback they receive, the more interaction they want. There are at least two possible interpretations of this phenomenon: One is that it reflects the way students compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction. Or, it may be that this medium disinhibits student communication, thereby stimulating the message exchange process. As the intellectual excitement of these conversations grows, so does the amount of interactivity in the virtual community.[See Rafaeli, Sheizaf and Fay Sudweeks (1998), "Interactivity in the Nets," in Network & Net Play: Virtual Groups on the Internet,
    Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press/The MIT Press]

    I estimate this mode of instruction requires roughly 40% to 50% more work on the teacher’s part in comparison with conventional classroom delivery. For example, where I might put approximately 36 hours of work per week routinely into a regular course load with a total of 120 students in four traditional class sections at a large public university, online instruction at Fielding required 50 hours or more per week - with only 24 students in just three sections of my digital classes. It also takes longer for faculty members and administrators to reach consensus in electronic group meetings.

    B.M. Brown
    "Digital Classrooms:  Some Myths About Developing New Educational Programs Using the Internet,"
    T.H.E. Journal, December 98, p. 57
    The online version is at
    http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/current/feat04.html

    Also see Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change


    Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education

    Concerns About High Attrition Rates in Distance Education

    From Infobits on December 21, 2001

    HOW TO KEEP E-LEARNERS FROM E-SCAPING

    Institutions that offer e-learning courses are reporting high levels of student attrition and a wide gap between student enrollments and completions. The authors of "How to Keep E-Learners from E-scaping" (by Jim Moshinskie and the eLITE Think Tank, JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTION DEVELOPMENT, vol. 14, no. 1, Summer 2001, pp. 8-11) present some techniques for getting, motivating, and keeping online students. Although the paper focuses primarily on online corporate trainers, the ideas are transferable to any online learning environment.

    Some of the techniques outlined in the paper are common to all instruction delivery methods; some are specific to online teaching and learning. Here are a few of the authors' strategies:

    Before the Online Course "What's in it for me?" Before the course begins, course providers must help learners see the benefit of taking the course and taking it online. Instructors must know their learners' goals, work environments, and connection capabilities. If the course is for in-service professional development, the students' employers need to get involved in providing peer coachers and by creating opportunities for practice and feedback.

    During the Online Course Online learning can be an isolating experience for students. During the online course, instructors need to pay attention to feedback and human interaction to make up for the lack of in-person contact. Strategies include giving legitimate feedback that focuses on an individual's progress and specifically addresses individual performance. "Chat rooms, E-mail, electronic office hours, audio streaming, and online mentoring" all can provide the "human touch" between instructor and student and among fellow students.

    After the Online Course Recognizing that learning is a process, not an event, instructors can support the student who completes the course by offering follow-up communication, virtual mentoring, and help in applying the learning in the student's workplace.

    Note: the article is not available on the Web. Check with your college or university library to obtain copies.

    Journal of Interactive Instruction Development [ISSN 1040-0370] is published quarterly by the Learning Technology Institute, 50 Culpeper Street, Warrenton, VA 20186 USA; tel: 540-347-0055; fax: 540-439-3169; email: info@lti.org ; Web: http://www.lti.org/ 


    Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus

    In 1997, I listened to an address by Robert S. Sullivan, Directory of the IC2 Institute, University of Texas at Austin. He was extremely positive about opportunities for ALN networking and bridging of curriculum gaps with web courses that in many instances will become much higher in quality than a single university will normally be able to develop only for its own campus. At the end of his address, in response to a question from the audience, he did raise two very serious concerns (that I paraphrased below from my videotape of his remarks):

    Problem 1: One day a "university" may only be left with onsite faculty and programs that distributed education vendors are not willing to "pay for." There is an important debate going on that focuses on the issue of whether the "university concept" might be undermined.

    Problem 2: Students, especially undergraduate students, cannot have a complete learning experience without being physically present on a campus. The interpersonal and social dynamics of a campus may be put at risk with distributed learning.

    Robert S. Sullivan, August 20, 1997 Plenary Session
    Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association

    Bob Jensen's Other Documents

    Starting Page

    Education

    Learning

    Table of Contents

    Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian

    One of my students, Elizabeth Eudy, coined the phrase "irrevocably Orwellian."  At http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/eeudy/aln.htm she writes the following:

    Although it is too far fetched to say that we will turn into cold, heartless robots as a result of ALN and that our society has become irrevocably Orwellian, the lack of face-to-face social interaction could potentially do more harm than good in our education. Will graduates of ALN degree programs be left wondering how they will cope in an actual job interview? Students need social interaction as vital component of maturation and professional development. The most successful use of ALN thus presents itself as a combination of online courses and real classroom interaction. The classes do not necessarily have to meet twice or three times a week as most do now, but rather as needed by the demands of students or by the judgment of the professor. In any case, as the market for ALN courses expands (as it is doing) traditional universities will have to upgrade their curriculum to ALN in order to remain competitive.

    At a later point she writes the following:

    ALN courses can be dehumanized to such an extent that students will no longer feel as if they belong to a learning community. Community is a key concept for the learning process, and enables students to gain support from each other. This concept is taken to the limit in traditional universities where students belong to a university community--they live in the dorms, they eat together at the cafeteria, they join various student organizatons, and most importantly, they learn together. The professors and students ideally belong to the same community of learning; although in some universities students feel that professors are too inaccessible. Many proponents of ALN still agree that the human component of education and university life is necessary. Degerhan Usleul, the chief operating officer of Interactive Learning International Corporation (ILINC), is quoted as saying: The importance of an instructor's physical presence, complete with body language, as well as the rapport one builds with classmates, are not easily replaced. Jo Ann Davy continues in the article, writing that Usluel recommends holding a physical event to help relationships, before connecting online.
    Davy, Jo Ann. "Education and Training Alternatives." Managing Office Technology: Cleveland. April 1998.

    Another student named Katie Lawrence lists drawbacks of ALN in a term paper as follows:

    • There are more dropouts than in actual on-campus courses
    • Loss of commuinty/campus atmosphere
    • There are no current standards for program assessment, so it is difficult for students to know which courses will be worth the money they are spending
    • Often, the high fees charged for some ALN courses go to fund actual campus courses rather than the virtual courses being offered.
    • Due to the large number of students taking ALN courses and their tendency to contact professors frequently, more professors or teaching assistants are required to adequately teach a cyber course.
    • "Learning ceases to be about analysis, discussion, and examination, and becomes a product to be bought and sold, to be packaged, advertised, and marketed." (taken from Dangers of Global Education)
    • Students loose out by not actually reading published books.
    • Because the courses are developed in the Western world, Western views are spread to all parts of the globe, which may inhibit the cultural growth of other societies, thus creating a unified, undiverse world. Computer access and availability and modem speed are problems for ALN courses given on college campuses - students are often times unable to log on due to slow modems or busy network lines.

    Barbara Brown discusses the myth of asynchronous learning impersonality:

    Another myth one frequently encounters about computer-mediated instruction is that of impersonality. People assume that in the absence of face-to-face interaction, relations automatically become more distant and impersonal. Traditional distance learning formats are said to be plagued with this problem.[9] Not so, in my experience with the interactive digital classroom. There is a type of intimacy achievable between teachers and students in this medium that is quite extraordinary, reminiscent of what Sproull and Keisler refer to as "second-level" social effects of the technology. I believe this intimacy results from a sense of shared control and esponsibility, commitment to collaboration and dialogue, and increased willingness to take risks in communications with others online. The verbal and writing-intensive nature of the text-based forum network also forces one to make one’s thoughts very explicit whenever possible; there is little room for subtlety. As one administrator put it: "In an online environment, words matter.... Words are everything."

    Also, it takes longer for groups to reach consensus in brain-storming and problem-solving situations online.[10] People’s feelings can be hurt easily, so more time and effort are put into explaining meanings and supplying detailed contextual background to enhance mutual understanding. Thus, writers get to know one another intimately over time while computer-mediated conversations - both formal and informal - unfold. Neither e-mail nor chat, the forum classroom environment at Fielding calls for and inspires thoughtful, composed (after reading and reflection) asynchronous networked interactions, without sacrificing human warmth.

    At this stage in the evolution of Internet educational technology, we are all learners. There is also a sense that we are innovators and early adopters who "crossed over" early in the technology transfer and diffusion process.[11] In the Fielding culture, this pioneer experience has come to be known as riding the waves, or embracing the "turbulence" of rough seas - a metaphor for global and organizational unrest as well. The attention given to group process online and the thoughtful nature of master’s-level conversations establish an intimacy within the group, belying the myth of impersonality.

    B.M. Brown
    "Digital Classrooms:  Some Myths About Developing New Educational Programs Using the Internet,"
    T.H.E. Journal, December 98, pp. 57-58
    The online version is at
    http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/current/feat04.html

    "The Myths Of Growing Up Online," by Henry Jenkins, MIT's Technology Review, September 3, 2004 ---  http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/09/wo_jenkins090304.asp?trk=nl 
    Alarmist and polarized rhetoric is distorting important new findings about the risks and benefits of children's use of the Internet.

    For almost a decade now, the debate about youth and new media technologies has been polarized around two conflicting myths—let's call them the Myth of the Columbine Generation and the Myth of the Digital Generation. The first is driven by fear, the other hope, but both distort the reality kids and parents must negotiate in the online world, and both exaggerate the centrality of digital media in children's lives.

    Parents, educators, and policymakers can get whiplash trying to respond to the competing pull of these two myths. One pulls us toward wiring every classroom in the country so that kids may enjoy the benefits of digital access, the other mandates filtering programs in school and library computers since kids can't be trusted once they log on.

    In a classic version of the Columbine Generation argument, Eugene Provenzo Jr., a professor of education at the University of Chicago, argues that recent school shootings are the "result" of a "social experiment" in giving children unfettered access to pornography and violence. By contrast, journalist Jon Katz, in his books Virtuous Reality and Geeks, offers a vivid version of the Digital Generation perspective, celebrating the ways that the online world has liberated children from the constraints of their own neighborhoods and the limitations of their narrow-minded parents.

    Anyone who has read my column over the past few years knows I fall much closer to Katz than Provenzo. But if we are being honest, the truth lies somewhere in the huge space in between those two overstatements. When I went into schools around the country following the Columbine shootings, it was clear that teachers, parents, and students had heard plenty about the dangers of going online and little about the benefits. The case that growing up online was going to produce a more socially connected, better informed, and more creative generation was a perspective that was needed to counterbalance the hysteria being generated by the most sensationalistic news stories. I remember one student exclaiming, "Why haven't we be told this before?"

    As time has passed, I have felt a greater need to pull back from such either-or arguments, yet to do so seems like unilateral disarmament as long as the culture warriors are ready to pounce on any concession. I have become increasingly concerned by the ways that television discussions, newspaper articles, and government hearings are structured around the assumption that this debate can be reduced to two opposing sides, usually pushed to their extremes—making it impossible for more moderate perspectives to be heard.

    A case in point: a conference held this summer at the University of London brought together educators, activists, and scholars from more than 40 different countries to examine the research on the impact of new media on children's mental and social development, and on education, family, and community life. David Buckingham, one of the event's organizers, opened the sessions by challenging us to move beyond the easy answers and to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions our research was uncovering—good advice that was hard to follow.

    A highlight of the conference was London School of Economics professor Sonia Livingstone's announcement of the preliminary findings of a major research initiative called UK Children Go Online. This project involved both quantitative and qualitative studies on the place of new media in the lives of some 1,500 British children (ages 9 to 19) and their parents. The study's goal was to provide data that policymakers and parents could draw on to make decisions about the benefits and risks of expanding youth access to new media. Remember that phrase—benefitsandrisks.

    According to the study, children were neither as powerful nor as powerless as the two competing myths might suggest. As the Myth of the Digital Generation suggests, children and youth were using the Internet effectively as a resource for doing homework, connecting with friends, and seeking out news and entertainment. At the same time, as the Myth of the Columbine Generation might imply, the adults in these kids' lives tended to underestimate the problems their children encountered online, including the percentage who had unwanted access to pornography, had received harassing messages, or had given out personal information.

    Livingstone’s report arrives at a pivotal moment: after decades of state-supported broadcasting, the British government is deregulating media content and opening the airwaves to greater commercial development. The number of media channels in British homes is expanding—and parents are being asked to play gatekeepers determining what media entered their home without being given the training or resources needed to do that job properly.

    Continued in the article

     

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    Concerns About Making Education and Training Too Easy

    It has been demonstrated in various ways in cognitive and learning science that making a training environment easier may be dysfunctional in the sense that it improves short term memory at the expense of long-term memory and performance.   Complex information needs to be multiply encoded in semantic and/or situational associations.  Computer-aided training may either enhance or detract from long-term performance.

    For example, I am inclined to make it easier for students to find answers or get leads in each course topic.  I view it as taking the Mickey Mouse drudgeries of finding things that consume time. I hope to provide my students with more time to study what they find and less time trying to find what they study.   To do so I provide as much literature as possible on CD-ROMs (many of which I record myself), my LAN hard drive, and the University's web server.  However, it is possible that the Mickey Mouse activities contribute significantly to long-term memory.  To the extent that I am making discovery less difficult and more predictable, I might in fact be improving students' short term performance at the expense of long-term memory and cognition.

    Robert Bjork states:

    It has now been demonstrated in a variety of ways, and with a variety of motor, verbal, and problem-solving tasks, that introducing variation and/or unpredictability in the training environment causes difficulty for the learner but enhances long-term performance --- particularly the ability to transfer training to novel but related task environments.

    Robert A. Bjork
    "Memory and Metamemory considerations in the Training of Human Beings,"
    Metacognition:  Knowing about Knowing
    Edited by Janet Metcalfe and Arthru P. Shimaura
    The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    ISBN:   0262132982, 1994, Page 189

    Click Here to View Working Paper 265 on Metacognition
    Concerns in Designs and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training:
    Are We Misleading Ourselves About Measures of Success?

    Other references are provided later on in this document under the section entitled "Fostering Deeper Learning:   Risks of Teaching More Than You Know."

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    Concerns About Making Education and Training Too Hard

    All courses at Trinity University are three-credit courses.  Virtually all of my students are full-time students who are taking at least five courses each semester.  On the faculty evaluation forms one of the questions reads:  "How would you rate the workload of this course?"   Another question reads:  "How difficult did you find this course?"   As I added more ALN modules in place of lectures, answers to these questions virtually all moved to "Very Heavy" and "Very Difficult."  The following quotation is representative of class concerns:

    The work load was very heavy and put a strain on my other classes.  I liked the material, but weekly quizzes and examinations plus 50-90 pages of reading per class along with other classes is too much.

    Actually I usually do not assign pages to read, but in the process of studying assigned topics, my graduate students dig out a huge amount of material that they themselves feel they must study.  In research projects constituting over 50% of the course grade, they must seek out, sift, digest, and nurture a vast amount of learning material.   Often students must spend a great deal of time building foundations to even study the material.  For example, projects entailing both design and implementation of relational databases entail learning how to make complicated software work.  Projects entailing how to account for financial instruments derivatives entail learning what those financing contracts are and how they are used in hedging strategies.

    The bottom line is that it is not be reasonable for all five graduate courses each semester to take as much time as my courses.   Students would become frustrated, angered, and seek to somehow short circuit their effort if there was not enough time each week to cover five similar ALN courses.   Their traditional lecture courses are often neat and tidy with problems assigned from the back of the textbook and sufficient material in the textbook or lectures to master the assigned materials.  Students all study the same materials and can help each other in many lecture courses.  In my asynchronous modules, students must do a lot more digging on their own and generally come away frustrated by the "loose ends" that they neither have the time nor skills to master nor the skills to master.   For example, in the process of studying risk exposures of derivatives contracts they encounter mathematically complex Value at Risk time series models.   A few of the mathematically inclined students who elect to delve into such models learn more about Value at Risk  than students who go down other avenues on their projects.  Hence, students are not all studying the same materials, and it becomes more difficult to lean on each other for help crossing troubled waters.  In many instances their instructor, me, is not sufficiently up on the particulars of each topic to bail them out.  For more on this, skip to the section entitled Fostering Deeper Learning:   Risks of Teaching More Than You Know.

    I like to force students to struggle on their own, because I think this prepares them for life after graduation.  However, there is a fine line in ALN between making ALN too easy versus making ALN too hard. I have not yet achieved the correct balance.  One example where asynchronous learning appears to achieve a good balance is the Business Activity Model (BAM) in Intermediate Accounting at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.  A portion of one of my recent email messages is quoted below:

    The mere fact that many ALN courses are shown to improve grades and/or the rate at which learning takes place does not imply that long-term performance has been enhanced. It is not clear whether better performance arises from a confounding of added sweat with ALNs. What does intrigue me, however, is how an entire year of Intermediate Accounting (typically very tough courses requiring memorization of lots of accounting rules and procedures) is now being taught at the University of Virginia totally without lectures by the two professors (Croll and Catanach) who, up until 1996, lectured (quite brilliantly) in virtually every class. Their anecdotal claims for the "BAM" non-lecture approach are that students are doing markedly better on in course examinations, the CPA examination, and on the job (which they can monitor since all students have internships with firms). I now feature a multimedia workshop module of the University of Virginia BAM ALN program. The average SAT of students in these UVA classes is over 1300. It is not clear that BAM will work so well on lesser mortals.

    One way to judge good ALN workload balance is to keep track of teaching evaluations.  Students generally voice complaints when workloads are unreasonable (they will not always complain when a course is too easy).   The BAM asynchronous courses at the University of Virginia have heavy workloads, but Professors Croll and Catanach manage to pull these courses off with some of the highest instructor evaluations in the McIntire School of Commerce.

    For more detailed information on the BAM pedagogy, I recommend the following two links:

     

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    Concerns About Corporate Influences on Traditional Missions

    There are two types of partnerings between business firms and universities.  The first type is where the university's faculty deliver a specialized degree program to employees of a business firm.  The program is often specialized calendar, courses, and mode of delivery.  For example, the PriceWaterhouse Coopers MBA program at the University of Georgia has a customized calendar, customized courses, and all courses are delivered asynchronously on the web.  

    Another type of partnering is where the business firms deliver courses for the university degree programs.  An example of this type of partnering is the AT&T partnering with Western Governors University that was announced in two magazines that I track regularly.   For example, see

    "AT&T Learning Network Hosts WGU Content," T.H.E. Journal, February 1999, 14-16.

    One of my undergraduate students, Paul Meekey, notes the rise of partnerships between universities and corporations where the universities participate in educating and training employees of companies.  Paul's paper can be found at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/pmeekey/frame2.htm wherein he states the following:

    Employers are always trying to find ways to cut costs and now with the introduction of ALN,
    they should be able to do so. Two companies that have enabled this technology are helping to reduce costs in their post graduate business training programs. CIGNA Corporation, an
    insurance company located in Philadelphia has formed a partnership with Drexell University, also in Philadelphia to create a master's program for information systems. They came up with a three year program that would train their students online. The only time they actually met offline was for a two day orientation at the Drexell campus and after that  it was totally online. After the success of the program, Metlife, another insurance company decided to form a similar partnership with Drexel University. One advantage to this program that both company enjoyed was that both companies didn't have to give up their employees to go back to a university campus for the 2 yr. graduate program.

    The employees could remain working for the company, continue working on their projects and fulfill their educational requirements after work, before work, on their days off, or on the weekends. Richard H. Lytle, dean of Drexel's College of Information and Technology, says that the he is really excited that both companies are not only using his program but applying it to software application within their own applications of everyday work. The program helps the companies to eliminate some costs and uncertainties of trying to hire full-qualified employees from major universities and also the time lost when employees have to go to these classes during normal working hours. The companies are also using what they have learned through Drexel University to eventually have all training in the company done through ALN, in all departments. New York University's School of Continuing Education also participates in online learning, and just recently formed a partnership with IBM to offer information systems courses for their professionals, on a global scale. We are sure to see a huge increase in ALN used in the business environment. Companies can keep their employees working hard and earning the profits while training them to make them more efficient at their job. Although still young, ALN is helping companies such as Citicorp, NYNEX Corp., and Sandoz to become more cost efficient in training their employees.

    The above trends are a mixed blessing.   Clearly, expansion into corporate education and training expands the market alternatives for colleges facing a shrinking and increasingly competitive environment for traditional students and traditional continuing education students.  The flip side of the coin is that the universities may sacrifice some of their independence in setting curricula and course contents since corporations paying for the education and training will dictate such matters to a large degree.

    For more discussion and references about corporate universities and partnerships between corporations and traditional universities, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#CorporatePartnerships and http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#ErnstandYoung .

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    Concerns About Library Services

    The Internet has become the world's library.   However, content pales in comparison with scholarly works found in libraries that contain vast resources that either are not or cannot be digitized.  Making centuries of literature available on networks is cost prohibitive to digitize for and deliver from web servers.  Copyright restrictions deliberately protect vast bodies of new and older literature from being digitized. 

    When asynchronous courses are delivered off campus, library access becomes a major problem that is frequently ignored in the hype of ALN promotion.  One of my students, Katie Greene, addresses this problem at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/kgreene/distanceno.htm

    In the above document, Katie provides links and references to literature on looming issues and "new roles for librarians."  She states:


    Librarians must change their role if they want to keep up with the changes in education. They will need to change in three different ways. The first way would be that "librarians will take on a more proactive role in the classroom and will work more collaboratively with the teaching faculty to develop assignments that are feasible in the off-campus/ distance environment." (Lebowitz) Secondly, distance education will bring about "greater collaboration among institutions". (Lebowitz) Because their are no constraints on location, libraries from all over can work together to create collections of works and pool their resources. A good example of this cooperation, is Western Governors University, which is a university made by the governors of the western states. Along with this cooperation, though, "the supplying of library services will become highly competitive, and libraries may choose to outsource the provision of services to other institutions" (Cavanagh). Thirdly, the librarian's role "will shift to one of facilitator/instructor, rather than provider of information." (Slade) Librarians will now be communicating with students in remote locations via e-mail, video conferencing, chat lines, or audio conferencing. One example of this is at University of Maryland University College where students can "chat" with librarians online and ask any questions they might have. Librarians will have to be proactive and learn about the new technologies and make the materials available to students all over the world.

    Many have already used these devices and made the information available. Old ways included loan programs and mailing books and other materials. Now librarians use information technology to develop online, virtual libraries. One criticism is that distant students do not have access to as much information, but librarians are now able to put entire works, full texts of books, journals, references, newspapers, as well as web searches and internet access on the internet.

    Some Examples include:

    VIVA the virtual library of Virginia - electronic collections of books, journals, newspapers , as well as internet searches.

    Online Literature Library

    Internet Public Library- references, magazines, newspapers, online texts.

    Carrie-Full-Text Electronic Library.

    Katie Greene raises other concerns and discusses the challenges of giving distance learners the same access to libraries as the access available to resident students.  One wonders how top programs such as the Duke University Global Executive MBA program and the Ohio University Online MBA Without Boundaries program  manage to provide library resources to students.

    Judy Luther provides a paper entitled "Distance Learning and the Digital Library:  What Happens When the Virtual Student Needs to Use the Virtual Library in a Virtual University," Educom Review, July/August 1998, 23-26.  Although no virtual library is going to contain the text of all books and journals in a major academic library due to copyright and impracticalities of digitizing trillions of pages of text and graphics, there are some collaborative efforts being made by various universities to aid students taking virtual courses off campus.   Judy Luther's article is available at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/edreview.html.

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    Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics, and Student Ethics

    The University of Phoenix, a network of colleges run by the Apollo Group, is drawing attention from regulators as well as Wall Street investors. 

    "Can For-Profit Schools Pass an Ethics Test?" by Eryn Brown, The New York Times, December 12, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/business/yourmoney/12school.html?oref=login 

    Over the last few years, the Apollo Group has watched its profile rise - mostly for the right reasons. It has expanded its University of Phoenix to 158 campuses, providing professional and technical degrees to working adults from Salem, Ore., to Guaynabo, P.R. Enrollment has doubled, to 255,600 students, in just the last four years. The market capitalization of the company, which earns a profit, has surged 374 percent over the same period.

    But these days, the Apollo Group, based in Phoenix, may be gaining notice of a less desirable kind. In September, it agreed to pay the federal Department of Education $9.8 million to settle charges that its recruiting practices violated Title IV of the Higher Education Act, which regulates how almost $70 billion of federal grants, loans and work-study programs are distributed to students at colleges and universities each year.

    A Department of Education report asserted that the school based its recruiters' pay on the numbers of students they brought in, and punished underperforming recruiters by isolating them in glass-walled rooms and threatening to fire them if they failed to meet management goals. Enrollment-based incentives and punishments are sometimes illegal under federal law.

    Terri Bishop, a spokeswoman for Apollo, denied any wrongdoing by the company. "We were not required to change our compensation practices, because we were not found guilty of the allegations," she said.

    Recently, a number of for-profit colleges have faced inquiries, lawsuits and other actions calling into question the way they pursue federal funds.

    In the last year, the Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. The company, which said it considered the suits groundless, acknowledged that it was under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It declined to say what the federal officials were investigating. The Justice Department and S.E.C. declined to discuss this or any other active investigation.

    In February, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems; the company has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

    A routine government audit in December 2003 of student aid programs at Bryman College in San Jose, Calif., part of Corinthian Colleges, found that it was too slow to return federal aid to the government after students withdrew from school, and it incorrectly calculated how much it owed the government and did not keep proper records, said a department spokeswoman, Jane Glickman.

    After that, the Department of Education required Corinthian, which is based in Santa Ana, Calif., to give its own money to students and then seek reimbursement from the government. The requirement was lifted on Sept. 22, but the Corinthian Web site says the S.E.C. opened an investigation on Sept. 16 into its "projections, financial performance and communications with securities analysts and investors during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2004."

    Such scrutiny may portend tough times for what has been a high-flying, profitable industry. According to Department of Education statistics, for-profit post-secondary schools, including those that grant degrees and those that do not, enrolled 765,701 students in the fall of 2001, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. That is almost 30 percent more than the 589,600 they enrolled in 1996.

    The schools say they offer practical career training in a time when job stability has vanished for many people. The Career College Association, an industry trade group in Washington, reports that 70 percent of the students at for-profit colleges are the first in their families to go to college. David Longanecker, a Department of Education official in the Clinton administration who is now the executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a research group in Boulder, Colo., said for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix "are emerging as an important part of the educational system."

    For-profit education companies also had the best run of any group on Wall Street from 2000 to 2003, said Howard Block, an analyst at Banc of America Securities in San Francisco, which does not have a financial interest in Apollo, Career Education, Corinthian Colleges, or ITT Educational Services, though the bank has advised some of those companies. Over all, he noted, publicly traded postsecondary-education stocks rose 460 percent over that period, compared with a 24 percent loss for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.


    One of my students, Sophia Mena, at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/smena/learning.htm wrote the following:

    The first thing that came to mind when I first started researching the Virtual Classroom is how professors monitor if students are doing their own work. In the Traditional Classroom a professor can easily detect if a person is cheating on their test, but how can they monitor that if someone is taking a test by way of a computer?   It seems very easy for someone to cheat in an asynchronous learning environment. To find out more about computer ethics you can visit:

    Computer Ethics - Cyberethics:
    http://www.siu.edu/departments/coba/mgmt/iswnet/isethics/index.htm

    IEEE Code of Ethics: http://www.ieee.org/committee/ethics

    In the 1900s it was common for students to take tests in the presence of the village vicar who then certified that all conditions placed upon taking an examination were followed.  Some conditions are easily met with existing technologies such as timing the examination and webcams and microphones that allow the examiners to view and hear the student from most any distance around the world.   Newer technologies such as retinal scanners are emerging to verify that the student taking the examination is truly the student who is authorized to take the examination. 

    Nevertheless, there are enormous problems with ethics and academic standards in ALN.  For example, monitoring students on chat lines becomes expensive and intrusive.  Most ALN courses assume that the email messages and chat line messages from a student are genuine without monitoring those messages with the same scrutiny that is given to course examinations.

    In some ways investigating suspected plagiarism is easier on the web.   Unhappily, I have discovered several instances where my students lifted parts of their work (in two cases the entire paper) from sources that were not cited.  Finding these instances of plagiarism was much easier in their web documents due to the ability to search for suspected phrases in web search engines. 

    Plagiarism has always been and will always be a problem in education and research.  The problem is exacerbated by computing technologies due to the ease of selecting all or part of a document and clicking on (Edit, Copy) and (Edit, Paste).  Culprits do not even have to type the text.  If they cleverly use the technologies, phrases can be easily modified so it becomes more difficult to discover that the passage was first lifted and then modified so as to escape detection.

    One problem with emerging speech recognition technologies is that spoken words (e.g., in a lecture or a session at a conference) can be recorded and digitized automatically such that text that has never appeared in print is created by speech recognition software.  How easy it becomes to beat the speaker in putting that speaker's presentation into printed text. Faculty clinging to traditional lectures and classroom case discussions may not even be aware that whatever went on in their classrooms is now available at hidden sites on the web at either a public or a private web site.  Those infamous "fraternity files" have never been so rich as they will become with speech recognition technologies.

     

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    Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites

    An emerging area of interest to me is the rate at which marginal and fraudulent asynchronous courses and programs are emerging. For example, I consider it a shame when someone other than a major university uses a domain name of that university. One of my students, Elizabeth Eudy, wrote the following at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/eeudy/aln.htm

    I may be mistaken in the specific case, but the person in Reykjavik, Iceland who owns the domain name CarnegieMellon.com seems well positioned to offer services in a way that just might be confused with services offered by a well known U.S. university. Hundreds of examples exist of domain names that seem purposely designed to be misleading...Two problems stem from this: First, there is no way for the typical user to know whether the actual location of an Internet site is in, say, Pittsburgh or Reykjavik. Second, these sites are not under any single legal jurisdiction. The FBI, for instance, probably has little clout in Reykjavik

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    Concerns About CyberPsychology

    The accelerating pace of networking for education, entertainment, research, therapy, and commerce is having profound psychological impacts on society.   IFOBITS in May 1998 made the following announcement about a new CyberPsychology journal:

     

    CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR is a new, peer-reviewed journal for the mental health community devoted to the "impact of the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society." Articles in its inaugural issue include "The Gender Gap in Internet Use," "Internet Addiction on Campus," "The Relationship Between Depression and Internet Addiction," and "A Review of Virtual Reality as a Psychotherapeutic Tool."

    Cyberpsychology & Behavior [ISSN: 1094-9313] is published quarterly by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2 Madison Avenue, Larchmont, NY 10538; tel:

    914-834-3100; fax: 914-834-3582; email: info@liebertpub.com; Web:

    http://www.liebertpub.com/

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    Concerns in Designs and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training:
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    Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability

    This morning I went to one of our student labs to check to see if one of my new ToolBooks was being transported properly on the Internet.  I discovered that someone had wiped out both the Internet Explorer and the Netscape Communicator web browsers on the first three lab computers that I logged into.  It is terribly frustrating for faculty and students to repeatedly encounter hardware and software failures.  Student frustrations center around not having enough lab computers, wasting time on lab computers that fail, having their own computers crash during the semester, and encountering network crashes or delays due to clogged bandwidth.

    An enormous problem for universities who engage more and more in ALN courses that rely daily upon networking systems is to keep those systems efficient and reliable for students.  Faculty members occasionally miss class due to illness or scheduling conflicts, but faculty miss class much less often than computers crash on most campuses.  In addition, there are disruptions due to necessary maintenance and updating of computer systems.  Few, if any, campuses have budgets to provide backup systems for disruptions of service.

    There are increasing risks of security failures on campus computers.   Geeks hack or crack their way into systems on every college campus.  In most instances they do so without intent to cause great harm.  However, they may also be intent upon bringing down the system or parts thereof.  Equipping divisions (e.g., a College of Business within the university) with their own servers, labs, and computing maintenance centers reduces the risks of university-wide computer system failure, but the cost becomes enormous in terms of hardware and personnel costs.  However, this may also spread technician talent so thin across the campus that the risk of poor performance in some divisions may be increased.

    There are no easy solutions to the problem that ALN learning is absolutely dependent on reliability of computers and networking systems.

     

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    Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes

    Email messages from Roger Debreceny and Andrew Priest

    I do not doubt for a minute that small group, f2f teaching can be highly effective. I sure hope so, because like many of the people on this list, I have devoted many hours of my life to the pursuit of better f2f small group teaching! <g>.

    As regards large group f2f teaching, I am much less sanguine. I lecture to a group of 750 students (!!) in one large (ok, it’s enormous!) lecture theatre. There are clearly some benefits to such large group teaching (mostly sociological) but not many. In most cases, large group lectures are poorly presented, inadequately planned and almost completely lacking in challenges to the students. Large group lectures lead, in my view, to the "I attend, therefore I learn" syndrome. We all know that all the evidence points to the inability of humans to concentrate in such environments for more than a few minutes at a time. Yet we consistently ignore such evidence.

    There are many problems, however, with both small group and large group f2f teaching and learning processes. Key amongst them is the idea that we engender in our students, that they can go to a sage and receive knowledge in some structured fashion. Contrast that with our research processes. OK, we do have research tutorials (e.g. at the AAA Annual Meeting), but they are relatively rare. Research is undertaken by search for, and integration of, knowledge. Research is much, much more like the real work world that our graduates will experience than the f2f classroom.

    Where networked technology can assist us is to change the teaching and learning model from sage/pupil towards research leader/co-researcher.

    We should listen more to the ideas of thinkers such as Schank (see, for example, a short article by Schank in the July issue of Communications of the ACM).

    Now, just as an example of a colleague who has made some interesting advances in using networked technologies to move from pedagogy more towards androgogy here is a write-up on Mark Freeman at University of Technology, Sydney that was recently posted to ATeach-L by Andrew Priest. We can get a flavour of a new learning environment.

    Roger Debreceny

    =============================

    Hi Folks

    Thought this article from the Business Review Weekly http://www.brw.com.au may be of interest.

    Regards Andrew Priest

    Mass lectures, often repeated, are the usual way that university business courses cope with cost pressures and student loads. Students are bored to tears by them. Mark Freeman, a senior lecturer in finance at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and a specialist in teaching methods, thinks he has found a better way: using the Internet. "The groundswell of student interest in Web-based learning is like no other phenomenon I have seen in educational innovation," he says, after tests involving more than 2000 students.

    At 4 am students can have lively interchanges on the site.

    Business students make up 30% of the enrolment at UTS but their courses get only 15% of total UTS funding. Freeman felt an obligation to make learning better for students who are struggling to hold down a job or cope with English, pay fees, mind children and resist fatigue at night. They may travel to university and find there are 30-40 students in a tutorial. Or part-timers might visit reserved sections of the library, only to find that desperate students have torn out the pages of a book or stolen it altogether.

    Freeman began Internet-based teaching in 1996 with 800 students on a basic Internet system. Last year UTS brought in experimentally a special on-line teacher-student pack called TopClass for messages and conferences, involving 1000 students. This year 10,500 students, nearly half the UTS student population of 23,000, are using it. In one class of 100 last month, Freeman found that every student had private Internet access.

    Some academics misuse the medium by merely posting their lectures on the Web, he says. This is no better than telling students that information is in the library and "go get it".

    One of Freeman’s examples of "new learning" is an on-line role-playing exercise this year for post-graduate students of securities markets law. They take the identity of people such as John Howard, Allan Fels, or securities regulators, with their real identities staying secret until the program ends. The program was based on a method used at Macquarie University in a simulation of Middle-Eastern politics.

    In the first week the students describe their roles; then crises are provided, such as a currency slump, bank failure or misleading prospectus for a privatisation. Students must research how their character would react, and type responses to the central on-line site. The "prime minister" can even negotiate privately with the "stock exchange chairman", as occurs in the real world. Freeman is the only observer able to read the messages. Since each student researches a unique situation, cheating is difficult. In normal work, cheating is a serious problem, now that vast amounts of material can be cut and pasted into assignments or lifted from "cheat sites" on the Web.

    In team debates, groups take positions on issues such as corporate law reform, and hone their responses in private conferences before posting them on the Internet. Many students in their professional lives are already feeling the effect of corporate law reform, and have strong opinions. Even at 4am there can be lively interchanges among six students using the site.

    Freeman says: "Students get completely immersed in the role playing. In addition they do not have the hang-ups often suffered by people in face-to-face arguments, such as deferring to those of the opposite sex or those perceived to be higher in status. Shy people are not argued down, rhetorical flourishes can’t be used, and non-English students cope better with the language."

    Later there is a coming-out session at the university where the students show their real identities, often to surprise and applause. The debate is also a permanent and expandable record useful for future students. "The best part is that the students are not learning just what I tell them, but learning to think and make choices based on good information." An individual assignment is to investigate and give an assessment of a domestic and international securities regulator’s Web site, and present the results to a discussion forum.

    Freeman admits to having the usual failures of a pioneer. "Technology in teaching can operate like an unguided missile unless the goals are well specified, such as changing student understanding," he says.

    There is less staff administrative work because the Web is used for announcements, such as where to lodge assignments, errors in a text, changes to deadlines, and guides to marking. Staff have to discourage students from calling by phone and private e-mail, instead of logging on to the site.

    But there is still a huge workload in the Internet-posted queries. Some students at other universities became irate when Freeman failed to respond to their queries. Students expect staff to respond seven days a week, and mark faster. Now, without the Internet, the requests would be totally unmanageable. "I used to get 40 calls on my voice-mail before I even started work. This morning I had none," Freeman says. He predicts that in the coming decade, some universities will fail, especially those that have chased short-term economies at the expense of quality. Students are already exercising their consumer rights and demanding "just-in-time" learning, rather than conforming to university teaching schedules. University teachers failing to get average grades of "highly satisfactory" would be sacked, since students would no longer tolerate mediocrity and would take their "business" elsewhere.

    Freeman predicted six months ago that many universities would become user-pays systems where for $1000, for example, students could use a bare minimum of the facilities, and pay $100 each for a menu of add-ons such as on-line self-study material, videos and discussion groups. Replies within 24 hours would be guaranteed seven days a week, with a ceiling of ten sessions per subject and $100 per chat thereafter. There could be a $500 premium service involving time with experts face-to-face, on-line or in video-conference. "In the US, user-pays universities have already arrived," Freeman says. "It’s no longer a prediction."—

    Andrew Priest, School of Accounting, Edith Cowan University
    Mailto:a.priest@cowan.edu.au Mailto:apriest@imstressed.com
    http://www.bs.ac.cowan.edu.au/acctinfoplus/
    "Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese"- SteveWright

    Bob Jensen's Other Documents

    Starting Page

    Education

    Learning

    Table of Contents

    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

    Probably the major stumbling block to education change is faculty unwillingness to venture into technology and new learning experiments.  Instead of leading the way, faculty in traditional schools and colleges are behind corporate and military/government trainers in adapting to technologies and learning experimentation.

    A funny thing happened to a campus event designed to bring our faculty together to exchange information and demonstrations of technology in the classroom. In the three years since the conference was launched, we have had steadily fewer faculty attending.

    We surveyed our faculty to find out why attendance had declined at our on-campus technology conference (scheduled during a day when classes were not in session). Results indicated that while some faculty and staff did have a disinterest in technology, more often the problem was their frustration with it. Among reasons for why they were not using technology in their work, they cited lack of the following: training, support, space, equipment, and knowledge of what was available and how items could be obtained.

    "Where Are They?": Why Technology Education for Teachers Can Be So Difficult"
    by Claudia Rebaza
    http://www.microsoft.com/education/hed/vision.htm  

    Although the barriers mentioned above by Dr. Rebaza are serious, in my viewpoint they tend to be excuses rather than reasons in many instances.  Far more serious are the lack of credit given to technology innovations in promotion, pay-raise,  publication, and tenure decisions.    In fact, I maintain messages of selected "daring professor" who are willing to take chances in adverse environments.  The web address is http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm

    Some email correspondence from a faculty member at Trinity University  is provided below:

    From: [Name Deleted]
    Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 1998 12:40 PM
    To: rjensen@trinity.edu
    Subject: Web projects

    Dear Bob,

    Thanks for sending along your web assignment and its rationale. I’m interested in doing a book-length project that has web links to my own set of materials and exercises. Or even doing the whole book in this way.

    Question is, does one receive academic credit for producing work on the internet? Have you ever discussed this with the Administration?

    Thanks,

    [Name of the Trinity University Faculty Member Deleted]

    ========================================================================

    Reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi ______

    One problem with web publishing is that if you submit your stuff to a top journal, the editor wants you to hide your research from the world until the journal gets around to publishing your work (which in a recent case took five years "in press" for an accepted Jensen and Sandlin article to finally get published). I recently had another paper accepted for publication. Then I had a long ‘fight" with the editor over whether I can keep a "live" and ever-changing version of the essence of that paper at my web site.

    I have discussed web publishing with administrators is many universities. They have not and cannot take much of an official position without action by the faculty. Matters of promotion and tenure are pretty well decided all along the way (departmental faculty, Chair, Dean, and P&T faculty) with rare administrative reversals of recommendations. Faculty bring individual biases into peer evaluation, and at the moment web publishing is a new thing to most of them. Until the peer evaluation culture is changed, web publishing will not count heavily toward promotion, tenure, or take home pay.

    The main issue is that web publishing is not refereed with the same rigor (as refereeing in leading journals) or, in most cases, is not refereed at all. This is a concern since it is pretty easy to disguise garbage as treasure at a web site. Leading journals will one day offer refereeing services for web publishing and may, in fact, do away with their hard copy editions. Until then what do we do? Most certainly we do not put up a web counter and brag about the number of hits --- Playboy probably gets more hits per day than all professors combined.

    Somewhat of a substitute for hard core refereeing is a record of correspondence that is received from scholars and students who use your web documents. This lacks the anonymity of the refereeing process. Also there are opportunities to cheat (I’ll lavishly praise your work if you will adore mine in a succession of email messages), but most scholars have more integrity than to organize that sort of conspiracy. If you have a file of correspondence from people that your peers know and respect, chances are that your peers will take notice. Include copies of this correspondence in your performance reports. But this process is more anecdotal than the genuine blind refereeing process.

    Until a rigorous web refereeing process is established, those who must evaluate a web publisher must do more work. They must study your web materials and make their own judgments regarding quality and relevance. It is much easier to simply tick off the refereed hits (For when the binary scorer comes to write against your name, he writes only ones or zeros, to him the unread articles are all the same). It is easy to become too cynical about the refereeing process. We have all had frustrations with bad referees, including acceptances of our weaker output and rejections of our best work. At my web site, I have section for my "big ones that got away." See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/#BigOnes Refereeing is a little like democracy --- it ain’t perfect, but until a better system comes along it beats the alternatives over the long haul.

    My trouble, and I suspect that Mike Kearl has the same problem, is that web publishing is addictive. The responses that you get from around the world set "your tail wagging." I have published many papers and several books (a sign of my advanced age), but I have never had the "action" following hard copy publication that I get from web publication. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that more people than you can imagine stumble on your web documents while using a search engine on the web. Not all of them send you nice messages, but a message recently received by me last week from a total stranger is reproduced be low:

    ==================================================================

    Dr. Jensen,
    Wanted to say thanks for maintaining your Technological Glossary page. I
    am currently studying for my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exams. Your page has been a god-send.

    Pacificare,Network Associate II
    Al Janetsky
    Microsoft Certified Professional

    Messages like the above message "keep my tail wagging." I even like the messages that signal items to be corrected --- at least those users found my stuff worth correcting. If you have audio on your computer, you can listen to Mike Kearl discuss what makes his "tail wag." Mike also discusses the issue that you raised in your message to me. The web address for Mike’s audio on this is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm . That particular article is entitled "Daring Professors" and contains audio and email messages from other faculty members who were willing to take some chances with their careers.

    I can offer you a wagging tail and small pay raises if you rely entirely on web publishing as evidence of scholarship. Old hounds like me can opt for more tail wagging, but young pups need more nourishment shoved into the other end. (Actually I still publish hard copy to maintain respectability, but I personally am far more proud of my "living" web research documents than my annual refereed "dead" hits over the past few years).

    Until the evaluation culture is changed in peers who hold you on leash, try to do web publishing alongside your refereed journal publishing. But don’t let the tail wag the dog or you will wind up in the dog house. If your book or journal editor objects to having your working documents published at your web site, remember who your master is at all times. His title is Editor in Chief!

    An interesting paper by William H. Geoghegan at IBM Academic Consulting is entitled "WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY?" discusses some of the issues as to why the faculty are not yet adapting to education technologies. Estimates run as high as 95% of higher education faculty are not using these technologies. Geoghegan analyses social and diffusion barriers in particular. The paper is at http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html

    Bob Jensen
    Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
    Trinity.University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
    Voice: 210-736-7347 Fax: 210-736-8134

    Also see Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

    Bob Jensen's Other Documents

    Starting Page

    Education

    Learning

    Table of Contents

    Other Concerns


    Forwarded on November 23, 2004 by Jagdish Gangolly [JGangolly@UAMAIL.ALBANY.EDU

    REPORT RAISES QUESTIONS OVER EDUCATIONAL BENEFIT OF COMPUTERS

    A recent study of the effects of computer use on teenage students suggests that increased computer use may result in lower academic performance. The authors of the study, Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of the CESifo economic research organization in Munich, looked at data on many thousands of students in 31 countries. Initial results indicated a positive relationship between computers and academic achievement, specifically in math and reading. When the results were adjusted, however, to compensate for the higher levels of wealth and education in homes where computers are more likely to be present, the data showed that the more computers there are in the home, the lower the student's performance. In addition, despite showing higher test scores for increased time spent using computers at home, the study showed that the more time students spent using computers at school, the lower their test scores. According to the report, "the initial positive pattern on computer availability at school simply reflects that schools with better computer availability also feature other positive school characteristics." BBC, 22 November 2004 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4032737.stm>


    "Contrarian finding: Computers are a drag on learning," by Jeffrey MacDonald, The Christian Science Monitor, December 6, 2004 --- http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1206/p11s01-legn.html 

    For all the schools and parents who have together invested billions to give children a learning edge through the latest computer technology, a mammoth new study by German researchers brings some sobering news: Too much exposure to computers might spell trouble for the developing mind. 

    From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them several times per week at school saw their academic performance decline significantly as well.

    "It seems if you overuse computers and trade them for other [types of] teaching, it actually harms the student," says lead researcher Ludger Woessmann in a telephone interview from Munich. "At least we should be cautious in stating that increasing [access to] computers in the home and school will improve students' math and reading performance."

    With the rise of computers in classrooms, has come a glut of conflicting conclusions about the actual value computers bring to timeless tasks of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. For some in education, these results indicate how thoroughly this field of research has come to resemble that of the conventional wisdom about weight loss, which seems to shift with the tide. Yet others see hopeful signs of a maturing debate, where blind faith in the educational benefits of technology is giving way to greater appreciation for an understanding when computers are useful and when they're not.

    "You could argue that's the big issue here: People need guidance in how to use [computers in education]," says Dr. Marcia Linn, professor of education and director of the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley.

    In surveying the gamut of research for his 2003 book "The Flickering Mind" (Random House), journalist Todd Oppenheimer [Editor's note: The original version misstated Oppenheimer's first name.] found most studies have overstated either the benefits or the drawbacks computers pose in education. The most thorough studies have found computers to have little effect either way, he said, although some guiding principles are beginning to emerge.

    Computer technology "is used too much and very unwisely in the younger years, and not wisely enough in the older years," says Oppenheimer. For 15-year-olds, he says, "you'd be foolish not to use the [World Wide] Web" for a research project, but only alongside conventional information-gathering techniques. The big picture goal: help students use high-quality sources.

    Against this backdrop, the German study stands out on account of two features: its unusually broad, international sample and its bid to isolate computers as a performance-shaping factor.

    Mindful that computers are more common among affluent families, whose children often outperform more disadvantaged ones, the University of Munich researchers controlled for such variables as parents' education and working status.

    When those were removed from the equation, having more than one computer at home was no longer associated with top academic performance. In fact, the study says, "The mere availability of computers at home seems to distract students from learning." Computers seem to serve mainly as devices for playing games.

    Still, there were a few exceptions: Academic performance rose among those who routinely engaged in writing e-mail or running educational software.

    To hear new questions raised about the educational value of technology is music to the ears at the Waldorf schools, an association of 350 schools where students don't touch computers until the 11th grade. There the priority lies with training students to think, says Patrice Maynard, leader for outreach and development, because problem-solving acumen and creativity lead to success and a joyful life.

    Yet for educators in Maine, computers represent something far more promising. There they seem to hold the key to the type of skills employers want to see as the state says goodbye to textiles and other antiquated industries. Maine taxpayers are investing $37 million over four years to put laptop computers into the hands of every seventh- and eighth-grader, as well as their 3,000 teachers.

    As the debate continues, consensus holds that more research is needed to know exactly where computers make the most difference in an educational process. "There's this sort of bizarre belief that computers cast a spell over students and teachers and schools," says Christopher Dede, professor of learning technologies at the Harvard School of Education. "Can you imagine what would happen if you had the same in business, asking if computers were interfering with performance? It would be a big joke."


    Full semester credit courses have not tended to sell very well, and they are very costly to produce.  It may well be that short, non-credit courses have a better market opportunity.

    Something Your (Our) College President Should be Thinking About 
    Tuition Revenue from Quality Non-Credit, Short, and Inexpensive Online Courses

    Prestigious=University of Michigan, Inexpensive=$45.

    The material for this course takes approximately 5-10 hours which you can complete at your convenience, a few minutes a day or all at once. A discussion board, moderated by a course instructor, offers learners the opportunity to express ideas, exchange opinions and post voluntary weekly assignments. Students may enroll in this course up to four weeks after the start date, until May 21. All students will have password-protected access to this seminar until June 25.
    Source:  See the message below from Fathom

    The expensive cost drivers in any credit course arise from maintaining academic standards needed to maintain reputation when granting course credits.  Admission standards, intense student-instructor communications, and performance standards must all be implemented.  Quality education for academic credit is very, very expensive.

    But in lifelong learning, it is not always necessary to take the expensive route.

    Delivering a non-credit course such as the one below is in many ways more pure and a heck of a lot more fun.  It's learning for learning's sake and the instructor can focus on what he or she probably likes best --- quality of delivery and preparation of  content!.  

    It's the free market at its best.  Students choose to pay for the content and delivery rather than the grade.  Bad courses don't sell because they offer easier A grades.  Bad courses don't sell because they're required in the curriculum plan.  Bad courses don't sell period if they are not required and/or do not offer any grades.

    What is frustrating for most of us that are teaching credit courses is that most students are more concerned with the grade than with the content.  This cannot be the case in the course described below.  Students are only paying for learning in its purest sense.  Students in the course are not driven by the quest for a grade on a transcript or a curriculum plan that requires three courses out of ten on the menu in each of seven required categories.

    This is also a way for administrators and faculty to think out of the box, to imagine new ways of generating huge amounts of lower cost tuition revenue.  In managerial accounting we call this Cost-Profit-Volume (CPV) analysis where lower cost drives up volume which in turn drives up profits.  I anticipate that prestigious colleges and universities will one day see the CPV light and begin to offer more and more courses like the one described below.  The advantage of prestige in this market will be the expectations by customers that prestigious schools are more apt to have better quality controls and better faculty to draw upon for these innovative short courses.

    May 1, 2002 message from Fathom 
    (Note that the faculty involved are purportedly some of the best specialists in the world:  Sharon Herbert , David S. Potter , Terry Wilfong , Susan E. Alcock)

    We're excited to tell you about a new e-course from the University of Michigan, "Daily Life in the Eastern Roman Empire (100 BCE-100 CE): Trade, Travel, and Transformation." To celebrate the launch of this course, we're offering a special 20% discount if you enroll before May 15. Just enter the coupon code ROMEMP at checkout to claim your discount.

    Students in this nine-week course will learn how great changes in the Roman empire, such as the stirrings of early Christianity, affected the daily lives of subjects in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Taught by a team of four University of Michigan professors of classics, archaeology, and egyptology, the course offers a fascinating look at various characters and occupations during this turbulent era. To learn more or to enroll, go to:

    http://www.fathom.com/course/35702802/romemp 

     

    If you are a college educator, think about CVP analysis if you are unhappy with your present salary level and wish that your college could generate more revenue for faculty salaries.

    May 3 reply from Gary Schneider

    The interesting state of affairs that leads Fathom.com to offer low-priced on-line courses taught by stellar faculty is explored in a New York Times article titled "Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U.":

    http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html 

    --Gary

    Gary P. Schneider, Ph.D, CPA 
    Associate Professor of Accounting and Information Systems 
    University of San Diego School of Business Administration 5998 
    Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492

    I provide an introductory excerpt from that article:

    "Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U., by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, May 2, 2002 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html 

    Go to Fathom.com and you will encounter a veritable trove of online courses about Shakespeare. You can enroll in "Modern Film Adaptations of Shakespeare," offered by the American Film Institute, or "Shakespeare and Management," taught by a member of the Columbia Business School faculty.

    The site is by no means confined to courses on Shakespeare. You can also treat yourself to a seminar called "Bioacoustics: Cetaceans and Seeing Sounds," taught by a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    Or if yours is a more public-policy-minded intellect, you can sign up for "Capital Punishment in the United States," a seminar with experts from Cambridge University Press, Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

    What's more, all are free.

    That part was not always the plan. Fathom, a start-up financed by Columbia, was founded two years ago with the goal of making a profit by offering online courses over the Internet. But after spending more than $25 million on the venture, Columbia has found decidedly little interest among prospective students in paying for the semester-length courses.

    Now Fathom is taking a new approach, one that its chief executive likens to giving away free samples to entice customers.

    Call it the Morning After phenomenon. In the last few years, prestigious universities rushed to start profit-seeking spinoffs, independent divisions that were going to develop online courses. The idea, fueled by the belief that students need not be physically present to receive a high-quality education, went beyond the mere introduction of online tools into traditional classes.

    The notion was that there were prospective students out there, far beyond the university's walls, for whom distance education was the answer. Whether they were 18-year-olds seeking college degrees or 50-year-olds longing to sound smart at cocktail parties, students would flock to the Web by the tens of thousands, paying tuitions comparable to those charged in the bricks-and-mortarboard world — or so the thinking went.

    Continued at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html 


    Virtual public schools have graduated from only a handful a few years ago to more than 30. While most have done well, a few bad apples have prompted states to ask for greater oversight authority.

    "Online Schools Under Scrutiny," by John Gartner, Wired News, May 3, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52207,00.html 

    More than 30 publicly funded virtual charter schools have launched during the past five years, and parents have largely been pleased with the results.

    But the alleged mismanagement of two academies run by for-profit companies is prompting

    Educators say the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) in Ohio and Einstein Academy in Pennsylvania, both of which are run by private companies, have ignored numerous academic guidelines while operating with questionable accounting practices.

    The Ohio Federation of Teachers joined with nine other teaching associations to sue the state's Board of Education, alleging that state officials have violated state law by allowing for-profit companies to control and operate charter schools.

    Federation president Tom Mooney said ECOT is "really being run by Bozo and Clarabell," claiming that management company Altair Learning Management had no background in education or technology. However, Mooney said they were "shrewd enough to smell a really good opportunity."

    A state audit (PDF) of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow's freshman year of 2000-2001 alleged that Altair Learning could use a few math lessons.

    The audit, which was released in April, showed that the company overcharged the state by $1.65 million for teaching hours it could not substantiate, and that $500,000 worth of computer equipment given to students who left the program were not recovered.

    The auditor's office said ECOT's net loss of $3.8 million during the school year "causes substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern."

    ECOT recently agreed to pay back $1.6 million to Ohio's department of education over the next three years. ECOT superintendent Jeffrey P. Forster, who saw 30 percent of his students leave the program during its first year, said that because of cost cutting, the academy is on solid financial footing.

    Forster, who was a high school principal for 35 years, said the online school helps students who would otherwise have difficulty in public schools. "We're not getting the captain of the football team or the prom queen here," he said.

    The federation also cites a recent charter granted directly to Akron "industrialist" David Brennan's White Hat Management company instead of to a nonprofit as required by state law.

    Mooney said that when legislators passed the charter school law, they never envisioned cyber schools and "did not set up appropriate guidelines for oversight."

    Motions for summary judgments in the case, which ask the judge to rule on the validity of the complaint, are due on May 15.

    In neighboring Pennsylvania, several pending lawsuits claim that online charter schools violate the state's constitution.

    Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52207,00.html 

    See also:
    •  Cyber School Flunking First Year
    •  Setting Standards for Web-Ed
    •  Ed-Tech Is Not Tech But Ed
    •  Rotten Links Hamper Learning
    •  E-Learning Is Good; Now What?
    •  It's time to go Back to School

    A Worst-Case MOO
    "Students’ Distress with a Web-based Distance Education Course: An Ethnographic Study of Participants' Experiences"
    http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html 

    Noriko Hara SILS Manning Hall University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599 haran@ils.unc.edu  

    Rob Kling The Center for Social Informatics SLIS Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 kling@indiana.edu  http://www.slis.indiana.edu/kling  (812) 855-9763

    Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kinds of communicative and technical capabilities and work required by students and faculty. There are few systematic analytical studies of students who have experienced new technologies in higher education. This article presents a qualitative case study of a web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a topic that is glossed over in much of the distance education literature written for administrators, instructors and prospective students: students' periodic distressing experiences (such as frustration, anxiety and confusion) in a small graduate-level course due to communication breakdowns and technical difficulties. Our intent is that this study will enhance understanding of the instructional design issues, instructor and student preparation, and communication practices that are needed to improve web-based distance education courses.

    Bob Jensen's Comments
    Th Hara and King study mentioned above focuses upon student messages, student evaluations, and instructor evaluations of a single course.  The interactive communications took place using MOO software that is sometimes used for virtual classroom settings, although the original intent of both MOO and MUD software was to create a virtual space in text in which students or game users create their own virtual worlds.  You can read more about MUD and MOO virtual environments at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#M-Terms.  In some universities, MOO software has been used to create virtual classrooms.  In most instances, however, these have given way to multimedia virtual classrooms rather than entirely text-based virtual classrooms.  

    MOO classrooms have been used very successfully.  For example, at Texas Tech University, Robert Ricketts has successfully taught an advanced tax course in a MOO virtual classroom when students are scattered across the U.S. in internship programs.  His course is not an internship course.  It is a tax course that students take while away from campus on internships.  Professor Ricketts is a veteran tax instructor and taught the MOO course under somewhat ideal conditions.  The students were all familiar with electronic messaging and they all know each other very well from previous onsite courses that they took together on the Texas Tech Campus in previous semesters.  They also had taken previous courses from Professor Ricketts in traditional classroom settings.

    In contrast to Professor Ricketts'  MOO virtual classroom, the Hara and King study reported above is almost a worst-case scenario in a MOO virtual classroom.  The instructor was a doctoral student who had never taught the class before, nor had she ever taught any class in a MOO virtual classroom.  Half the class "had only minimal experience with computers" and had never taken a previous distance education course.  The students had never taken a previous course of any type from the instructor and did not know each other well.  The course materials were poorly designed and had never been field tested.  Students were hopelessly confused and did not deal well with text messaging (graphics, audio, and video were apparently never used in the course).  This seems utterly strange in an age where text, graphics, audio, and even video files can be attached to email messages.  It also seems strange that the students apparently did not pick up the telephone when they were so confused by the networked text messaging.

    One of the most important things to be learned from the Hara and King study is the tendency for hopelessly confused students to often give up rather than keep pestering the instructor or each other until they see the light.  Instructors cannot assume that students are willing to air their confusions.  A major reason is a fear of airing their ignorance.  Another reason is impatience with the slowness of text messaging where everything must be written/read instead of having conversations with audio or full teleconferencing.

    In summary, the Hara and King study is not so much a criticism of distance education as it is a study of student behavior in settings where the distance education is poorly designed and delivered.  A similar outcome is reported in "Student Performance In The Virtual Versus Traditional Classroom," by Neil Terry, James Owens and Anne Macy, Journal of the Academy of Business Education, Volume 2, Spring 2001 --- http://www.abe.villanova.edu/tocs01.html.  An earlier report on this topic appears in entitled "Student and Faculty Assessment of the Virtual MBA:  A Case Study,"  by Neil Terry, James Owens, and Anne Macy, Journal of Business Education, Volume 1, Fall 2000, 33-38 --- http://www.abe.villanova.edu/tocf00.html.


    One of my students, Joshua Miller, lists the following concerns:

    • may require students to have "technological literacy" (I think this a
      good thing but some of the sites I visited said otherwise)

    • content may become subservient to the technology

    • poses new difficulties for program evaluation and accreditation

    • could alienate academics

    • may encounter language barriers/translation problems

    • can be obstructed by time zones

    • requires forms of institutional support to be projected to distant
      students

    • is complex in relation to copyright issues

    • often requires establishment of regional centers

    • can be costly for students to obtain equipment


    "Push for Computers in Classrooms Gathers New Foes," by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times, December 15, 1999 --- http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/cyber/education/15education.html 

    Now, a new group of educators, doctors, psychologists and others is challenging that notion. In a draft statement on technology literacy, a committee of the group, called the Alliance for Childhood, says that the American approach to technology in homes and schools has been flawed, emphasizing ephemeral vocational skills and the razzle-dazzle of educational software, rather than helping children think critically about technology and its appropriate use.

    Among other things, the committee is urging that computers have a restricted role, if any role at all, in elementary school classrooms and in later years be introduced in a way that assures children understand how computers work, can examine the appropriate place of technology in their lives and be instilled with the idea of ethical behavior online.

    The hope, said Joan Almon, coordinator of the group, is to influence policy makers, parents and teachers at a time when "there is still a window," when computers have not yet become as entrenched in life as, say, television.

    The alliance, which was formed last February, plans to incorporate as a formal nonprofit organization. Its founding members include Almon, a long-time teacher and consultant; Jane M. Healey, an educational psychologist and author of "Failure to Connect," a critique of computer use in education; Stephen L. Talbott, the editor of a well-regarded electronic newsletter examining the social implications of technology; and Bettye Caldwell, a professor of pediatrics and former president of National Association for the Education of Young People.

    The purpose of the group is to fight what its members see as a "toxic cultural environment" where they say children are buffeted by stress that is leading to a decline in their well-being and an increase in health problems like hyperactive disorders and depression. They say that stress includes academic pressures, lack of interaction with caring adults, and mass exposure to violence, sex and crass commercialism in electronic media.

    Related Articles
    Project Trains Teachers to Use Technology
    (September 15, 1999)

    Survey Finds Teachers Unprepared for Computer Use
    (September 8, 1999)

    Focus Shifts to Effectiveness of Education Technology
    (July 14, 1999)

    Non-Traditional Teachers More Likely to Use the Net
    (May 26, 1999

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    A Message from Peter Kenyon on November 18, 1999

    My own experience is with a three-semester experiment of a non-majors "survey" course. We met as a class once at the beginning of the semester and once again at the final exam. Without presuming that my experience can be generalized to others, I've made the following observations.

    It was MUCH more work to prepare and execute the course than I ever expected. I covered a little less material than in the traditional course. Assessment was very difficult. Student reaction was strong and about equally divided between those who loved it and those who hated it. DL seems better suited to mature learners with well-developed learning skills.

    In the end, I concluded their was little for me to like about this mode of instruction. It takes away the part of my job I like best (classroom interaction) and substituted mass quantities of gizmo tweaking (GT). Improved tools will reduce the need for GT, but I don't see how we maintain interesting human interaction. I use gizmos to support traditional instruction, but I have no desire to give up the classroom.

    As Barry Rice says, the traditional classroom MAY be a dinosaur in need of extinction. But when it does, I'll find other work to do because there's little joy for me as a cyber-prof.

    Peter Kenyon [pbk1@AXE.HUMBOLDT.EDU ]

    The most frequent refrain that I hear from my wife is: "Did you hear what I just said?" I am sorry to say that I often must ask Erika to repeat both that question and her comments preceding the question. In fact, my penchant for listening without hearing has become somewhat of a joke between us. She has threatened to learn about computers just to communicate with me. Her problem is that she is just too busy to learn about computers. When she does find the time, however, I'm in for big trouble. Seriously, however, when I am in the midst of concentrating on one thing, I have a bit of the same problem with student communications on other issues.

    I agree with Peter and Ron  to a point. However, the Sloan Foundation Experiments suggest that faculty/student and student/student communications increase with asynchronous courses. Students who rarely take the trouble to visit faculty during office hours will send email and chat room communications. Students have a penchant for catching us in our offices at a bad time, and they become embarrassed that it is a bad time. The trouble is that, being so busy, there is rarely a really good time for us to really communicate face-to-face. Sometimes students have to wait outside our offices, and being human, they conclude that they have better things to do with their time --- such as seeking out a teaching assistant or another student in the class. I sometimes think my "former" students know be better, via email, after graduation than while they were my students. Perhaps it is because they learn to appreciate my work more after they have graduated. But I am certain there is more to it than that.

    I taught in five universities over the years and encountered a few, surprisingly few, professors who have great face-to-face encounters with students outside the classroom. There are many (like me) who seem to do better with electronic communications. Years ago, I encountered an assistant professor from a prestigious university who reported that the only way for faculty or students to really make contact (before email was invented) with one of the superstars on the faculty was through written memos even though that superstar was located two doors down the hall.

    For more on the relation between communications and pedagogy, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/slide01.htm. For more on student evaluations, see the course evaluations at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois. What seems to be more of a problem with asynchronous courses seems to be faculty burn out that, in large measure, is caused by increased communications with students. Asynchronous courses are also more demanding on materials development. Much of what we expound in lectures comes from long-term memory that is triggered by something (patterns of association) in the midst of class. Beforehand, the same thoughts may not have surfaced in our offices that surface in the middle of a class. This makes it almost impossible to write down complete lectures for asynchronous courses having no lectures.

    Electronic communications, of course, are not as satisfactory in many respects as face-to-face encounters. However, I would argue that electronic communications are sometimes "closer." For example, there are times when I feel a bit intimidated myself in the presence of some people that I communicate freely with by email. There are people that I hate to interrupt with a telephone call, but I am rarely embarrassed to send them email messages. After a face-to-face or telephone visit, there are almost always things that I belatedly think that I should have said or not said. This seems to be less of a problem with email, and when it happens I just send out correction/addendum messages.

    My point here is to avoid associating "closeness" with "face-to-face." We can be virtual strangers face-to-face and close friends over a network. We may repeat daily greetings with colleagues in the hallways who we rarely communicate with in depth. I am less close with colleagues that I "see" in our hallways than with many of you with whom I correspond regularly. There have been some studies (one was reported in Playboy) showing that husbands and wives that see each other every day have a surprisingly small amount of genuine communication except at certain peak moments such as when they are in a car together on a long trip or awaiting a meal by candlelight in a slow-service restaurant. Would some us learn more about our spouses and kids if we communicated anonymously or openly with them via email and chat rooms? Will our kids open up more to anonymous strangers on the web than they will face-to-face with us?

    But then maybe I am just "listening" to Peter and Ron without "hearing."

    Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

    -----Original Message----- 
    From: Ron [mailto:rrtidd@MTU.EDU] 
    ent: Friday, November 19, 1999 6:55 AM 
    To: AECM@VAX.LOYOLA.EDU 
    ubject: Re: Distance Learning with traditional undergraduate students

    Peter made one comment that I suspect reflects the sentiments of many 20th century educators- any technology that detracts from our ability to physically connect with our students is going to diminish our career satisfaction. While I share this sentiment whole heartedly, I believe that we confront two inescapable realities in 21st century education.

    First, distributed education (whether distance or proximity) is going to become a more prominent feature of the academic landscape. Second, students are going to become increasingly comfortable with online social interaction and communities.

    Given those two "assumptions," most (if not all) educators must learn how to develop an appropriate classroom community in cyberspace. To me, that means having a community that fulfills all participants' needs to connect, while achieving academic objectives. A difficult challenge when the participants come from two generations that define connecting and community in such different ways.

    I have not had a chance to read it, yet, but some might find "Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace," (Palloff and Pratt) to be informative.

    Ron Tidd

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    The Future and Darker Sides of Distance Education

    Alternative Futures for Distance Learning: The Force and the Darkside 

    Murray Turoff 
    Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science Department of Computer and Information Science 
    New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark NJ, 07102, USA email: murray@vc.njit.edu  
    homepage: http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff/ Copyright Murray Turoff 1997

    Abstract 
    There are forces at work that are going to reshape the practice of distance learning and higher education in the United States. Technology only enters as an opportunity to channel these forces in very different directions. The channeling process is really that of administrative and management practices and policies that govern the utilization of educational technology and methods. While there are desirable futures possible it is becoming evident that many current practices and related economic forces can result in a future that is quite analogous to the "darkside" of the force.

    The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any organization with whom the author may have an affiliation.

    Table of Contents 
    Introduction The Force Commercialization 
    The Erosion of Tenure 
    Faculty and Adjunct Compensation and Considerations 
    Performance Throughput Rates 
    Budget Paradoxes 
    Future Alternatives 
    Accreditation of Distance Learning 
    Program Support 
    Evaluation The Nature of Learning 
    Related Administrative Practices 
    Warped Views on Distance Education 
    Faculty Developed Materials 
    The Organization of Distance Learning 
    Final Conclusion and Observations 
    References

    http://www.westga.edu/~distance/turoff11.html


    http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff


    http://eies.njit.edu/~hiltz

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    The Sanford Report in the Stanford Report

    Hi Kevin,

    Thank you for the message below.  My concern with John Sanford's report is that critics of distance education often have never tried it.  Or even if they have tried it, they have never tried it with the instant message intensity of an Amy Dunbar --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q3.htm#Dunbar 

    I just do not think the armchair critics really appreciate how the Dunbar-type instant messaging pedagogy can get inside the heads of students online.  

    But I think it is safe to day that the Sanford-type critics will never have the motivation and enthusiasm to carry off the Dunbar-type instant messaging pedagogy.  For them and many of us (actually I'm almost certain that I could not pull off what Dr. Dunbar accomplishes), it is perhaps more "suicidal" for students.

    I also think that success of distance education depends heavily upon subject matter as well as instructor enthusiasm.  But I think there is only a small subset of courses that cannot be carried off well online by a professor as motivated as Dr. Dunbar.

    I am truly grateful that I was able to persuade Professor Dunbar and  distance education expert from Duke University to present an all-day workshop in the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel on August 13, 2002.  If our workshop proposal is accepted by the AAA, this is an open invitation to attend.  Details will soon be available under "CPE" at http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/2002annual/meetinginfo.htm 

    Thanks for helping me stay informed!  Other views on the dark side are summarized at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

    Bob Jensen

    Bob, 
    Since I know you track information technology WRT education, I thought you might be interested in this. The original source is the "Stanford Report" cited below: TP is a listserv that redistributed it.
    Kevin

    Folks:

    The article below presents an interesting take on the limitations of technology, teaching, and learning. It is from the Stanford Report, February 11, 2002 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/ . Reprinted with permission.

    Regards,

    Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu  UP NEXT: Book Proposal Guidelines

     

    HIGH-TECH TEACHING COULD BE "SUICIDAL"

    BY JOHN SANFORD

    University educators largely extol the wonders of teaching through technology. But skeptics question whether something is lost when professors and lecturers rely too heavily on electronic media, or when interaction with students takes place remotely -- in cyberspace rather than the real space of the classroom.

    Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, is one such skeptic. "I think this enthusiastic and sometimes naïve and sometimes blind pushing toward the more technology the better, the more websites the better teacher and so forth, is very dangerous -- [that it] is, indeed, suicidal," Gumbrecht said, speaking at the Jan. 31 installment of the Center for Teaching and Learning's "Award-WinningTeachers on Teaching" series.

    But Gumbrecht cautioned that there are few, if any, studies either supporting or rejecting the hypothesis that traditional pedagogy is superior to teaching via the Internet or with a host of high-tech classroom aids. "If [such studies] exist, I think we need more of them," he said.

    He added that he could point only to his "intuition that real classroom presence should be maintained and is very, very important," and emphasized the need for educators to critically examine where technology serves a useful pedagogical function and where it doesn't.

    However, Gumbrecht allowed that, for courses in which knowledge transmission is the sole purpose, electronic media probably can do the job well enough. Indeed, given the 20th century's knowledge explosion and the increasing costs of higher education, using technology as opposed to real-life teachers for the transmission of information is probably inevitable, he said.

    In any case, knowledge transmission should not be the core function of the university, he added, noting that the Prussian statesman and university founder Wilhelm von Humboldt, sociologist Max Weber and Cardinal John Henry Newman all held that universities should be places where people confront "open questions."

    "Humboldt even goes so far to say -- and I full-heartedly agree with him -- they should ideally be questions without a possible answer," Gumbrecht said. He asserted the university should be a place for "intellectual complexification" and "riskful thinking."

    "We are not about finding or transmitting solutions; we are not about recipes; we are not about making intellectual life easy," he continued. "Confrontation with complexity is what expands your mind. It is something like intellectual gymnastics. And this is what makes you a viable member of the society."

    Paradoxically, "virtual" teacher-student interaction that draws out this kind of thinking probably would be much costlier for the university than real-time, in-class teaching, Gumbrecht said. The reason for this, he suggested, is that responding to e-mail from students and monitoring their discussion online would require more time -- time for which the university would have to pay the teacher -- than simply meeting with the students as a group once or twice a week.

    In addition, Gumbrecht asserted that discussions in the physical presence of others can lead to intellectual innovation. He recalled a Heidegger conference he attended at Stanford about a year ago, where he said he participated in some of the best academic discussions of his career. Heidegger himself "tries to de-emphasize thinking as something we, as subjects, perform," Gumbrecht said. "He says thinking is having the composure of letting thought fall into place." Gumbrecht suggested something similar happens during live, in-person discussions.

    "There's a qualitative change, and you don't quite know how it happens," he said. "Discussions in the physical presence have the capacity of being the catalyst for such intellectual breakthroughs. The possibility of in-classroom teaching -- of letting something happen which cannot happen if you teach by the transmission of information -- is a strength."

    Gumbrecht argued that the way in which students react to the physical presence of one another in the classroom, as well as to the physical presence of their professor, can invigorate in-class discussions. "I know this is problematic territory, but I think both the positive and negative feelings can set free additional energy," he said. "I'm not saying the physical presence makes you intellectually better, but it produces certain energy which is good for intellectual production."

    Asked to comment on some of the ideas Gumbrecht discussed in his lecture, Decker Walker, a professor of education who studies technology in teaching and learning, agreed that pedagogy via electronic media may work best in cases where information transmission is the goal -- for example, in a calculus course. In areas such as the humanities and arts, it may be a less valuable tool, he said.

    In any case, the physical presence of teachers can serve to motivate students, Walker said. "I think young people are inspired more often by seeing other people who are older -- or even the same age -- who do remarkable things," he said. "It would be hard to replace this with a computer."

    On the other hand, Walker maintained that computer technology can be a useful educational aid. One such benefit is access to scholars who are far away. "Technology can enable a conversation, albeit an attenuated online one, with distant experts who bring unique educational benefits, such as an expert on current research on a fast-moving scientific topic," Walker said. "This may greatly enrich a live class discussion with a local professor."

    Walker maintained that the university environment is not in danger of being supplanted by technology. On the contrary, he noted, large businesses have adopted aspects of the university environment for their employees' professional education. For example, General Motors started GM University, whose main campus is at the company's new global headquarters in Detroit's Renaissance Center.

    Museums also function in some ways like universities, he noted. For example, the Smithsonian Institution has numerous research, museum and zoo education departments

    And for all the emphasis high-tech companies put on developing devices and software for remote communication, many have had large campuses constructed where workers are centralized -- a nod, perhaps, to the importance of person-to-person interaction.

    Rick Reis, executive director of Stanford's Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing and associate director of the Learning Lab's Global Learning Partnerships, noted that the subject of technology in education covers a lot of territory. Few people, for example, are likely to argue that making students trudge over to the library's reserve desk to get a piece of reading material for a course, or making hundreds of hard copies, is preferable to posting it on the web, Reis said. But he added that whether the kind of teaching generally reserved for a seminar could be as effective online is an open question.

     

     

    Distance Education on the Web David Noble's Articles on Digital Diploma Mills

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    David Nobles' Concerns for Students' Privacy

    A Long-Standing Critic of Distance Education, David Noble,  Blasts it Once Again

    "New Book by Critic of Distance Education Describes Privacy Threats," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2002 ---  http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002011801u.htm 

    Distance education threatens the privacy of students and professors because online class discussions can be monitored in ways that are impossible in traditional classrooms, argues David Noble, a history professor at York University, in Toronto, and a well known critic of technology.

    Mr. Noble's latest critiques of distance education, along with revised versions of earlier salvos that first circulated online, are collected in a new book, Digital Diploma Mills (Monthly Review Press).

    Mr. Noble says the privacy of students and professors online is a particularly important issue in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, because "governments have vastly enlarged their powers of surveillance, and surveillance of electronic communication in particular."

    Some software packages for delivering online courses can automatically capture and store the texts of all online class discussions, or collect detailed information about what students look at online. That worries Mr. Noble, who says that if the material is stored and archived, it could be possible for law-enforcement officials to demand transcripts of class discussions.

    "Certainly administrators and political authorities will be in a position to monitor any and all such activities as never before, remotely and discreetly, without permission or acknowledgment," writes Mr. Noble. "And they will have ready access to extensive electronic records of course content and communications."

    Much of the new material in Mr. Noble's book focuses on the influence of the U.S. government -- and particularly the military -- on the continuing evolution of online distance education. He worries that the program could lead the military to bring greater standardization to distance education.

    In particular, Mr. Noble focuses on the U.S. military's eArmyU, a $453-million program that will allow enlisted soldiers to take courses and earn degrees online through partner colleges.

    The project was announced in 2000, just as some commercial distance-education efforts by colleges and companies were beginning to falter, says Mr. Noble. He argues that the demand for online education was not as great as colleges had anticipated, and he sees the government's project as an effort to bolster the use of technology in education.

    Continued at http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002011801u.htm 


    Zuleyma Tang-Martinez apparently sides with David Noble

    "Higher Education and the Corporate Paradigm: the Students are the Losers," by Zuleyma Tang-Martinez --- http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/tang-martinez.html 

    0.1. As institutions of higher education throughout the US and abroad have adopted the corporate model, "efficiency" and profit have been emphasized, while students have been redefined as "customers", "consumers," and "clients." In reality, what we are currently witnessing, as the result of this corporate paradigm, is the destruction of American higher education. University presidents and administrators take on the roles of Chief Executive Officers, and business managers have not supported greater diversity or inclusiveness in academia, whether in terms of faculty or students. The bottom line has become making money rather than educating students or fostering an environment conducive to free intellectual inquiry and development. 

    0.2. Although faculty often object to the corporate paradigm, because of what it does to our profession and to us as individuals, it is important to keep in mind that ultimately it is the students and their education who suffer the most and have the most to lose. There are three trends, dictated by the corporate approach, that profoundly affect the quality of the education our students receive.

    For the positive side, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 

    For a summary of assessment issues, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 


     

    Update Messages on Trends in Corporate Education

    I thank Dan Gode for calling my attention to the following article.
    "Two years ago, learning portals popped up across the Internet’s landscape. Today, many are buried in the dot-com rubble. What happened?" by Kim Kiser, Online Learning --- http://www.onlinelearningmag.com/new/sept01/cover.htm 

    By the spring of 2001, learning portals had started to implode like so many of the dot-coms that came before them. Among the casualties were Headlight.com, which initially provided learning to small and medium-sized businesses; Acadio, which targeted professionals; EduPoint.com, which started out serving consumers, then switched to corporate clients; TrainSeek.com, which also targeted corporations; and consumer sites HungryMinds.com (bought by IDG Books, which adopted the name) and FreeEdu.com, to name a few.

    What went wrong? For one thing, consumers weren’t as starved for knowledge as the founders of these companies had hoped. “The idea of ‘If you build it, they will come’ hasn’t quite been the case,” says Dave Egan, one of the founders of Billerica, Mass.-based TrainingNet, now Thinq. “As individuals, we’re not likely to go to Thinq.com or HungryMinds.com on a Saturday morning and find learning — especially if we know full well that we could go back to work on Monday and have that course paid for by the corporation.” Egan adds that less than one percent of his company’s revenues came from consumers.

    Corporations were wary of the portal model, too. Michael Lodato, vice president of market development for DigitalThink in San Francisco, which provided content to several portal companies, remembers going on sales calls with TrainingNet in the early days. “We would walk in, and the client would say, ‘TrainingNet, why do you have to be in the picture? What value do you bring to the table?’ All I could see in the first iteration of portals were massive libraries with very little advice on what you should do with them,” he recalls.

    And because many portal companies failed to help buyers make intelligent choices about which courses best met their needs, they failed to create demand for the content — and brought little revenue to the organizations supplying it. “If you [as the content vendor] have 300 courses inside a portal with 60,000 choices, how often are you going to generate revenue in that environment?” Lodato asks.

    Companies like DigitalThink also found it took more work than they expected to offer courses through a portal. “It costs money to get your stuff over to these people. Then you have to have alliance managers working with them and accounting people watching over it,” Lodato says. DigitalThink, which initially signed on with about 50 portal companies, got “nothing of any significance” from most of the relationships, he says.

    Tom Brown, vice president of sales for the Americas for NETg, a Naperville, Ill., company that sells IT-related courses, saw similar results. NETg currently has courses listed on several portals, including Thinq’s, KnowledgePlanet’s and Click2learn’s. “The revenues we got out of the portals in 2000 was minimal,” Brown says. “Out of all the portals combined, it was in the low six figures.”

    Investors also soured on the idea, as they watched Internet companies of all kinds failing to live up to their expectations. By the spring of 2000, TrainSeek.com and Headlight.com were among the portal companies looking for additional funding to carry them forward until they became profitable. “In the summer of 2000, you couldn’t do second-round financing for a dot-com, even if it was in the training and education space,” says Lloyd Singer, CEO of LearnCom, a suburban Chicago firm that has been buying up training video and other content companies. At press time, LearnCom was trying to purchase TrainSeek’s Web site and customer base.

    Not all companies that boasted about their portals two years ago have fallen on hard times. Some have lived through the shakeout — and now downplay the fact that they were ever associated with the portal model.

    For the most part, those that survived — and, in some cases, thrived — did so by changing their business models or distinguishing themselves early on. TrainingNet (now Thinq) emerged as an early leader after aggressively pursuing relationships with content providers and assembling what may be the largest online listing of courses, books, audio tapes and videotapes. (Today, their catalog, which isn’t easy for the casual Web site visitor to find, has upward of 500,000 products, including more than 4,000 online courses.)

    In addition to selling courses to individuals and building learning portals for other corporations, Thinq acquired a learning management system and businesses that specialized in marketing, technology and consulting in the United States and United Kingdom. “The whole idea of marrying content, management structure, technology and services seems to be the magic elixir corporate clients are looking for,” says Egan.

    Investors seem to agree. This spring, Thinq received $20 million in fourth-round financing from CIBC Capital Partners and Mellon Ventures, bringing the two-year-old company’s total financing to $66 million.

    Click2learn, which dropped the dot-com from its name and no longer has a link to its course catalog on its Web site, also differentiated itself in several ways. Before launching its portal, the company was well-known for its course authoring software. It also had a learning management system — a feature few portal companies could offer in 1999. Says consultant Hall: “They were one of the first to have a portal, but their other businesses were able to sustain that model.”

    Kevin Oakes, president and CEO of the Bellevue, Wash., company, admits that corporate customers haven’t bought large volumes of off-the-shelf courses from the portal the way he originally hoped. However, he explains, one reason Click2learn, which works with some 50 content companies and has nearly 10,000 offerings in its catalog, has had some success with its portal business was because they could create both hosted and behind-the-firewall learning sites for corporations.

    “The difference between our model vs. Headlight or TrainSeek is that our whole business wasn’t built on the ASP (application service provider) content aggregation model,” he explains.

    Learn2.com is another company that’s hanging on after changing its name and business model several times. Originally known as 7th Level, the company first targeted consumers, then corporations, government agencies and small businesses with everything from courses on Access 2000 to free tutorials on how to hang wallpaper. They also sell courses on CD-ROM and video through retailers such as CompUSA.

    Learn2.com, whose stock was dropped from the NASDAQ in early August because of its low price, recently signed a merger agreement with E-Stamp Corp., a dot-com that has foundered in its attempts to sell postage online and later supply chain management software. If approved by shareholders later this year, the merger will give Learn2.com an infusion of cash to repay its debt and, its owners hope, stimulate growth. But analysts aren’t optimistic about the company’s future. “The cash will take them through a few more quarters,” says Weggen. “But they have too many lines of business and are in too many markets.”

    Weggen and others believe the tectonic movements that caused the shake-up in the portal market haven’t ended, and that the lessons from last century’s learning portals will become the bedrock for learning systems of the future.

    “Bringing together courses from multiple publishers is only part of the game in terms of what it takes to serve the corporate market,” says Scott Mellen, co-founder of the defunct Headlight.com. “That’s only part of the challenge training managers deal with when confronted with trying to provide skills for their employees. They want the whole suite of functionality that’s important to business. And I think a lot of things that happened with learning portals are helping build this ultimate thing.”

    For the rest of the article, go to http://www.onlinelearningmag.com/new/sept01/cover.htm 

     

    Audio and Email Messages From Daring Educators

    I have an old and sadly neglected Web page (that in some ways has become history of the early pioneers in bringing technology into accounting education) that contains messages from various professors, some who burned out and/or became overwhelmed by early efforts to bring technology into education --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm 

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    Growing Up is More Anxiety-Provoking/Stressful

    What is happening to the quality of our students?

    A recent meta-analysis of multiple studies which revealed that schoolchildren in the 1980s (i.e. our recent and current students) reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients did in the 1950s. Thus, our students may find life to be far more anxiety-provoking/stressful than we did as undergraduates.

    Adding to this finding is the one described below that indicates stress impairs the ability to remember and learn. Taken together, these studies suggest that significantly higher levels of anxiety/stress among the current generation of college students may help to account for the “decline” in the quality of academic performance that we lament. Perhaps most of our students are doing the best they can given their life experience just as we did the best we could given our life experience.

    Richard Reams, Ph.D. 
    Staff Psychologist Counseling & Career Services 
    Trinity University 715 Stadium Drive #78 San Antonio, TX 78212-7200


    How to Sign Up for a MOOC

    Hi Paul,

    Various options are linked at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Although not MOOC complete courses, there are over 2,000  free learning modules at Kahn Academy, including some advanced-learning accounting modules:
    Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/
    This site lists the course categories but there are more courses than fit undert these categories.  It's best to search for a topic of interest.

    The Big List of 500+ Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New Additions) --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/new_additions_to_our_list_of_530_free_online_courses_from_top_universities_.html


    Most MOOC, EdX, MITx, and Harvardx courses sign ups are only available on designated schedules. The best approach is to go to an elite university Website and look for links to free online courses.

    The MITx link is at
    http://www.mitx.org/

    The EdX link is at
    https://www.edx.org/

    Note the Great Graphic
    "Major Players in the MOOC Universe," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Major-Players-in-the-MOOC/138817/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


    There are many more alternatives linked at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    "What Are MOOCs Good For? Online courses may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they would, but they can prove valuable in surprising ways," by Justin Pope, MIT's Technology Review, December 15, 2014 ---
    http://www.technologyreview.com/review/533406/what-are-moocs-good-for/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141215

    A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these “massive open online courses” stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education. Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier teaching from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few hundred students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the Internet to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there appeared to be a solution to the problem of “scaling up” higher education: if it were delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the existing system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of the MOOC provider Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, 10 institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education.

    Then came the backlash. A high-­profile experiment to use MOOCs at San Jose State University foundered. Faculty there and at other institutions rushing to incorporate MOOCs began pushing back, rejecting the notion that online courses could replace the nuanced work of professors in classrooms. The tiny completion rates for most MOOCs drew increasing attention. Thrun himself became disillusioned, and he lowered Udacity’s ambitions from educating the masses to providing corporate training.

    But all the while, a great age of experimentation has been developing. Although some on-campus trials have gone nowhere, others have shown modest success (including a later iteration at San Jose State). In 2013, Georgia Tech announced a first-of-its-kind all-MOOC master’s program in computer science that, at $6,600, would cost just a fraction as much as its on-campus counterpart. About 1,400 students have enrolled. It’s not clear how well such programs can be replicated in other fields, or whether the job market will reward graduates with this particular Georgia Tech degree. But the program offers evidence that MOOCs can expand access and reduce costs in some corners of higher education.

    Meanwhile, options for online courses continue to multiply, especially for curious people who aren’t necessarily seeking a credential. For-profit Coursera and edX, the nonprofit consortium led by Harvard and MIT, are up to nearly 13 million users and more than 1,200 courses between them. Khan Academy, which began as a series of YouTube videos, is making online instruction a more widely used tool in classrooms around the world.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    I always hate to see the Khan Academy, YouTube Channels, MOOCs, and Distance Education for fees and credits mingled together in the same article. MOOCs are usually filmed versions of live courses at prestigious universities. They are free by definition, although fees might be charged by third parties for taking competency examinations for credits ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    "The MOOC Where Everybody Learned:  And they learned just as much as MIT students who had taken a similar course on the campus, according to a new study." by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/the-mooc-where-everybody-learned/54571?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    EdX --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX
    "6 Big Takeaways From the EdX Global Forum," by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, November 23, 2014 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/6-big-takeaways-edx-global-forum

    Distance education courses are usually fee-based online courses for credit. In many instances at major universities some sections of courses are taught live on campus and others are taught live online ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    Khan Academy and YouTube Channels offer free tutorials. Learners can cherry pick topics and watch basic and advanced learning videos that vary in length form a few minutes to longer but usually much less than an hour for each module. These were never intended to be anything more than self-learning alternatives for highly motivated students. Some leading universities like the University of Wisconsin now over limited choices for taking competency examinations for college credit, but the distance between a few learning videos and college credit is a very long distance indeed.

    More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu
    Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
    Search for words like “accounting”

    "The 12 Most Popular Free Online Courses (MOOCs) For Professionals," by Maggie Zhang, Business Insider, July 8, 2014 ---
     http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7

    01. Wesleyan University's "Social Psychology"

    02. University of Maryland's "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems"

    03. Duke University's "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue"

    04. Duke University's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior"

    05. University of Toronto's "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals"

    06. Stanford University's "Startup Engineering"

    07. Yale University's "Financial Markets"

    08. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Financial Accounting"

    09. University of Washington's "Introduction to Public Speaking"

    10. University of Michigan's "Introduction to Finance"

    11. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Marketing"

    12. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's "Data Analysis"

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7#ixzz37LiJgQ57

    For Members of the American Accounting Association
    One of the best sessions at the AAA's 2014 Annual Meetings was the the session
    7.02 The Impact of MOOCs and Online Courses on Accounting...
    A video of this entire session is now available to AAA members ---
    http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/4a2206f6ab
    There were three panelists including a leading technical speaker from EdX and a professor who teaches accounting in Wharton's MOOCs of virtually all of its MBA core courses (for free to the world).
    The speakers are outstanding, but the videos do not show the PowerPoint screens. This is a bit frustrating, but the speakers generally described what was on each PowerPoint slide.

    AAA members who did not attend the above session really missed what was one of the best technical sessions at the 2014 Annual Meetings.

    Other videos of sessions are linked at
    http://commons.aaahq.org/hives/8d320fc4aa/summary
    I also highly recommend watching the video of Jimmy Wales' Plenary Session. Jimmy is the founder and CEO of Wikipedia. Wikipedia for most of us is the most important site in the world for instant learning from an unbelievable number of crowd-sourced encyclopedia modules. When I say unbelievable I mean an UNBELIEVABLE number of topics covered in over 200 languages. Nearly five million of these topics are in English. Jimmy reported that Wikipedia has over 500 million visitors per month. The population of the USA is only about 300 million people.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

    Wikipedia (Listeni/ˌwɪkɨˈpdiə/ or Listeni/ˌwɪkiˈpdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone who can access the site[6] can edit almost any of its articles. Wikipedia is the sixth-most popular website[5] and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.[7][8][9]

    Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger[10] coined its name,[11] a portmanteau of wiki (from the Hawaiian word for "quick")[12] and encyclopedia. Although Wikipedia's content was initially only in English, it quickly became multilingual, through the launch of versions in different languages. All versions of Wikipedia are similar, but important differences exist in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of more than 200 Wikipedias, but remains the largest one, with over 4.6 million articles. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.[13] Wikipedia has more than 22 million accounts, out of which there were over 73,000 active editors globally as of May 2014.[2]

    Studies tend to show that Wikipedia's accuracy is similar to Encyclopedia Britannica, with Wikipedia being much larger. However, critics have worried that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias, and that its group dynamics hinder its goals. Most academics, historians, teachers and journalists reject Wikipedia as a reliable source of information for being a mixture of truths, half truths, and some falsehoods,[14] and that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is notoriously subject to manipulation and spin.[15] Wikipedia's Consensus and Undue Weight policies have been repeatedly criticised by prominent scholarly sources for undermining freedom of thought and leading to false beliefs based on incomplete information.[16][17][18][19]

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    One of the great sources for accuracy arises when professors assign graduate students to correct and otherwise improve Wikipedia modules. One of the most important uses of Wikipedia is for people seeking to learn about medical ailments, treatments, and medications. Among the great happenings in Wikipedia is the truly active role medical schools play in perfecting these medical modules since errors and misleading statements in those modules can be particularly damaging to hundreds of millions of users of those modules.

    Of course, users of any encyclopedia or most any other academic source must always remain skeptical. The hired editors must spend an undue amount of time on controversial topics, particularly political topics. These editors often warn people to be skeptical when encountering particular modules. These editors also resist allowing the public to delete criticisms that in the eyes of editors are justified. Virtually all of the 73,000+ editors do not want Wikipedia to become too much of a public relations database. I applaud them for their dedication and hard work.

    Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs and open sharing learning materials in general ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's links to the library links of the world ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

     

     


    "10 Top Education Companies of 2013," Center for Digital Education, February 14, 2013 ---
    http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/10-Education-Companies-2013.html

    From the Scout Report on March 22, 2013

    Massive open online courses move ahead amid support and controversy

    Colleges Assess Cost of Free Online-Only Courses
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/education/colleges-assess-cost-of-free-online-only-courses.html?ref=technology&_r=0

    The Professors Who Make the MOOCs
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905/#id=overview

    Google Will Fund Cornell MOOC
    http://www.cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2013/03/05/google-will-fund-cornell-mooc

    California’s Move Toward MOOCs Sends Shock Waves, but Key Questions
    Remain Unanswered
    http://chronicle.com/article/California-Considers-a-Bold/137903/

    UW-Madison to offer free public online courses starting in fall
    http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/uwmadison-to-offer-free-public-online-courses-starting-in-fall-198rsr2-192186161.html

    Who Owns a MOOC?
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/19/u-california-faculty-union-says-moocs-undermine-professors-intellectual-property

    "The Idea Makers:  Tech Innovators for 2013," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Idea-Makers-Tech/138823/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetoo


    Department of Education in March 2014:  17,374 online higher education distance education and training programs altogether

    Jensen Comment
    Note that the hundreds of free MOOC courses from prestigious universities are not the same as fee-based distance education degree and certificate programs that are more like on-campus programs in terms in student-instructor interactions, graded assignments, and examinations. Some campuses like the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee even treat online programs as cash cows where the tuition is higher for online programs than identical on-campus programs.

    The (Department of Education Report in March 2014) report says that American colleges now offer 17,374 online programs altogether, 29 percent of which are master’s-degree programs, with bachelor’s and certificate programs making up 23 percent each. Business and management programs are the most popular, at 29 percent of the total, followed by health and medicine programs (16 percent), education programs (14 percent), and information technology and computers (10 percent) ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-there-may-be-fewer-online-programs-than-you-think/51163?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    US News:  2015 Best Colleges and Universities ---
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges

           Frequently Asked Questions about US News Rankings ---
          
    http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

    . . .

    19. How does U.S. News handle for-profits in the rankings?

    All regionally accredited for-profit institutions are included in U.S. News' data collection efforts. Among them are many schools that have large online bachelor's degree programs.

    Any for-profit college or university that grants bachelor's degrees, is regionally accredited and meets the specific U.S. News ranking criteria to be included in the Best Colleges rankings can be ranked. However, as a result of the U.S. News eligibility standards, almost all of the for-profit institutions have been grouped with the unranked schools.

    Why? Their bachelor's degree candidates are largely nontraditional students in degree completion programs, for example, or they don't use SAT or ACT test scores in admissions decisions – both of which are factors U.S. News uses to decide if a school is eligible to be ranked.

    20. How does U.S. News handle schools that refuse to respond to the U.S. News annual statistical survey, given that many of them are still included in the rankings?

    Nonresponders are still included in the rankings if they are eligible to be ranked. For schools that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey in the spring and summer of 2015, we have made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were required to report to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. That includes such factors as SAT and ACT scores, acceptance rates, number of faculty, and graduation and retention rates. We also use data from other sources, such as the Council for Aid to Education (for alumni giving rates) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (for graduation rates).

    How to Use the Rankings

    1. What is the best way for students and their parents to use the rankings?

    Students can use the rankings to create an initial list of schools to consider, to narrow down that list and to compare overall academic quality. Students can also use the data underlying the rankings to identify schools with specific characteristics that they value.

    However, the editors of U.S. News believe rankings are only one of many criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one school over another. 

    A prospective student's academic and professional ambitions, personal preferences, financial resources and scholastic record, as well as a school's size, cost, programs, atmosphere and location, should play major roles in determining a college choice.

    Moreover, it is crucial to remember that schools separated by only a few places in the rankings are extremely close in academic quality.

    [Get more information on how to use the rankings.]

    2. How can I find the rank of a particular school?

    U.S. News publishes the rankings in two places: in a college guidebook, "Best Colleges 2016,'' and on this website, which also offers the U.S. News College Compasshome to the most complete rankings and data. The guidebook is available for purchase at newsstands, by calling 1-800-836-6397 or by visiting the U.S. News store. For discounts on bulk orders of 50 or more copies, please contact booksales@usnews.com.

    Continued at  http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

     

    US News:  2015 Best Online Bachelor's Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    1. Penn State University World Campus
    2. Daytona State College
    3. University of Illinois Chicago
    4. Western Kentucky University
    5. Embry-​Riddle Aeronautical University—​Worldwide
    6. Oregon State University
    7. Colorado State University Global Campus
    8. Arizona State University
    9. Ohio State University --- Columbus
    10. Pace University
    11. Others --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    US News:  2015 Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

        1. University of Houston
        2 .Florida State University
        3. Northern Illinois University
        4. Penn State University World Campus
        5. Central Michigan University
            Graceland University
            University of Nebraska --- Lincoln

        8. Auburn University
            Ball State University
            George Washington University

      11. Creighton Unversity
            Emporia State University
            Michigan State University
            Others ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

     US News:  2015 Best Online MBA Programs
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba

        1.  Indiana University (Kelly)
            Temple (Fox)
            University of North Carolina --- Chapel Hill

        4.  Arizona State University (Carey)
             University of Florida (Hough)

        6 . University of Texas --- Dallas

        7.  Carnegie-Mellon University (Tepper)
             Penn State University World Campus

        9.  North Carolina State University (Jenkins)

        10. Auburn University

    US News:  2015 Online Higher Education Search Engine ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

     

     

    US News:  2015 Best Colleges and Universities ---
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges

           Frequently Asked Questions about US News Rankings ---
          
    http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

    . . .

    19. How does U.S. News handle for-profits in the rankings?

    All regionally accredited for-profit institutions are included in U.S. News' data collection efforts. Among them are many schools that have large online bachelor's degree programs.

    Any for-profit college or university that grants bachelor's degrees, is regionally accredited and meets the specific U.S. News ranking criteria to be included in the Best Colleges rankings can be ranked. However, as a result of the U.S. News eligibility standards, almost all of the for-profit institutions have been grouped with the unranked schools.

    Why? Their bachelor's degree candidates are largely nontraditional students in degree completion programs, for example, or they don't use SAT or ACT test scores in admissions decisions – both of which are factors U.S. News uses to decide if a school is eligible to be ranked.

    20. How does U.S. News handle schools that refuse to respond to the U.S. News annual statistical survey, given that many of them are still included in the rankings?

    Nonresponders are still included in the rankings if they are eligible to be ranked. For schools that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey in the spring and summer of 2015, we have made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were required to report to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. That includes such factors as SAT and ACT scores, acceptance rates, number of faculty, and graduation and retention rates. We also use data from other sources, such as the Council for Aid to Education (for alumni giving rates) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (for graduation rates).

    How to Use the Rankings

    1. What is the best way for students and their parents to use the rankings?

    Students can use the rankings to create an initial list of schools to consider, to narrow down that list and to compare overall academic quality. Students can also use the data underlying the rankings to identify schools with specific characteristics that they value.

    However, the editors of U.S. News believe rankings are only one of many criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one school over another. 

    A prospective student's academic and professional ambitions, personal preferences, financial resources and scholastic record, as well as a school's size, cost, programs, atmosphere and location, should play major roles in determining a college choice.

    Moreover, it is crucial to remember that schools separated by only a few places in the rankings are extremely close in academic quality.

    [Get more information on how to use the rankings.]

    2. How can I find the rank of a particular school?

    U.S. News publishes the rankings in two places: in a college guidebook, "Best Colleges 2016,'' and on this website, which also offers the U.S. News College Compasshome to the most complete rankings and data. The guidebook is available for purchase at newsstands, by calling 1-800-836-6397 or by visiting the U.S. News store. For discounts on bulk orders of 50 or more copies, please contact booksales@usnews.com.

    Continued at  http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

     

    US News:  2015 Best Online Bachelor's Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    1. Penn State University World Campus
    2. Daytona State College
    3. University of Illinois Chicago
    4. Western Kentucky University
    5. Embry-​Riddle Aeronautical University—​Worldwide
    6. Oregon State University
    7. Colorado State University Global Campus
    8. Arizona State University
    9. Ohio State University --- Columbus
    10. Pace University
    11. Others --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    US News:  2015 Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

        1. University of Houston
        2 .Florida State University
        3. Northern Illinois University
        4. Penn State University World Campus
        5. Central Michigan University
            Graceland University
            University of Nebraska --- Lincoln

        8. Auburn University
            Ball State University
            George Washington University

      11. Creighton Unversity
            Emporia State University
            Michigan State University
            Others ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

     US News:  2015 Best Online MBA Programs
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba

        1.  Indiana University (Kelly)
            Temple (Fox)
            University of North Carolina --- Chapel Hill

        4.  Arizona State University (Carey)
             University of Florida (Hough)

        6 . University of Texas --- Dallas

        7.  Carnegie-Mellon University (Tepper)
             Penn State University World Campus

        9.  North Carolina State University (Jenkins)

        10. Auburn University

    US News:  2015 Online Higher Education Search Engine ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

     

    US News:  2015 Best Colleges and Universities ---
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges

           Frequently Asked Questions about US News Rankings ---
          
    http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

    . . .

    19. How does U.S. News handle for-profits in the rankings?

    All regionally accredited for-profit institutions are included in U.S. News' data collection efforts. Among them are many schools that have large online bachelor's degree programs.

    Any for-profit college or university that grants bachelor's degrees, is regionally accredited and meets the specific U.S. News ranking criteria to be included in the Best Colleges rankings can be ranked. However, as a result of the U.S. News eligibility standards, almost all of the for-profit institutions have been grouped with the unranked schools.

    Why? Their bachelor's degree candidates are largely nontraditional students in degree completion programs, for example, or they don't use SAT or ACT test scores in admissions decisions – both of which are factors U.S. News uses to decide if a school is eligible to be ranked.

    20. How does U.S. News handle schools that refuse to respond to the U.S. News annual statistical survey, given that many of them are still included in the rankings?

    Nonresponders are still included in the rankings if they are eligible to be ranked. For schools that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey in the spring and summer of 2015, we have made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were required to report to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. That includes such factors as SAT and ACT scores, acceptance rates, number of faculty, and graduation and retention rates. We also use data from other sources, such as the Council for Aid to Education (for alumni giving rates) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (for graduation rates).

    How to Use the Rankings

    1. What is the best way for students and their parents to use the rankings?

    Students can use the rankings to create an initial list of schools to consider, to narrow down that list and to compare overall academic quality. Students can also use the data underlying the rankings to identify schools with specific characteristics that they value.

    However, the editors of U.S. News believe rankings are only one of many criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one school over another. 

    A prospective student's academic and professional ambitions, personal preferences, financial resources and scholastic record, as well as a school's size, cost, programs, atmosphere and location, should play major roles in determining a college choice.

    Moreover, it is crucial to remember that schools separated by only a few places in the rankings are extremely close in academic quality.

    [Get more information on how to use the rankings.]

    2. How can I find the rank of a particular school?

    U.S. News publishes the rankings in two places: in a college guidebook, "Best Colleges 2016,'' and on this website, which also offers the U.S. News College Compasshome to the most complete rankings and data. The guidebook is available for purchase at newsstands, by calling 1-800-836-6397 or by visiting the U.S. News store. For discounts on bulk orders of 50 or more copies, please contact booksales@usnews.com.

    Continued at  http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

     

    US News:  2015 Best Online Bachelor's Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    1. Penn State University World Campus
    2. Daytona State College
    3. University of Illinois Chicago
    4. Western Kentucky University
    5. Embry-​Riddle Aeronautical University—​Worldwide
    6. Oregon State University
    7. Colorado State University Global Campus
    8. Arizona State University
    9. Ohio State University --- Columbus
    10. Pace University
    11. Others --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    US News:  2015 Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

        1. University of Houston
        2 .Florida State University
        3. Northern Illinois University
        4. Penn State University World Campus
        5. Central Michigan University
            Graceland University
            University of Nebraska --- Lincoln

        8. Auburn University
            Ball State University
            George Washington University

      11. Creighton Unversity
            Emporia State University
            Michigan State University
            Others ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

     US News:  2015 Best Online MBA Programs
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba

        1.  Indiana University (Kelly)
            Temple (Fox)
            University of North Carolina --- Chapel Hill

        4.  Arizona State University (Carey)
             University of Florida (Hough)

        6 . University of Texas --- Dallas

        7.  Carnegie-Mellon University (Tepper)
             Penn State University World Campus

        9.  North Carolina State University (Jenkins)

        10. Auburn University

    US News:  2015 Online Higher Education Search Engine ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

     

     

    US News:  2015 Best Colleges and Universities ---
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges

           Frequently Asked Questions about US News Rankings ---
          
    http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

    . . .

    19. How does U.S. News handle for-profits in the rankings?

    All regionally accredited for-profit institutions are included in U.S. News' data collection efforts. Among them are many schools that have large online bachelor's degree programs.

    Any for-profit college or university that grants bachelor's degrees, is regionally accredited and meets the specific U.S. News ranking criteria to be included in the Best Colleges rankings can be ranked. However, as a result of the U.S. News eligibility standards, almost all of the for-profit institutions have been grouped with the unranked schools.

    Why? Their bachelor's degree candidates are largely nontraditional students in degree completion programs, for example, or they don't use SAT or ACT test scores in admissions decisions – both of which are factors U.S. News uses to decide if a school is eligible to be ranked.

    20. How does U.S. News handle schools that refuse to respond to the U.S. News annual statistical survey, given that many of them are still included in the rankings?

    Nonresponders are still included in the rankings if they are eligible to be ranked. For schools that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey in the spring and summer of 2015, we have made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were required to report to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. That includes such factors as SAT and ACT scores, acceptance rates, number of faculty, and graduation and retention rates. We also use data from other sources, such as the Council for Aid to Education (for alumni giving rates) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (for graduation rates).

    How to Use the Rankings

    1. What is the best way for students and their parents to use the rankings?

    Students can use the rankings to create an initial list of schools to consider, to narrow down that list and to compare overall academic quality. Students can also use the data underlying the rankings to identify schools with specific characteristics that they value.

    However, the editors of U.S. News believe rankings are only one of many criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one school over another. 

    A prospective student's academic and professional ambitions, personal preferences, financial resources and scholastic record, as well as a school's size, cost, programs, atmosphere and location, should play major roles in determining a college choice.

    Moreover, it is crucial to remember that schools separated by only a few places in the rankings are extremely close in academic quality.

    [Get more information on how to use the rankings.]

    2. How can I find the rank of a particular school?

    U.S. News publishes the rankings in two places: in a college guidebook, "Best Colleges 2016,'' and on this website, which also offers the U.S. News College Compasshome to the most complete rankings and data. The guidebook is available for purchase at newsstands, by calling 1-800-836-6397 or by visiting the U.S. News store. For discounts on bulk orders of 50 or more copies, please contact booksales@usnews.com.

    Continued at  http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq

     

    US News:  2015 Best Online Bachelor's Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    1. Penn State University World Campus
    2. Daytona State College
    3. University of Illinois Chicago
    4. Western Kentucky University
    5. Embry-​Riddle Aeronautical University—​Worldwide
    6. Oregon State University
    7. Colorado State University Global Campus
    8. Arizona State University
    9. Ohio State University --- Columbus
    10. Pace University
    11. Others --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509

    US News:  2015 Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

        1. University of Houston
        2 .Florida State University
        3. Northern Illinois University
        4. Penn State University World Campus
        5. Central Michigan University
            Graceland University
            University of Nebraska --- Lincoln

        8. Auburn University
            Ball State University
            George Washington University

      11. Creighton Unversity
            Emporia State University
            Michigan State University
            Others ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings

     US News:  2015 Best Online MBA Programs
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba

        1.  Indiana University (Kelly)
            Temple (Fox)
            University of North Carolina --- Chapel Hill

        4.  Arizona State University (Carey)
             University of Florida (Hough)

        6 . University of Texas --- Dallas

        7.  Carnegie-Mellon University (Tepper)
             Penn State University World Campus

        9.  North Carolina State University (Jenkins)

        10. Auburn University

    US News:  2015 Online Higher Education Search Engine ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

     

     

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.


    "Students Avoid ‘Difficult’ Online Courses, Study Finds," by Ann Schnoebelen, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 26, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-avoid-difficult-online-courses-study-finds/43603?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    Students just don't understand that when done correctly online courses can have more rather than less interactions with the instructor and other students who can help them. Of course, not all distance education courses are "done correctly/"  MOOC classes tend to be so huge that interactions are minimized. MOOCs, however, often have some of the best lecturers in the world and are sought after because they are free. MOOCs sometimes take advantage of technology like screen cast videos that can be repeated over and over until mastered. This is also the idea behind Khan Academy videos.

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education alternatives around the world ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


    How to Lower the Costs of College Degrees (often at $0 tuition)

    Chamber of Commerce Guide to Scholarships From Various Sources ---
    https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/best-college-scholarships

    Scholarships --- https://www.mometrix.com/blog/scholarships-for-college/

    Free Book:  Learning to Learn Online ---: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/learningtolearnonline/

    Important Scholarships in Higher Education ---
    https://www.mometrix.com/blog/scholarships-for-college/

    Jensen Comment
    Although these are not all of the "top" scholarships, these are very important scholarships for students to consider. I consider the top scholarships to include the full-ride scholarships offered by virtually all universities such as the Ivy League schools' full-ride scholarships for low income students that cover tuition, room, board, and other incidentals. A small wave of scholarships is commencing to form for free medical school education at NYU and Cornell.

    There's also a difference between learning versus transcript credits and badges/certifications. Thousands of MOOC courses provide free learning to anybody from the most prestigious universities in the world. However, earning transcript or certification credit requires some form of verification of what students learn, and verification requires fees in most instances. But the learning itself is free ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    There's also a rising wave of employer-funded college degrees ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#EmployerSubsidized

    "How to Flatten the Cost Curve of College," by Alana Dunagan, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2, 2017 ---
    http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Flatten-the-Cost-Curve/240486?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=ea9036e73cc942279f01b5fa4afc959a&elq=a246d4fdfd274984b5e2ea434f5675cd&elqaid=14715&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6221

    Political pressure is building to lower the cost of college, as seen in efforts in many states to make college tuition-free. But the expenses involved in running a college aren’t going anywhere but up, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Big tuition increases are getting tougher to sell — and they are translating to smaller increases in revenue, because of rising tuition-discount rates. The business model of higher education is being stretched thin, and administrators are scrambling to find pennies to pinch in order to balance budgets for another fiscal year.

    But some leaders are taking a bolder path. Five institutions profiled in "Colleges Transformed," my recent paper for the Clayton Christensen Institute, are searching for new business models that can help them serve more students, improve work-force outcomes, and strengthen their own fiscal sustainability.

    While these institutions are diverse — small and large; public and private; some in financial straits, others hoping to broaden their missions — all of them are willing to look beyond incremental solutions and rethink the role of higher education.

    Each of the programs brought new students, and new types of students, into the institution. Some of those arrivals were adult learners looking to start or finish bachelor’s degrees. Others were looking to retrain for new careers. Regardless, the programs allowed colleges to reach untapped pools of students with the goal of raising their bottom line.

    Simmons College, a Boston-based institution with a traditionally regional draw, has attracted students from across the country and even globally to its online graduate nursing, social-work, and management programs. Simmons has seen revenues from its online programs rise to almost 40 percent of the total, from nothing three years ago. Other programs, like Northeastern University’s Level boot camp for data analytics, haven’t yet increased total institutional revenues but represent a move into a new and fast-growing market aimed at defining success through student outcomes in the work force — a model that could eventually compete with traditional degrees.

    Arizona State University’s president, Michael M. Crow, has pressured the institution to redefine itself by whom it accepts, not whom it excludes. That thinking, which cuts against the prestige-oriented grain of higher education, inspired the Global Freshman Academy and other efforts there to build a more inclusive culture and pedagogy.

    The academy is a set of online courses, free and open to anyone. What sets them apart from MOOCs, or massive open online courses, is that students who complete them can pay to convert them into Arizona State credits, thus completing their freshman year. That removes some of the risk of attempting a college degree, given that many students do not complete their first year.

    In all cases, institutional leadership was crucial to inspiring and creating these new pathways to innovation. Northeastern University’s president, Joseph E. Aoun, has said, "It’s time to stop thinking of higher education as an experience people take part in once during their young lives … and begin thinking of it as a platform for lifelong learning." Under his leadership, Northeastern has built a team assigned to future-proof the university.

    For many institutions, challenging the status quo has been driven by necessity: an understanding that the current system of higher education can’t tweak its way into financial sustainability, or into meeting the work-force needs of the 21st century. That was the case for the University of Wisconsin, which realized that as the state diversifies out of a manufacturing-intensive economy, the need for retraining exceeds the system’s capacity. In response, the university developed an online competency-based program called UW Flex, designed especially to meet the needs of adult learners.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    Via MOOCs learning is free from thousands of courses in the most prestigious universities in the world. However, transcript credits entail meeting academic standards and paying for credit via some of the alternatives listed at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Learning is also free online when funded by some employers like Wal-Mart and Starbucks. Starbucks even pays for Arizona State University degrees for its part-time employees ---
    https://www.starbucks.com/careers/college-plan

    Probably most students pressed for funds in the USA attend classes at local community colleges that are now free in some states and very low cost in other states. Quality varies greatly in those colleges, but this is a good way to conserve funding for advanced studies in higher larger state universities.

    Most prestigious universities (e.g., the Ivy League, Stanford, Rice, Chicago, etc.) are now offering free tuition or nearly free tuition to admitted students from families earning less than $50,000 per year. The trick is to be admitted among pools of highly-competitive applicants.

    New York State is now offering free four-year degrees from state universities, but there are some negatives such as having to pay the funding back for students who leave the state after graduation.

    Other tuition-free college alternatives ---
    http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/16/pf/college/states-tuition-free-college/index.html


    Harvard:  The Death of Supply Chain Management ---
    https://hbr.org/2018/06/the-death-of-supply-chain-management?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_weekly&utm_campaign=weeklyhotlist_not_activesubs&referral=00202&deliveryName=DM7738

    Jensen Comment
    Darn --- just when Walmart commenced to pay for college majors in this discipline

    Walmart’s too-good-to-be-true “$1 a day” college tuition plan, explained ---
    https://www.vox.com/2018/6/1/17413326/walmart-college-tuition-worker-pay-unemployment

    If headlines this week like “Walmart’s perk for workers: Go to college for $1 a day” (CNN) or “Walmart to offer employees a college education for $1 a day” (Washington Post) sound too good to be true, that’s because they largely are. The benefit is real, but it is much more restrictive than those headlines suggest. It’s essentially a bulk purchasing discount for a narrow range of online college courses.

    It’s also a telling benefit on a number of levels. The labor market is getting stronger, and employers are needing to think harder about how to invest in recruiting and retaining employees. But the old-fashioned strategy of paying more continues to be something corporate America resists, in part out of habit and in part because offering higher wages is a little more complicated than it looks. Companies like Walmart are, in essence, trying to get creative with their compensation packages in hopes of narrowly targeting the money they expend on the core goal of recruiting and retaining desirable workers.

    The question is whether policymakers will keep unemployment low long enough to break through the wall of resistance to across-the-board pay hikes and force big companies to finally just raise pay.

    Walmart’s actual tuition plan, explained

    The Walmart program is limited to online degree programs offered by three schools — the University of Florida, Brandman University, and Bellevue University — and specifically focused on bachelor’s or associate degrees in either business or supply chain management.

    You won’t, in other words, be able to do part-time shifts at Walmart to “pay your way through college” in the traditional sense.

    But qualifying Walmart employees (including both full-time and part-time workers who’ve been with the company for 90 days) will get discounted tuition, books, and access to a coach who will help them decide on an appropriate program and shepherd them through the application process

    It’s a nice opportunity for Walmart employees to gain a chance at upward mobility off the retail floor, and that’s likely the point. Unlike higher cash wages (which of course can be used for online college tuition as well as rent, gasoline, movie tickets, medical expenses, etc.), the tuition benefit is likely to be disproportionately appealing to people who are on the more ambitious end of the distribution. It’s an effort, in other words, to make Walmart more attractive specifically to the most appealing set of potential workers, a strategy other companies have pursued in recent years.

    Many large employers are trying tuition benefits

    Modest tuition programs have long been a staple of large employer benefits packages largely because of favorable tax treatment. The IRS allows employers to give employees several thousand dollars’ worth of tuition benefits tax-free, which makes establishing a program something of a no-brainer for most companies big enough to be employing a large back-office staff anyway.

    But four years ago, Starbucks blazed the trail of offering a much more ambitious reimbursement program that essentially offered taxable tuition subsidies rather than taxable wage increases.

    The reason: Academic research shows that workers who are interested in tuition subsidies are different from workers who are not. While everyone likes money, Peter Cappelli’s 2002 research indicates that the workers who like tuition subsidies are more productive than those who don’t, and Colleen Manchester’s 2012 research shows that subsidy-using employees have longer time horizons and are less likely to switch jobs.

    In March of this year, a consortium of big US hotels launched a generous tuition discount program, and later that month, McDonald’s substantially enhanced its tuition benefits. Kroger — another top five US employer — rolled out a new tuition program in April, and Chick-fil-A expanded its program in May.

    These initiatives differ in detail, but the broad story is the same. The unemployment rate is now low, so recruiting new staff is getting harder. Companies are looking to enhance their compensation but would like to do so in targeted ways.

    Continued in article

     


    Employer-Subsidized and/or Inexpensive Online MOOC Degrees

    You May  Not Even Have to be a Full-Time Employee:  Here are 15 major companies that will help you pay for college ---
    https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-pay-tuition-2018-9

    Chipottle
    UPS
    Wells Fargo
    Smuckers
    Starbucks
    Walmart and Sam's Club
    Verizon
    Bank of America
    Fidelity Investments
    Comcast
    Disney
    Best Buy
    AT&T
    Oracle
    British Petroleum

    There are many others --- See below

    Chamber of Commerce Guide to Scholarships From Various Sources ---
    https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/best-college-scholarships

    Scholarships --- https://www.mometrix.com/blog/scholarships-for-college/

    Free Book:  Learning to Learn Online ---: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/learningtolearnonline/

    Important Scholarships in Higher Education ---
    https://www.mometrix.com/blog/scholarships-for-college/

    Jensen Comment
    Although these are not all of the "top" scholarships, these are very important scholarships for students to consider. I consider the top scholarships to include the full-ride scholarships offered by virtually all universities such as the Ivy League schools' full-ride scholarships for low income students that cover tuition, room, board, and other incidentals. A small wave of scholarships is commencing to form for free medical school education at NYU and Cornell.

    There's also a difference between learning versus transcript credits and badges/certifications. Thousands of MOOC courses provide free learning to anybody from the most prestigious universities in the world. However, earning transcript or certification credit requires some form of verification of what students learn, and verification requires fees in most instances. But the learning itself is free ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    There's also a rising wave of employer-funded college degrees ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#EmployerSubsidized

    It's also becoming increasingly common for companies to help employees repay student loans.

     

    Following Starbucks' lead, JetBlue employees will now get free college education in the online Arizona State University program
    "JetBlue Will Pay Employees’ College Tuition Upfront," by Corinne Ruff, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2016 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/JetBlue-Will-Pay-Employees-/236144?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=2c1186cfd9b341cb9c63ee9ed19e27b4&elq=ff4810688471400f82f0d34fb98b721c&elqaid=8697&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2932

    The program is the latest company-and-college partnership that takes cues from the Starbucks College Achievement Plan — a program, created in 2014, that allows employees of the coffee-shop chain to take online classes at Arizona State University while continuing to work at the company.

    But there’s a key difference between the JetBlue program and many other partnerships in the Starbucks-Arizona State model.

    Most of the programs either reimburse tuition costs or offer discounts, requiring employees to foot at least some of the bill for their courses. But JetBlue employees won’t pay anything upfront: The company will cover the full cost of an associate degree.

    To earn a bachelor’s degree, however, students would have to cover the $3,500 capstone course at Thomas Edison State, either out of pocket or through a scholarship.

    In August the company started a pilot version of the program with 200 employees with at least two years’ seniority and with at least 16 credits from an accredited college or university already in hand.

    Bonny W. Simi, president of the subsidiary JetBlue Technology Ventures, says that employees had long asked for tuition reimbursement, but that the company wanted to go a step further and foot the whole bill.

    ‘Success Coaches’ Are Assigned

    As interest grows in the unbundling of higher education — the use of just the learning material from the college experience — Ms. Simi says the JetBlue program was made possible by the flexibility and affordability of competency-based education.

    "We’ve mapped out degrees so that it’s basically higher ed but stripped away are the cafeterias, the football team, the big campuses, the dorm, and everything," says Ms. Simi, who oversees the program. "It’s just the class."

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    There are other free or highly subsidized college programs paid for by employers such as the huge Wal-Mart program with American Public University, but the Starbucks and JetBlue programs have the most prestigious diplomas in my opinion.

    "News Analysis: Is 'Wal-Mart U.' a Good Bargain for Students?" by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Wal-Mart-U-a-Good/65933/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Following Starbucks employee education benefits with Arizona State University,
    Anthem Blue Cross offers education benefits with the University of Southern New Hampshire


    Walmart’s too-good-to-be-true “$1 a day” college tuition plan, explained ---
    https://www.vox.com/2018/6/1/17413326/walmart-college-tuition-worker-pay-unemployment

    If headlines this week like “Walmart’s perk for workers: Go to college for $1 a day” (CNN) or “Walmart to offer employees a college education for $1 a day” (Washington Post) sound too good to be true, that’s because they largely are. The benefit is real, but it is much more restrictive than those headlines suggest. It’s essentially a bulk purchasing discount for a narrow range of online college courses.

    It’s also a telling benefit on a number of levels. The labor market is getting stronger, and employers are needing to think harder about how to invest in recruiting and retaining employees. But the old-fashioned strategy of paying more continues to be something corporate America resists, in part out of habit and in part because offering higher wages is a little more complicated than it looks. Companies like Walmart are, in essence, trying to get creative with their compensation packages in hopes of narrowly targeting the money they expend on the core goal of recruiting and retaining desirable workers.

    The question is whether policymakers will keep unemployment low long enough to break through the wall of resistance to across-the-board pay hikes and force big companies to finally just raise pay.

    Walmart’s actual tuition plan, explained

    The Walmart program is limited to online degree programs offered by three schools — the University of Florida, Brandman University, and Bellevue University — and specifically focused on bachelor’s or associate degrees in either business or supply chain management.

    You won’t, in other words, be able to do part-time shifts at Walmart to “pay your way through college” in the traditional sense.

    But qualifying Walmart employees (including both full-time and part-time workers who’ve been with the company for 90 days) will get discounted tuition, books, and access to a coach who will help them decide on an appropriate program and shepherd them through the application process

    It’s a nice opportunity for Walmart employees to gain a chance at upward mobility off the retail floor, and that’s likely the point. Unlike higher cash wages (which of course can be used for online college tuition as well as rent, gasoline, movie tickets, medical expenses, etc.), the tuition benefit is likely to be disproportionately appealing to people who are on the more ambitious end of the distribution. It’s an effort, in other words, to make Walmart more attractive specifically to the most appealing set of potential workers, a strategy other companies have pursued in recent years.

    Many large employers are trying tuition benefits

    Modest tuition programs have long been a staple of large employer benefits packages largely because of favorable tax treatment. The IRS allows employers to give employees several thousand dollars’ worth of tuition benefits tax-free, which makes establishing a program something of a no-brainer for most companies big enough to be employing a large back-office staff anyway.

    But four years ago, Starbucks blazed the trail of offering a much more ambitious reimbursement program that essentially offered taxable tuition subsidies rather than taxable wage increases.

    The reason: Academic research shows that workers who are interested in tuition subsidies are different from workers who are not. While everyone likes money, Peter Cappelli’s 2002 research indicates that the workers who like tuition subsidies are more productive than those who don’t, and Colleen Manchester’s 2012 research shows that subsidy-using employees have longer time horizons and are less likely to switch jobs.

    In March of this year, a consortium of big US hotels launched a generous tuition discount program, and later that month, McDonald’s substantially enhanced its tuition benefits. Kroger — another top five US employer — rolled out a new tuition program in April, and Chick-fil-A expanded its program in May.

    These initiatives differ in detail, but the broad story is the same. The unemployment rate is now low, so recruiting new staff is getting harder. Companies are looking to enhance their compensation but would like to do so in targeted ways.

    Continued in article


    "Fiat Chrysler Offers Degrees to Employee Families (including families of dealer employees) ," Inside Higher Ed, November 23, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/23/fiat-chrysler-offers-degrees-employee-families?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b3c3eb755f-DNU20151123&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b3c3eb755f-197565045

    "An Increasingly Popular Job Perk: Online Education," by Mary Ellen McIntire, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/an-increasingly-popular-job-perk-online-education/56771?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    Of course there are thousands of free online education and training courses available from prestigious universities such as Stanford, MIT, and top Ivy League universities. But transcript credits are not free for students who want credits for MOOCs on their transcripts. Of course prices are much lower than onsite attendance credits ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Added Jensen Comment
    What I think is the most interesting trend in what might be termed competency-based courses and degrees is the lowering of the bar on admissions standards. Virtually anybody can take these newer online cheaper and/or subsidized courses with grades awarded on the basis of competency examinations while taking the courses. In comparison, students admitted on site to universities like Harvard and Stanford and Arizona State University face higher admission standards. But with grade inflation in virtually all on-site campuses (now having median grades of A-) the standards for competency are much lower, in my viewpoint, than the competency-based online courses via MOOCs that dare not become shams with grade inflation.

    The bottom line is that the competency standard for Harvard University and Stanford University is being admitted to study on campus. The competency standard for getting transcript credit for their MOOC courses is . . . er . . . er . . . demonstrated competency in the subject matter.

    If you want to make a Harvard University onsite student or an ASU onsite student wet his pants make him accept the online competency-based tests for the course he just received an A or B grade in from his professor on campus.

    Arizona State University is now under enormous pressure not to make the corporate-subsidized online degrees truly competency-based and not grade-inflated shams.

     

     

     

     


    Links to Bob Jensen's Workshop Documents on Education and Learning

    The Shocking Future of Education 

    First File

    Second File

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
    (Includes helpers for finding online training and education courses, certificate programs, and degree Programs)
    Detail File

    Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade

    First File

    Second File

    The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education

     Detail File

    Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research Detail File
    History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies Detail File
    Knowledge Portals and Vortals Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Advice to New Faculty (and Resources) Detail File
    Threads of Online Program Costs and Faculty Compensation Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Helper Videos and Tutorials Detail File
    Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher Education
    (both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
    Old Book
    Additional Links and Threads Threads

    Education Technology Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Bob Jensen's Homepage is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/

    Education & Learning: Asia Society --- http://www.asiasociety.org/education-learning

    Portal to Asian Internet Resources --- http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:3200/PAIR/index.html 


    NCES: Distance Learning Dataset Training ---
    https://nces.ed.gov/training/datauser/
    Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


    The Dartmouth (Student) E-Guide to Academic Success (free book) ---
    https://sites.dartmouth.edu/learning/free-study-skills-e-book/


    How Online Learning Compares to the Traditional Classroom ---
    https://www.cpajournal.com/2018/09/27/icymi-how-online-learning-compares-to-the-traditional-classroom/

    Jensen Comment
    I suspect if we try hard enough we can find all sorts of things that are controversial when comparing online versus traditional pedagogy. This begins with defining what "learning" means and what the purposes and goals of education and training. What follows are the many and varied types of students and well as alternative approaches to either online or learning education. For example a MOOC may have 50,000 students and zero personal communications between the teacher and students.  An online tutorial can have one-on-one intense personal communications. A traditional lecture course might have over 1,000 students or it might have less than 20 students.

    In the very modern online courses students may have face-to-face communications between themselves and with their teacher. Students may have informal online communications that resemble in many ways online communications inside a library or in a dorm lounge.

    Thus there is a very gray zone these days between "online" versus "traditional."

    And it's very shaky to say online is more cost-efficient. Residential campuses do shift living costs from the outside world to a campus. But after that a traditional course can be much cheaper or much more expensive than an online course. For example, it's often possible to have a scientific lab experience online, but it may be costly. On the other hand when very expensive expensive equipment is needed or very dangerous chemicals are being used, the only alternative may be onsite. There are certainly limits to online learning. Pilot training, for example, can be taught online, but at some point the student has to get into a real airplane. We can think of all sorts of medical school settings that must be onsite.

    Hence when we are comparing we must be very careful regarding just what it is we are comparing. Also these days traditional courses are hybrid with some online learning components. And online students may have to assemble sometime for traditional learning experiences.

    In any case, I don't want to detract from your reading of the above well-intended article, especially reading of the last portions of the article.


    The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning --- http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/index

    Bob Jensen's threads on Open (free) learning materials, MOOCs, and tutorials from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's treads on fee-based distance education alternatives around the world ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    For-Profit Universities Turn to Outsourcing Services and Promotions of Other Learning Providers
    "How For-Profit Education Is Now Embedded in Traditional Colleges," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 4, 2016 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/How-For-Profit-Education-Is/234550?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=bba4a6ecbd9d4ee8bac64e878e39e15e&elqCampaignId=2155&elqaid=7399&elqat=1&elqTrackId=64428ebd44b9487a9dde5d48cd6a071e 

    It has come to this. A once-soaring for-profit college company, Career Education Corporation, recently announced that it expected to have to pay a buyer to take some of its struggling colleges off its hands. Then it decided to just close them altogether.

    These days the fortunes of for-profit colleges are fading fast: Many face diving enrollments and shrinking market values. Corinthian Colleges Inc. went bankrupt this year, and several of the companies that remain are facing heightened legal, political, and regulatory scrutiny. Even the sector’s trade and lobbying group, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, has been hit by member defections that have forced it to cut its budget and lay off staff members.

    Yet while for-profit colleges are on the wane, there is another type of for-profit higher-education company whose profile and influence continues to expand. These new for-profits aren't seeking to run college programs themselves or win the traditional seal of accreditation. These companies do things like help traditional colleges start online programs, or offer colleges analysis on student behavior to help improve retention.

    Call it the "Embedded For-Profit" sector in education, and it has become the darling of the venture-capital crowd and attracted billions in financial backing.

    The emergence of this new sector also brings wide-ranging and yet-unexamined ramifications for colleges and policy makers, not to mention the taxpayers who indirectly subsidize these ventures.

    It's 'Everywhere'

    When for-profit higher education meant the University of Phoenix or an ITT Institute, many in traditional higher education largely dismissed it. It was "the other."

    But these newer educational for-profits — selling things like interactive courseware and academic-advising engines — come much closer to teaching and other educational activities that colleges have long done for themselves. (A whole other universe of for-profits is springing up along the edges of academe, including coding boot camps.)

    "Now, ‘for-profit’ is everywhere," says Jorge Klor de Alva, a former president of the University of Phoenix and currently president of the education-focused Nexus Research and Policy Center

    Continued in article


    Educating the Net Generation
    Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, Editors
    Educause,
    ISBN 0-9672853-2-1 (free online)
    2005
    http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub7101f.pdf

    Educating the Net Generation Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, Editors

    Chapter 1: Introduction by Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE, and James Oblinger, North Carolina State University

    Chapter 2: Is It Age or IT: First Steps Toward Understanding the Net Generation by Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE, and James Oblinger, North Carolina State University

    Chapter 3: Technology and Learning Expectations of the Net Generation by Greg Roberts, University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown

    Chapter 4: Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not Just the Cool New Thing by Ben McNeely, North Carolina State University

    Chapter 5: The Student’s Perspective by Carie Windham, North Carolina State University

    Chapter 6: Preparing the Academy of Today for the Learner of Tomorrow by Joel Hartman, Patsy Moskal, and Chuck Dziuban, University of Central Florida

    • Introduction • Generations and Technology
    • Emerging Pattern s
    • Assessing the Generations in Online Learning
    • Learning Engagement, Interaction Value, and Enhanced Learning in the Generation s
    • Responding to Result s
    • Excellent Teaching
    • Conclusion • Endnote s
    • Further Reading
    • About the Authors

    Chapter 7: Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology by Robert Kvavik, ECAR and University of Minnesota


    If it grows, this may be a great opportunity for genuine experts who are good at online teaching and want to "own" and "promote"  their own courses
    "New Adjunct-Focused Venture Wins Approval to Offer Courses," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/bottomline/new-adjunct-focused-venture-wins-approval-to-offer-courses/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    A new for-profit education organization, designed to give more academic and financial control to the adjunct instructors who teach its online courses, has just won approval from the state of Vermont to operate.

    The Vermont State Board of Education’s approval of Oplerno (the company’s name stands for “open learning organization”) means that its courses can qualify for credit at colleges and universities, at the institutions’ discretion.

    Robert Skiff, the entrepreneur behind Oplerno, says he plans to begin offering the first classes within three weeks and to offer as many as 100 by the end of 2014. Already, he says, more than 80 faculty members have signed up to develop classes in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences.

    Under the Oplerno model, tuition per course would run from about $500 to $1,500, with a maximum of 25 students per class.  Instructors will design—and own—the content and set the price of the course, within those parameters. The instructors would then earn 80 percent to 90 percent of the revenue the class generates.

    Jensen Comment
    The key to success is for instructors to be so good that they can persuade accredited colleges and universities to offer their courses. In turn this is an opportunity for financially-strapped schools to fill in gaps in their curricula. Although in most instances transcript credit will be given for these courses, I can also anticipate that some colleges may find this to be an opportunity to provide more offerings in non-credit remedial courses.

    For example, accounting Ph.D,s are among the most highly paid faculty on campus with starting salaries now in excess of $120,000 plus summer deals. Urban colleges can generally fill in accounting faculty gaps with local experts in such areas as advanced tax, advanced accounting, auditing, and AIS. But remote colleges, like most of those in Vermont, generally do not have a pool of local experts to serve as accounting adjuncts. The above Oplerno innovative approach is a great way to fill in faculty gaps with outstanding experts, some of whom may even have Ph.D. credentials such as retired accounting faculty like me.

    Even urban schools might fill in gaps. For example, this year SMU in Dallas had a gap in faculty to teach advanced-level accounting courses. They paid my friend Tom Selling in Phoenix a generous stipend plus air fare to commute and teach regularly on the SMU campus in Dallas. Tom does have an accounting Ph.D. from OSU and research and teaching experience in several outstanding universities including Dartmouth. But he now primarily earns a living in consulting. Those weekly flights plus long taxi rides are not only expensive to SMU, but the the round trip travel times must be a real waste of time for Tom. Think of how much more efficient it would be to buy Tom's online advanced-level accounting courses if (a big IF) Tom was willing to teach online for a much higher stipend.

    I anticipate resistance from tenured faculty in some colleges and universities to this type of coverage on the grounds that it may become an excuse to not hire expensive faculty to serve on campus. However, I assume that control for each outsourced course will primarily reside within each on-campus department where local faculty generally have a lot of power in their small domains. There can be added incentives such as the spreading of performance raises and travel budgets over fewer onsite faculty.

    The main objection, a big one, will be that faculty on campus have many more responsibilities than to teach their courses. They assist in recruiting and advising students and serve on all sorts of academic and administrative committees. They are responsible for research and become a major factor in the reputations of their departments and their colleges.  They are huge factors in alumni relations and student placement. Hence, I foresee that outsourced coverage of courses will only be a small part of the curriculum of any department. It could become a means of having a better curriculum for a few courses, particularly those advanced specialty courses that are really do well with existing onsite faculty.

     


    The President of Northwestern University Predicts Online Learning … in 1934! ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/the-president-of-northwestern-university-predicts-online-learning-in-1934.html
    Only the medium was radio in those days --- the barrier then and now was inspiring people to want to sweat and endure pain to learn
    Bob Jensen's threads for online education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

    Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

     


    Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States
    The Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, 2012
    http://babson.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4SjGnHcStH5g9G5

    Some key report findings include:

    • Over 6.7 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2011 term, an increase of 570,000 students over the previous year.
    • Thirty-two percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
    • Seventy-seven percent of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face.
    • Only 30.2 percent of chief academic officers believe that their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education - a rate that is lower than recorded in 2004

    Full Report Now Available.
    (PDF and several eBook formats)


    The whole world is invited to learn from BYU's many online courses (except for high school athletes)
    "Black Mark for BYU," by Doug Lederman , Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2010 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/09/byu

    Brigham Young University's Independent Study program appears to be wildly successful. At any given time, students are taking more than 100,000 high school courses and 22,000 college classes, for a variety of reasons: to get courses out of the way in the summer, finish high school or college early, or improve their performance in classes in which they struggled. Based on those numbers and the fees the program charges for its nearly 600 online courses, the program generates millions of dollars in revenue a year. (BYU officials won't say.)

    A tiny fraction of its enrollments -- about 500 a year -- are high school athletes seeking to use the BYU program's courses to meet the National Collegiate Athletic Association's freshman eligibility standards. Yet for the second time in several years, dealings with the high-stakes world of big-time college athletics appear to pose a potentially serious threat to the 90-year-old program's status. Last month, the NCAA decided to "de-certify" the BYU program (and one other, the American School) as a legitimate provider of "nontraditional" courses. The decision came in response to a change in NCAA rules this spring requiring "nontraditional" courses to include regular interaction between students and professors, and to set specific timeframes in which the courses must be completed.

    Brigham Young officials expressed dismay about the NCAA's decision, which they said had caught them by surprise. "We do want to look at what we can do to be in compliance with what the NCAA has put in place," said Carri Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the university.

    She noted that BYU Independent Study had made a set of changes in its programs and policies the last time it drew NCAA scrutiny -- when athletes at several colleges were found to have earned credit from their institutions for courses at BYU in which they did little or no work (or cheated to complete). Among other changes, Jenkins noted, BYU Independent Study altered its policies surrounding when and how tests are administered, and stopped letting athletes enrolled in NCAA member colleges enroll in its classes.

    But the courses remain a commonly-trod path for high school athletes seeking to meet the NCAA's academic eligibility standards for freshman athletes, which require students to surpass a minimum grade-point average in 16 core high school courses to compete in their first year in college. BYU and the American School, which is based in Illinois, are among the most common programs from which high school athletes seek eligibility through nontraditional courses, which the association defines as "[t]hose taught via the Internet, distance learning, independent study, individualized instruction, correspondence, and courses taught by similar means, including software-based credit recovery courses."

    Use of the courses has burgeoned, and in March the association's Division I members approved a rule aimed at toughening oversight of them, said Chuck Wynne, an NCAA spokesman. "Members were obviously concerned that prospective student-athletes were taking these courses and not being prepared for the rigors of college academics," he said. The changes require that instructors and students have "ongoing access to one another and regular interaction with one another for purposes of teaching, evaluating and providing assistance to the student throughout the duration of the course"; that the "student's work ... is available for review and validation"; and that "[a] defined time for completion of the course is identified by the high school or secondary school program."

    In the wake of the rules changes, NCAA officials began reviewing providers of nontraditional courses, and the association has "approved a bunch" as meeting the new standards, Wynne said. So far, only BYU Independent Study and the American School were found to fall short. (American School responded to the NCAA's findings, which it is appealing, here.)

    Wynne declined to specify exactly how and why BYU was deemed to fall short of the NCAA standards. But he said that most of the scrutiny of the nontraditional programs focused on the lack of regular, sustained interaction between students and instructors -- ideally interaction initiated by the instructor, designed to ensure at least some oversight of the students' work -- and on some programs' failure to set a minimum timeframe for the completion of course work.

    One NCAA review -- "not necessarily at BYU," Wynne said -- found that one high school athlete had completed "a semester of algebra in six minutes."

    "We understand that these are good quality educational tools when implemented and done right," Wynne said, noting that the NCAA is not philosophically opposed to online learning. "It's mostly about the administration of these programs. You can have the best curriculum in the world, but if someone does algebra in six minutes, you know there's something wrong."

    Jenkins of BYU insisted that the six-minute-algebra incident had most definitely not taken place in one of the university's online offerings. She said that the university plans to do whatever it needs to to reassure the NCAA that its courses are of high quality, and that the independent study program had not heard from past, current or prospective students who might be concerned about a stigma from the NCAA's action.


    "For-Profit Colleges Are Projected to Sharply Increase Their Share of Adult Students," by Kelly Truong, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 14, 2010 --- http://chronicle.com/article/For-Profit-Colleges-Are/65942/ 

    "Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College:  A 50-year rise in grade-point averages is being fueled by private institutions, a recent study finds," by Catherine Rampell. The New York Times, April 19, 2010 ---
    http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109339/want-a-higher-gpa-go-to-a-private-college?mod=edu-collegeprep
     

    Bob Jensen's grim threads on for-profit universities and the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    Fee-Based Distance Education Degree Experiments at Yale and Stanford

    "Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-announces-blended-online-masters-degree/56003?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Yale University is creating a master’s program that will hold many courses online, continuing the Ivy League institution’s foray into “blended” learning.

    The online program, to be offered by the Yale School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology. They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they live.

    It is the second professional school at Yale to try the “blended” model for a graduate program, following the Yale School of Nursing, which opened a partially online doctoral degree in 2011.

    Yale has taken an active but measured interest in online education in the past decade. In 2007 it became one of the first elite institutions to post lecture videos online at no charge. In 2011 it began offering online summer courses to small groups of undergraduates for credit. In 2013 it joined with Coursera and started building MOOCs.

    But a degree program that includes fully online courses is a step toward a different vision of how Yale and other highly selective traditional universities are likely to incorporate online education. Free online courses might make headlines, but tuition-based professional degrees in high-demand fields such as health care are where online courses, and the companies that help build them, are gaining a foothold.

    Other top-tier universities have created online versions of their professional-degree programs, which is something Yale noticed when taking stock of its online presence in 2012. The Johns Hopkins University, for example, offers an online master’s program in public health that delivers about 80 percent of its coursework on the web.

    2U, the online “enabler” company that is helping Yale develop the new program, previously built nursing programs at Georgetown University and Simmons College, as well as programs in public health and health administration at George Washington University.

    Institutions typically sign contracts with companies like 2U when they want to create new online programs as fast as possible without spending a lot of cash upfront. That is an especially attractive option for universities that are trying to grab a larger chunk of the market for high-demand professional degrees in fields such as health, nursing, data science, and business. It is there that 2U and others have found their sweet spot. The companies provide the technology platform and marketing expertise, and take a large share of the tuition revenues.

    Yale would hire new instructors to teach courses in the program, which is still awaiting accreditation approval. The tuition and faculty-to-student ratio would be roughly equivalent to the residential program.

    James Van Rhee, director of the program, said he did not know if the online version would be more profitable, but he did expect it would expand the medical school’s reach — especially in rural areas. The institution hopes to increase enrollments from 40, the size of the current program, to around 300.

    “I don’t know if it will be cost-efficient for us,” said Robert J. Alpern, dean of the medical school, but “hopefully it will be cost-efficient for the students, because they’ll be able to do it from home.”

    Distance Education:  Stanford Center for Professional Development
    Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive in that students must work for employers Must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements are as follows:

    For details go to
    http://scpd.stanford.edu/home

    Most other top universities in the USA now have selected online certificate and degree programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of interest and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online doctoral programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for employment in the Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such doctoral degrees when seeking employment in the Academy.

    "Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online) Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 6, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online 

    Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took its relationship with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of the Internet.

    “I don’t know of anything else like this,” says Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online course].”

    Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May 2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford, and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.

    “We really want to create the high-engagement, community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she says.

    The classes will be offered on a platform supplied by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program: About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.

    “This is by far the most serious and most significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.

    People go to business school for more than just lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer skills and build a network of peers.”

    The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including Harvard Business Schools $1,500 nine-week online program and the Wharton School’s entirely free first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera last fall.

    The program may seem less pricey, though, to the company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus program costs executives $62,500.

    To Novoed, which also provides technology to Wharton, the Haas School of Business, and the Darden School of Business, the Internet is an obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive education programs.

    Saberi says companies are interested in elite training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We expect that programs like this are going to grow.”

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

     


    Government Aid Will Still Flow to For-Profit College Programs of Dubious Quality
    "Education Dept. Will Release Stricter Rules for For-Profits but Delays One on 'Gainful Employment'," by Kelly Fields and Jennifer Gonzalez, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2010 --- http://chronicle.com/article/Education-Dept-Will-Release/65958/

    After an intense lobbying effort by for-profit colleges, the Education Department announced Tuesday that it will postpone the release of a rule that proprietary institutions said would shutter thousands of their programs.

    The rule, which would cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates carry high student-loan debt relative to their incomes, is one of 14 that the department and college stakeholders have been negotiating over the past eight months. The other regulations, including one that would tighten a ban on incentive compensation for college recruiters, will be made public Friday.

    In a call with reporters Tuesday, an Education Department official said the agency still plans to hold for-profits accountable for preparing their graduates for "gainful employment," but needs more time to develop an appropriate measure of that outcome. The official said the proposal will be released later this summer, and will most likely be included in a package of final rules due out in November.

    "We have many areas of agreement where we can move forward," Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, said in a statement. "But some key issues around gainful employment are complicated, and we want to get it right, so we will be coming back with that shortly."

    The delay gives for-profit colleges more time to fight the department's proposal to bar aid for programs in which a majority of students' loan payments would exceed 8 percent of the lowest quarter of graduates' expected earnings, based on a 10-year repayment plan. The colleges have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing an alternative that would require programs to provide prospective students with more information about their graduates' debt levels and salaries.

    Their lobbying and public-relations blitz has met with mixed success. While the department has not yet abandoned plans to measure graduates' debt-to-income ratios, the rules that will be released Friday would require programs to disclose their graduation and job-placement rates and median debt levels—the approach favored by for-profits.

    A Welcome Delay Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, said the delay in releasing the rest of the rule suggested that "the department has heard the message from industry and Congress, and that there was some overreaching."

    "Clearly, trying to gather more data before proceeding is being responsible," he added.

    For-profit colleges have complained that the department has refused to release the data it used to justify drafting the rule, and have questioned whether they even exist.

    The fight over gainful employment comes amid increased federal scrutiny of the for-profit sector, which educates a growing share of students and is highly dependent on federal student aid. On Thursday, the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a hearing to examine whether accrediting agencies are doing enough to ensure that students studying online are getting an adequate amount of instruction for the degrees they earn. The hearing will focus on a recent report by the Education Department's Office of Inspector General that questioned the decision of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations, to approve accreditation of American InterContinental University, a for-profit college owned by the Career Education Corporation. The Senate education committee follows with a hearing next week focused on the growth of the for-profit sector and the risks that may pose to taxpayers.

    In a statement issued Tuesday, the chairman of the Senate committee praised the proposed rules. "The federal government must ensure that the more than $20-billion in student aid that these schools receive is being well spent and students are being well informed and well served," said Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. "For-profit colleges must work for students and taxpayers, not just shareholders."

    Meanwhile, a top Republican on the panel, Sen. Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, called the disclosures that would be required by the rules that will be released on Friday "much better than the first approach on gainful employment." Mr. Alexander, a former secretary of education, had threatened to offer an amendment to withhold the funds needed to put the rule into effect if the department followed through with its original proposal.

    "Secretary Duncan is focusing on a real problem," he said. "Some students are borrowing too much and not getting enough value for what they are paying."

    Tougher Stance on Recruitment But if the department is showing signs that it may soften its stance on gainful employment, it has dug in its heels on another controversial issue: recruiter compensation. During negotiations over the rules, the department proposed striking a dozen "safe harbors" from a ban on compensating recruiters based on student enrollment. It followed through with that proposal in the rules due out Friday, while promising to provide guidance on what is—and isn't—allowed under the ban.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges operating in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    "How Colleges Are Buying Respect:  For-profit education companies are scooping up small schools to gain accreditation—and the financial aid dollars that come with it," by Daniel Golden, Business Week, March 4, 2010 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_11/b4170050344129.htm?link_position=link4

    TT Educational Services (ESI) didn't pay $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June just to acquire its red-brick campus, 1,200 students, or computer science and aviation training programs.

    To ITT, the third-biggest higher-education company in the U.S., the Nashua (N.H.) college's "most attractive" feature was its regional accreditation, says Michael Goldstein, an attorney at Dow Lohnes, a Washington firm that has long represented the Carmel (Ind.) company. Regional accreditation, the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard, is a way to increase enrollment and tap into the more than $100 billion the federal government pays out annually in financial aid.

    The nation's for-profit higher-education companies have tripled enrollment, to 1.4 million students, and revenue, to $26 billion, in the past decade, in part through the recruitment of low-income students and active-duty military. Now they're taking a new tack. By exploiting loopholes in government regulation and an accreditation system that wasn't designed to evaluate for-profit takeovers, they're acquiring struggling nonprofit and religious colleges—and their coveted accreditation. Often their goal is to transform the schools into taxpayer-funded behemoths by dramatically expanding enrollment with online-only programs; most of those new students will receive federally backed financial aid, which is only available at accredited colleges.

    "The companies are buying accreditation," said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany who studies for-profit higher education. "You can get accreditation a lot of ways, but all of the others take time. They don't have time. They want to boost enrollment 100% in two years."

    By acquiring regional accreditation, trade schools and online colleges gain a credential associated with traditional academia. Six nonprofit regional associations set standards on financial stability, governance, faculty, and academic programs. Normally the process takes five years and requires evaluations by outside professors. Most for-profits have been accredited by less prestigious national organizations. Students enrolled at both regionally and nationally accredited colleges can receive federal aid, but those at regionally accredited schools can transfer credits more easily from one college to the next.

    "CREATIVE ARRANGEMENTS"

    For-profit education companies, including ITT and Baltimore-based Laureate Education, have purchased at least 16 nonprofit colleges with regional accreditation since 2004. The U.S. Education Dept., which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that requires a two-year wait before new for-profit colleges can qualify for assistance, says Deputy Education Under Secretary Robert Shireman. Under federal regulations taking effect on July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the Education Secretary if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50% in one year. "It certainly has been a challenge both for accreditors and the Department of Education to keep up with the new creative arrangements that have been developing," Shireman says.

    Buying accreditation lets the new owners immediately benefit from federal student aid, which provides more than 80% of revenue for some for-profit colleges, instead of having to wait at least two years. Traditional colleges are also more inclined to offer transfer credits for courses taken at regionally approved institutions, making it easier to attract students.

    The regional accreditors, which rely on academic volunteers, bestow the valuable credential with scant scrutiny of the buyers' backgrounds, says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers in Washington.

    March 6, 2010 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [gangolly@GMAIL.COM]

    Bob,

    I agree that losing accreditation can be a disaster. But then again, how many institutions lose it? It is a black swan event?

    I abhor the thought of looking upon education as a "business", but if we want accountability, we must recognise that there is a business aspect to education. And it is here that some marriage of business and education might help.

    In businesses, normal attrition takes care of efficiency and career advancement problems the same way that wars take care of similar issues in the military. In the universities, on the other hand, the tenure system prevents that from happening. That has two consequences:

    1. It reduces mobility and promotes stagnation. So, the only people who can and do move are the well-dressed beggars in the blog I sent a bit earlier today.

    2. The career path comes to a dead end once you have reached the full (or chaired) slot. The result is that thew organisation comes to resemble an inverted pyramid, obviously a disequilibrium. Most universities solve this problem by creating fancy titles and taking people out of the classrooms (how many Deans or vice Presidents teach or are active in their fields?).

    The businesses taking over smaller institutions might bring better accountability and greater efficiencies.But I am not sure it would maintain the standard of education or sustain freedom of inquiry and academic freedom. Such universities might resemble Chinese factories producing standardised low quality stuff at an attractive price.

    Jagdish S. Gangolly
    Department of Informatics College of Computing & Information State University of New York at Albany Harriman Campus, Building 7A, Suite 220 Albany, NY 12222 Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247

     

    March 6, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi Jagdish,

    Anecdotally, I know of quite a few colleges who were put on regional accreditation probation. The only way they saved their accreditation was to manage to get their finances and academic standards back on track. There are of course some that went under.

    One of the best known cases recently was Florida A&M’s loss of accreditation. This university has since turned itself around ---
    http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2008/06/30/florida-am-regains-accreditation.html
    Another famous case of a university that let academic standards slide was Gallaudet University ---
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202453.html
    I think Gallaudet turned itself around.

    There are also some Colleges of Business that were put on AACSB probation. In most of those cases the university had to take from Peter Humanities to pay Paul Business.

    This brings up one point concerning strategy regarding accrediting a program within a university. In truth, AACSB accreditation is very costly with only limited benefits to universities that have solid reputations university-wide. For example, who cares if the Harvard Business School has AACSB accreditation? For that matter, who cares if the University of Maine is AACSB accreditation.

    When I was at the University of Maine (UMO) I was the person assigned the duty of getting AACSB accreditation for UMO. Doing so was the strategy of a very smart Dean (for four decades) of the College of Business named Stan Devino (one of my all-time best friends in my entire life). Somehow Stan convinced the President of UMO that getting AACSB accreditation was a great idea.

    But Stan’s secret motive was to lever UMO for more resources. At the time UMO’s College of Business was under fed in terms of numbers of tenured business faculty, office space, salaries of business faculty, and scholarships for the MBA program. We got some resources to gain the initial accreditation. But in later years when UMO budgets fell under greater stress, the College of Business was not cut back as much as other campus programs because losing AACSB accreditation would be devastating for UMO. I suspect the President of UMO rued the day he helped us become attain AACSB accreditation. The College of Business even jumped to the top of the capital expenditure list for a great new building.

    Hence, the threat of losing accreditation is a double-edged sword that can play to the advantage of a cunning Dean. If I was the President of a reputed college I would probably throw any dean out of my office who proposed a quest to get program accreditation unless there were exceptional benefits from such accreditation. If graduates of a program virtually cannot advance unless their program has accreditation then this is an exceptional benefit. For example, I think this is the case for nursing programs. It is not the case for business programs in universities have great university-wide reputations.

    Bob Jensen

    Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation controversies ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AccreditationIssues

    Online Distance Education is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance in Traditional as Well as For-Profit Colleges ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation

    The Dark Side ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


    Absent Student Shadows in Class:  Virtual Students in the Classroom

    April 1, 2010 message from Robert Blystone [mailto:rblyston@trinity.edu]

    I remember years ago receiving my first FAXed term paper (35 pages). I can add a new technological wonder to my first-time teaching experiences. One of my students left home early for Easter. I have a lab/class that meets at 4pm Tuesday and Thursday. She Skyped into the class by contacting another student in the class with a laptop. She attended the class via Skype and commented on the festivities as they happened. Amazing.

    Bob Blystone

    Robert V. Blystone, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Trinity University One Trinity Place San Antonio, Texas 78212
    rblyston@trinity.edu
    210-999-7243

    A[ro; 2, 2010 reply  from Knutel, Phillip [pknutel@BENTLEY.EDU]  

    We use Saba-Centra - Skype on steroids, essentially - in 90-100 grad classes in our MSA and other grad programs every year.  We have a camera built into the back wall of 13 "hybrid online" classrooms so online students can see both the professor and classroom students as well as anything on the PC or written on the Smartboard.  Faculty clip on a wireless mic, and there are built-in mics at every student seat.  Online students click on a "raise hand" icon to ask a question, and when called on, are heard via the ceiling speakers.  If online students have webcams, the class sees them as well. 

    As of last semester, 37% of students attended online vs. in the classroom, and 22% said the online option was why they chose Bentley.  90% of in-class and online students play back recorded classes, and unlike most online formats that struggle with simple student retention, 80% of online students rated their experience an 8 or higher on a 1-10 scale.  One of these days, we may start advertising our hybrid-online programs, as enrollments have grown significantly almost entirely due to word-of-mouth.

    We have a TA in all these classes to monitor online student technical/audio issues, and we also use the TA PC that we install next to the primary classroom PC in the podium as a "hot swap" backup PC.  If anything goes wrong with the main PC, we can switch the room over to the TA PC in a matter of seconds to keep classes running seamlessly until the next break.  These things you learn after doing this for 10 years!

    Phil

    Phillip Knutel, Ph.D.
    Executive Director of Academic Technology, the Library, and Online Learning Bentley University 180 Adamian Academic Center
    175 Forest St.
    Waltham, MA 02452
    781.
    891.3422/3125 (fax)

    April 2, 2010 reply form Peters, James M [jpeters@NMHU.EDU]

    In effect, this is how I teach all my classes now.  I use Elluminate instead of Skype, which works much better because I can broadcast what I am displaying on my in class computer and I don't broadcast a video of the classroom, just sound and what is displaying on the computer.  This makes what on the computer much clearer.  I have some students in class and some students attending via the internet, but they are treated the same in the class and I seamlessly switch from working with students in class and working with those on the internet (i.e., I use Socratic Method and so classes are dialogs and group problem solving exercises, not lectures).

    Nothing really new here, at least not in my little corner of the world.

     Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

    Bob Jensen's neglected threads on classroom design are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Design


    "Colleges See 17 Percent Increase in Online Enrollment," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Colleges-See-17-Percent/20820/

    Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2008, according to the findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday by the Sloan Consortium.

    The growth rate eclipsed last year's 12-percent increase and dwarfed the 1.2 percent growth rate of the overall higher-education student population. The report, which has become a widely cited benchmark of distance learning, found a total of more than 4.6-million online students overall. That's up from about 3.9 million the previous year.

    Despite this surge, the data suggest that not enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

    "They have to wake up and begin to think about this as a strategic item," Mr. Mayadas says.

    The report found that public institutions are by far the most likely to believe that online education is key to their long-term strategy. That reflects the striking demand for online couses at institutions like the University of Central Florida, where more than half of the 53,500 students take at least one online course each year.

    The university's online efforts stem from its mission of providing access and its budget realities. All new construction money is "basically frozen at the state level," says Tom Cavanagh, assistant vice president for distributed learning.

    "For us to grow, it’s going to be online until that money is freed up again," he says.

    The Sloan report is based on data collected from more than 2,500 colleges and universities by the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board. Among the study's other key findings:

    * Bad economic times, which traditionally drive more people back to school, are having a particularly strong impact on demand for online courses. Seventy-three percent of institutions report increased demand for existing online courses, compared with 54 percent for face-to-face. Sixty-six percent report increased demand for new online courses. And students are clamoring for distance education at colleges that don't offer it; 45 percent of institutions in that category report growing demand for new online courses and programs.

    * Fewer than one-third of chief academic officers think that their faculty members accept the "value and legitimacy" of online education, a perception that hasn't change much in the past six years. (Another survey, released in 2009, also reflected broad faculty suspicion about the quality of online courses.)

    * More than two-thirds of institutions have a contingency plan to deal with a disruption from the H1N1 flu, and substituting online for face-to-face classes is an element in 67 percent of those plans.

    * The overwhelming majority of the 4.6 million online students — over 82 percent — are undergraduates.

     


    I must be psychic, because I've been saying this all along --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
    So has Amy Dunbar --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm

    "The Medium is Not the Message,"  by Jonathan Kaplan, Inside Higher Ed, August 11, 2009 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/08/11/kaplan 

    A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face instruction.

    The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

    Except for one article,
    on this Web site, you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.

    But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion. I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report showing that students in online learning environments performed worse, there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.

    I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.

    We know that online learning requires devout attention on the part of both the professor and the student -- and a collaboration between the two -- in a different way from that of a face-to-face classroom. These critical aspects of online education are worth particular mention:

    • Greater student engagement: In an online classroom, there is no back row and nowhere for students to hide. Every student participates in class.
    • Increased faculty attention: In most online classes, the faculty’s role is focused on mentoring students and fostering discussion. Interestingly, many faculty members choose to teach online because they want more student interaction.
    • Constant access: The Internet is open 24/7, so students can share ideas and “sit in class” whenever they have time or when an idea strikes -- whether it be the dead of night or during lunch. Online learning occurs on the student’s time, making it more accessible, convenient, and attainable.

    At Walden University, where I am president, we have been holding ourselves accountable for years, as have many other online universities, regarding assessment. All universities must ensure that students are meeting program outcomes and learning what they need for their jobs. To that end, universities should be better able to demonstrate -- quantitatively and qualitatively -- the employability and success of their students and graduates.

    Recently, we examined the successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming better teachers.

    In higher education, there is still too much debate about how we are delivering content: Is it online education, face-to-face teaching, or hybrid instruction? It’s time for us to stop categorizing higher education by the medium of delivery and start focusing on its impact and outcomes.

    Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study concluded, online education can do that and much more.

    But Kaplan above ignores some of the dark side aspects of distance education and education technology in general --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
    The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is that if distance education is done correctly with intensive online communications, instructors soon become burned out. In an effort to avoid burn out, much of the learning effectiveness is lost. Hence the distance education paradox.

    Kaplan also ignores some of the strong empirical support for online learning, especially the enlightening SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

    August 11, 2009 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

    Isn't online education more expensive than face to face? With face to face it class sizes can be a bit larger. Online, or so I've read, requires a huge time commitment from instructor. At least, this is what I've concluded from reading various reports.

    David Albrecht

    August 11, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi David,

    I have a sadly neglected Website on costs of distance education programs at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/distcost.htm

    You are raising a very complicated issue, not the least of which is that there is a temptation in major state universities and some prestigious private universities to turn distance education into cash cows. A recent example is the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee that started charging higher tuition for distance education courses that most likely are cheaper than onsite course equivalents.

    Cost varies all over the board. Stanford adopted the ADEPT engineering masters degree to be almost entirely a video degree program with very lite communications between faculty and students (thereby greatly reducing faculty cost) but having a heavy fixed cost to develop the videos. However, this pedagogy only works with highly talented (i.e., engineering students admitted to Stanford’s graduate program) and highly motivated (e.g., Silicon valley engineers) who need very little hands on guidance.

    In contrast, the University of Connecticut pays Amy Dunbar to teach tax to graduate students who occupy her time even at home with intense instant messaging. This is almost the opposite end of the spectrum except that her students are talented and motivated ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm

    At the opposite end of the spectrum we have students in need of remedial studies who are trying to learn with a kid squirming on each knee. Effective distance education in such circumstances is very, very expensive.

    Sadly, many distance education programs are designed on the cheap, and students are led into ineffective courses.

    Once again one of my favorite examples of how effective distance education can be is a case study instigated by the Chronicle of Higher Education to have one of its editors (Goldie) take a Not-for-Profit Accounting Course at the University of Phoenix:

    The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
    Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

    ·         All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase

    ·         $1,600 fee for the course and materials

    ·         Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content

    ·         Instructor had good communications with students and between students

    ·         Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs

    ·         30% of grade from team projects

    ·         Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie

    ·         Goldie earned a 92 (A-)

    ·         She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she had the time

    ·         She considered the course to have a heavy workload

     

    Since the University of Phoenix did not have to hire a tenure-track accounting professor with a PhD, I suspect the faculty cost is relatively low vis-à-vis the new not-for-profit onsite courses at Rutgers. Of course since it is very difficult to find specialists in not-for-profit specialty courses (also in tax courses), even Rutgers might be hiring specialized practitioners for onsite courses.

    In any case, cost analysis of online versus onsite education is very, very difficult due to the usual suspects --- joint costs, indirect costs, and highly variable circumstances leading to huge missing variables in cost models.

    Bob Jensen

    August 11, 2009 reply from Steve Markoff [smarkoff@KIMSTARR.ORG]

    Reply 1
    Bob:

    I've always believed that the role of the teacher is one of FACILITATOR. My role in the classroom is making it EASIER for information to move from one place to another - from point A to point B. This could be from textbook to student, it could be from the outside world to the student, from another student to the student, from the student him or herself to that same student AND from teacher to student (me to them). In defining the word 'teaching', I think many people overemphasize the last transition that I mentioned, thinking that the primary movement of information is from them(the teacher) to the students. In fact, it constitutes a minority of total facilitated information flow in a college classroom. I think this misunderstanding leads many to underestimate the value of other sources in the education process other than themselves. Online content is just one of many alternative sources.

    Unfortunately, online formats do allow certain professors to hide behind the electronic cloak and politely excuse themselves from the equation, which greatly hurts the student. Also, online formats can be fertile ground for professors who lack not only the desire to 'teach' but the ability and thus become mere administrators versus teachers.

    steve

    Hi John and Pat and Others,

    I would not say that out loud to Amy Dunbar or Denny Beresford that they’re easy graders ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm

    I would not say that out loud to the graduates of two principles of accounting weed out courses year after year at Brigham Young University where classes meet on relatively rare occasion for inspiration about accountancy but not technical learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

    Try to tell the graduates of Stanford University’s ADEPT Masters of Electrical Engineering program that they had an easier time of it because the entire program was online.

    There’s an interesting article entitled how researchers misconstrue causality:

    Like elaborately plumed birds … we preen and strut and display our t-values.” That was Edward Leamer’s uncharitable description of his profession in 1983.

    “Cause and Effect:  Instrumental variable help to isolate causal relationships, but they can be taken too far,” The Economist, August 15-21, 20098 Page 68.

    It is often the case that distance education courses are taught by non-tenured instructors, and non-tenured instructors may be easier with respect to grading than tenured faculty because they are even more in need of strong teaching evaluations --- so as to not lose their jobs. The problem may have nothing whatsoever to do with online versus onsite education --- ergo misconstrued causality.

    I think it’s very rewarding to look at grading in formal studies using the same full-time faculty teaching sections of online versus onsite students. By formal study, I mean using the same instructors, the same materials, and essentially the same examinations. The major five-year, multimillion dollar study that first caught my eye was the SCALE experiments on the campus of the University of Illinois where 30 courses from various disciplines were examined over a five year experiment.

    Yes the SCALE experiments showed that some students got higher grades online, notably B students who became A students and C students who became A students. The online pedagogy tended to have no effect on D and F students --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

    Listen to Dan Stone’s audio about the SCALE Experiments --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    But keep in mind that in the SCALE experiments, the same instructor of a course was grading both the online and onsite sections of the same course. The reason was not likely to be that online sections were easier. The SCALE experiments collected a lot of data pointing to more intense communications with instructors and more efficient use of student’s time that is often wasted in going to classes.

    The students in the experiment were full time on campus students, such that the confounding problems of having adult part-time students was not a factor in the SCALE experiments of online, asynchronous learning.

     

    A Statement About Why the SCALE Experiments Were Funded
    ALN = Asynchronous Learning
    We are particularly interested in new outcomes that may be possible through ALN. Asynchronous computer networks have the potential to improve contact with faculty, perhaps making self-paced learning a realizable goal for some off- and on-campus students. For example, a motivated student could progress more rapidly toward a degree. Students who are motivated but find they cannot keep up the pace, may be able to slow down and take longer to complete a degree, and not just drop out in frustration. So we are interested in what impact ALN will have on outcomes such as time-to-degree and student retention. There are many opportunities where ALN may contribute to another outcome: lowering the cost of education, e.g., by naturally introducing new values for old measures such as student-faculty ratios. A different kind of outcome for learners who are juggling work and family responsibilities, would be to be able to earn a degree or certification at home. This latter is a special focus for us.

    Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in
    Learning Outside the Classroom at 
    http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/
     

    Another study that I love to point to was funded by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read about when one of the Chronicle’s senior editors took a Governmental Accounting Course at the University of Phoenix during which the instructor of the course had not idea that Goldie Blumenstyk was assessing how difficult or how easy the course was for students in general. I think Goldie’s audio report of her experience is still available from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Goldie came away from the course exhausted.

    The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
    Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

    ·         All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase

    ·         $1,600 fee for the course and materials

    ·         Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content

    ·         Instructor had good communications with students and between students

    ·         Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs

    ·         30% of grade from team projects

    ·         Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie

    ·         Goldie earned a 92 (A-)

    ·         She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she had the time

    ·         She considered the course to have a heavy workload

     

    "U. of Phoenix Reports on Its Students' Academic Achievement," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3115n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

     

    The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13, 2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers --- http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm

    "The Engaged E-Learner," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, November 13, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/13/nsse

     


    November 2, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [KOTLas@email.unc.edu]

    STATISTICS ON THE STATE OF EDUCATION, U.S. AND WORLDWIDE

    The Sloan Consortium's "Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning," a report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education, is "aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education." These questions include:

    -- How many students are learning online?

    -- Where has the growth in online learning occurred?

    -- What are the prospects for future online enrollment growth?

    -- What are the barriers to widespread adoption of online education?

    The report, and previous years' editions, can be downloaded at no cost at http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp  

    The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/ 

    . . . .

    Each year, since 2001, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes the "Education at a Glance" report, an "annual round-up of data and analysis on education, providing a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on education systems in the OECD's 30 member countries and in a number of partner economies." Main areas covered in the reports are:

    -- participation and achievement in education

    -- public and private spending on education

    -- the state of lifelong learning

    -- conditions for pupils and teachers

    The current and all past "Education at a Glance" reports are available online at no charge at http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343,en_2649_39263294_39251550_1_1_1_1,00.html 

    The OECD's mission is "to help its member countries to achieve sustainable economic growth and employment and to raise the standard of living in member countries while maintaining financial stability -- all this in order to contribute to the development of the world economy." As one of the world's largest publishers in the fields of economics and public policy, OECD monitors, analyzes, and forecasts economic developments and social changes in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, and taxation. For more information contact: OECD, 2 rue Andre Pascal, F-75775, Paris Cedex 16 France; tel: +33 1.45.24.82.00; fax: +33 1.45.24.85.00; email: webmaster@oecd.org ; Web: http://www.oecd.org

    RECOMMENDED READING

    "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.

    "The Basement Interviews: Peter Suber" October 2007 http://poynder.blogspot.com/2007/10/basement-interviews-peter-suber.html 

    Journalist Richard Poynder writes on information technology and online rights issues. In a series of interviews he speaks with leading advocates in the open source movement. One of his recent interviews was with Peter Suber, a leading proponent of the open access movement and author of SPARC Open Access Newsletter and Open Access News. (Suber's SPARC OPEN ACCESS NEWSLETTER is available at
    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm )

     


    The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13, 2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers --- http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm

    "The Engaged E-Learner," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, November 13, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/13/nsse

    The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released today, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers.

    Beyond the numbers, however, what institutions choose to do with the data promises to attract extra attention to this year’s report.

    NSSE is one of the few standardized measures of academic outcomes that most officials across a wide range of higher education institutions agree offers something of value.Yet NSSE does not release institution-specific data, leaving it to colleges to choose whether to publicize their numbers.

    Colleges are under mounting pressure, however, to show in concrete, measurable ways that they are successfully educating students, fueled in part by the recent release of the report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which emphasizes the need for the development of comparable measures of student learning. In the commission’s report and in college-led efforts to heed the commission’s call, NSSE has been embraced as one way to do that. In this climate, will a greater number of colleges embrace transparency and release their results?

    Anywhere between one-quarter and one-third of the institutions participating in NSSE choose to release some data, said George Kuh, NSSE’s director and a professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington. But that number includes not only those institutions that release all of the data, but also those that pick and choose the statistics they’d like to share.

    In the “Looking Ahead” section that concluded the 2006 report, the authors note that NSSE can “contribute to the higher education improvement and accountability agenda,” teaming with institutions to experiment with appropriate ways to publicize their NSSE data and developing common templates for colleges to use. The report cautions that the data released for accountability purposes should be accompanied by other indicators of student success, including persistence and graduation rates, degree/certificate completion rates and measurements of post-college endeavors.

    “Has this become a kind of a watershed moment when everybody’s reporting? No. But I think what will happen as a result of the Commission on the Future of Higher Ed, Secretary (Margaret) Spelling’s workgroup, is that there is now more interest in figuring out how to do this,” Kuh said.

    Charles Miller, chairman of the Spellings commission, said he understands that NSSE’s pledge not to release institutional data has encouraged colleges to participate — helping the survey, first introduced in 1999, get off the ground and gain wide acceptance. But Miller said he thinks that at this point, any college that chooses to participate in NSSE should make its data public.

    “Ultimately, the duty of the colleges that take public funds is to make that kind of data public. It’s not a secret that the people in the academy ought to have. What’s the purpose of it if it’s just for the academy? What about the people who want to get the most for their money?”

    Participating public colleges are already obliged to provide the data upon request, but Miller said private institutions, which also rely heavily on public financial aid funds, should share that obligation.

    Kuh said that some colleges’ reluctance to publicize the data stems from a number of factors, the primary reason being that they are not satisfied with the results and feel they might reflect poorly on the institution.

    In addition, some college officials fear that the information, if publicized, may be misused, even conflated to create a rankings system. Furthermore, sharing the data would represent a shift in the cultural paradigm at some institutions used to keeping sensitive data to themselves, Kuh said.

    “The great thing about NSSE and other measures like it is that it comes so close to the core of what colleges and universities are about — teaching and learning. This is some of the most sensitive information that we have about colleges and universities,” Kuh said.

    But Miller said the fact that the data get right to the heart of the matter is precisely why it should be publicized. “It measures what students get while they’re at school, right? If it does that, what’s the fear of publishing it?” Miller asked. “If someone would say, ‘It’s too hard to interpret,’ then that’s an insult to the public.” And if colleges are afraid of what their numbers would suggest, they shouldn’t participate in NSSE at all, Miller said.

    However, Douglas Bennett, president of Earlham College in Indiana and chair of NSSE’s National Advisory Board, affirmed NSSE’s commitment to opening survey participation to all institutions without imposing any pressure that they should make their institutional results public. “As chair of the NSSE board, we believe strongly that institutions own their own data and what they do with it is up to them. There are a variety of considerations institutions are going to take into account as to whether or not they share their NSSE data,” Bennett said.

    However, as president of Earlham, which releases all of its NSSE data and even releases its accreditation reports, Bennett said he thinks colleges, even private institutions, have a professional and moral obligation to demonstrate their effectiveness in response to accountability demands — through NSSE or another means a college might deem appropriate.

    This Year’s Survey

    The 2006 NSSE survey, which is based on data from 260,000 randomly-selected first-year and senior students at 523 four-year institutions(NSSE’s companion survey, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, focuses on two-year colleges) looks much more deeply than previous iterations of the survey did into the performance of online students.

    Distance learning students outperform or perform on par with on-campus students on measures including level of academic challenge; student-faculty interaction; enriching educational experiences; and higher-order, integrative and reflective learning; and gains in practical competence, personal and social development, and general education. They demonstrate lower levels of engagement when it comes to active and collaborative learning.

    Karen Miller, a professor of education at the University of Louisville who studies online learning, said the results showing higher or equal levels of engagement among distance learning students make sense: “If you imagine yourself as an undergraduate in a fairly large class, you can sit in that class and feign engagement. You can nod and make eye contact; your mind can be a million miles away. But when you’re online, you’ve got to respond, you’ve got to key in your comments on the discussion board, you’ve got to take part in the group activities.

    Plus, Miller added, typing is a more complex psycho-motor skill than speaking, requiring extra reflection. “You see what you have said, right in front of your eyes, and if you realize it’s kind of half-baked you can go back and correct it before you post it.”

    Also, said Kuh, most of the distance learners surveyed were over the age of 25. “Seventy percent of them are adult learners. These folks are more focused; they’re better able to manage their time and so forth,” said Kuh, who added that many of the concerns surrounding distance education focus on traditional-aged students who may not have mastered their time management skills.

    Among other results from the 2006 NSSE survey:

    • Those students who come to college less well-prepared academically or from historically underrepresented groups tend to benefit from engagement in educationally purposeful activities even more than their peers do.
    • First-year and senior students spend an average of about 13 to 14 hours per week preparing for classes, much less than what faculty members say is needed.
    • Student engagement is positively correlated to grades and persistence between the first and second year of college.
    • New students study fewer hours during their first year than they expected to when starting college.
    • First-year students at research universities are more likely than students at other types of institutions to participate in a learning community.
    • First-year students at liberal arts colleges participate in class discussions more often and view their faculty more positively than do students at other institutions.
    • Seniors at master’s level colleges and universities give class presentations and work with their peers on problems in class more than students at other types of institutions do.

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives around the world are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


    February 2, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    ONLINE EDUCATION TRENDS

    "Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006" 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 report, 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?

    For more information or to download the complete report, go to
    http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/pdf/making_the_grade.pdf.

    The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.

    For a related article, see:

    "The Invisible Professor and the Future of Virtual Faculty"
    By Martha C. Sammons, Wright State University, and Stephen Ruth, George
    Mason University

    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND DISTANCE LEARNING January 2007 http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_07/article01.htm

    "Although the online teaching continues to grow in popularity, it places greater demands on faculty than traditional courses. The Sloan report found that this problem exists at all levels of postsecondary education, from doctoral-granting institutions to community colleges. A significant number of full-time professors are thus understandably reluctant to participate in distance learning, and faculty questions about online teaching continue. Traditional professors are disappearing from online classrooms as distance learning has altered their roles and responsibilities, as well as their professional status, job security, workload, rewards, and intellectual freedom. This article delineates some of the most significant challenges and suggests that distance learning has created new questions about the future of virtual faculty."

    ......................................................................

    2007 HORIZON REPORT ON EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

    The 2007 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.

    The complete report is available at --- http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2007_Horizon_Report.pdf.

    The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an "international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies."
    For more information, go to http://www.nmc.org/.

    The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) is a "strategic initiative of EDUCAUSE. While EDUCAUSE serves those interested in advancing higher education through technology, ELI specifically explores innovative technologies and practices that advance learning." For more information, go to http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?Section_ID=86.

    In "If the Academic Library Ceased to Exist, Would We Have to Invent It?" (EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 42, no. 1, January/February 2007, pp. 6-7) Lynn Scott Cochrane argues that "if college and university libraries and librarians didn't exist, we would certainly have to invent—better yet, re-invent—them."
    The article is available at http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0714.asp


    Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
    How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college in Fall 2005?

    More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . . ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’
    Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online

    More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.

    Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term, the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in 2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.

    The report, a joint partnership between the group and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent of the content is delivered via the Internet.

    The Sloan Survey of Online Learning, “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,” shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.” Both numbers are up from a year ago.

    Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack of survey responses from those institutions.)

    Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served by face-to-face programs.

    What stands out is the number of faculty who still don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the programs.

    Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers are striking.

    “As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said. “It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”

    Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in class).

    She said she isn’t surprised to see data illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.

    “Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.

    The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.

    Nearly all institutions with total enrollments exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment totals and not looking to expand into the online market.

    The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be involved in online learning.

    “Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges. The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.

    Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said she plans to include that in next year’s edition.

    Few survey respondents said acceptance of online degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.

    November 10, 2006 reply from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@vt.edu]

    Hi Bob:

    One reason why might be what I have seen. The in residence accounting students that I talk with take online classes here because they are EASY and do not take much work. This would be very popular with students but not generally so with faculty.

    John

    November 10, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi John,

    Then there is a quality control problem whereever this is a fact. It would be a travesty if any respected college had two or more categories of academic standards or faculty assignments.

    Variations in academic standards have long been a problem between part-time versus full-time faculty, although grade inflation can be higher or lower among part-time faculty. In one instance, it’s the tenure-track faculty who give higher grades because they're often more worried about student evaluations. At the opposite extreme it is part-time faculty who give higher grades for many reasons that we can think of if we think about it.

    One thing that I'm dead certain about is that highly motivated students tend to do better in online courses ceteris paribus. Reasons are mainly that time is used more efficiently in getting to class (no wasted time driving or walking to class), less wasted time getting teammates together on team projects, and fewer reasons for missing class.

    Also online alternatives offer some key advantages for certain types of handicapped students --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm 

    My opinions on learning advantages of E-Learning were heavily influenced by the most extensive and respected study of online versus onsite learning experiments in the SCALE experiments using full-time resident students at the University of Illinois --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois 

    In the SCALE experiments cutting across 30 disciplines, it was generally found that motivated students learned better online then their onsite counterparts having the same instructors. However, there was no significant impact on students who got low grades in online versus onsite treatment groups.

    I think the main problem with faculty is that online teaching tends to burn out instructors more frequently than onsite instructors. This was also evident in the SCALE experiments. When done correctly, online courses are more communication intent between instructors and faculty. Also, online learning takes more preparation time if it is done correctly. 

    My hero for online learning is still Amy Dunbar who maintains high standards for everything:

    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q4.htm#Dunbar

    Bob Jensen

    November 10, 2006 reply from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@vt.edu]

    Hi Bob:

    Also why many times it is not done 'right'. Not done right they do not get the same education. Students generally do not complain about getting 'less for their money'. Since we do not do online classes in department the ones the students are taking are the university required general education and our students in particular are not unhappy with being shortchanged in that area as they frequently would have preferred none anyway.

    John

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

    Motivations for Distance Learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#Motivations

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of online learning and teaching are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


     

     

     


    November 2, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    RECOMMENDED READING

    "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.

    "Emerging Leadership Roles in Distance Education: Current State of Affairs and Forecasting Future Trends" By Lisa Marie Portugal ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP, vol. 4, issue 3, Summer 2006 http://www.academicleadership.org/volume4/issue3/student_research/portugal_lisa_marie2/article.html 

    "This paper discusses the enormous impact distance learning has had on traditional higher education and leadership roles within those constructs. . . . [It focuses] on transformational leadership qualities that are necessary for current and future successful distance education programs."


    In High Schools, Technical Schools, and Colleges:  Online Enrollment is Skyrocketing

    "Degrees@StateU.edu: Online University Enrollment Soars as Quality Improves; Tuition Funds Other Projects," by Daniel Golden, The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2006; Page B1 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114713782174047386.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace

    While overall higher-education enrollment in the U.S. is virtually stagnant, online enrollment is skyrocketing, and the recent repeal of a federal rule requiring colleges to provide at least half of their instruction on campus will boost it more. By early 2008, one out of 10 college students will be enrolled in an online degree program, Boston-based market research firm Eduventures estimated last year.

    Public schools are driving much of the growth. Overcoming skepticism among some faculty members, state universities are capitalizing on their traditional advantages -- quality education at affordable prices -- to attract a nontraditional student body: online learners who often live out of state. What's more, the online programs generate millions of dollars that can be ploughed back into university operations.

    At UMass, online enrollment has quadrupled to 9,200 students since 2001. Most are working adults between the ages of 25 and 50, and 30% are from out of state, compared with 20% of on-campus students. UMass's online applicants undergo the same admissions review as candidates for on-campus slots and can choose among 61 programs, ranging from a master's degree in business to certificates in gerontology and casino management.

    Tuition is slightly higher than on-campus students pay, because Web-based courses aren't state subsidized, enabling the online program to net a projected $10 million this year for other university endeavors. For instance, online students pay $670 a credit toward a professional master's degree in business administration, compared with $540-$600 for on-campus students. Still, UMass's online program is a bargain compared with some for-profit ones: Ms. Patel says she has paid $18,000 in tuition for two years at UMass, while her brother paid Phoenix $24,000 over a similar period.

    "Public universities are moving into the online environment extremely rapidly," says Gary Miller, associate vice president for outreach at Pennsylvania State University, which has 5,691 students taking online courses, up 18% from the prior fiscal year. "It's part of our mission as a land grant university of reaching out to people. The question in our case wasn't 'Should we do this?' but 'How do we do it right?' "

    Continued in article


    Ottawa-Carleton e-School (an example of an online high school curriculum in Canada) --- http://www.ottawacarletone-school.ca/viewallcourses.asp


    From the University of Wisconsin
    Distance Education Clearinghouse ---  http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html

    The Distance Education Clearinghouse is a comprehensive and widely recognized Web site bringing together distance education information from Wisconsin, national, and international sources. New information and resources are being added to the Distance Education Clearinghouse on a continual basis.

    The Clearinghouse is managed and maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Extension, in cooperation with its partners and other University of Wisconsin institutions.

    Jensen Comment
    This site has glossaries and many links to other distance education sites.

    Bob Jensen's links to distance education sites are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


    An Enduring Story for a Pioneering For-Profit Distance Learning Institution
    60,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees through its distance learning program

    Administrators say that one of the state’s top universities — either the University of Michigan or Michigan State — will soon partner with Central on a distance-based business program, thanks to its strong and solid history. Likewise, leading giants in the distance education field, including Phoenix, have turned to the relatively small Midwestern campus for advice.
    "Distance Ed Pioneer Reassesses Itself," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher Ed, May 3, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/03/central

    “People are very devoted to our campus,” says Terry Rawls, interim vice president and executive director of professional education at Central Michigan University, “but I’m embarrassed to say that most have never been to a Chippewa football game.”

    That’s because — long before for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, Strayer University and Capella University made Internet-based education a widespread phenomenon — the institution has been churning out a variety of long distance degrees for individuals who live nowhere near Michigan. The university, located in Mt. Pleasant, smack dab in the middle of the state, has awarded about 60,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees through its distance learning program since 1971, and about 7,000 students now enroll in distance learning courses during any given term, according to the university. Central has 60 satellite campuses total, with a majority of sites in Michigan, Georgia, Virginia and Ontario.

    About 10 percent of regular fulltime instructors from the Central Michigan campus teach both online and satellite courses. A total of over 200 faculty and staff members administer the distance education programs. New instructors must pass a strict review by faculty members from the main campus in order to be hired. Of all institutions in the country, Central is the second largest granter of master’s of business degrees to African Americans.

    Administrators say that one of the state’s top universities — either the University of Michigan or Michigan State — will soon partner with Central on a distance-based business program, thanks to its strong and solid history. Likewise, leading giants in the distance education field, including Phoenix, have turned to the relatively small Midwestern campus for advice.

    But as more institutions — publics, privates and for-profits — get into the arena that Central first started researching in the early 1970s, administrators at the university are trying to cope with the competition. Like many other pioneering distance education institutions, including the University of Maryland University College, the institution is trying to figure out how to position itself for growth, while remaining focused on offering high quality education.

    Phoenix, in particular, has recently opened several campuses in Michigan, where Central currently has 14 satellites. There has been concern among administrators at Central Michigan that enrollment growth would wane, which hasn’t happened yet.

    “It’s difficult for a school like CMU to say that they’re a leader in this field in the Midwest when you’ve got all kinds of Phoenixes popping up,” says Charles Baker-Clark, a director with the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education, who notes that one Phoenix campus has recently opened in his hometown of Grand Rapids. “As a business, these kinds of shops can be much more adaptable than a traditional university.”

    For-profits aren’t the only competition. Rawls says that many smaller public universities have created programs similar to Central’s in various regions of the country. “It’s the state schools that are trying to do what we’ve been doing for 35 years now. Everybody is having problems with state appropriations,” he says. “So more people are saying, ‘Let’s reach out to adult learners to make some money.’ ”

    Alan Knox, an education policy expert with the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cautions that institutions that think of distance learning as a money-making venture would be wise to explore failures like Columbia University, which spent millions of dollars on a widely heralded distance education program that failed to take off. “When you look at the cost-benefit ratio, some assume that distance learning will be profitable,” says Knox. “But in actuality, it is not hugely different if you ignore the costs of building and operating bricks and mortar campuses.”

    Rawls also says that Central Michigan is trying to be proactive on the recruitment and retention front. Not an easy task, considering the fact that the off-campus division of the university is limited in its budget abilities to spend money on marketing. Some for-profits spend up to 25 percent of their revenue on glossy marketing campaigns that have nationwide appeal. “There’s no way that we can afford to play that game,” says Rawls, even though his division is self-supporting and provided about $5 million in profits back to the Mt. Pleasant campus over the past year.

    The off-campus programs, to date, have largely depended on word-of-mouth advertising, but administrators are currently upping their e-marketing efforts and working with Web-based companies on how to optimize keyword searches.

    Administrators, too, have reached out to Eduventures, a consulting firm that focuses on the education industry, to help the institution communicate its strengths and learn from its weaknesses. That firm has suggested that Central focus on efforts that help them stand out from other institutions.

    “Why are we successful?” asks Rawls. “Because we have been doing it longer than most and we are as good as or better than anyone in the country.”

    In Rawls’s book, being “good” means implementing programs that work for adult learners, who make up the majority of consumer of Central’s distance learning programs. The university offers a variety of courses to meet the divergent needs of individuals, including Web-based programs as well as traditional distance learning programs where a student can take evening courses at a Central campus — in, for instance, Hawaii. In Atlanta alone, Central has 12 learning centers, which makes it easier for commuters to not have to deal with as much traffic, says Rawls.

    “Our goal is to deliver the same academic experience in terms of educational quality in both on- and off- campus efforts,” says Cheri DeClercq, associate director of enrollment management for Central’s off-campus programs.

    DeClercq also says that Central is competitive in terms of pricing. For most distance learning programs offered by the institution, the cost is $345 per credit hour, whether the classes are offered online or at satellite campuses. Many for-profit institutions charge substantially more for online courses than they do for in-person courses because they tend to be more attractive to students who need flexible scheduling.

    Rawls also hopes to expand the number of online offerings vastly in the short term. About 15 percent of the classes currently offered in the off-campus programs are online, and he wants to be more competitive with other institutions on this front. “Central and many other institutions around the country are trying to respond to the for-profit market by embracing technology in ways that help students,” says Knox.

    Deborah Ball, dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Education and an expert on distance education, says that Central should be careful what programs can and should be offered online and what needs to be done in person. Rawls says he realizes that one of the strongest aspects of the program to date has been the one-on-one interaction that Central has been able to offer thousands of students at satellite campuses.

    Central Michigan’s Board of Trustees has kept a watchful eye over the growth and development of the off-campus programs. In the early part of this decade, they explored a plan to largely expand the off-campus program to try to create more funds. They determined that accreditation and other concerns put the idea out of reach at that time.

    “We are such a different and unique beast,” says Rawls. He sees Central going one of two routes over the next 35 years. “We could have a damned good extended learning program in Michigan because of our infrastructure here already and really focus on that,” he says. “Or we could have a worldwide online operation, leveraging on our face-to-face presences already.”

    He seems to favor a combination of the two.


    DOES DISTANCE LEARNING WORK?
    A LARGE SAMPLE, CONTROL GROUP STUDY OF STUDENT SUCCESS IN DISTANCE LEARNING,
    by James Koch --- http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/vol8_no1/fullpapers/distancelearning.htm

    The relevant public policy question is this---Does distance learning "work" in the sense that students experience as least as much success when they utilize distance learning modes as compared to when they pursue conventional bricks and mortar education? The answer to this question is a critical in determining whether burgeoning distance learning programs are cost-effective investments, either for students, or for governments.

    Of course, it is difficult to measure the "learning" in distance learning, not the least because distance learning courses now span nearly every academic discipline. Hence, most large sample evaluative studies utilize students’ grades as an imperfect proxy for learning. That approach is followed in the study reported here, as well.

    A recent review of research in distance education reported that 1,419 articles and abstracts appeared in major distance education journals and as dissertations during the 1990-1999 period (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001). More than one hundred of these studies focused upon various measures of student success (such as grades, subsequent academic success, and persistence) in distance learning courses. Several asked the specific question addressed in this paper: Why do some students do better than others, at least as measured by the grade they receive in their distance learning course? A profusion of contradictory answers has emanated from these studies (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001; Machtmes and Asher, 2000). It is not yet clear how important to individual student success are factors such as the student’s characteristics (age, ethnic background, gender, academic background, etc.). However, other than knowing that experienced faculty are more effective than less experienced faculty (Machtmes and Asher, 2000), we know even less about how important the characteristics of distance learning faculty are to student success, particularly where televised, interactive distance learning is concerned.

    Perhaps the only truly strong conclusion emerging from previous empirical studies of distance learning is the oft cited "no significant difference" finding (Saba, 2000). Indeed, an entire web site, http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference, exists that reports 355 such "no significant difference" studies. Yet, without quarreling with such studies, they do not tell us why some students achieve better grades than others when they utilize distance learning.

    Several studies have suggested that student learning styles and receptivity to distance learning influence student success (see Taplin and Jegede, 2001, for a short survey). Unfortunately, as Maushak et. al. (2001) point out, these intuitively sensible findings are not yet highly useful, because they are not based upon large sample, control group evidence that relates recognizable student learning styles to student performance. Studies that rely upon "conversation and discourse analysis" (Chen and Willits, 1999, provide a representative example) and interviews with students are helpful, yet are sufficiently anecdotal that they are unlikely to lead us to scientifically based conclusions about what works and what does not.

    This paper moves us several steps forward in terms of our knowledge by means of a very large distance education sample (76,866 individual student observations) and an invaluable control group of students who took the identical course at the same time from the same instructor, but did so "in person" in a conventional "bricks and mortar" location. The results indicate that gender, age, ethnic background, distance learning experience, experience with the institution providing the instruction, and measures of academic aptitude and previous academic success are statistically significant determinants of student success. Similarly, faculty characteristics such as gender, age, ethnic background, and educational background are statistically significant predictors of student success, though not necessarily in the manner one might hypothesize.

    Continued in this working paper

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on the future of distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm


    See the U.S. News service for finding distance education programs --- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/elearning/elhome.htm 


    Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C)
    The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines --- http://www.sloan-c.org/


    Open2 portal to learning
    I think Open University in the U.K. is the largest university in the world. It has extensive onsite and online courses.  BBC News and Open University combined forces to create the Open2 portal to learning and news --- http://www.open2.net/
    There are also various forums.

    Open2 Net Learning from Open University (the largest university in the U.K.) --- http://www.open2.net/learning.html


    Online Journal of Distance Education --- http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/

    Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration --- http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html


    July 31, 2005 message received from tjdl@genesis.coe.uh.edu
    The Texas Journal of Distance Learning ( http://www.tjdl.org ), an independent, peer-reviewed online journal, encourages, collects, and shares scholarly knowledge about all aspects of distance learning emanating from higher education in the state of Texas. An editorial board of recognized academics and practitioners guides and produces the journal. The University of Houston hosts and supports the TJDL.


    "Students Perceptions of Distance Learning, Online Learning and the Traditional Classroom," by John O'Malley, Department of Management and Business Systems Harrison McCraw, Department of Accounting and Finance Richards College of Business State University of West Georgia Carrollton, Georgia 30118-3030 --- http://www.westga.edu/~distance/omalley24.html


    Title: Complete book of distance learning schools : everything you need to earn your degree without leaving home. 
    Editor: Princeton Review
    Publisher: New York : Random House, 2001
    Amazon link --- http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ow/a4647388fffede6ea19afeb4da09e526.html

    Distance education -- Directories. -- United States | Correspondence schools and courses -- Directories. -- United States | Universities and colleges -- Directories. -- United States | University extension -- Directories. -- United States


    "Offering Entire Degrees Online is One Key to Distance Education, Survey Finds,"  by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 2005, Page A1

    The distance-education programs that offer entire degrees online are more successful than those that offer only a scattering of courses, a new survey has found.

    The report, titled "Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education," was written by Rob Abel, president of a nonprofit organization called the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.  The report was set to be released this week.

    Mr. Abel says the organization wanted to find out what made a distance-education program successful and to share the information with other institutions.  The organization surveyed officials at 21 colleges and universities that it determined to be successful in distance education.  In their responses, college officials highlighted the need for such common elements as high-quality courses and reliable technology.

    But what struck Mr. Abel as most important was that 89 percent of the institutions created online degree programs instead of just individual online courses.  Online degree programs lead to success, he says, because they tend to highlight a college's overall mission and translate into more institutional support for the faculty members and students working online.

    "It's easier to measure the progress at a programmatic level," Mr. Abel says.  "The programmatic approach also gets institutions thinking about student-support services."

    Of course, success is subjective, he says, and what may be deemed successful for one institution may not work at another.

    But he found that some college officials believe distance education has not lived up to their expectations.  He hopes that some colleges will learn from institutions that have succeeded online.  "These particular institutions didn't see this as a bust at all," Mr. Abel says.  "Maybe that just means that they set realistic expectations."

    SUCCESS STORIES

    One of the institutions included in the report is the University of Florida, which enrolls more than 6,000 students in its online degree programs.  William H. Riffee, associate provost for distance, continuing, and executive education at the university, says Florida decided to move forward with a strong distance-education program because so many students were demanding it.

    "We don't have enough seats for the people who want to be here," Mr. Riffee says.  "We have a lot of people who want to get a University of Florida degree but can't get to Gainesville."

    The university does not put a cap on enrollments in online courses, he says.  Full-time Florida professors teach the content, and part-time faculty members around the country field some of the questions from students.

    "We have learned how to scale, and we scale through an addition of faculty," Mr. Riffee says.  "You scale by adding faculty that you have confidence will be able to facilitate students.

    Another college the organization deemed successful in distance education is Westwood College, a for-profit institution that has campuses all over the country, in addition to its online degree programs.  Shaun McAlmont, president of Westwood College Online, says some institutions may have trouble making the transition to online education because higher education tends to be slow to change.

    "How do you introduce this concept to an industry that is very much steeped in tradition?"  he asks.  "You really have to re-learn how you'll deliver that instruction."

    Mr. McAlmont, who has also spent time as an administrator at Stanford University, says non-profit institutions could learn a lot from for-profit ones when it comes to teaching over the Internet.

    Continued in article


    Important Distance Education Site
    The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.aln.org/ 
    The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.


    Education Fraud and Gray Zone Warnings About Questionable Online Program --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill
      


     

    "Distance Education:  A Review of Contemporary Literature," by Stephanie M. Bryant, Jennifer B. Kahle, and brad A. Schafer, Issues in Accounting Education, August 2005, pp. 255-272.  This is published by the American Accounting Association and is available for a fee --- http://aaahq.org/pubs/electpubs.htm

     


    Added May 31, 2003
    EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research --- http://www.educause.edu/ecar/ 

    The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make better decisions about information technology (IT). The current environment is characterized by a lack of reliable information on IT in higher education. While there are ample anecdotes, there is little factual information and even less analysis. And the central issue may not be IT.

    Although controversy often accompanies large-scale information technology projects, in many cases it is not the technical aspects of these projects that are the most problematic. Outsourcing, network security, e-procurement, and e-learning are examples of complex issues that may have been triggered by information technology, but whose resolution cannot focus on IT alone.

    ECAR assembles leading scholars, practitioners, researchers and analysts to focus on issues of critical importance to higher education, many of which carry increasingly complicated and consequential implications. ECAR provides educational leaders with high-quality, well-researched, timely information to support institutional decision-making.

     


    Added March 15, 2003
    The AT&T Learning Network Community Guide http://www.att.com/communityguide/index.html 

    Welcome to the AT&T Learning Network Community Guide. AT&T developed this Guide as part of its ongoing effort to help communities take advantage of the many benefits of information technology. As part of that effort, AT&T funded a variety of organizations to develop public community access centers for community members who do not have other means to connect to the Internet. This Guide is intended to be a companion document for those centers and other technology access centers around the country. Whether you’re involved in running a community access center or you’re a community member interested in learning the uses and benefits of the Internet, this Guide will help get you started. If you’re a community member looking for ways to begin planning your own access center, you’ll find tips on how to “kickstart” that effort.

    Community access centers take many forms and take place in many sites within the community where people gather to communicate with and learn from one another. You may find Internet access points in a library, a church or a senior citizen-center. Perhaps your children attend a summer camp that has an area where they can learn about and use these technology resources. Many organizations, like the NAACP and the National Urban League, provide many types of services for community members and are now branching out to bring the reach of the Internet to their centers as well. The point is that there are many organizations, many types of centers and many opportunities to “get connected”— often from places that may have seemed unlikely in the past.


    Added January 1, 2003

    A Special Report from the United Nations on Global Distance Education 

    This December 2002 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Division of Higher Education published a report: "Open And Distance Learning: Trends, Policy And Strategy Consideration." The paper's objective is "to review open and distance learning in the context of present challenges and opportunities, examine relevant concepts and contributions, outline current global and regional trends, suggest policy and strategy considerations, and identify UNESCO's initiatives in open and distance learning, including its role in capacity-building and international co-operation." --- http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001284/128463e.pdf 

    Note especially the astounding growth in the number of students enrolled in online training and education courses in developing companies.  These numbers are discussed in Part IV of the UNESCO report.  Many of the numbers are for 1995 or earlier, and we can only speculate the the numbers have increased in the last eight years.  For example, in Indonesia  enrollments were reported at 350,000 in 700 distance education courses.

    You can read the following introduction in the report at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001284/128463e.pdf 

    As a force contributing to social and economic development, open and distance learning is fast becoming an accepted and indispensable part of the main- stream of educational systems in both developed and developing countries, with particular emphasis for the latter. This growth has been stimulated in part by the interest among educators and trainers in the use of new, Internet- based and multimedia technologies, and also by the recognition that traditional ways of organizing education need to be reinforced by innovative methods, if the fundamental right of all people to learning is to be realized. 

    The globalization of distance education provides many opportunities for developing countries for the realization of their education system-wide goals. Two main factors have led to an explosion of interest in distance learning: the growing need for continual skills upgrading and retraining; and the techno- logical advances that have made it possible to teach more and more subjects at a distance. 

    As Member States and their governments become more aware of the potential of open and distance learning, it is essential for their educational planning that the opportunities offered by new technologies be realistically examined within the framework of national development plans in general and educational policies in particular. 

    Faced with new training demands and new competitive challenges, many institutions need to undertake profound changes in terms of governance, organizational structure and modes of operation. More and more traditional universities are rapidly transforming themselves from single mode to dual mode universities, recognizing the importance of distance education in providing students with the best and most up-to-date educational resources available in addition to the traditional teaching methods that they receive. The increasing number of open universities being established across the world is highly indicative of this trend. 

    The Division of Higher Education is proposing an updated version of its document, Open and Distance Learning: Prospects and Policy Considerations, published in 1997. The present paper aims to review open and distance learn- ing in the context of present challenges and opportunities, describe relevant

    FOREWORD .................................................................................................3

    CONTENTS ...................................................................................................5

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .............................................................................7

    Challenges and opportunities ........................................................................7

    Concept and contributions .............................................................................8

    Present trends in open and distance learning .............................................10

    Internet and Web-based education ...............................................................11

    Economics of open and distance learning ...................................................11

    UNESCO™s initiatives in open and distance learning .................................13

    I.INTRODUCTION ........................................................................ ........................15

    II.CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES ................................................17

    Global changes, and challenges to education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

    The potential of open and distance learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

    III.THE CONCEPT OF OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING ...............22

    Introduction ...................................................................................................22

    Components of all distance learning systems .............................................25

    Major contributions of open and distance learning ....................................28

    General education .........................................................................................28

    Teacher education .........................................................................................29

    Vocational and continuing education ...........................................................31

    Non-formal education ..................................................................................33

    Higher education ..........................................................................................35

    The role of open and distance learning in educational innovation ................36

    IV.PRESENT TRENDS IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING ..........40

    Global trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

    Regional trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

    Africa ............................................................................................................42

    Arab States ....................................................................................................46

    Asia and the Pacific ......................................................................................47

    South Pacific .................................................................................................53

    Europe ..........................................................................................................53

    Latin America and the Caribbean .................................................................57

    North America ..............................................................................................61

    V.INTERNET USAGE AND WEB-BASED EDUCATION ......................64

    Setting the global context ..............................................................................64

    Web-based learning .......................................................................................65

    Creating a new educational platform ..........................................................66

    Individualized learning and teaching ..........................................................67

    Group learning and teaching via the Internet .............................................68

    Collaborative activities ..................................................................................68

    The institutional impact of Internet-technologies .....................................69

    VI.ECONOMICS OF OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING ...................70

    The cost-efficiency of open and distance learning . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . 70

    Factors affecting the cost of open and distance learning . . . . . . .     . . . 73

    Who pays? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 79

    Qualitative considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 80

    VII.UNESCO ’S INITIATIVES IN OPEN AND DISTANCE

    LEARNING ..........................................................................................................................83

    Setting the international context: open and distance education

    from the lifelong learning perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

    Basic education for all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

    Adult education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

    Renewing and diversifying education systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . 86

    Teacher training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

    Higher education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

    Capacity-building for open and distance learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

    International co-operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

    BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................91

     

    Web Portals and Higher Education: Technologies to Make IT Personal
    ID No. PUB5006 
    Category Publications From the EDUCAUSE Office 
    Author Richard N. Katz 
    Organization EDUCAUSE Year 2002 
    Subject Terms Enterprise Portals 
    Price $18.00

     


    Added August 30, 2002

    HANDBOOK OF ONLINE LEARNING: INNOVATIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND CORPORATE TRAINING Edited by Kjell-Erik Rudestam and Judith Schoenholtz-Read Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002 ISBN: 0761924027 (hbk.); 0761924035 (pbk.)

    From http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761924035/qid%3D1030482142/sr%3D2-1/ref%3Dsr%5F2%5F1/002-8650629-2144831#product-details 
    Editorial Reviews Book Description Technology-mediated instruction has taken the university and the corporate sector by storm. As more instructors teach online for a dispersed learning community in both academic and business environments, there’s a need for resources that will help them adapt to this new sort of "classroom." Educators who come out of traditional academic institutions tend to use traditional methods when offering courses online (e.g., lectures, textbooks and readings, examinations) rather than attend to small-group processes and principles of what the editors of this volume call "andragogy." This handbook goes beyond the mechanics of how to create and direct an online learning experience to consider such a new approach to pedagogy in doing so. Their primary purpose is to clarify the conceptual issues that underlie effective online teaching and to offer practical guidance to educators and corporate trainers who plan to teach in a virtual environment. Their central tenet: the adoption of computer networks as the teaching vehicle of the future demands a reexamination of our core beliefs about pedagogy and how students learn. The transfer of a classroom curriculum into cyberspace is deceptively simple, but doing so without an appreciation of the nuances and implications of learning online ignores not only the potential of this medium but the inevitable realities of entering it. Rather than fear the challenges that new technology brings to systems of learning, the editors hope to help instructors embrace it by rethinking how knowledge is acquired and how educational processes may be optimally designed in a new age of teaching and learning.

    From the Publisher 

    Part I provides an overview and includes discussion of the unique structural aspects of the electronic learning environment, pedagogical issues, curriculum design, psychological and group dynamics, and ethical issues. 

    Part II examines practical issues associated with implementing courses online, both in the traditional university setting and in professional/corporate training environments.

    The book draws heavily on personal case examples.

     

    Added on March 27, 2002

    Online Learning: From Philosophy to Application - Why We Should to How We Can
    By Mary Delgado, Technology and Learning, March 2002, Page 52 --- http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/mdelgado.htm 

    Philosophy - Why We Should

    Explore Web sites that will help you develop a strategy for online learning from developing a philosophy to determining scenarios for application. In other words, find out why we should to how we can.

    Distance Learning...What is it?
    This site presents an interesting critique of the nature of e-learning and how it can or cannot fit into existing philosophies of education. Differentiates the different kinds of courses using online structure.

    Learning To Learn: Using research to define effective distance education.
    The author presents a paper of the ideas of notable writers on the subject of the philosophy of distance education.

    alt.education.distance FAQ [part 1 of 4]
    This four-part website answers frequently asked questions about distance and online learning.

    Philosophy and Purposes of Distance Education
    This lengthy paper describes the philosophy and purposes of distance education including credit and non-credit courses, relationship of on-campus and off campus learning, and different models of distance learning.

    Constructivist Theory Unites Distance Learning and Teacher Education
    They said it couldn't be done, but here is an article that combines constructivist theory with both distance learning and teacher education. The authors use interviews with teachers whose teaching methods have changed after combining constructivist theory in building online courses.

    Application -- How We Can

    GOALS: Global Online Adventure Learning Site
    This is a terrific site for teachers interested in taking their students on virtual journeys. Each location allows students to view graphics and read about the area. They can then email the explorers with comments and questions. The Classroom Expedition page provides lesson plans and activities.

    EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform
    "An intelligent, detailed, informed and practical guide, both to education related issues concerning the Internet, and to educational resources on the World Wide Web." (quoted from the Harvard Educational Review)

    Online Learning - an Overview
    Excellent site on the pitfalls and successes of online learning for university students. Interactive pages provide wealth of information for prospective students of e-learning.

    Planning and Designing Educational Facilities Online
    This is an online course from the University of California Riverside for all school board members, administrators, district planners, etc., who are involved in the planning, designing, and executing the advancement of e-learning.

    The Web of Asynchronous Learning Networks
    Visit this resource website, which is for anyone interested in asynchronous online delivery systems.


    Education Fraud

    Added September 9, 2002

    One of the things I do out of sheer boredom on a long flight, is to open the airline's in-flight magazine and scan the classified advertisements. One can usually obtain a PhD for around $350 in cash and a seven day waiting period. There are other graduate degrees available.

    My point is that technology has not changed education fraud much over time, although phony degrees are now easier to advertise and can pop up from Web searches. One of the things I really hate is when the phony "college" name on the diploma is exactly like or similar to your own. There is a diploma bucket shop in the U.K that will give you a phony degree and let you declare the name of the college you want it to be from, e.g., Trinity College or Trinity University. We have had some "graduates" of that diploma mill actually contact our Career Placements Department at the real Trinity University and ask for assistance in getting "post-graduate" jobs.

    The good news is that really phone degrees are so commonplace that most legitimate colleges and employers are somewhat wary. But it is easy to be careless! What amazes me is how commonplace it is for persons to practice as "doctors" without having the proper medical degrees and licenses. Now that's scary!

    For some reason, Utah is often the address of choice for some of these is Salt Lake City. I think Utah needs to fix up its state laws (perhaps it has since the last time I looked).

    For those with phony degrees, I can recommend some promising investment opportunities in Nigeria.

    Bob Jensen

    Original Message----- 
    From: Davidson, Dee (Dawn) [mailto:dgd@MARSHALL.USC.EDU]
    Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 12:29 PM 
    To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU Subject: Phony "Distance Learning" on the Web

    Good Morning, Bob and others with a stake in Distance Learning.

    This article is in Sunday's L.A. Times. It discusses the phony diploma mills that are available through the internet. Phony diplomas and even "schools" that award diplomas for a small fee have been around forever. My excerpt here has 2 points of interest to us:

    1. the book by John Bear includes these places with the legitimate schools offering Distance Learning. 2. one of the "illegitimate" places is named Trinity College and could be easily confused with Trinity University.

    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-diploma8sep08002107.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dbusiness 

    'But unlike traditional diploma mills, the online versions exploit the wide reach of the Internet to send millions of e-mail advertisements promising degrees without "tests, classes, books or interviews.... No one is turned down."

    The history of so-called universities that sell degrees without any education or true evaluation of experience goes back at least to the 19th century, said John Bear, coauthor of "Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning," which includes information on diploma mills operating on the Internet.

    "Nothing has much changed, except that on the Internet it's so much easier," he said. "You can set up a site in an hour and send out e-mails. Then you just need a printing press."

    There may be dozens of these operations, with names such as Earlscroft University, thought to originate in Belgium, and Trinity College and University, with offices in Pakistan and Venezuela.'

    dee davidson 
    Accounting Systems Specialist 
    Leventhal School of Accounting 
    Marshall School of Business 213.740.5018 dgd@marshall.usc.edu 

    Bob Jensen's threads on education fraud are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill  


    Added on August 4, 2001
    Free Long Book

    The Changing Faces of Virtual Education --- http://www.col.org/virtualed/ 
    Dr. Glen Farrell, Study Team Leader and Editor
    The Commonwealth of Learning

    RELEASED IN JULY 2001 by The Commonwealth of Learning (COL): The Changing Faces of Virtual Education, a study on the latest “macro developments” in virtual education. This is a follow-up on COL’s landmark study on current trends in “virtual” delivery of higher education (The Development of Virtual Education: A global perspective, 1999). Both reports were funded by the British Department for International Development and are available on this web site.

    One of the conclusions of the authors of the 1999 report was that the development of virtual education was “more rhetorical than real!” Dr. Glen Farrell, study team leader and editor of both reports, says “This follow-up study concludes that, two years later, virtual education development is a lot more rhetorical, and a lot more real!”

    In terms of the rhetoric, virtual education is now part of the planning agenda of most organisations concerned with education and training. And the terminology being used to describe the activities is even more imprecise and confusing! On the reality side, there are many more examples of the use of virtual education in ways that add value to existing, more traditional delivery models. However, a remarkable feature of this surging interest in virtual education is that it remains largely focussed on ways to use technology to deliver the traditional educational products (i.e., programmes and courses) in ways that make them more accessible, flexible, and cheaper and that can generate revenues for the institution.

    As global discussions on closing the “digital divide” have observed, it is not surprising that the report notes that a major feature of the current state of virtual education development is that it depends on where you live. The growth is largely occurring in countries with mature economies and established information and communication infrastructure (ICTs). A lack of such infrastructure, together with the lack of development capital, means that the developing countries of the world have not been able to, as yet, use virtual education models in their efforts to bring mass education opportunities to their citizens.

    However, the report demonstrates that there are several trends emerging that are likely to bring about radical changes to the way we think about the concepts of campus, curriculum, courses, teaching/learning processes, credentials/awards and the way ICTs can be utilised to enable and support learning. These trends, called “macro developments” in the report, include new venues for learning, the use of “learning objects” to define and store content, new organisational models, online learner support services, quality assurance models for virtual education and the continuing evolution of ICTs. Each of these “macro developments” is defined and described in separate chapters of the report. The final chapter looks at their impact on the development of virtual education models in the future. While the conclusions will be of general interest, particular attention has been paid to the role these developments are likely to have in the evolution of virtual education systems in developing countries.

    The entire study is available on-line from this page. By clicking on the various hyperlinks below you will be able to download and open the individual chapters or the entire book in Acrobat (.PDF) format. (The chapter files are not created with internal bookmark hyperlinks, but the all-in-one file has bookmarks throughout for easier navigation.) Acrobat documents can also be resized on screen for readability but are usually best viewed when printed. Adobe Acrobat version 3.0 is required to download and read the files. With version 4.0 each Chapter's actual page numbering is retained in Acrobat's "Go To Page" facility and "Print Range" selections.

    The Changing Faces of Virtual Education

    CHAPTER FILES TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD IN PDF FORMAT    

    Preliminary pages: title page, copyright page, contents   (pg. i-iv) 160kb

    Foreword, Prof. Gajaraj Dhanarajan and Acknowledgements   (pg. v-viii) 120kb  

    Chapter 1:     Introduction, Dr. Glen M. Farrell   (pg. 1-10) 234kb  

    Chapter 2:    The Changing Venues for Learning, Mr. Vis Naidoo   (pg. 11-28) 307kb

    Chapter 3:    The Continuing Evolution of ICT Capacity: The Implications for Education, 
                          Dr. Tony Bates   (pg. 29-46) 335kb

    Chapter 4:    Object Lessons for the Web: Implications for Instructional Development, 
                          Mr. David Porter   (pg. 47-70) 639kb

    Chapter 5:    The Provision of Learner Support Services Online, Dr. Yoni Ryan   (pg. 71-94) 389kb

    Chapter 6:    The Development of New Organisational Arrangements in Virtual Learning, 
                          Dr. Peter J. Dirr    (pg. 95-124) 448kb

    Chapter 7:    Quality Assurance, Ms. Andrea Hope    (pg. 125-140) 304kb

    Chapter 8:    Issues and Choices, Dr. Glen Farrell    (pg. 141-152) 247kb

    Comment by Bob Jensen
    All of the chapters of this book are informative and well written.  I especially liked Chapter 5 by Yoni Ryan.  In Chapter 5, Dr. Ryan discusses the pedagogical theory of learner-centeredness and the trend of "commodification" in education that brought with it other services such as career counseling, preparatory courses, and something akin to "customer service" as part of an entire package of services to students.  Some of the things mentioned include the following:

    There is much more in Chapter 5 than can be summarized here.  For example, what did Open University do to help reduce the frequency of dropping out of online courses?  What are some of the things happening in India for learner support?


    Added on July 12, 2001
    Free Short Book

    Distance Education and Its Challenges:  An Overview, by D.G. Oblinger, C.A. Barone, and B.L. Hawkins (ACE, American Council on Education Center for Policy Analysis and Educause, 2001)
    http://www.acenet.edu/bookstore/pdf/distributed-learning/distributed-learning-01.pdf 

    Abstract v

    Distance or distributed education is one of the most complex issues facing higher education institutions today.  This paper is designed to provide college and university presidents with an overview of distance education, e-learning,or what we prefer to call distributed learning.  We prefer the term distributed learning over distance education because “distance ”is too restrictive a concept. Few institutions will be untouched by the discussion and debate surrounding distributed education.  As a result, institutional leaders will need to understand its implications for themselves and their institutions.  This first paper in the ACE/EDUCAUSE series, Distributed Education and Its Challenges:  An Overview, provides a general framework for understanding the key questions that distributed education poses to the higher education community. This overview paper identifies significant issues associated with distributed education and suggests a series of questions to help institutional leaders establish and validate their options.  We encourage institutions to use this paper as a primer and hope that it will catalyze in-depth, strategic discussions.  In addition to framing the issues for various stakeholders, the paper outlines topics that will be addressed thoroughly in future monographs in the series, including issues of quality control and leadership.

    Foreword vii

    Introduction 1

    Challenging Assumptions 3

    Student Learning 5

    Strategic Goals 7

    Intended Audiences 9

    Market Size and Growth of Distance Education 11

    Governance and Organization 13

    Partnerships 17

    Quality 19

    Policies 21

    Barriers 25

    Leadership Challenges 27

    Conclusion 29

    The educational opportunities that distributed learning affords are exciting, but institutions face significant obstacles that need to be addressed before such prospects can be made real.  Among the challenges are the development of 

    •Viable organizational, governance, and business strategies. 

    •Appropriate definitions of intellectual property rules with faculty and other developers. 

    •Teaching modalities that recognize new styles of learning. 

    •Suitable online student services and sup port structures. 

    •Adequate faculty support structures. 

    •Meaningful assessment metrics. 

    •Articulation agreements defining what and how many courses will be accepted and transferable for a degree.

    •Policies regarding administration of financial aid. 

    While there may be responses to each of these challenges, not all answers are likely to be compatible within the traditional cultures, structures, and processes of our colleges and universities. How do higher education institutions develop a proactive direction that harmonizes with the existing culture and values?  The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative ’s (NLII ’s)12 conditions for change found in Appendix 6 express the conviction that the entire institutional “system ”must adapt for the venture to succeed. 

    Although culture and technical readiness for distributed education are not trivial issues, policy issues —and the resulting legislation — may be as difficult.  Policies designed to remove the barriers to widespread adoption of distributed education must come from all levels — federal and state governments, policy agreements among the states, and state university systems —as well as from the institutions them selves. 

    Distributed education can bring many benefits to higher education, such as 

    •Enhanced learning experiences. 

    •Improved access to education. 

    •Greater learner flexibility. 

    •Expansion of education to new groups. 

    •Increased interaction and collaboration. 

    Distributed education will be part of higher education’s future.  With careful planning, judicious choices, and resolute execution, that future will be a positive one for our institutions, as well as for those we serve.

    Appendix 1:

    Comparison of Target Markets Among Selected Educational Providers 31

    Appendix 2: Guidelines for Distance Education 33

    Appendix 3:  Council for Higher Education Accreditation Competency Standards Project 35

    Appendix 4:  Measures of Quality in Internet-Based Distance Learning 39

    Council for Higher Education Accreditation Competency Standards Project 35

    Appendix 4: Measures of Quality in Internet-Based Distance Learning 39

    Appendix 5: Resources for Distributed Learning 41

    Appendix 6: Twelve Conditions for Change 43

    Notes 45

    About the Authors 47

    The twelve conditions for change are as follows:

    The following 12 conditions are indicative of the institutional characteristics that are essential to effective action in the knowledge-based economy in which higher education now operates: 

    1. Choices —Identifying a strategic direction and selecting a path to get there based on a clear sense of institutional mission. 
    2. Commitment — Allocating resources to enable the institution to adjust its course and to follow the path selected.
    3. Courage — Energetic and focused leadership from the very highest level of administration. 
    4. Communication — Building a climate of trust by including the entire campus community in the transformation process through a carefully conceived and well-executed strategy for dissemination of information about extant and emerging services, plans, decisions, etc.
    5. Cooperation — Collaborating across functions and throughout levels and constituencies to achieve a consistent and integrated set of support services for teaching and learning.
    6. Community — Complementing the community of support nurtured through cross-functional collaboration with an equally cohesive community of faculty across disciplines.
    7. Curriculum — Reconceptualizing the curriculum to reflect its distributed, interdisciplinary, and outcomes-oriented nature.
    8. Consistency — Reflecting institutional commitment to transformation through consistent action and recognizing the importance of standards, within both the technology industry and the institution.
    9. Capacity — Developing the teaching and learning capacity of the institution (e.g., curriculum and faculty) to serve student achievement and outcomes.
    10. Culture/Context — Understanding the culture, values, and sensitivities of a given campus climate.
    11. Complexity/Confusion — Overcoming the confusion associated with coping with transformation by adapting to the inherent complexity of the decision-making process by adopting more agile and responsive governance processes.
    12. Creativity — Developing strategies and tactics that harmonize with the campus culture and context and recognizing that this is a creative, not just a political,process.38

    Added on June 2, 2001
    "The Work of Education in the Age of e-College," by Chris Werry, First Monday, May 2001 --- http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_5/werry/ 

    There has recently been a mad rush by universities, venture capitalists and corporations to develop online courses, virtual universities, education portals, and courseware. The drive to develop a winning formula for commercial online education has fostered some unusual partnerships. This paper provides a broad overview of some models of online education that have been developed by commercial and academic institutions. It examines some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used to talk about online education by commercial groups, and discusses some of the hopes and fears that have been associated with online instruction by academics, administrators, and businesspeople. The paper outlines some of the main players and positions involved in debates about online education, and suggests some strategies that academic groups ought to explore. In particular, the author argues that academics need something an open source movement for academic resources, akin to the Free Software Foundation. This 'Free Courseware Foundation' would give teachers greater control of their resources, and better enable them to share materials with other teachers and with the public.

    There has recently been a mad rush by universities, venture capitalists and corporations to develop online courses, virtual universities, education portals, and courseware. The drive to develop a winning formula for commercial online education has fostered some unusual partnerships. This paper provides a broad overview of some models of online education that have been developed by commercial and academic institutions. It examines some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used to talk about online education by commercial groups, and discusses some of the hopes and fears that have been associated with online instruction by academics, administrators, and businesspeople. The paper outlines some of the main players and positions involved in debates about online education, and suggests some strategies that academic groups ought to explore. In particular, the author argues that academics need something an open source movement for academic resources, akin to the Free Software Foundation. This 'Free Courseware Foundation' would give teachers greater control of their resources, and better enable them to share materials with other teachers and with the public.

    Contents 

    • Introduction 
    • Education Meets E-Commerce, or Michael Milken's Plot to Eat Our Lunch 
    • Some Broad Trends within 
    • Online Education 
    • Four Positions Taken in Debates about Online Education 
    • The Rhetoric of Online Education Solutions

    Here are some tidbits that I jotted down while reading Werry's paper:

     

    www.instantknowledge.com  - a place to connect, build community, exchange ideas, and earn a professional wage.

    IK knowledge producers from around the world earn money - quickly - write about the books they love, edit the best knowledge on the Web, and deliver the news.

    Join a growing movement of scholars benefiting from the power of the Internet to break down walls that have separated the sources of knowledge - scholars - from those who need it most - students.

    And in July 2000 their Web site invited graduate students to "earn money doing what you love - creating knowledge, building community, establishing career credentials. Take control of your academic career - offer your knowledge beyond the scope of the university, to the world, through the Internet". The site organizes and hosts the materials produced by graduate students and TAs, and makes money from sponsorships, advertising and co-branding. InstantKnowledge is one of many commercial online education companies that do not offer courses per se, but do provide a range of services and resources to university students. Other companies provide online tutoring services, test advice, and collect databases of course evaluations (needless to say the criteria constructed are typically quite different from the ones teachers use to evaluate classes). These services function as an informal, largely invisible (to most academics, at least) network of educational materials, advice, and knowledges that may, over time, subtly recontextualize aspects of the educational work we carry out.

    Page 8
    With the arrival of Jones International University, higher education found its "first fully accredited online university" [17]. Jones International University was granted accreditation by the U.S. regional accreditation agency in March 1999, and is the first online university to become fully certified by the Global Alliance for Transnational Education. Courses at Jones International are taught over the Internet by part-time, free-lance teachers located in universities all over the U.S. The courses are highly modular and all involve business subjects. There is no regular faculty or participatory governance system, and no research is carried out. Critics of Jones International argue that although it has the term "university" in its title, it ought not be considered one. Altbach argues that Jones International is merely a credentialing service, "a degree delivery machine, providing tailored programs that appeal to specific markets" [18]. The American Association of University Professors has fought to prevent accreditation of Jones University, along with similar online programs.

    Quotation from Page 51 of The Business of Borderless Education, by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000). Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

    It (JIU) currently offers two degrees, Bachelors and Masters degrees in Business Communications, and certificate programs, with each subject costed at about $600 at Bachelor level, making a degree about $11 000, and $700 at Masters level ($19 000 total). Student numbers have been low to date, with only 1 0 students enrolled in the Bachelors program at March 1999, and 64 in the Masters. Officials do not anticipate making a profit until 2001, and expect to spend ‘millions’ in advertising (Pam Pease, The Denver Business Journ a l, Marc h 12-18 1999, p. 29A). Curriculum development costs have been $US2.5 million to date (C H E, March 19, 1999, p. A27).

    One such members of the UNext Advisory Faculty (Steve Orpurt who is now completing his accounting Ph.D. at the University of Chicago) and Don Wortham (Executive Director, For-Credit Programs at UNext.com) will be making presentations on authoring and delivery systems at the August 11 CPE No. 1 session at the American Accounting Association annual meetings in Atlanta --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/2001annual/cpe/cpe1.htm 

    A unique institution that offers degrees and certificates based completely on competencies -- your ability to demonstrate your skills and knowledge on a series of assessments -- not on required courses. We make it possible for you to accelerate your "time to degree" by providing recognition for your expertise..

    You can read more about WGU in my threads on assessment at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#WGU 

    Forwarded by Aaron Konstam on February 25, 2003

    WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY, a virtual institution, was granted regional accreditation on Tuesday by a group of four accrediting agencies. Officials at the university believe this will legitimize distance education and competency-based education in the eyes of other institutions. --> SEE http://chronicle.com/free/2003/02/2003022601t.htm 

    The WGU home page is at http://www.wgu.edu 

    WGU has had a long and hard struggle getting accreditation because it is so non-traditional.  The most important thing to note is that WGU is competency based and non-traditional even though major colleges and universities are providing the learning materials --- http://www.wgu.edu/wgu/academics/understanding.html 

    Unlike traditional universities that are typically credit-based, WGU is a competency-based institution. Competencies are nothing more than skills or knowledge identified by professionals in a particular field as being essential for mastery of that field.

    The benefit of this competency-based system is that it makes it possible for you -- if you are already knowledgeable about a particular subject -- to make progress toward completing a WGU degree even if you lack college experience. WGU recognizes that you may have gained skills and knowledge on the job, through years of life experience, or by taking a course on a particular subject. This competency-based system does not use credits in awarding degrees. Instead, students demonstrate their knowledge or skills through assessments.

    However, if you have completed college coursework at another institution, you may have your transcripts evaluated and may be able to have some associate-level domains cleared. Please use the links on this page to learn more about WGU's competency-based education for postsecondary degrees.

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance training and education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

    Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
    Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

    From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

    Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

    WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

    The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

    2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     


     

    "Continued Growth for 2 Distance Ed Models," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/19/distance

    Two unique models of providing distance education to mainly nontraditional students are coming into their own, each showing a healthy expansion of enrollments and growth in available course offerings. One, the Online Consortium of Independent Colleges & Universities, has been enlarging since its inception, while the other, Western Governors University, faced years of skepticism from critics who said its ambitious goals would never be met. Now, both are touting their success with fresh numbers and statistics, suggesting that online education needn’t only come from large for-profit companies or local community colleges.

    In 2005, Regis University announced a consortium of colleges that would work together, rather than compete, to share each others’ online courses in a way that would in effect vastly expand the offerings of each of the group’s members. Since then, the 39 founding colleges of the OCICU have expanded to 68, with 1,784 course enrollments over the past year.

    The model is unusual in that it allows colleges that are interested in offering courses online, but don’t necessarily have the resources to cover every conceivable topic, to supplement their catalog with classes that already exist — in the consortium and on the Web, but not on their campuses. So far, seven of the member colleges, including Regis, act as “providers,” essentially allowing other colleges in the group to pick and choose which courses to make available to their own students, with full institutional credit assigned through the student’s college.

    “We’ve just experienced remarkable growth and great feedback from the schools participating,” said Thomas R. Kennedy, executive director of new ventures at Regis. “Especially as member schools ... they don’t have any online schools whatsoever, and overnight they have one. That’s one of the beauties of it.”

    That near-instant capability can serve students in a number of ways. Do they need to fulfill a general elective requirement, like sociology or political science? The providers offer plenty of possibilities for students at colleges that don’t have the resources to fill every gap in the curriculum. What about students interested in a niche topic, like Irish studies? Some of the providers, as well as members that are planning on offering up courses to the rest of the consortium in the future, have such offerings as well.

    Many, but not all, of the member colleges are religiously affiliated, and most fit the profile of small- or medium-sized institutions in the Council of Independent Colleges that may not have the resources to get into the distance education business on their own. Members pay a one-time fee of $3,500 to join the consortium plus an annual fee of $1,000, Kennedy said, to cover administrative costs. Of the approximately $1,350 in tuition for a three-credit course, he added, about $500 would go to the provider school per student — essentially extra cash for a course that was already being held, he pointed out — and $700 would remain at the student’s home college, which would incur no additional cost.

    “All these provider schools are doing is opening up their classes ... to visiting students, in a way,” he said. The key difference, however, is that students receive credit as if they took the courses at their own institutions, rather than as transfer credits.

    Kennedy said he’s been urging member colleges to pocket that extra tuition money “and start investing in your own online program.”

    Some are doing just that. Keuka College, in upstate New York, administers degree completion programs by partnering with hospitals and community colleges across the state. To help students in its various programs who need to take a specific course or two to complete their degrees, the college can now send them to offerings available online through the consortium.

    “We found that by using courses offered through the consortium, we could offer students more forms of access,” said Gary Smith, associate vice president for professional studies and international programs at Keuka, especially for the “general education or general elective pool that’s outside our major program offerings.”

    This year, Keuka will ramp up its own online courses by playing to its strengths: If all goes according to plan, Smith said, the college will add classes in Asian studies to the consortium’s lineup.

    A ‘Competency-Based’ University Takes Off

    Another model that’s meeting or exceeding the expectations of its leaders is breathing a sigh of relief. Western Governors University, founded in 1997 by 19 state governors, started with ambitious plans to grow its enrollment and become a regional economic engine. But the initial plans faltered and the university found itself the object of criticism and even scorn — although that wasn’t necessarily confined to Western Governors.

    “If you go back to the mid-’90s, when the idea for WGU bubbled up from among the conversations from the governors of the Western states, there was at that time no clear sense of whether or not online education would work, period, or would work with any level of success and any decent level of quality,” said Patrick Partridge, the university’s vice president of marketing and enrollment. But, he acknowledged, there was plenty of skepticism in academe as well. “I think that skepticism was both of a financial type and sort of an awareness ... of the kind of political hurdles in the higher-ed world.”

    These days, the picture for both online education in general, and WGU in particular, seems quite a bit brighter. The nonprofit institution, which receives no state support and sustains itself primarily through tuition and private donations, announced this month that it had reached an enrollment of 10,000 students — up from 500 in 2003. That growth can be attributed to a number of factors, including regional accreditation, but the university also emphasizes two features that distinguish it from most of its peers: a “competency-based” approach to assessing students’ work, and its nationally accredited Teachers College.

    From the outset, courses and curriculums are developed with input from senior faculty together with an “outside council” including practitioners from a given field. Course material is then assessed to a level that’s considered “highly competent,” Partridge said, by the developers of the course, effectively creating a standardized set of requirements in lieu of more independent assessments by individual instructors. Upon completion, employers can theoretically be assured that students are proficient in a specific set of skills and knowledge.

    The university doesn’t give letter grades, and it allows students to take as long as they want in their course of study — which could be a mixed blessing, since they pay a flat fee (a bit under $3,000) every six months. All in all, Partridge said, “we are as different from the other online schools as they are from” traditional higher education. It’s a model not suited to everyone, he acknowledged, but especially tailored to students with a certain “impatience” or “determination” to complete in a timely manner.

    Another significant draw for WGU is the Teachers College, which, unlike any other such online program, places graduates at schools in virtually every state. Now, at least half of WGU’s students are enrolled in the teaching program. “[W]e offer a path to initial teacher licensure for individuals all around the country who want to become teachers, often later in life where returning to a traditional school of education ... is just not that convenient,” Partridge said.

    The university projects further growth in the coming years, with a predicted enrollment of up to 15,000 in the foreseeable future. “We really see the future as one in which the people of the United States and the adult audience need to have very good-quality and affordable options to either get a first bachelor’s degree or continue to pursue [a] master’s degree, in particular change careers and pursue dreams that will in the long run strengthen our economy, the citizenry and make our country, our states, etc., stronger,” said Partridge.

     


     

     

    The Werry article is too long and complex to do justice to in a brief quote.  Werry most certainly wants the power and the open source rights in the hands of faculty rather than college administrators and corporate executives. His concluding comments are as follows:

    In the e-commerce text Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities, Hagel and Armstrong describe how to organize and exploit the resources produced by online communities. They discuss how to train "community architects" whose job it is to "acquire members, stimulate usage, and extract value from the community" [38]. I would like to suggest that in our teaching practices we could attempt to produce oppositional "community architects". This would entail resituating courses that deal with online information as part of an expanded project of critical practice in which students are seen not just as technical problem solvers, but also as critics who actively intervene in situations in which issues of value, power, and social organization are negotiated. Such classes might promote the idea that it is important that those who are engaged in the design and publication of electronic texts, interfaces, databases, and tools for the formation of online resources think about the cultural, political, and social implications of their work. Training "community architects" could involve looking at how competing discourses and competing information architectures represent the possibilities for organizing online space, activity, access, assembly, public use, control and ownership.


    Added May 27, 2001
    Free Long Book:
    The Business of Borderless Education
    , by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000).  Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

    Acknowledgments viii
    Research Team.ix
    Abbreviations and acronyms.x

    Executive summary xii

    1 The brief and methodology 1

    1.1 The brief 1
    1.2 Methodology 2
    1.2.1 Selection of interviewees 3
    1.2.2 Interview protocols 7
    1.2.3 Timeline 7
    1.2.4 Dissemination 8

    2 Corporate, for-profit and virtual universities and the emergence of the corporatised universities 9

    2.1 Introduction .9
    2.2 The corporate university  12
    2.3 The for-profit university 15
    2.4 The virtual university 16
    2.5 The traditional university 17
    2.6 The emergence of corporate and virtual universities18
    2.7 The corporatised university 23
    3 New providers 27

    3 New Products

    3.1 Exemplar organisations 27

    3.1.1 Corporate universities

    McDonalds Hamburger University 27
    Ford 28
    AAPL 30
    Microsoft 32

    3.1.2 For-profit universities 32

    University of Phoenix 32
    DeVry Inc. and Keller Graduate School of Management 35
    Sylvan Learning Systems Inc 36

    3.1.3 Public/corporate universities 38

    USAF Air University 38
    US Army 39

    3.2 Contextual organisations 39

    3.2.1 Corporatised arms of traditional universities 40

    New York Universityonline 40
    University of Maryland University College 41

    3.2.2 Regulatory and government organisation 42
    3.2.3 Virtual universities 45

    Western Governors University 45
    National Technology University 47
    Christian University GlobalNet 49
    Michigan Virtual/Michigan Virtual Automotive College.50
    Jones International University 51

    3.3 Labour organisation 52

    The National Education Association 52

    3.4 Service companies 53

    Corporate Universities Xchange 53
    Gartner Group 53

    3.5 Corporate universities 54

    Sears Universities 54
    Disney University 55
    General Electric 56
    Sun Microsystems Educational Services 58
    Digital Education Systems 60
    Motorola University 60

    3.6 Other US developments in corporate, for-profit and distance education .62

    3.6.1 Auxilliary organisations 64

    3.7 Australian organisations investigated  69

    Coles Institute 69
    Melbourne University Private 71

    4 Trends and issues in higher education 75

    4.1 Major trends 75

    4.1.1 The business of education 75
    4.1.2 The borderlessness of education 77
    4.1.3 The rise of new providers 79

    Corporate universities 79
    Virtual universities 82
    For-profit universities 83

    4.2 Operations of the new providers 84

    4.2.1 Mission and purpose 84
    4.2.2 Governance and culture 87
    4.2.3 Curriculum and content 90
    4.2.4 Students and staffing 93
    4.2.5 Technology 96

    4.3 Issues 101

    4.3.1 The business of education 101
    4.3.2 Borderless education 103
    4.3.3 International trade agreement and higher education 106
    4.3.4 Mission and purpose 109
    4.3.5 Governance and culture 109
    4.3.6 Curriculum 110
    4.3.7 Students and staffing 115
    4.3.8 Technology 122

    5 Implications for Australian higher education 125

    5.1 Introduction 125
    5.2 Potential for development of corporate and virtual universities in Australia 125

    5.2.1 Technology and borderless education 126
    5.2.2 Corporate universities 129
    5.2.3 Publicly-driven virtual universities 132
    5.2.4 For-profit providers 133

    5.3 Policy implications for Australian postsecondary education 136

    5.3.1 Recognition and regulation 138
    5.3.2 Cross-sectoral issues 144
    5.3.3 Equity and access issues 146
    5.3.4 Institutional academic and staffing policies 148

    Appendix A 155
    Appendix B 165
    References 313


    Distance Education, by Marina Stock McIsaac and Charlotte Nirmalani Gunawardena --- http://earthvision.asu.edu/~laurie/mcisaac/distance.htm 
    I don't know when this was written (I suspect in the mid-1990s), but some of the material is very informative even if the study is somewhat dated.


    Become familiar with the following documents:

    Global-Cross Border Issues in the 21st Century --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Assessment of Education Technologies --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 


    The Power of the Internet for Learning: Moving from Promise to Practice
    Report of the Web-Based Education Commission of the U.S. Congress, December 19, 2000 --- http://interact.hpcnet.org/webcommission/index.htm 


    "Practical Strategies for Teaching Computer-Mediated Classes" by Brent Muirhead focuses on "strategies and principles that will help online teachers to be creative and effective teachers." The paper is available at http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/MAY01_Issue/article02.html 


    Other Publications of Interest: --- http://www.detc.org/content/publica.html 

    Accredited Institutions of Postsecondary Education, American Council on Education, Published for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation; ISBN 1-57356-282-3, $59.95; The Oryx Press, 4041 North Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85012-3397; (800-279-6799).

    Bear’s Guide to Earning Degrees Nontraditionally by John Bear, Ph.D., and Mariah Bear, M.A., Published by Ten Speed Press, P.O. Box 7123, Berkeley, CA 94707; $29.95. ISBN 0-9629312-4-1; 1-800-841-BOOK or 510-559-1600.

    Campus-Free College Degrees by Marcie Kirsner Thorson; ISBN 0-916277-56-9, 9th Edition, $27.95 (plus $4 for shipping); Thorson Guides, P.O. Box 470886, Tulsa, OK 74147; 1-800-741-7771.

    College Degrees by Mail and Internet by John Bear, Ph.D., and Mariah Bear, M.A., Published by Ten Speed Press, P.O. Box 7123, Berkeley, CA 94707; $12.95, ISBN 1-5008-109-6; 1-800-841-BOOK or 510-559-1600.

    Distance Learning Evaluation Guide (1996), Published by the American Council on Education, ISBN 1-57356-106-1; $13.50; ACE Fulfillment Service (Code W), Dept. 191, Washington, D.C, 20055-0191; phone: 301-604-9073.

    Guiding Principles for Distance Learning in a Learning Society, 1996, Published by the American Council on Education, ISBN 1-57356-091-X, $8.50; ACE Fulfillment Service (Code W), Department 191, Washington, DC 20055-0191; phone: 301-604-9073.

    Pocket Guide to College Credit and Degrees: Valuable Information for Adult Learners Seeking College Degrees by Jacqueline E. Johnson, Jo Ann Robinson and Sally R. Welch; ISBN 0-8268-1465-1; $9.95 U.S./$12.95 Canada (includes shipping and handling); ACE Fulfillment Service, Dept. 191, Washington, D.C, 20055-0191; phone: 301-604-9073.

    The Best Distance Learning Graduate Schools: Earning Your Degree Without Leaving Home by Vicky Phillips and Cindy Yager, published by Random House/Princeton Review Books, ISBN# 0-679-76930-7; $20; 1-800-733-3000 or local bookstores.




    An Innovative Online International Accounting Course on Six Campuses Around the World   http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm 

    A highlight for me at the November 6-7, 1998 AICPA Accounting Educators Conference was a presentation by Sharon Lightner from San Diego State University and Linard Nadig from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.  This presentation followed a ceremony presenting Professors Lightner and Nadig with the $1,000 AICPA Collaboration Award prize.

    The course syllabus is located at http://www.aznet.net/course/doors/ 

    The Collaboration Award was given for an online course that is now offered to a class comprised of five students from each of six universities in the United States, Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Hong Kong, and the United States.  I videotaped the presentation by Professors Lightner and Nadig.  The purpose of this document is to provide you with a summary of the highlights of this innovative international accounting course.

    The course has some highly innovative features including the online participation of accounting standard setting bodies in the various countries mentioned above.  The course is also innovative in that students in class and in team projects see and hear one another over the Internet in a manner much like they would see and hear each other if they were all in the same classroom.




    MOOCs Are Free and Open to Everybody in the World

    Massive Open Online Course --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

    By definition there are no admission standards to take a MOOC and admission is free, although fees may be charged for recognition (badges, completion credentials, or college credits) that have added academic standards. In general, MOOCs are video windows into advanced courses filmed live across the curriculum at prestigious universities. Although some universities provide MOOCs for introductory courses (undergraduate or graduate) MOOCs are not well suited to introductory students who need more hand holding and personalized supervision that are seldom, if ever, available in a MOOC taken by a "massive" number of students. At the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania introductory courses in the first-year MBA core can be taken for free as MOOCs. Students who are planning to go into MBA programs around the world often take these MOOCs in preparation when they will later be taking similar courses in accounting, finance, management, marketing, etc. for credit.

    IBM Certificate Badges Available
    Free Analytics, Big Data, and Data Science Courses ---
    https://bigdatauniversity.com/

    Bob Jensen's threads on free distance education and training courses (most from prestigious universities) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education and training courses ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

     

    Whereas the Wharton Business School offers core MBA courses as MOOCs, other programs have distance education courses that are not MOOCs because of fees and admission standards. For example, the Harvard Business School has an extension program for pre-MBA courses that are relatively expensive and capped regarding course size with competitive admission standards. Bob Jensen's threads on these and other free-based distance education courses are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Harvard Extension School: Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Open Learning Course --- 
    https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/intensive-introduction-computer-science

    Links to Free Computer and Coding Courses ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet

    The cumulative number of MOOCs didn’t break 100 until the end of 2012. But by the end of 2013 that number had grown to over 800. And today the number of registered MOOC students added in 2015 is nearly equal to the last three years combined.
    "MOOCs Are Still Rising, at Least in Numbers," by Ellen Wexler, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/moocs-are-still-rising-at-least-in-numbers/57527?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=7bf78ed93ead47d3a4da220c40587cbd&elqCampaignId=1647&elqaid=6629&elqat=1&elqTrackId=f325471009eb4e959e66d27de2031216

    When one of the first massive open online courses appeared at Stanford University, 160,000 students enrolled. It was 2011, and fewer than 10 MOOCs existed worldwide.

    It has been four years since then, and according to a new report, the cumulative number of MOOCs has reached nearly 4,000.

    Compiled earlier this month by Dhawal Shah, founder of the MOOC aggregator Class Central, the report summarizes data on MOOCs from the past four years. And the data show that even as the MOOC hype has started to die down, interest hasn’t tapered off.

    The cumulative number of MOOCs didn’t break 100 until the end of 2012. But by the end of 2013 that number had grown to over 800. And today the number of registered MOOC students added in 2015 is nearly equal to the last three years combined.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    Note the graph showing that the cumulative number of MOOCs to date is nearly 4,000 course, most of which are courses from prestigious universities like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Rice, etc. Although MOOCs are free by definition they cannot usually be taken for transcript credit unless a fee is paid for competency-based testing. The two largest credit providers are Coursera and EdX. One of the more noted MOOCs available is from Arizona State University where the entire first year of courses can be taken for credit.

    Noncredit credentials (badges) for a fee are also available for most MOOCs that demonstrate completion of a MOOC and sometimes a level of competency that might be recognized by employers even though they do not qualify for transcript college credit.

    "Who Takes MOOCs?" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2012 ---
     http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hints-what-type-student-takes-mooc

    Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are popular. This much we know.

    But as investors and higher ed prognosticators squint into their crystal balls for hints of what this popularity could portend for the rest of higher education, two crucial questions remains largely unanswered: Who are these students, and what do they want?

    Some early inquiries into this by two major MOOC providers offer a few hints.

    Coursera, a company started by two Stanford University professors, originated with a course called Machine Learning, which co-founder Andrew Ng taught last fall to a virtual classroom of 104,000 students. Coursera surveyed a sample of those students to find out, among other things, their education and work backgrounds and why they decided to take the course.

    Among 14,045 students in the Machine Learning course who responded to a demographic survey, half were professionals who currently held jobs in the tech industry. The largest chunk, 41 percent, said they were professionals currently working in the software industry; another 9 percent said they were professionals working in non-software areas of the computing and information technology industries.

    Many were enrolled in some kind of traditional postsecondary education. Nearly 20 percent were graduate students, and another 11.6 percent were undergraduates. The remaining registrants were either unemployed (3.5 percent), employed somewhere other than the tech industry (2.5 percent), enrolled in a K-12 school (1 percent), or “other” (11.5 percent).

    A subset (11,686 registrants) also answered a question about why they chose to take the course. The most common response, given by 39 percent of the respondents, was that they were “just curious about the topic.” Another 30.5 percent said they wanted to “sharpen the skills” they use in their current job. The smallest proportion, 18 percent, said they wanted to “position [themselves] for a better job.”

    Udacity, another for-profit MOOC provider founded by (erstwhile) Stanford professors, has also conducted some initial probes into the make-up of its early registrants. While the company did not share any data tables with Inside Higher Ed, chief executive officer David Stavens said more than 75 percent of the students who took the company’s first course, Artificial Intelligence, last fall were looking to “improve their skills relevant for either current or future employment.”

    That is a broad category, encompassing both professionals and students, so it does not lend much nuance to the questions of who the students are or what they want. And even the more detailed breakdown of the students who registered for Ng’s Machine Learning course cannot offer very much upon which to build a sweeping thesis on how MOOCs might fit into the large and diverse landscape of higher education.

    Coursera has since completed the first iterations of seven additional courses and opened registration for 32 more beyond that. Many of those courses — which cover poetry, world music, finance, and behavioral neurology — are likely to attract different sorts of people, with different goals, than Machine Learning did. “I'm expecting that the demographics for some of our upcoming classes (Stats One, Soc 101, Pharmacology, etc.) will be very different,” said Daphne Koller, one of Coursera’s founders, in an e-mail.

    Continued in article

    "Coursera Tops 1 Million Students," Inside Higher Ed, August 10, 2012 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/10/coursera-tops-1-million-students

    Coursera, the company that provides support and Web hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses. The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116 courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about 385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to 60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.

    Educating the Masses:  Coursera doubles the number of university partners
    "MOOC Host Expands," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2012 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-university-partnerships 

    "The 12 Most Popular Free Online Courses (MOOCs) For Professionals," by Maggie Zhang, Business Insider, July 8, 2014 ---
     http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7

    01. Wesleyan University's "Social Psychology"

    02. University of Maryland's "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems"

    03. Duke University's "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue"

    04. Duke University's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior"

    05. University of Toronto's "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals"

    06. Stanford University's "Startup Engineering"

    07. Yale University's "Financial Markets"

    08. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Financial Accounting"

    09. University of Washington's "Introduction to Public Speaking"

    10. University of Michigan's "Introduction to Finance"

    11. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Marketing"

    12. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's "Data Analysis"

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7#ixzz37LiJgQ57

    "MOOCs haven't lived up to the hopes and the hype, Stanford participants say," by Dan Stober, Stanford Report, October 15, 2015 ---
    http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/october/moocs-no-panacea-101515.html
    Thank you Glen Gray for the heads up.

    October 17, 2015 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi Glen,

    Is the message that learning from Stanford professors is not worth the price of $0?

    Actually I think the message is that for many folks who try MOOCs the work of learning is too intense and time consuming given their lack of commitment to keeping up with the class.

    Richard Campbell once revealed to the AECM that when he tried to learn from a MOOC it was like "trying to drink from a firehose." I dropped out of a C++ programming course because my heart just was not in keeping up with the class. Ruth Bender revealed to the AECM that completing a MOOC was one of the hardest things she ever tried.

    In my viewpoint MOOCs are not a good model for introductory students where more hand holding is generally needed. MOOCs are better suited to highly specialized advanced courses for learners who are way above average in terms of aptitude and prior learning.


    Udemy --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy

    Udemy.com is an online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults.[2] Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee.[3] Udemy provides tools which enable users to create a course, promote it and earn money from student tuition charges.

    No Udemy courses are currently credentialed for college credit; students take courses largely as a means of improving job-related skills.[3] Some courses generate credit toward technical certification. Udemy has made a special effort to attract corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their company.[4] For example, PayPal has used the service to train its employees to write Node.js code.[5]

    You can enroll in over 55,000 online classes for $10.99 each during Udemy's New Year's sale (sale ends on January 11, 2018) ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/udemy-new-years-sale-2018

    Udemy --- https://www.udemy.com/

    For example, in the "What do you want to learn" box type in accounting.

    Don't confuse Udemy with Coursera that serves on a higher plane in MOOC-for-credit education
    Coursera --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

     

     




    Cross-Border Training and Education Alternatives

    Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
    Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
    Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
    Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
    The Master List of Free Online College Courses ---
    http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

    From Mark Kappel on March 4, 2016

    MoneyGeek.com has created a financial aid guide for online colleges. An interactive map offers readers financial aid resources based on state, degree level, school type and more. In addition, readers can explore federal student loans and grants specific to online schools.

    Review the guide here: http://www.moneygeek.com/education/college/resources/financial-aid-for-online-colleges/

     

    InformED:  Listing of Sites for Free Courses and Learning Modules (unlike certificates, transferable credits are never free) ---
    http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/free-online-courses-50-sites-to-get-educated-for-free/

    Guide to Online Community Colleges --- http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/online-colleges/community-colleges/

    School of Open (Creative Commons) --- http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org

    AACC: 21st Century Center (community college helpers, including practice examinations) --- http://www.aacc21stcenturycenter.org/
    For example search on the term "accounting"

    A report on people who attended for-profit colleges in Florida in the past decade concluded that the education they received was superficial and not worth the amount of debt they accumulated ---
    Click Here


    Mega Universities Partnering with Private and Public Sectors for Employee Education and Traning
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Partnerships


    OpenClassrooms Online Vocational Training --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenClassrooms

    Among the prestigious firms using OpenClassrooms for retraining are Amazon, Microsoft, and PwC ---
    https://www.businessinsider.com/how-openclassrooms-is-helping-corporations-like-amazon-retrain-workers-2019-11


    Video: A Scenario of Higher Education in 2020 (or thereabouts)---
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ

    Can a Huge Online College Solve California’s Work-Force Problems?
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-a-Huge-Online-College/244054?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=f80ba3e869f84decb4965e602626b579&elq=fe9f9bb29c1f407097558d58d6c15b2f&elqaid=19912&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9243

    Jerry Brown was taking a victory lap.

    The call went out to reporters early on a recent Monday morning: The governor would attend that day’s meeting of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors. A few minutes after 11, tieless and relaxed, Brown slid into a seat on the dais. He was just in time — and not coincidentally — for a discussion of the state’s newest, and wholly online, community college.

    The virtual college, the 115th institution in California’s two-year system, is Brown’s baby, its approval in June the capstone to his sunset year in office. The college is meant to serve a population too often left behind by higher education: under- or unemployed adults who need new skills to land a job, secure a raise, nab a promotion, just to maintain a toehold in a swiftly changing workplace. An online institution, its advocates say, will allow so-called stranded workers — there are 2.5 million Californians without a postsecondary degree or credential between the ages of 25 and 34 alone — to take short-term courses whenever, wherever.

    Reaching those workers will be necessary for the world’s fifth-largest economy to continue to grow and thrive. And if the online college enrolls even a fraction of its target audience, it would become the largest provider of distance education, public or private, in the nation. The scale — and the potential for innovation — has people across the country looking West.

    Given the floor at the Board of Governors meeting, Brown, a Democrat, couldn’t help crowing. "This is a no-brainer, it is obvious, it is inevitable, it is a juggernaut that cannot be stopped," he said. "California is a leader, it will lead in this. And I say, hallelujah."

    For all the governor’s certitude, it may be premature to declare the online college a sure fix to the state’s yawning gaps in educational and economic opportunity. The unknowns are many: Will job seekers or employers find value in an institution that offers only certificates and credentials, as is the plan for new college, not the degrees so frequently required for middle-class work?

    Digital learning promises convenience, but will harried parents and overburdened breadwinners be any more likely to log onto a computer than set foot in a classroom? If they do register for an online course, will they flourish? After all, studies consistently show that students — low-income and first-generation students most especially — do better in face-to-face or hybrid courses.

    Backers of the new college, like Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the community-college system, pledge to consult with employers and unions to make sure the competency-based credentials offered are prized in the workplace. Research has identified interventions that can help online course takers perform well; starting from scratch, such strategies can be baked in. "We will do as much as possible," Oakley says, "to give them the best opportunity for success."

    Continued in article

    "A Future Full of Badges," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/A-Future-Full-of-Badges/131455/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

     


    Competency-Based Learning --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    EDUCAUSE:  Competency-Based Education (CBE) ---
    https://library.educause.edu/topics/teaching-and-learning/competency-based-educati

    Western Governors University is a Leading Competency-Based Learning University ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University

    Here’s How Western Governors U. Aims to Enroll a Million Students ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Here-s-How-Western-Governors/243492?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=0fe6b239932845ee9da44c2fa67cdf5f&elq=885d6ac654144af5aff9430a4640932d&elqaid=19192&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8710

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Competency-Based Learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge


    2U is a For-Profit Education Technology Company --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2U_(company)
    Abiyt 2U ---https://2u.com/about/

    London School of Economics and its partner company (2U) will create its first fully online data science (undergraduate) degree. Program, priced at $20,000 for a three year degree---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/08/06/london-school-economics-start-2us-first-undergraduate-degree?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=6cd3965160-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-6cd3965160-197565045&mc_cid=6cd3965160&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

     


    Purdue University purchased Kaplan University formerly owned by the Washington Post.
    Kaplan now has a new name called Purdue Global University
    https://www.purdueglobal.edu/


    NYT:  The for-profit-college industry continues to cheat students while the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress do nothing ---
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/opinion/predatory-colleges-students-devos.html?elqTrackId=5dc95869b80045dc96a6648f05c9c2bd&elq=8199fd0e47494950a55cdf9dbcbbfc9a&elqaid=19193&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8711


    Question
    What's the most important criteria for sustainable online programs?

    Bob Jensen's Answer
    In my mind the most important criteria are academic standard reputations and sustainability if the Federal government stopped paying tuition for military veterans. Sustainable online programs have reputation things and niches that make them survivors. Most flagship universities (think Wisconsin and Illinois) have online programs these days that are cash cows for the onsite programs and would survive even without Federal money for military veterans. Such flagship online programs are filling a variety of needs and are often taught by the same faculty who teach on campus. Probably the most exciting new things these days are the McDonalds new program for funding employee higher education (onsite or online) and the Purdue takeover of Kaplan University's faltering online programs.

    Of course some online programs have non-traditional funding like Western Governors University and programs funded by employers like Walmart, Starbucks, etc.

    The University of Phoenix’s online enrollment plummets while Western Governors and Southern New Hampshire near 100,000 students as they vie to rule the roost.---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/23/nonprofits-poised-unseat-u-phoenix-largest-online-university?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e057cf8bf5-DNU20180111&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e057cf8bf5-197565045&mc_cid=e057cf8bf5&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

    Liberty University --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_University
    Roughly Half the Students are Graduate Students
    15.000 Students On Campus
    Nearly 100,000 Students Online

    3.1 Center for Law and Government
    3.2 Rawlings School of Divinity
    3.3 Technical Studies and Trades
    3.4 Zaki Gordon Cinematic Arts Center
    3.5 College of Osteopathic Medicine
    3.6 School of Business
    3.7 School of Aeronautics
    3.8 School of Engineering
    3.9 School of Music

    NYT;  How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/magazine/how-liberty-university-built-a-billion-dollar-empire-online.html?elqTrackId=c3412b137c0b46c9999c5833ed3dca57&elq=c99a9c459f244693a05fd66569b048c0&elqaid=18667&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8407

    Not to be forgotten in all of this is Arizona State University's 150 online programs, including employer-funded programs (think Starbucks) ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_State_University

    Arizona State University (commonly referred to as ASU or Arizona State) is a public metropolitan research university on five campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area, and four regional learning centers throughout Arizona, as well as 150 online programs. The 2018 university ratings by U.S. News & World Report rank ASU No. 1 among the Most Innovative Schools in America for the third year in a row and has ranked ASU No. 115 in National Universities with overall score of 47/100 with 83% of student applications accepted.

    ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the U.S. It had approximately 72,000 students enrolled in fall 2017, including 59,198 undergraduate and 12,630 graduate students.] ASU's charter, approved by the board of regents in 2014, is based on the "New American University" model created by ASU President Michael M. Crow. It defines ASU as "a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but rather by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves."

    Liberty University, Purdue University, and ASU may well be the models of the future for comprehensive universities.

    Prestigious universities (think Stanford and MIT) have online specialty programs (e.g., in engineering) as well as participation in online MOOC degree and certificate programs via EdX, Coursera, etc. ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course#Notable_providers

     


    IBM Certificate Badges Available
    Free Analytics, Big Data, and Data Science Courses ---
    https://bigdatauniversity.com/

    Bob Jensen's threads on free distance education and training courses (most from prestigious universities) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education and training courses ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm


    Udemy --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy

    Udemy.com is an online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults.[2] Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee.[3] Udemy provides tools which enable users to create a course, promote it and earn money from student tuition charges.

    No Udemy courses are currently credentialed for college credit; students take courses largely as a means of improving job-related skills.[3] Some courses generate credit toward technical certification. Udemy has made a special effort to attract corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their company.[4] For example, PayPal has used the service to train its employees to write Node.js code.[5]

    You can enroll in over 55,000 online classes for $10.99 each during Udemy's New Year's sale (sale ends on January 11, 2018) ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/udemy-new-years-sale-2018

    Udemy --- https://www.udemy.com/

    For example, in the "What do you want to learn" box type in accounting.

    Don't confuse Udemy with Coursera that serves on a higher plane in MOOC-for-credit education
    Coursera --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

     


    The largest for-profit training school (with 130 campuses)  thrown under the bus?

    ITT --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute
    Now closed

    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on August 26, 2016

    This was it for ITT
    The Obama administration took steps Thursday that could effectively force the closure of one of the nation’s largest for-profit college chains, banning ITT Technical Institute from enrolling new students who receive federal aid. ITT, which has about 43,000 students nationwide, is facing accusations from its accreditor of chronic mismanagement of its finances and using questionable recruiting tactics. The company is also under investigation by state and federal authorities. Parent ITT Educational Services Inc.’s stock plunged.


    IBM Certificate Badges Available
    Free Analytics, Big Data, and Data Science Courses ---
    https://bigdatauniversity.com/

    Bob Jensen's threads on free distance education and training courses (most from prestigious universities) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education and training courses ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

     


    Update on Learning to Code

    Learn How to Code for Free: A DIY Guide for Learning HTML, Python, Javascript & More  ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/learn-how-to-code-for-free-a-diy-guide-for-learning-html-python-javascript-more.html

    CS For All: Introduction to Computer Science and Python Programming ---
    https://www.edx.org/course/cs-all-introduction-computer-science-harveymuddx-cs005x

    Code.org (computer sciencighties, Perl excels at processing text, and developers like it because it's powerful and flexible. It was once famously described as "the duct tape of the web," because it's really great at holding websites together, but it's not the most elegant language. Perl: Originally developed by a NASA engineer in the late eighties, Perl excels at processing text, and developers like it because it's powerful and flexible. It was once famously described as "the duct tape of the web," because it's really great at holding websites together, but it's not the most elegant language. Wikimedia Commons

    . . .

    C:
    One of the oldest programming languages still in common use, C was created in the early 1970s. In 1978, the language's legendary and still widely read manual, the 800-page "The C Programming Language," saw print for the first time. C: One of the oldest programming languages still in common use, C was created in the early 1970s. In 1978, the language's legendary and still widely read manual, the 800-page "The C Programming Language," saw print for the first time. Flickr

    . . .

    Objective-C:
    The original C programming language was so influential that it inspired a lot of similarly named successors, all of which took their inspiration from the original but added features from other languages. Objective-C has grown in popularity as the standard language to build iPhone apps, though Apple's been pushing its own Swift language, too. Objective-C: The original C programming language was so influential that it inspired a lot of similarly named successors, all of which took their inspiration from the original but added features from other languages. Objective-C has grown in popularity as the standard language to build iPhone apps, though Apple's been pushing its own Swift language, too. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    . . .

    JavaScript:
    This is a super-popular programming language primarily used in web apps. But it doesn't have much to do with Java besides the name. JavaScript runs a lot of the modern web, but it also catches a lot of flak for slowing browsers down and sometimes exposing users to security vulnerabilities. JavaScript: This is a super-popular programming language primarily used in web apps. But it doesn't have much to do with Java besides the name. JavaScript runs a lot of the modern web, but it also catches a lot of flak for slowing browsers down and sometimes exposing users to security vulnerabilities. Dmitry Baranovskiy via Flickr

    . . .

    Visual Basic:
    Microsoft's Visual Basic (and its successor, Visual Basic .NET) tries to make programming easier with a graphical element that lets you change portions of a program by dragging and dropping. It's old, and some think it's lacking features next to other languages, but with Microsoft's backing, it's still got its users out there. Visual Basic: Microsoft's Visual Basic (and its successor, Visual Basic .NET) tries to make programming easier with a graphical element that lets you change portions of a program by dragging and dropping. It's old, and some think it's lacking features next to other languages, but with Microsoft's backing, it's still got its users out there. Wikimedia Commons

    . . . 

    Ruby:
     Like Python, developers like this 24-year-old language because it's easy to read and write the code. Also popular is Rails, an add-on framework for Ruby that makes it really easy to use it to build web apps. The language's official motto is "A programmer's best friend." Ruby: Like Python, developers like this 24-year-old language because it's easy to read and write the code. Also popular is Rails, an add-on framework for Ruby that makes it really easy to use it to build web apps. The language's official motto is "A programmer's best friend." ©V&A images

    Python:
    This language traces back to 1989, and is loved by its fans for its highly readable code. Many programmers suggest it's the easiest language to get started with. Python: This language traces back to 1989, and is loved by its fans for its highly readable code. Many programmers suggest it's the easiest language to get started with. Flickr/nyuhuhuu CSS: Short for "Cascading Style Sheets," CSS is a programming language to design the format and layout of a website. A lot of website menus and mobile app menus are written with CSS, in conjunction with JavaScript and garden-variety HTML.

    CSS:
    Short for "Cascading Style Sheets," CSS is a programming language to design the format and layout of a website. A lot of website menus and mobile app menus are written with CSS, in conjunction with JavaScript and garden-variety HTML. Wikimedia Commons

    . . .

    R:
    This is the programming language of choice for statisticians and anybody doing data analysis. Google has gone on record as a big fan of R, for the power it gives to its mathematicians.

    Read more:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/programming-languages-in-highest-demand-2015-6?op=1#ixzz3eIfsCJdR

    Free Code Camp --- http://www.freecodecamp.com/

    DevArt: Art made with code --- https://devart.withgoogle.com/ 

    Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

    Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     

     


    "Enrollment Woes Continue for U. of Phoenix," Inside Higher Ed, March 26, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/26/enrollment-woes-continue-u-phoenix

    Jensen Comment
    An enormous problem for all online programs from for-profit university is the rise in the popularity and quality of online degree programs from major state-supported universities. Search for over 1,200 online programs at
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
    This is my recommended search engine for online degree programs.
    Note the links to US News rankings of these online programs at the above site.

    Don't trust those online search programs sponsored by for-profit universities because they exclude the affordable and higher quality online programs from major non-profit universities. Almost daily I get requests to link to one of these misleading search programs. I think people get paid if they can get Webmasters like me to link to these search programs (generally it is the same misleading search program under a different name).


    Lynda.com charges users between $250 to $375 a year to access content hosted on the platform ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynda_Weinman#Lynda.com

    "Lynda.com Announces $186 Million Investment," Inside Higher Ed,  January 15, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/01/15/lyndacom-announces-186-million-investment

    The online learning platform Lynda.com has set an early tone for the ed-tech venture capital and equity market in 2015 with a $186 million investment. The private equity company TPG Capital led the investment, while firms Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and Spectrum Equity -- as well as some of Lynda.com's earlier investors -- also participated. Lynda.com charges users between $250 to $375 a year to access content hosted on the platform, and will use the investment for acquisitions and growth, the company said in a press release.

    Lynda.com has became a huge learning site with over 500 instructors --- http://www.lynda.com/

    Jensen Comment
    Because of the high price for each student (in addition to textbook prices) I would look first to see if there are good free tutorials for what you need such as in the tens of thousands of tutorials in hundreds of learning channels now on YouTube, the thousands of free tutorials at the Khan Academy, and the hundreds of thousands of free learning tutorials linked at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

    Open Campus is a large provider of learning certificates. This site also has a substantial amount of free learning resources ---
    http://www.greycampus.com/opencampus


    Also note how popular technology is becoming in the onsite classrooms
    "Report: 83 Percent of High Schools Offer Online Courses," by Joshua Bolkan, T.H.E. Journal, June 6, 2014 ---
    http://thejournal.com/articles/2014/06/11/report-83-percent-of-high-schools-offer-online-courses.aspx

    Only 17 percent of high schools do not currently offer any online classes and more than 40 percent are offering online courses in English language arts, history, math or science, according to the latest report from Project Tomorrow's Speak Up report.

    Based on online survey responses from more than 400,000 teachers, administrators, students and community members, the latest report, "The New Digital Learning Playbook: Advancing College and Career Skill Development in K-12 Schools," examines attitudes about technology's role in preparing K-12 students for higher education and careers.

    The reasons principals who participated in the survey cited for offering online classes include offering remediation, at a rate of 66 percent, Keeping students engaged, at 63 percent and to provide credit recovery options, at 61 percent.

    "Teachers who teach online classes, in particular, see a strong correlation between the use of technology and students' college and career ready skill development," according to information released by Project Tomorrow. "More than half of these teachers say technology use helps students understand how to apply academic concepts to real world problems (58 percent), take ownership of their learning (57 percent) and develop problem solving and critical thinking skills (57 percent)."

    Other key findings regarding online learning and digital resources include:

    • 32 percent of elementary school teachers surveyed told researchers they use games in their classrooms. The most common reason cited was increasing engagement, at 79 percent, followed by the ability to address different learning styles at 72 percent;
    • Science teachers are more likely than other teachers to report using digital content in the classroom, with 63 percent reporting that they use videos they find online versus only 48 percent of other teachers. Science teachers also reported using animations at a clip of 52 percent and only 22 percent of other teachers said the same. The difference held across other types of digital content as well, including virtual labs, real time data, online textbooks and teacher-created videos;
    • Teachers with online classes were more likely than those in 1:1 environments and those using digital content to report that technology helps students develop creativity, take ownership of their learning, develop critical thinking or problem solving skills or understand how concepts relate to the real world;
    • Online teachers were less likely than teachers in 1:1 environments and teachers who use digital content to tell researchers technology can increase motiviation to learn or help students learn to work collaboratively;
    • While 41 percent of teachers surveyed reported that they had taken at least one online course for professional development, only 17 percent told researchers they were interested in teaching an online class;
    • More than half, 54 percent, of administrators who participated in the survey told researchers they believed " that the effective use of digital content within the classroom can increase students' career readiness by linking real world problems to academic content. Administrators surveyed also said that providing enough computers and bandwidth to realize those benefits was a challenge, at rates of 55 and 38 percent, respectively; and
    • Technology administrators who took part in the survey said that sufficient bandwidth would increase the use of streaming content in classes (74 percent), increase the use of multimedia tools (68 percent) and the use of online curricula (57 percent).

    Read more at http://thejournal.com/articles/2014/06/11/report-83-percent-of-high-schools-offer-online-courses.aspx#ly5DUUCPUp93XCxL.99

    MOOC for Credit Updates

    EdX (edX) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX

    Coursera --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

    Arizona State University (ASU) --- http://www.asu.edu/

    Global Freshman Academy at ASU --- http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/three-questions-for-the-asuedx-global-freshman-academy-online-program/#.mdnza8b:OlFh

    Jensen Comment
    Arizona State University is one of the most innovative, if not the most innovative, large and respective universities in the  USA. Innovation is so rapid and so complex at ASU that it must be an administrative nightmare.

    Academe was shocked when Starbucks Corporation announced a free undergraduate degree distance education fringe benefit to be administered by ASU. Originally, only employees who had a prior two years of college were eligible, but now virtually all full-time Starbucks employees are eligible to study online for four years from ASU for an undergraduate degree. This Starbucks fringe benefit is part of ASU's innovative online distance education program that is a fee-based program instead of a free MOOC program. For Starbucks employees their employer pays the tuition.

    The University also has an innovative MOOC sports program that the NCAA repackages via Coursera for third parties ---
    http://blogs.wpcarey.asu.edu/knowit/what-lurks-beneath-the-tip-of-the-mooc-iceberg/

    ASU first joined the MOOC window into courses with a journalism course and then expanded MOOC windows into other courses. ASU also commenced a MOOC program as well that is a free video window into its freshman general education core. Anybody in the world may view freshman courses through this window and study alongside ASU campus students taking these core courses. Initially the MOOC viewers could not get academic credit.

    Global Freshman Academy at ASU
    Now ASU is experimenting with making academic credit available to MOOC viewers through edX. MOOCs can be viewed for free but academic credit is fee-based.

    Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of MOOCs from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Harvard:  The Death of Supply Chain Management ---
    https://hbr.org/2018/06/the-death-of-supply-chain-management?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_weekly&utm_campaign=weeklyhotlist_not_activesubs&referral=00202&deliveryName=DM7738

    Jensen Comment
    Darn --- just when Walmart commenced to pay for college majors in this discipline

    Walmart’s too-good-to-be-true “$1 a day” college tuition plan, explained ---
    https://www.vox.com/2018/6/1/17413326/walmart-college-tuition-worker-pay-unemployment

    If headlines this week like “Walmart’s perk for workers: Go to college for $1 a day” (CNN) or “Walmart to offer employees a college education for $1 a day” (Washington Post) sound too good to be true, that’s because they largely are. The benefit is real, but it is much more restrictive than those headlines suggest. It’s essentially a bulk purchasing discount for a narrow range of online college courses.

    It’s also a telling benefit on a number of levels. The labor market is getting stronger, and employers are needing to think harder about how to invest in recruiting and retaining employees. But the old-fashioned strategy of paying more continues to be something corporate America resists, in part out of habit and in part because offering higher wages is a little more complicated than it looks. Companies like Walmart are, in essence, trying to get creative with their compensation packages in hopes of narrowly targeting the money they expend on the core goal of recruiting and retaining desirable workers.

    The question is whether policymakers will keep unemployment low long enough to break through the wall of resistance to across-the-board pay hikes and force big companies to finally just raise pay.

    Walmart’s actual tuition plan, explained

    The Walmart program is limited to online degree programs offered by three schools — the University of Florida, Brandman University, and Bellevue University — and specifically focused on bachelor’s or associate degrees in either business or supply chain management.

    You won’t, in other words, be able to do part-time shifts at Walmart to “pay your way through college” in the traditional sense.

    But qualifying Walmart employees (including both full-time and part-time workers who’ve been with the company for 90 days) will get discounted tuition, books, and access to a coach who will help them decide on an appropriate program and shepherd them through the application process

    It’s a nice opportunity for Walmart employees to gain a chance at upward mobility off the retail floor, and that’s likely the point. Unlike higher cash wages (which of course can be used for online college tuition as well as rent, gasoline, movie tickets, medical expenses, etc.), the tuition benefit is likely to be disproportionately appealing to people who are on the more ambitious end of the distribution. It’s an effort, in other words, to make Walmart more attractive specifically to the most appealing set of potential workers, a strategy other companies have pursued in recent years.

    Many large employers are trying tuition benefits

    Modest tuition programs have long been a staple of large employer benefits packages largely because of favorable tax treatment. The IRS allows employers to give employees several thousand dollars’ worth of tuition benefits tax-free, which makes establishing a program something of a no-brainer for most companies big enough to be employing a large back-office staff anyway.

    But four years ago, Starbucks blazed the trail of offering a much more ambitious reimbursement program that essentially offered taxable tuition subsidies rather than taxable wage increases.

    The reason: Academic research shows that workers who are interested in tuition subsidies are different from workers who are not. While everyone likes money, Peter Cappelli’s 2002 research indicates that the workers who like tuition subsidies are more productive than those who don’t, and Colleen Manchester’s 2012 research shows that subsidy-using employees have longer time horizons and are less likely to switch jobs.

    In March of this year, a consortium of big US hotels launched a generous tuition discount program, and later that month, McDonald’s substantially enhanced its tuition benefits. Kroger — another top five US employer — rolled out a new tuition program in April, and Chick-fil-A expanded its program in May.

    These initiatives differ in detail, but the broad story is the same. The unemployment rate is now low, so recruiting new staff is getting harder. Companies are looking to enhance their compensation but would like to do so in targeted ways.

    Continued in article

     


    "Less Than 1%," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, December 21, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/21/323-learners-eligible-credit-moocs-arizona-state-u?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=162e714d50-DNU20151221&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-162e714d50-197565045

    ASU has not shared how many credit-seeking MOOC learners it hopes to enroll -- if such a goal exists. Speaking to Inside Higher Ed in April, Philip Regier, university dean for educational initiatives, said there were “a lot of uncertainties” around that number. He added that he expected “maybe 25,000” to register for some of the MOOCs. The astronomy MOOC, the largest of the first three, attracted 13,423 registrants.

    A spokesperson for the university, in response to whether the results are satisfactory, said, “ASU’s goal is reaching learners who want access to high-quality college-level education. The Global Freshman Academy charts a new path in access to higher education, and the results of the inaugural courses are a positive first step for the GFA.”

    Low completion rates are nothing new to MOOCs. In fact, a completion rate in the low double digits -- even in the high teens -- can be seen as a success.

    MOOC researchers, however, have argued that completion rates don’t matter as much as they do in traditional online and face-to-face courses. The open structure of MOOCs, they say, allows learners to register for a course but only focus on a handful of units. In other words, a low completion rate can mask the fact that many learners got something out of the MOOC, even if they didn’t finish it.

    “In open online learning, completion numbers provide only one small perspective on people's learning experiences,” Justin Reich, executive director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab, said in an email. “It would also be worth learning more about the experiences of the 3,300 or the 34,000. Did they have good learning experiences? Are they more familiar with ASU and its faculty? What public interests or institutional interests were served by offering the course?”

    Reich has previously explored the demographics of the learners who registered for MOOCs offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- the two institutions behind edX. His recent research, which appeared earlier this month in Science, found MOOCs “can exacerbate rather than reduce disparities in educational outcomes related to socioeconomic status.” The results build on earlier findings about MOOCs, which have suggested MOOCs cater more to older learners with previously earned degrees instead of the learners ASU is targeting -- high school students, international students and students considering community college, among others.

    “I'm not surprised that few people took advantage of the credit option in the first run -- that's been common across certificate experiments in MOOCs,” Reich wrote. “A trajectory over time will be more useful than a snapshot. If these numbers stay very low, it will be harder to justify continuing the program than if they grow quickly and if the program gets more accepted and recognized.

    Continued in article

    "Nearly 4,000 Starbucks Employees Apply to Arizona State (online)," Inside Higher Ed, September 3, 2014 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/09/03/nearly-4000-starbucks-employees-apply-arizona-state

    Following Starbucks employee education benefits with Arizona State University,
    Anthem Blue Cross offers education benefits with the University of Southern New Hampshire

    "An Increasingly Popular Job Perk: Online Education," by Mary Ellen McIntire, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/an-increasingly-popular-job-perk-online-education/56771?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Wal-Mart subsidizes an entire undergraduate degree.

    "Fiat Chrysler Offers Degrees to Employee Families (including families of dealer employees) ," Inside Higher Ed, November 23, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/23/fiat-chrysler-offers-degrees-employee-families?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b3c3eb755f-DNU20151123&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b3c3eb755f-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online education (most of which still offers free learning without college credits) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    "The 12 Most Popular Free Online Courses (MOOCs) For Professionals," by Maggie Zhang, Business Insider, July 8, 2014 ---
     http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7

    01. Wesleyan University's "Social Psychology"

    02. University of Maryland's "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems"

    03. Duke University's "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue"

    04. Duke University's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior"

    05. University of Toronto's "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals"

    06. Stanford University's "Startup Engineering"

    07. Yale University's "Financial Markets"

    08. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Financial Accounting"

    09. University of Washington's "Introduction to Public Speaking"

    10. University of Michigan's "Introduction to Finance"

    11. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Marketing"

    12. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's "Data Analysis"

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7#ixzz37LiJgQ57

    Update
    2015:  The 10 most popular free online courses for professionals ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/most-popular-coursera-courses-of-2015-2015-12

    Bob Jensen's links to free course materials, videos, and entire courses from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    School of Open (Creative Commons) --- http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org


    Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women And Minorities ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/google-free-coding-lessons-to-women-2014-6#ixzz35qMerq6C

    Jensen Comment
    I think any women and minorities can apply, including college graduates, K-12 teachers, and professors.


    Department of Education in March 2014:  17,374 online higher education distance education and training programs altogether

    Jensen Comment
    Note that the hundreds of free MOOC courses from prestigious universities are not the same as fee-based distance education degree and certificate programs that are more like on-campus programs in terms in student-instructor interactions, graded assignments, and examinations. Some campuses like the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee even treat online programs as cash cows where the tuition is higher for online programs than identical on-campus programs.

    The (Department of Education Report in March 2014) report says that American colleges now offer 17,374 online programs altogether, 29 percent of which are master’s-degree programs, with bachelor’s and certificate programs making up 23 percent each. Business and management programs are the most popular, at 29 percent of the total, followed by health and medicine programs (16 percent), education programs (14 percent), and information technology and computers (10 percent) ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-there-may-be-fewer-online-programs-than-you-think/51163?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    Wharton's Financial Accounting course is in the Top 12
    Also note that those that argue you can't teach public speaking online are apparently wrong, although I don't see why they are wrong.

    The moving forces behind MOOCs have been MIT, Harvard, and Stanford.
    MIT and Harvard have the most MOOC offerings, but none of them made the Top 12. However, the rankings below are considered "professional" courses, and the graduate business schools at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford are not, to my knowledge, serving up MOOC courses. The Wharton School at Penn, however, is serving up the core courses in the first year of Wharton's two-year MBA program. Two of those courses are in the Top 12 below.

    Reasons for taking MOOCs are many and varied. I think many students who enroll for the free Wharton core business courses are preparing to do better in their forthcoming MBA programs wherever those are to be taken around the globe.

    Most students probably take free MOOCs in general out of curiosity of how popular courses at prestigious universities are taught. Some professors take MOOCs just to see how the content of courses is handled by a well-known teacher.

    "The 12 Most Popular Free Online Courses (MOOCs) For Professionals," by Maggie Zhang, Business Insider, July 8, 2014 ---
     http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7

    01. Wesleyan University's "Social Psychology"

    02. University of Maryland's "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems"

    03. Duke University's "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue"

    04. Duke University's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior"

    05. University of Toronto's "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals"

    06. Stanford University's "Startup Engineering"

    07. Yale University's "Financial Markets"

    08. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Financial Accounting"

    09. University of Washington's "Introduction to Public Speaking"

    10. University of Michigan's "Introduction to Finance"

    11. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Marketing"

    12. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's "Data Analysis"

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7#ixzz37LiJgQ57

    Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs and open sharing learning materials in general ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    There are for-credit distance education courses available from most major universities these days. These, however, are not free due, in part, to the costs of assigning grades for credit. Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education training and education alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

     


    Laureate International Universities --- http://www.laureate.net/

    Question
    What are the for-profit Laureate International Universities and where are their 800,000 paying students?
    Why did key alumni of Thunderbird University resign from the Board because of the sale of campus to Laureate?

    "Going Global," by Elizabeth Redden and Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, October 10, 2013 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/10/laureates-growing-global-network-institutions

    Laureate Education is big. Like 800,000 students attending 78 institutions in 30 countries big. Yet the privately held for-profit university system has largely remained out of the public eye.

    That may be changing, however, as the company appears ready for its coming out party after 14 years of quiet growth.

    Laureate has spent heavily to solidify its head start on other globally minded American education providers. In addition to its rapid growth abroad, the company has courted publicity by investing in the much-hyped Coursera, a massive open online course provider. And Laureate recently made news when the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank subsidiary, invested $150 million in the company -- its largest-ever investment in education.

    The company has also kicked up controversy over its affiliation with the struggling Thunderbird School of Global Management, a freestanding, nonprofit business school based in Arizona.

    The backlash among Thunderbird alumni, many of whom aren’t keen on a takeover by a for-profit, has dragged the company into the ongoing fight over the role of for-profits in American higher education, which Laureate had largely managed to avoid until now.

    In fact, Laureate likes to distinguish itself from other for-profit education companies. It is a strange (and substantial) beast to get one’s arms around.

    Laureate is a U.S.-based entity whose primary operations are outside the U.S. It is a private, for-profit company that operates campuses even in countries, like Chile, where universities must be not-for-profit by law.

    It is unabashed in its pursuit of prestige: Laureate boasts of partnerships with globally ranked public research universities like Monash University and the University of Liverpool as indicators of quality. It also aggressively promotes the connection to its honorary chancellor, former U.S. President Bill Clinton. When Laureate secured approval to build a new for-profit university in Australia (where for-profits are called “private” institutions), the headline in a national newspaper read: “First private uni in 24 years led by Clinton.”

    Laureate likes to use the tagline “here for good.” The company has moved into parts of the world where there are insufficient opportunities to pursue a higher education, investing heavily in developing nations. It's based on this track record that the IFC invested in the company with the stated aim of helping Laureate expand access to career-oriented education in "emerging markets": Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

    The strategy of expanding student access in the developing world has won Laureate many fans. And for a for-profit, it gets unexpectedly little criticism.

    Until recently, at least. With Thunderbird, Laureate has done what it has done in many countries around the world -- purchasing or in this case partnering with a struggling institution with a good brand, offering an infusion of capital, and promising to help develop new programs and grow enrollments and revenues. This time around, however, widespread skepticism about for-profit education has bedeviled the deal.

    The Bird's-Eye View

    Laureate’s footprint outside the United States tops that of any American higher education institution. The company brought in approximately $3.4 billion in total revenue during the 2012 fiscal year, more than 80 percent of which came from overseas.

    For comparison, the Apollo Group -- which owns the University of Phoenix and is the largest publicly traded for-profit chain -- brought in about $4.3 billion in revenue last year. However, Apollo Global, which is an internationally focused subsidiary, only accounted for $295 million of that.

    Indeed, in the late 1990s, when most other for-profit education companies were focused on the potential of the U.S. market, Laureate looked abroad. The Baltimore-based company, at that point a K-12 tutoring outfit known as Sylvan Learning Systems, purchased its first campus, Spain’s Universidad Europea de Madrid, in 1999, and has since affiliated with or acquired a total of 78 higher education institutions on six continents, ranging from art and design institutes to hotel management and culinary schools to technical and vocational colleges to full-fledged universities with medical schools

    Laureate operates the largest private university in Mexico, the 37-campus Universidad del Valle de México, and owns or controls 22 higher education institutions in South America (including 11 in Brazil), 10 in Asia, and 19 in continental Europe. It manages online programs in cooperation with the Universities of Liverpool and Roehampton, both in the United Kingdom. It has a new partnership with Australia’s Monash University to help manage its campus in South Africa and it runs seven vocational institutions in Saudi Arabia in cooperation with the Saudi government.

    In contrast, Laureate’s largest and most recognizable brand in the U.S. is the online-only, predominantly graduate-level Walden University, which enrolls 50,000 students. And even Walden is global, with students in 145 countries.

    Continued in article


    One way for these so-called distance education search engines to become more legitimate would be to add top not-for-profit distance education programs to their search engine databases.

    Cross-Cultural Investigations: Technology and Development (Multicultural Online Education and Open Sharing) ---
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/anthropology/21a-801j-cross-cultural-investigations-technology-and-development-fall-2012/

    "Southern Illinois University to Offer Online Accounting Degree," by Gail Perry, AccountingWeb, May 6, 2013 ---
    http://www.accountingweb.com/article/southern-illinois-university-offer-online-accounting-degree/221747?source=education

    A new program at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, IL allows off-campus students to complete an accounting degree completely online. SIU is the only Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International-accredited public institution in Illinois to offer the online undergraduate accounting degree, according to College of Business officials. Earning the top-tier AACSB accreditation places SIU's in the top one percent of the nation's accounting programs.

    Beginning in the fall of 2013, students can complete the requirements for a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting exclusively with online classes. The online program is open to off-campus students who have completed the initial core coursework typically covered during the first two years of college.

    Jill Gebke, assistant dean for the College of Business, explained the reasoning behind the new program. "We identified a large transfer population, All of the community colleges are at least an hour away. They told us there's a demand for the accounting program. This was the most convenient way to serve the community college students."

    "The program innovation happening right now in the College of Business is very exciting. Our online accounting degree completion option is just another example of that innovation and our continuing growth. This degree allows students the flexibility to blend their studies with work and family commitments and it is equal in quality, value, and accreditation with our on-campus program," said Dennis Cradit, dean of the College of Business.

    "What we have learned from our online MBA and our online undergraduate business administration degrees, we have used in designing this online accounting degree. Our number one priority is to provide an exceptional learning experience and this program is a clear reflection of our commitment to that goal," Cradit added.

    Typically, the new online accounting degree completion program will take about 24 months to finish over a six-semester time span. However, it is possible to complete the program in a minimum of 18 months.

    The online accounting program incorporates approximately 60 hours of coursework covering core areas of the business curriculum. The program is divided into 10 "course pairings," with each including two 3-credit-hour courses.  Each course runs eight weeks, allowing students to focus on two classes at a time while still completing four courses each semester.

    The same faculty members teach both the online and on-campus classes. However, the online option allows students the opportunity to complete their bachelor's degree through a nationally ranked, accredited institution from anywhere in the world and at their convenience, according to Jill Gebke, assistant dean for the College of Business. And while the face-to-face classroom setting is ideal for learning, Gebke told AccountingWEB that there are many students whose circumstances prevent them from attending on-campus. 

    Continued in article

     

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

     


    University of Illinois Extension
    http://web.extension.illinois.edu/state


     

    Those Deceptive For-Profit University Promotional Websites

    Almost daily I get requests to link to commercial sites disguised to be academic helper sites. Over half these requests are on behalf of for-profit universities, although the sites themselves are getting more and more clever about hiding the fact that they are promotional sites for for-profit universities. At the same time, I'm getting smarter about detecting these sites and no longer link to them on my Website or on the AECM.

    I think that for-profit universities pay people to promote their sites on some basis such as pay-per-click.

    To get more eyeballs, these for-profit university promotion sites are adding so called helpers that I've discovered in some cases have simply plagiarized material from other sites such as the History of Pacioli. In some instances the efforts to provide helpers are more legitimate. Nevertheless it galls me to link to these deceptive for-profit university sites. By "deceptive" I mean such thinks as providing links to distance education programs in selected fields like accounting, nursing, pharmacy, etc. Even though there are better and nearly always cheaper distance education degree programs from state-supported universities, those universities are excluded from the for-profit distance education promotional sites. For example, the only distance education degree programs in accounting will those degree programs available from for-profit universities.

    Having said this there are some useful for-profit university promotion sites. For example, the "40 Essential Links for CPA Exam Prep & Practice" is a rather helpful site at AccountingDegree.com ---
    http://www.accountingdegree.com/blog/2012/40-essential-links-for-cpa-exam-prep-practice/

    At the same time, there is much misleading information at this AccountingDegree.com site. For example, consider the various rankings of online universities at
    http://oedb.org/rankings
    In most cases the various better and cheaper non-profit colleges and universities are not even mentioned by AccountingDegree.com.

    Hence I am torn about posting links to for-profit university Websites. It's helpful to have the "40 Essential Links for CPA Exam Prep & Practice" is a rather helpful site at AccountingDegree.com ---
    http://www.accountingdegree.com/blog/2012/40-essential-links-for-cpa-exam-prep-practice/

    But it's deceptive when those sites never mention that there are cheaper and better distance education degree programs from nonprofit state universities. Some of the better and cheaper non-profit distance education programs have been highlighted by US News are listed below. You will never find these programs mentioned by AccountingDebree.com or most any for-profit university promotional Website.

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    "U. of Florida Online Bachelor’s Programs Win State Approval," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 29, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/u-of-florida-online-bachelors-programs-win-state-approval/46883?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


    Competency-Based College Credit --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ECA

    "Online Education Is Everywhere. What’s the Next Big Thing?" by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-is-everywhere-whats-the-next-big-thing/32898?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Western Governors University (a nonprofit, competency- based online university) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
    Also see http://www.wgu.edu/home2

    New Charter University (a for-profit, self-paced, competency-based online university) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Charter_University

    "No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 29, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/No-Financial-Aid-No-Problem/131329/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    It's a higher-education puzzle: Students are flocking to Western Governors University, driving growth of 30 to 40 percent each year. You might expect that competitors would be clamoring to copy the nonprofit online institution's model, which focuses on whether students can show "competencies" rather than on counting how much time they've spent in class.

    So why haven't they?

    Two reasons, says the education entrepreneur Gene Wade. One, financial-aid regulatory problems that arise with self-paced models that aren't based on seat time. And two, opposition to how Western Governors changes the role of professor, chopping it into "course mentors" who help students master material, and graders who evaluate homework but do no teaching.

    Mr. Wade hopes to clear those obstacles with a start-up company, UniversityNow, that borrows ideas from Western Governors while offering fresh twists on the model. One is cost. The for-profit's new venture—New Charter University, led by Sal Monaco, a former Western Governors provost—sidesteps the loan system by setting tuition so cheap that most students shouldn't need to borrow. The price: $796 per semester, or $199 a month, for as many classes as they can finish.

    "This is not buying a house," says Mr. Wade, co-founder and chief executive of UniversityNow. "This is like, do I want to get cable?"

    Another novelty: New Charter offers a try-it-before-you-buy-it platform that mimics the "freemium" model of many consumer Web services. Anyone can create an account and start working through its self-paced online courses free of charge. Their progress gets recorded. If they decide to pay up and enroll, they get access to an adviser (who helps navigate the university) and course specialists (who can discuss the material). They also get to take proctored online tests for course credit.

    The project is the latest in a series of experiments that use technology to rethink the economics of higher education, from the $99-a-month introductory courses of StraighterLine to the huge free courses provided through Stanford and MIT.

    For years, some analysts have argued that ready access to Pell Grants and federal loans actually props up colleges prices, notes Michael B. Horn, executive director for education at Innosight Institute, a think tank focused on innovation. That's because institutions have little incentive to charge anything beneath the floor set by available financial aid.

    "Gene and his team are basically saying, the heck with that—we're going to go around it. We think people can afford it if we offer it at this low a price," Mr. Horn says. "That could be revolutionary."

    Yet the project faces tall hurdles: Will employers value these degrees? Will students sign on? And, with a university that lacks regional accreditation right now­—New Charter is nationally accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council, and is considering seeking regional accreditation—will students be able to transfer its credits?

    Mr. Wade banks on appealing to working adults who crave easier access to education. When asked who he views as the competition, his reply is "the line out the door at community college." In California, where Mr. Wade is based, nearly 140,000 first-time students at two-year institutions couldn't get into any courses at all during the previous academic year, according to a recent Los Angeles Times editorial about the impact of state budget cuts.

    Mr. Wade himself benefited from a first-class education, despite being raised without much money in a housing project in a tough section of Boston. Growing up there, during an era when the city underwent forced busing to integrate its schools, felt like watching a "train wreck" but walking away unscathed. He attended high school at the prestigious Boston Latin School. With assistance from Project REACH, a program to help Boston minorities succeed in higher education, he went to Morehouse College. From there his path included a J.D. from Harvard Law, an M.B.A. from Wharton, and a career as an education entrepreneur.

    The 42-year-old founded two earlier companies: LearnNow, a charter-school-management outfit that was sold to Edison Schools, and Platform Learning, a tutoring firm that served low-income students. So far, he's raised about $8 million from investors for UniversityNow, whose New Charter subsidiary is a rebranded, redesigned, and relocated version of an online institution once called Andrew Jackson University. Breaking a Traditional Mold

    To build the software, Mr. Wade looked beyond the traditional world of educational technology, recruiting developers from companies like Google. Signing up for the university feels more like creating an account with a Web platform like Facebook than the laborious process of starting a traditional program—in fact, New Charter lets you join with your Facebook ID. Students, whether paying or not, start each class by taking an assessment to establish whether they're ready for the course and what material within it they need to work on. Based on that, the system creates a pathway to guide them through the content. They skip stuff that they already know.

    That was part of the appeal for Ruben Fragoso, who signed up for New Charter's M.B.A. program three weeks ago after stumbling on the university while Googling for information about online degrees. Mr. Fragoso, 53, lives in Albuquerque and works full time as a logistics coordinator for a solar power company. The Mexican-born father of two earned a bachelor's degree 12 years ago from Excelsior College. With New Charter, he mostly teaches himself, hunkering down in his home office after dinner to read and take quizzes. By week three, he hadn't interacted with any other students, and his instructor contact had been limited to a welcome e-mail. That was fine by him.

    He likes that he can adjust his schedule to whatever fits—one course at a time if a subject is tough, or maybe three if he prefers. His company's education benefits—up to $5,000 a year—cover the whole thing. With years of business experience, he appreciates the option of heading quickly to a final test on a subject that is familiar to him.

    Continued in article

    Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
    Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

    From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

    Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

    WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

    The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

    2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Jensen Comment
    I don't know why the largest for-profit universities that generally provide more online degrees than the above universities combined are not included in the final outcomes. For example, the University of Phoenix alone as has over 600,000 students, most of whom are taking some or all online courses.

    My guess is that most for-profit universities are not forthcoming with the data requested by US News analysts. Note that the US News condition that the set of online programs to be considered be regionally accredited does not exclude many for-profit universities. For example, enter in such for-profit names as "University of Phoenix" or "Capella University" in the "College Search" box at
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-phoenix-20988
     

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    Unitek IT Training from Cisco --- http://www.unitek.com/training/


    Graduates Who Are Happy to Land Minimum Wage Careers
    "Little-Known (usually unaccredited) Colleges Exploit Visa Loopholes to Make Millions Off Foreign Students," by Tom Bartlett, Karin Fischer, and Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Little-Known-Colleges-Make/126822/

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges working in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


    "MIT Expands 'Open' Courses, Adds Completion Certificates," Inside Higher Ed, December 19, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2011/12/19/mit-expands-open-courses-adds-completion-certificates

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which pioneered the idea of making course materials free online -- today announced a major expansion of the idea, with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to students who have no connection to MIT.

    MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning.

    The first course through MITx is expected this spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute MIT credit. The university also plans to continue MIT OpenCourseWare, the program through which it makes course materials available online.

    An FAQ from MIT offers more details on the new program.

    While MIT has been widely praised for OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open" educational movement has shifted to programs like the Khan Academy (through which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and an initiative at Stanford University that makes courses available -- courses for which some German universities are providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in OpenCourseWare.

    Question
    Is a free MIT online certificate worth more than most any comparable course grade from a North American college or university?

    "Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education?" by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 20, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/20/will-mitx-disrupt-higher-education/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    MIT has been doing online access to education a lot longer than most people, largely due to their invaluable OpenCourseWare project. (Here’s an interview MIT did with me last year on how OCW strongly influenced my inverted-classroom MATLAB course.) Now they are poised to go to the next level by launching an online system called MITx in Spring 2012 that provides credentialing as well as content:

    Mr. Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would start this spring — perhaps with just one course — but would expand to include many more courses, as OpenCourseWare has done. [...]

    The M.I.T.x classes, he said, will have online discussions and forums where students can ask questions and, often, have them answered by others in the class.

    While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential.

    “I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”

    The official FAQ reveals a couple of additional points. First, the content of MITx courses will be free — which seems to imply that MITx course content will be different than OCW course content, and not just a certification layer on top of existing resources — and you’ll only pay money for the certificate. Second, there will be no admissions process. If you want a course, you just take it and then pay for the credentialing if you feel like you’re up to it.

    I think this last point about having no admissions process may be the most significant piece of MITx. It seems to represent a complete shift from the traditional way of providing access to higher education. As far as I can tell, there will not even be a system of checking prerequisites for MITx courses. If that’s so, then if you feel you can step into, say, an Algorithms class and keep up with the material and demonstrate your mastery, then nobody at MIT will care if you haven’t had the right courses in basic programming, data structures, discrete math, or whatever. MIT is basically saying, we won’t be picky about who we let take these courses — if you can afford it and live up to our standards, we’re happy to credential you.

    Of course there are a lot of questions about MITx that are yet to be answered. What is the “modest fee” they plan to charge, and is it really affordable? How exactly will the credentialing process work? (It’s interesting that the certification will be handled by a non-profit organization to be formed within MIT. Is this a kind of outsourcing of grading?) How will one “demonstrate mastery” and what will MITx define as “mastery” in courses that are not strictly skills-based? Will there eventually be a full enough slate of courses offered to make the whole system compelling for learners? And perhaps most importantly, what will employers, graduate schools, and even undergraduate institutions make of applicants who come in with some of these MITx certifications? Without external buy-in, MITx will likely be just another continuing education program like hundreds of others.

    We’ll hear a lot more about this in the future, but for now this seems to have the potential to be genuinely disruptive in higher education. What do you think?

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online courses, lectures, videos, and course materials from open-sharing prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     


    Deloitte University --- http://careers.deloitte.com/united-states/students/csc_general.aspx?CountryContentID=16027

    Bob Jensen's threads for education technology in general are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Resources for Learning to Teach on line

    Ideas for Teaching Online --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas

    Teaching online is no different in many respects with respect to fundamental differences in pedagogy and student aptitudes and abilities. Examples include the following:

     

    Teaching online involves such a wide range of alternatives, that there is no one set of resources that satisfies each pedagogy and style of teaching/learning. Differences include such things as the following:

    The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

    One important thing to do is to study how some existing online courses are taught successfully. Some great places to search for those illustrations include the following:

    San Antonio on August 13, 2002 
    CPE/CEP Workshop Number 1 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm 

    Free audio and presentation files of the following speakers:
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm 

    • Dennis Beresford, University of Georgia
    • Amy Dunbar, University of Connecticut
    • Nancy Keeshan, the Global MBA and Cross-Continent MBA Programs of Duke University
    • Susan Spencer, San Antonio College
    • Bob Jensen, Trinity University
       

    Atlanta on August 11, 2001
    CPE/CEP Workshop Number 1 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm

    Free audio and presentation files of the following speakers:
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm

    • Don Carter, Chartered Accountancy (CA) School of Business
      (Perhaps the only complete performance-based pedagogy program in the world)
    • Michael T. Kirschenheiter, while he was at Columbia University
    • Robert Walsh, Prentice-Hall and Marist College
    • A team of faculty from UNext
    • Bob Jensen, Trinity University
       

    Philadelphia on August 12, 2000
     CPE/CEP Workshop Number 1 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    Free audio and presentation files of the following speakers:
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    • Charles Hickman, AACSB and Quisic (formerly University Access)
    • Michael T. Kirschenheiter, Columbia University
    • Anthony H. Catanach, Villanova University
    • Dan N. Stone, University of Illinois
    • Bob Jensen, Trinity University
       

    International Teacher Training and Lesson Sharing --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#Training

    Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
    Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
    Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
    Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Keep in mind that students often prefer online learning whereas teachers often burn out or become frustrated with the tremendous amount of work involved in the best online courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Workloads

    Also note the Dark Side of Education Technology and Online Learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

    Bob Jensen's personal advice would be to see how much of this course you can teach on video using Camtasia. Even if you don't use the Camtasia videos in each online class, those videos can be invaluable for students to study asynchronously --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Video

    Ideas for Teaching Online --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas

    Where to look for online training and education --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    October 10, 2008 message from Bruce Lubich [BLubich@UMUC.EDU]

    Hi Dexter,

    I'd like to suggest another alternative. Here at UMUC, we hire adjunct faculty to teach our online classes. Every new hire is required to pass a 5 week online training class which focuses on the pedagogy of online teaching. There is no charge for the class, and afterward you are okay to teach for us online. In your case, you would have gotten the education you are seeking, as well as being able to teach for us.

    If you want more information, go to http://umuc.edu/facultyrecruit/index.shtml 

    Bruce Lubich, PhD, CPA
    Program Director,
    Accounting Graduate School of Management and Technology
    University of Maryland University College

     


    Prison University Project --- http://www.prisonuniversityproject.org


    The Alternative Model:  Partnerships Between Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Education Distance Education Ventures
    The model is not new but it may become much more common as for-profit stand-alones become more stressed by regulations and drying up markets

    "Outsourcing Plus," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 12, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/12/azstate

    With budgets tight and the commercial market flush with companies willing to take on various tasks that come with running a university, it has become relatively common for institutions to outsource parts of their operations to outside companies.

    It is less common for a public university to entrust an outsider with such a wide swath of duties that it calls that private company an equal partner in online education. But Arizona State University announced on Monday that it is doing just that with Pearson, the education and media company.

    Under the agreement, the Arizona State faculty will teach online courses through Pearson’s learning management platform, LearningStudio, using the tools embedded in that platform to collect and analyze data in hopes of improving student performance and retention. Pearson will also help with enrollment management and “prospect generation," while providing more "customer-friendly" support services for students, the university says.

    Arizona State, meanwhile, says it will retain control over all things academic, including instruction and curriculum development.

    Universities often strike deals with private companies to manage parts of their online operations, particularly when they are trying to quickly grow their online enrollments, which is Arizona State’s stated goal in this case (now serving 3,000 online students, it hopes to grow to somewhere between 17,000 and 30,000 within five years). Companies such as Embanet, 2Tor, SunGard Higher Education, Bisk Education, Colloquy, and Compass Knowledge Group have, to varying degrees, taken over online program management at other name-brand universities in exchange for a cut of the tuition revenue.

    Jensen Comment
    There is obviously a spectrum of partnerships that will probably emerge. At one end the courses are totally managed by a not-for-profit university that only uses the for-profit partner's media delivery services. Then there might be a move up where selected for-profit's courses are selectively brought into the curriculum. Then there might be entire specialized programs that are brought into the curriculum such as executive programs (non-degree) or undergraduate pharmacy or even accounting degree programs.

    The next move up the ladder would be for-profit graduate degree programs where assessment is controlled by the not-for-profit partner. For example, Western Governor's University now has over 10,000 students in competency-based programs. One might imagine partnering of WGU with a for-profit distance education MBA program where the competency assessments and degrees are administered by WGU.

    Lastly, one might envision doctoral programs, although these might come last because they are typically money losers if they have respectability in the market such as AACSB respectability. For example, Capella now has an online accounting doctoral program that I view as a fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#CommercialPrograms
    One might envision a partnering with some respected state university, such as ASU, that greatly alters the curriculum and the assessment process and the dissertation advising to bring Cpaella's accounting doctoral program more in line with ASU's onsite accounting doctoral program. This off course is probably way, way down the road.

    "Where For-Profit and Nonprofit Meet," by David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed, October 13, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/13/princeton

    Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accounting doctoral programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


    The whole world is invited to learn from BYU's many online courses (except for high school athletes)
    "Black Mark for BYU," by Doug Lederman , Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2010 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/09/byu

    Brigham Young University's Independent Study program appears to be wildly successful. At any given time, students are taking more than 100,000 high school courses and 22,000 college classes, for a variety of reasons: to get courses out of the way in the summer, finish high school or college early, or improve their performance in classes in which they struggled. Based on those numbers and the fees the program charges for its nearly 600 online courses, the program generates millions of dollars in revenue a year. (BYU officials won't say.)

    A tiny fraction of its enrollments -- about 500 a year -- are high school athletes seeking to use the BYU program's courses to meet the National Collegiate Athletic Association's freshman eligibility standards. Yet for the second time in several years, dealings with the high-stakes world of big-time college athletics appear to pose a potentially serious threat to the 90-year-old program's status. Last month, the NCAA decided to "de-certify" the BYU program (and one other, the American School) as a legitimate provider of "nontraditional" courses. The decision came in response to a change in NCAA rules this spring requiring "nontraditional" courses to include regular interaction between students and professors, and to set specific timeframes in which the courses must be completed.

    Brigham Young officials expressed dismay about the NCAA's decision, which they said had caught them by surprise. "We do want to look at what we can do to be in compliance with what the NCAA has put in place," said Carri Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the university.

    She noted that BYU Independent Study had made a set of changes in its programs and policies the last time it drew NCAA scrutiny -- when athletes at several colleges were found to have earned credit from their institutions for courses at BYU in which they did little or no work (or cheated to complete). Among other changes, Jenkins noted, BYU Independent Study altered its policies surrounding when and how tests are administered, and stopped letting athletes enrolled in NCAA member colleges enroll in its classes.

    But the courses remain a commonly-trod path for high school athletes seeking to meet the NCAA's academic eligibility standards for freshman athletes, which require students to surpass a minimum grade-point average in 16 core high school courses to compete in their first year in college. BYU and the American School, which is based in Illinois, are among the most common programs from which high school athletes seek eligibility through nontraditional courses, which the association defines as "[t]hose taught via the Internet, distance learning, independent study, individualized instruction, correspondence, and courses taught by similar means, including software-based credit recovery courses."

    Use of the courses has burgeoned, and in March the association's Division I members approved a rule aimed at toughening oversight of them, said Chuck Wynne, an NCAA spokesman. "Members were obviously concerned that prospective student-athletes were taking these courses and not being prepared for the rigors of college academics," he said. The changes require that instructors and students have "ongoing access to one another and regular interaction with one another for purposes of teaching, evaluating and providing assistance to the student throughout the duration of the course"; that the "student's work ... is available for review and validation"; and that "[a] defined time for completion of the course is identified by the high school or secondary school program."

    In the wake of the rules changes, NCAA officials began reviewing providers of nontraditional courses, and the association has "approved a bunch" as meeting the new standards, Wynne said. So far, only BYU Independent Study and the American School were found to fall short. (American School responded to the NCAA's findings, which it is appealing, here.)

    Wynne declined to specify exactly how and why BYU was deemed to fall short of the NCAA standards. But he said that most of the scrutiny of the nontraditional programs focused on the lack of regular, sustained interaction between students and instructors -- ideally interaction initiated by the instructor, designed to ensure at least some oversight of the students' work -- and on some programs' failure to set a minimum timeframe for the completion of course work.

    One NCAA review -- "not necessarily at BYU," Wynne said -- found that one high school athlete had completed "a semester of algebra in six minutes."

    "We understand that these are good quality educational tools when implemented and done right," Wynne said, noting that the NCAA is not philosophically opposed to online learning. "It's mostly about the administration of these programs. You can have the best curriculum in the world, but if someone does algebra in six minutes, you know there's something wrong."

    Jenkins of BYU insisted that the six-minute-algebra incident had most definitely not taken place in one of the university's online offerings. She said that the university plans to do whatever it needs to to reassure the NCAA that its courses are of high quality, and that the independent study program had not heard from past, current or prospective students who might be concerned about a stigma from the NCAA's action.

     


    Update on Deloitte University, January 2010, Page 21 ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeloitteTransparency Report.pdf

    I’m confident that our continued investment in the development of our people, including our commitment to create a ‘Deloitte University,’ will help signal our intention to be a magnet for the best talent to serve the best clients.
    Barry Salzberg, CEO, Deloitte LLP22

    The learning programs incorporate a number of pervasive themes across levels. These themes include audit documentation, the use of specialists, consultation, detection of potential fraud, the importance of professional skepticism and professional judgment, and others, with a foundational theme of achieving audit quality. All client service professionals of Deloitte & Touche LLP, whether or not they are CPAs, are required to complete at least 20 hours of CPE in each calendar year and at least 120 hours for each three-calendar-year period. Professionals who spend more than 25% of their time on audit or other attest engagements or who have partner, director, or manager responsibility for any such engagement must have at least 40% of their required CPE hours in subjects broadly related to accounting and auditing. An online system monitors each professional’s individual CPE requirements (which for CPAs may vary depending on the states in which each individual is licensed) and hours completed for each reporting period; the system flags any deficiencies for follow-up. Deloitte University

    To further enhance the quality and effectiveness of the learning curriculum for all the Deloitte U.S. Entities, Deloitte LLP recently acquired a 107-acre property near Dallas, Texas, and has begun construction of a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to learning and leadership. This decision represents a significant commitment to and in our people and to enhancing quality and leadership development. The facility will employ cutting edge, interactive technology and will offer a curriculum that includes simulations, case studies, collaborative learning, and discussion and debate. It is expected to open in 2011. Deloitte University will provide a powerful catalyst for career-long learning and professional growth for all our professionals.

    Continued in article

     


     

    Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
    Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
    Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
    Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     

     

    Distance Education.org or DistanceEducation.Org is a Great Helper Site
    Ben Pheiffer in San Antonio forwarded this link to a terrific listing (with pricing estimates) of online training and education degree programs and courses from respectable universities --- http://www.distance-education.org/Courses/
    Both graduate and undergraduate degree programs are listed as well as training courses (some free).

     

     

    Free online tutorials in various disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm/#Tutorials


    Bob Jensen's writing helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

     

    Bob Jensen's links to free online mathematics and statistics tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics 

     

    Bob Jensen's links to online science tutorials are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Science%20and%20Medicine

     

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing courses and videos (free) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     

    Onsite and Online College Directory by State in the U.S. --- http://www.college-scholarships.com/index.html#collegestate
    Always investigate the credibility of any college you're interested in before assuming all college degrees are accepted for employment and further study.

    Also see http://www.onlinelearning101.com  

    Scholarship sources --- http://www.college-scholarships.com/free_scholarship_searches.htm
    Always look for gimmicks such as a scholarship to a questionable online college or university.

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds and the gray zones --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


    Princeton Review Buys Distance-Education Provider for $170-Million

    The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory company, announced today that it would pay $170-million in cash to purchase the Penn Foster Education Group, a 118-year-old company that operates three accredited distance-education institutions serving 223,000 secondary and postsecondary students in more than 150 countries. In a news release, the Princeton Review, which is not connected with Princeton University, said the deal would increase the company's "cash flow generating capabilities

    Jensen Comment
    What surprised me is the number of students served by the Penn Foster Education Group ---
    http://www.pennfoster.edu/index.html?semkey=Q092344
    One contributing factor to the large number of online students is the granting of high school diplomas. Penn Foster also offers career training as opposed to education --- http://www.pennfoster.edu/programs_diplomas.html

    American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers Certification Exam
    One of the training programs is a certificate bookkeeping program --- http://www.pennfoster.edu/bookkeeping/index.html

    Bookkeeping

    CAREER OUTLOOK

    Your New Career

    Thousands of new businesses open each year and every organization, large or small, needs someone with the right training to maintain and update its financial records. Bookkeepers hold vital positions within the companies they work for. They verify and balance receipts, post debits and credits, and record transactions.

    Some Bookkeepers have offices in their own homes and make extra money in addition to their regular salary. Newspaper ads regularly appear for payroll clerks, accounts receivable and payable clerks, and Bookkeepers for large and small businesses. Enjoy career independence in this exciting profession!

    Whether you work for an established business or earn extra income at home, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects more than 263,000 new job opportunities for Bookkeepers through 2016.*

    Your New Skills

    Learn to prepare a balance sheet, create a profit and loss statement, and produce a financial report for any business. You'll have the skills others depend on in the business world, earning the respect of your employers, and making you a vital asset to any corporation.

    You'll learn all of the important skills you need in Bookkeeping.

    "Nation's Largest Labor Union Group Creates Online Degree Program," by Jill Laster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Nations-Largest-Labor-Union/20538/

    A new distance-learning program says it is the first accredited, degree-granting, online college open only to union members.

    The new program, called the College for Working Families, is a joint venture between the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Labor College, and the Penn Foster Education Group (now owned by the Princeton Review) --- http://www.pennfoster.edu/index.html?semkey=Q092344

    The National Labor College already offers in-person training and some online classes as the only accredited higher-education institution specifically for unions. The new online program would combine the college's on-the-ground resources with online tools to offer programs in subjects including health care and business administration.

    Leaders of the effort are surveying union members on what courses they would find useful, and some classes should begin in the fall, said William Scheuerman, president of the National Labor College.

    The online college would charge about $200 a credit and offer bachelor's degrees, adding associate and master's degrees later.

    Mr. Scheuerman said the online learning model would be especially helpful to union members, who may not be able to attend classes in person because of their work schedules.

    The new college would also provide much-needed skills for union members, he said. "A key change in the labor economy is the shift from muscle power to brain power, so working people need the same advantages as middle class folk," he said.

    The college is still subject to negotiations between the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Labor College, and the Princeton Review, which should be completed in the next few months.

    Jensen Comment
    Penn Foster now offers accounting associate degrees and business management bachelors degrees ---
    http://www.pennfostercollege.edu/accounting/index.html
    I don't think students can get sufficient accounting courses to sit for the CPA examination.

    Accreditation is a bit controversial --- http://www.pennfostercollege.edu/accreditation.html
    Students might have trouble transferring some courses into major universities, but this is only speculation on my part.
    Given a choice, it may be safer to obtain course credits and degrees from distance education from programs at major universities like the University of Wisconsin, University of Maryland, and most state universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AccreditationIssues

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm


    An Online Learning Experiment Overwhelms the University of Southern California
    "An Experiment Takes Off," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 7, 2009 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/07/uscmat# 

    When Karen Symms Gallagher ran into fellow education deans last year, many of them were "politely skeptical," the University of Southern California dean says (politely), about her institution's experiment to take its master's program in teaching online.

    Many of them seemed to appreciate Gallagher's argument that the traditional model of teacher education programs had largely failed to produce the many more top-notch teachers that California (and so many other states) desperately needed. But could a high-quality MAT program be delivered online? And through a partnership with a for-profit entity (2Tor), no less? Really?

    Early results about the program known as MAT@USC have greatly pleased Gallagher and USC. One hundred forty-four students enrolled in the Rossier School of Education program's first full cohort in May, 50 percent more than anticipated and significantly larger than the 100 students who started at that time in the traditional master's in teaching program on the university's Los Angeles campus.

    And this month, a new group of 302 students started in the second of three planned "starts" per year, meaning that USC has already quadrupled the number of would-be teachers it is educating this year and, depending on how many students enroll in January, is on track to increase it a few times more than that.

    It will be a while -- years, probably, until outcomes on teacher certification exams are in and the program's graduates have been successful (or not) in the classroom -- before questions about the program's quality and performance are fully answered (though officials there point out that the technology platform, like much online learning software, provides steady insight into how successfully students are staying on track). But USC officials say that short of quantitative measures such as those, they believe the online program is attracting equally qualified students and is providing an education that is fully equivalent to Rossier's on-ground master's program -- goals that the institution viewed as essential so as not to "dilute the brand" of USC's well-regarded program.

    "So far, we've beaten the odds," says Gallagher. "We're growing in scale while continuing to ensure that we have a really good program."

    "Scale" is a big buzzword in higher education right now, as report after report and new undertaking after new undertaking -- including the Obama administration's American Graduation Initiative -- underscore the perceived need for more Americans with postsecondary credentials. Many institutions -- especially community colleges and for-profit colleges -- are taking it to heart, expanding their capacity and enrolling more students. The push is less evident at other types of colleges and universities, and almost a foreign concept at highly selective institutions.

    That's what is atypical, if not downright exceptional, about the experiment at USC, which Inside Higher Ed explored in concept last fall. At that time, some experts on distance learning and teacher education -- not unlike some of Gallagher's dean peers -- wondered whether students would be willing to pay the tuition of an expensive private university for an online program, among other things.

    Officials at the university and 2Tor -- the company formed by the Princeton Review founder John Katzman, which has provided the technology and administrative infrastructure for the USC program -- were confident that they would be able to tap into the market of Ivy League and other selective college graduates who flock to programs like Teach for America in ever-growing numbers each year but are also interested in getting a formal teaching credential right away.

    While those students certainly have other options -- major public universities such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Virginia, and private institutions like Columbia University's Teachers College and Vanderbilt University, among others -- all of them require students to take up residence in way that doesn't work for everyone.

    Haley Hiatt, a 2005 graduate of Brigham Young University, actually does reside in Los Angeles -- but she's also a relatively new mother who "didn't want to have to put [her nearly 2-year-old daughter] in day care all the time," she says. So after first contemplating master's programs in history at institutions like Vanderbilt and George Washington University, and then weighing a series of graduate programs at institutions in and around Los Angeles, Hiatt entered the first cohort of the MAT@USC program. She now joins her fellow students in "face to face" meetings (on the Internet, using video chat technology) twice a week, but otherwise does most of her other course work on her own time. "I find it takes more discipline than I needed when I was in the classroom" every day at BYU, she says.

    Of the initial cohort of 144 students, about 5 percent got their bachelor's degrees from Ivy League institutions, and about 10 percent came from the crosstown rival University of California at Los Angeles, says Gallagher. About 10 percent hail from historically black colleges and universities -- the proportion of students in the online program who are black (about 11 percent) is about double the proportion in the on-ground program, though the campus program has slightly higher minority numbers overall. Students in the online program are somewhat older (average age 28 vs. 25 for the face-to-face program) and the average college grade point average is identical for both iterations of the program: 3.0, USC officials say.

    Other numbers please Gallagher even more. A greater proportion of students in the online program are in science-related fields than is true in the campus-based program, a heartening sign given the pressure on American teacher education programs to ratchet up the number of science teachers they produce.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The key to this kind of explosion in online enrollments is mostly triggered by reputation of the university in general.

    Many universities are finding online programs so popular that they are now treating them like cash cows where students pay more for online tuition than for onsite tuition. One university that openly admits this is the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UMW).

    Bob Jensen's threads on why so many students prefer online education to onsite education (even apart from cost savings) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation
    Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineVersusOnsite

    Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

     


    Brigham Young University (BYU) launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with
    six Creative Commons licensed courses

    Before reading this module you may want to read about the Creative Commons ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/

    From Canada's Creative Commons --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15108

    Jane Park, June 10th, 2009

    It appears that David Wiley’s move to Brigham Young University has already resulted in progress towards opening the university’s content. Long-time pioneer and academic of open education, Wiley reports that BYU’s Independent Study has launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with six Creative Commons licensed courses under CC BY NC-SA.

    “The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed).”

    The most interesting thing about this pilot is that it “is part of a dissertation study to measure the impact of OCW courses on paying enrollments.” So far, “the results are very positive - 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses… if this pattern remains stable, then BYU IS OCW will be financially self-sustainable with the ability to add and update a number of new courses to the collection each year, indefinitely, should they so choose.” Echoing Wiley, that is an exciting prospect. We look forward to seeing these results develop, in addition to other inquiries into the sustainability of general OER initiatives in the future…

    BYU Independent Study --- http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/courses/ocw/
    Also see http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/aboutus/index.cfm

     

    University Courses   High School Courses

    You may view, use, and reuse all materials in the Open CourseWare courses. Please note that Open CourseWare courses do not provide the opportunity to submit assessments for credit, interact with faculty, or receive credit or a certificate upon completion. BYU Independent Study provides these courses as a community service under a Creative Commons license. The course materials are freely available for you to use, download, modify and share as long as you do not sell the products you derive from them. If you alter, transform, or build upon the courses, you may distribute your work only using licensing terms the same as or similar to the Creative Commons Atribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

    University Courses  (includes art, accounting, chemistry, etc.)
    High School Courses
    Middle School Courses
    Personal Enrichment Courses
    Free Courses (includes such things as dating and romance)

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing (learning materials, videos, lectures, and entire courses) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 

     

     



    Question
    Where can students substitute their college instructors for an online ($399) McGraw-Hill tutor for possible college credit?

    An accounting tutor (not for advanced courses)  is listed at http://straighterline.com/courses/descriptions/#accounting1

    Other course tutors, including college algebra and English composition, are listed at http://straighterline.com/

    "Who Needs a Professor When There's a Tutor Available?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3095&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    An unusual new commercial service offers low-cost online courses and connects students to accredited colleges who will accept the courses for credit. The only thing missing: professors.

    The service, called StraighterLine, is run by SmartThinking, a company that operates an online tutoring service used by about 300 colleges and universities. The online courses offered by StraighterLine are self-guided, and if students run into trouble they can summon a tutor from SmartThiking and talk with them via instant messaging. Students turn in their assignments or papers to tutors for grading as well.

    “We’re using our tutoring service as the instructional component,” says Burck Smith, CEO of SmartThinking. “Students move through the course, and when they have a problem they click a button and they’re talking with a tutor.”

    The courses cost $399 each, which includes 10 hours of time with a tutor. If students need more one-on-one help, they can pay extra for more tutoring.

    The courses themselves were developed by McGraw-Hill, and StraighterLine uses Blackboard’s course-management service. So this virtual college is essentially cobbled together from various off-the-shelf learning services.

    So far three colleges have agreed to grant credit for the StraighterLine courses — Fort Hays State University, Jones International University, and Potomac College.

    The colleges see the partnership as a way to attract new students. “One of the things we hope to do is convert those students to Jones students,” says D. Terry Rawls, a vice chancellor at Jones International. “My expectation is that in reality students will take one maybe two courses with StraighterLine and then the students will take the rest of their courses with us.”

    Richard Garrett, a senior analyst for Eduventures, sees the service as part of a broader trend of colleges granting credit for unconventional college experience, provided that the students can pass a test or otherwise demonstrate competency. And that raises the question, he says, “what is the core business of the academy versus what can be outsourced?

     

    Jensen Comment
    It may well be that colleges and universities may soon have to accept transfer credit for these tutors from such places as Fort Hays State University --- http://www.fhsu.edu/

    In addition to its onsite programs in Hays, Kansas, Fort Hays State University has its own online degree programs at http://www.fhsu.edu/virtualcollege/

    Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online video courses and course materials from leading universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Free online tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

    Free textbooks and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


    Continuing Education for Accountants

    "Distance learning: The world of online training for accountants," AccountingWeb, December 2007 ---
    http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=103948

    Also see the bookmarks at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304OnlineAccountingCPEandTraining

    From Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, November 2007 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov2007/smart_stops.htm 

    CONTINUING EDUCATION

    THE CPA TOOLBOX
    www.cpemarket.com

    This Smart Stop is part of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy’s www.nasbatools.com, which offers “tools for accountancy compliance.” CPAs can search CPE course providers, the National Registry of CPE Sponsor courses and quality assurance service courses, plus click on “Pilot Test CPE Courses” to try out courses for free. There’s also access to instructor resumes and in-house course providers. Click on the state you’re licensed in to find updated information on mandated continuing education requirements and links to your state’s board of accountancy.

    CREDITS ON THE GO
    www.cchpodcast.com/partners/cchPodcast

    Check this site for free CPE podcasts, available as streaming audio or downloadable to your computer or audio player. Click on “Course Catalog” to download available podcasts and their supplementary PDFs, including a study guide and final exam questions. When you’re ready to take the exam, enroll and purchase the credits—your exam grading and certification is available immediately. Be sure to check if your state’s board of accountancy accepts these CCH self-study courses by clicking the “CPE Accreditation” link.

    ASSESS YOURSELF
    www.cpa2biz.com/CPE

    Just starting your continuing education requirements? Test your skills and training needs with the site’s “Competency Self-Assessment Tool,” free for AICPA members, then search CPE courses by topic, level, job area or format, including CD-ROM and DVD. Check back often to see the month’s top sellers and new releases or to download catalogs for the “CPE Direct” program and “Staff Training Series.”

    THE ROAD TO CPE COMPLIANCE
    www.cpetracking.com

    Can’t keep up with your CPE hours? Launched in 2006, this site keeps accounting professionals and firms up-to-date on CPE hours and compliance. Registered users can record CPE credits, which are then compared to the requirements from each state’s board of accountancy and regulatory agencies. The service also provides status reports by jurisdiction and reporting period, as well as access to all of your CPE records in one location.
     

     

    Most accountancy associations, firms, and many colleges also offer CPE courses.

     


    Learnthat.com: Free web training for computer courses ---
    http://www.learnthat.com/courses/computer/default.asp


    Introduction to Electronics, Signals, and Measurement --- Click Here


    eLearning Africa --- http://www.elearning-africa.com/


    From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on March 9, 2007

    Toyota University Opens Admissions to Outsiders
    by Mike Spector and Gina Chon
    Mar 05, 2007
    Page: B1
    Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
     

    TOPICS: Accounting, International Accounting, Inventory Systems, Just-In-Time Inventory Management, Kaizen costing, Managerial Accounting, Operational Control Systems, Productivity, Quality Costs

    SUMMARY: Toyota Motor Corp. operates a training center in Gardena, CA, that it began in 1998 to "train the company's own employees in it distinctive business philosophy and 'lean-thinking' approach to producing cars....The school occupies the Toyota Plaza building...' and is run by Mike Morrison, who is referred to as "the dean," and Will Decker, "assistant dean." Toyota is not offering training sessions to outsiders now because of demand for its services by the companies' own workers, but has done so in the past. The article describes Toyota's lean-thinking management and production philosophies and describes several cases of outsiders using its services. One story covered in the article describes how the LA Police Department participated in the training seminar to improve the process for booking inmates. A result of the LAPD participation also was the benefit received when staff police realized their suggestions were taken to heart by management.

    QUESTIONS: 
    1.) Why has Toyota established its "Toyota University"? Would you call it a university or a training center? What is the difference between these two?

    2.) Why has Toyota offered its management and process training to outsiders? Why is it not doing so now? What are the strategic advantages and disadvantages to offering corporate training to outsiders?

    3.) What production innovations has Toyota developed that form the central philosophy for the training discussed in the article? List the terms for the innovations and define them.

    4.) What hands on learning strategy is used to emphasize the problems with defects that can arise in traditional production planning systems? Why do you think this technique might be more effective than, say, having an instructor merely list the pros and cons of particular production systems?

    5.) Why is it possible for good production process techniques in one industry to benefit very different industries, even government services such as the police force? How does listening and learning about very different circumstances from one's own industry, produce part of this benefit?

    6.) What evidence in the article speaks to the benefits of management listening to staff suggestions?

     


    Auto and Truck Repair and Advice --- http://www.econofix.com/
    (includes a module on how to listen for problems)


    Helpers for Managing a Restaurant
    Restaurant Doctor --- http://www.restaurantdoctor.com/index.html


    The National Centers for Career and Technical Education --- http://www.nccte.org/


    Truck Driver Test Questions & Answers

    CDL Online Practice Questions --- http://www.testprepreview.com/cdl_practice.htm

     


    Spatial News (GIS history and use) --- http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/
    Note the Education section


    Question
    How can you find an accredited only college or set of online courses within an accredited college?

    Answer
    One approach is to go to "Accredited-Online-Colleges,com" ---
    http://www.accredited-online-colleges.com/Online-Degrees/index.asp

    Online Degrees Accounting & Finance | Business | Business Administration & Management | Communication & Journalism | Education | Engineering | Family & Consumer Sciences | Human Resources | Information Technology & Computers | Legal Professions | Liberal Arts & General Studies | Medical & Health Care | Multimedia & Design | Psychology | Public Administration & Social Services | Sales & Marketing | Security & Protective Services | Visual & Performing Arts |

    Jensen Comment
    My recommendation here is "Buyer Beware." This site has a truly mixed bag of colleges to a point where I would take the phrase "Accredited Colleges" with a giant grain of salt. Having said this, I also find that this AOC site can be helpful in finding online alternatives.

    Beware of any college that gives credit for "life experience." Every older adult has life experience. Often colleges that resort to this marketing gimmick are not providing quality degrees.

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill 


    Distance Learning Today will be a quarterly supplement to USA Today newspaper
    Dr. John G. Flores, CEO of The United States Distance Learning Association, today announced his organization's sponsorship of "Distance Learning Today," a quarterly supplement in USA TODAY. "Distance learning is transforming the American educational landscape, through on-line technology, video conferencing systems, satellite delivery and other media," Flores said. "We expect this supplement to be an invaluable guide for millions of present and potential distance learners as well as a means for our member institutions and corporate sponsors to reach them." The first supplement will appear in September and is expected to exceed twenty pages. Editorial will include features on the distance learning revolution, financing a distance education, increasing acceptance of distance learning degrees among employers, technology requirements and, importantly, how to evaluate the quality of a distance learning offering. "Today, there are thousands of institutions offering degrees and certifications for distance learners," Flores said. "It's timely to provide the public with a reliable information resource concerning this dynamic educational alternative." Formed in 1987, the United States Distance Learning Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs of the distance learning community by promoting the development and application of distance learning for education and training and by providing advocacy, information, networking and distance learning opportunities.
    PRWeb, June 9, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb396750.htm

    Jensen Comment
    PRWeb is a tremendous (overwhelming?) source of news in a huge set of categories --- http://www.prweb.com/newsbycategory/index.htm


    European Training Foundation -- http://www.etf.eu.int/


    "Deloitte to Build $300 Million Campus," SmartPros, July 1, 2008 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x62352.xml

    Accounting firm Deloitte LLP announced that it will invest approximately $300 million in the creation of a 107-acre learning and leadership development center in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in Westlake, Texas.

    Construction will begin in 2009 and the center is expected to open in 2011.

    The 750,000-square-foot campus will serve as a central destination for all of Deloitte's talent, including everyone from new hires to senior leadership to partners, principals and directors.

    "We expect this facility to become the heart of our organization -- the place where we meet, learn and develop our next generation of leaders," said Barry Salzberg, chief executive officer, Deloitte LLP.

    The campus will have 800 guest rooms, conference spaces, and classrooms. The facility will also feature dining venues, a ballroom, a business center, recreational facilities and a fitness center. The campus will be constructed according to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council.

    In addition to the direct benefit for Deloitte and its people, the facility is expected to provide economic benefits to Westlake and the Dallas/Fort Worth region.

    Jensen Comment
    I'm certain that the location decision was influenced heavily by the same reason that AT&T is moving its top executive headquarter from San Antonio to the Dallas region. That reason --- the DFW Airport. Over and over again, a major hub airport proves its value in economic development. Companies generally want convenient airports, and airports with the most direct flights, including direct flights to Asia and Europe, are the most sought after. AT&T moved the executive headquarters not too long ago from St. Louis to San Antonio and later discovered that San Antonio did not have enough convenient direct flights.

    Having said this, however, the age of modern communications has cut into the airport advantage somewhat. One company some years back moved its executive headquarters to Camden (where the movie Carrousel was filmed) on the coast of main which is inconvenient to freeways and airports and, to be honest, civilization. But Camden has broadband and a great sailboat harbor.

    Jane Froman's rendition (a tear jerker) of Carrousel's most favorite song is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_AgXdkgegs


    ShortCourses.com: A Complete Guide to Digital Cameras and Photography --- http://www.shortcourses.com/


    February 7, 2012 message from Fabiola Esposito (Madrid University)

    My name is Fabiola Esposito and I am writing to you on behalf of the Spanish School of the University of Madrid .
    I
    have found your website (http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm) while looking for web pages for the promotion of languages and culture and  have seen your reviews on different topics which I found very interesting, specially the one that speaks about the combination of synchronous and asynchronous methods when teaching and how close one can get to the students online.

    Anyhow, the aim of this email is that on the University of Madrid Spanish School we have recently finished developing our new website for offering our Spanish courses to everyone who want to come to Madrid to study the Spanish language and immerse into the Spanish culture. We also offer classes focused on Spanish literature and culture; and we offer specialized courses in Spanish on different academic areas such as arts, history, business and politics too.
     

    I have reviewed with much interest your section about cross-border training and educational alternatives and would like to know if you are interested in offering our website to your visitors in case they may be interested in spending a period learning or improving their Spanish skills abroad. It may be interesting either for the student community as for the educators' community, given that we also offer courses for proficient users who want to improve or review their knowledge on Hispanic studies and everything related to them; language, culture, sociology, literature, etc.

    Our Madrid University Spanish School website is www.madrid-university.es, if you think this might be a useful resource for your users you can contact me or feel free to place it between your resources.
    Thank you in advance for your time and consideration, and if you have any comments or questions please don't hesitate to contact me.
    Looking forward to hearing from you soon.


    Best regards,
     
    --
    Fabiola Esposito

    MAIL / fabiola.esposito@madrid-university.es

    WEB / www.madrid-university.es MAIL / info@madrid-university.es

     


    November 2, 2006 message from Elena Gozalo

    We will like to ask you to please add a link to the Barcelona University UAB Spanish course website www.barcelona-university.es .

    We offer students the opportunity to book Spanish language courses and accommodation at the University of Barcelona UAB in Spain.

    I am looking forward to hearing from you soon,

    Elena Gozalo
    www.barcelona-university.es


    Education Fraud and Gray Zone Warnings About Questionable Online Program --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill


    "Help Site for the Poor," Wired News, June 9, 2006 ---
    http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71116-0.html?tw=wn_index_17

    The site would provide information about such basics as public safety, emergency services, education, health care and jobs. U.S. Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, serve as honorary co-chairmen of the group.

    Continued in article

    The One Economy homepage is at http://www.one-economy.com/


    "Boston University Launches Online CMA Prep," SmartPros, February 13, 2006 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x51781.xml


    September 1, 2004 message from danirob@optusnet.com.au 

    Dear Bob

    I would like to submit for your consideration an English language learning web site which I believe would be of interest to users of your bookmarks web page. (Category: 'Education Resources').

    The English Maze www.englishmaze.com  is a web-based learning system for individuals and schools worldwide. It combines leading language learning theories with cutting edge technology to bring users a unique approach to learning English. With the English Maze, students can improve their pronunciation, speaking, reading, listening and writing skills. The site contains hundreds of hours of material, much of which is free.

    Thanks in advance for your time in considering this link. We hope you find it useful and will be able to share it with your readers.

    Daniel Robinson 
    English Maze www.englishmaze.com 


    The University of Scranton is a Jesuit university with quite a few online programs ---
    http://elearning.scranton.edu/
     

    University of Scranton Online MBA Program ---
    http://elearning.scranton.edu/


    Education Index --- http://www.educationindex.com/

    Welcome to the Education Index®, an annotated guide to the best education-related sites on the Web. They're sorted by subject and lifestage, so you can find what you're looking for quickly and easily. There's also a place to find out more about us, and about all that the Education Index has to offer.

    The Web WeaselSM is here to guide you through the site; you'll find "The Weas" (as we affectionately know it) mixing it up in the chemistry lab, providing health care, and running for office.

    This section is a topic-by-topic breakdown of the best sites on the World Wide Web. We're continually reviewing new sites and adding resources, and appreciate your comments and suggestions.

    Agriculture Finance Military Technologies
    Anthropology General Reference Music
    Archaeology General Science Parks & Recreation
    Architecture/Design Geography Performing Arts
    Art Geology Personal Services
    Astronomy Health & Medicine Philosophy
    Biology/Life Sciences History Physical Education
    Botany Home Economics Physics
    Business Interdisciplinary Studies Political Science
    Chemistry Language Protective Services
    Communications Law Psychology
    Computer Science Liberal Arts & Sciences Public Administration
    Conservation Library Science Sociology
    Construction Trades Literature Statistics
    Economics Manufacturing Technology
    Education Marketing Theology
    Engineering Mathematics Transportation
    Environmental Science Mechanics Women's Studies
    Ethnic/Cultural Studies

    Learning Tree International (Global Information Technology Training)
    This company is featured in a full page article in Barrons, January 20, 2003, Page 27.

    Learning Tree International is a world leader in hands-on training for IT Professionals. Over 1.3 million course participants from 18,000+ companies have enhanced their IT skills through intensive hands-on exercises led by expert instructors with real-world experience. Courses are presented at Learning Tree Education Centers and other locations throughout the world, as well as on-site at client facilities. Choose from over 150 courses in today's hottest technologies, including Windows XP, 2000, .NET, Java, XML, Oracle9i and 8i, UNIX and IT Management, along with 42 Professional Certification Programs


    American InterContinental University (AIU) Online--- http://www.aiuniv.edu/ 

    American InterContinental University is a wholly owned subsidiary of Career Education Corporation (NASDAQ: CECO). CEC operates 78 campuses in the U.S., Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates and had approximately 83,200 students as of January 31, 2004. AIU Online is the Web-based virtual campus of American InterContinental University, an international university with onsite campuses located in Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles, CA; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Houston, TX; London, England; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. American InterContinental University has been educating students for more than 30 years and is regionally accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
    Lycos, March 5, 2004 --- http://snipurl.com/LycosGore 


    "DeVry University to Offer Accounting Technology (Asspcoates) Degree," AccountingWeb, April 10, 2006 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=102017


    From Syllabus News on February 10, 2004

    Menlo Named "Best New Corporate University"

    Menlo University, a training center for 12,000 employees who work for transportation, supply chain management and logistics companies that operate under the Menlo Worldwide brand, was awarded a "Best New Corporate University" award at an annual conference for commercial training organizations. The Corporate University Best in Class (CUBIC) recognize corporate universities that are best practices.

    Menlo University offers Menlo employees e-based distance learning and computer-based training programs worldwide. It maintains four main campuses in the U.S. and Europe, including Dayton, Ohio; Portland, Ore., Scranton, Penn., and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Expansion plans for the near future call for additional campuses in Asia and Latin America.

    Menlo University's home page is at http://www.menloworldwide.com/ 

    Menlo Worldwide helps companies attain operational excellence across the global supply chain. We combine the most inventive logistics minds and advanced technology with the best in global transportation services. MWW has a proven track record of developing new creative global solutions and finding innovative ways to improve bottom line results for our customers.


    Teachers Without Borders  --- http://www.teacherswithoutborders.org/


    Free Training Course on the Mortgage Industry --- http://mortgage-education.com/ 

    From T.H.E. Newsletter on April 14, 2004

    Mortgage-Education.com is a Web site dedicated to providing postsecondary education about mortgage loans. The goal of the site is to take novices in the finance industry and turn them into well-trained loan officers within 60 days. The site features the Complete Mortgage Industry Certification (CMIC) program that trains students about conventional, nonconventional and FHA loans. The CMIC enables students to properly process a loan in a timely manner. All of the lessons on the site are taught online in video, audio and text, and are now approved by the American Council of Education for nine semester hours of college credit toward an associate's or bachelor's degree. Furthermore, upon completion of the CMIC, the student's name will be entered into a database allowing all 50 major lending corporations to view the individual's résumé for a potential job offer.


    Wal-Mart University Tuition Discounts

    Update on Wal-Mart University

    Does this pass the Academy’s smell test?
    "Wal-Mart Employees Get New College Program—Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Wal-Mart-Employees-Get-New/24504/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    The American Public University System has been described as a higher-education version of Wal-Mart: a publicly traded corporation that mass-markets moderately priced degrees in many fields.

    Now it's more than an analogy. Under a deal announced today, the for-profit online university will offer Wal-Mart workers discounted tuition and credit for job experience.

    Such alliances are nothing new; see these materials from Strayer and Capella for other examples. But Wal-Mart is the country's largest retailer. And the company is pledging to spend $50-million over three years to help employees cover the cost of tuition and books beyond the discounted rate, according to the Associated Press.

    "What's most significant about this is that, given that APU is very small, this is a deal that has the potential to drive enrollments that are above what investors are already expecting from them," Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, told Wired Campus. "Which is why the stock is up."

    Wal-Mart workers will be able to receive credit—without having to pay for it—for job training in subjects like ethics and retail inventory management, according to the AP.

    Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S. Roughly half of them have a high-school diploma but no college degree, according to The New York Times. A department-level manager would end up paying about $7,900 for an associate degree, factoring in the work credits and tuition discount, the newspaper reported.

    “If 10 to 15 percent of employees take advantage of this, that’s like graduating three Ohio State Universities,” Sara Martinez Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart’s external advisory council, told the Times.

     

    "News Analysis: Is 'Wal-Mart U.' a Good Bargain for Students?" by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Wal-Mart-U-a-Good/65933/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    There might have been a Wal-Mart University.

    As the world's largest retailer weighed its options for making a big splash in education, executives told one potential academic partner that Wal-Mart Stores was considering buying a university or starting its own.

    "Wal-Mart U." never happened. Instead, the retailer chose a third option: a landmark alliance that will make a little-known for-profit institution, American Public University, the favored online-education provider to Wal-Mart's 1.4 million workers in the United States.

    A closer look at the deal announced this month shows how American Public slashed its prices and adapted its curriculum to snare a corporate client that could transform its business. It also raises one basic question: Is this a good bargain for students?

    Adult-learning leaders praise Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, for investing in education. But some of those same experts wonder how low-paid workers will be able to afford the cost of a degree from the private Web-based university the company selected as a partner, and why Wal-Mart chose American Public when community-college options might be cheaper. They also question how easily workers will be able to transfer APU credits to other colleges, given that the university plans to count significant amounts of Wal-Mart job training and experience as academic credit toward its degrees.

    For example, cashiers with one year's experience could get six credits for an American Public class called "Customer Relations," provided they received an "on target" or "above target" on their last performance evaluation, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. A department manager's training and experience could be worth 24 credit hours toward courses like retail ethics, organizational fundamentals, or human-resource fundamentals, she said.

    Altogether, employees could earn up to 45 percent of the credit for an associate or bachelor's degree at APU "based on what they have learned in their career at Wal-Mart," according to the retailer's Web site.

    Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, points out that this arrangement could saddle Wal-Mart employees with a "nontransferable coupon," as one blogger has described it.

    "I now see where the 'trick' is—if a person gets credit for Wal-Mart courses and Wal-Mart work, they aren't likely to be able to transfer those to much of anyplace else," Ms. Poley wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Transferability could be important, given the high turnover rate in the retail industry.

    Inside the Deal Wal-Mart screened 81 colleges before signing its deal with American Public University. One that talked extensively with the retailer was University of Maryland University College, a 94,000-student state institution that is a national leader in online education. According to University College's president, Susan C. Aldridge, it was during early discussions that Wal-Mart executives told her the company was considering whether it should buy a college or create its own college.

    When asked to confirm that, Ms. Galberth said only that Wal-Mart "brainstormed every possible option for providing our associates with a convenient and affordable way to attend college while working at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club," which is also owned by Wal-Mart Stores. "We chose to partner with APU to reach this goal. We have no plans to purchase a brick-and-mortar university or enter the online education business," she said.

    The Wal-Mart deal was something of a coming-out party for American Public University. The institution is part of a 70,000-student system that also includes American Military University and that largely enrolls active-duty military personnel. As American Public turned its attention to luring the retail behemoth, it was apparently able to be more flexible than other colleges and willing to "go the extra mile" to accommodate Wal-Mart, said Jeffrey M. Silber, a stock analyst and managing director of BMO Capital Markets. That flexibility included customizing programs. APU has a management degree with courses in retail, and its deans worked with Wal-Mart to add more courses to build a retail concentration, said Wallace E. Boston, the system's president and chief executive.

    It also enticed Wal-Mart with a stable technology platform; tuition prices that don't vary across state lines, as they do for public colleges; and online degrees in fields that would be attractive to workers, like transportation logistics.

    Unlike American Public, Maryland's University College would not put a deep discount on the table.

    Credit for Wal-Mart work was also an issue, Ms. Aldridge said.

    "We feel very strongly that any university academic credit that's given for training needs to be training or experience at the university level," Ms. Aldridge said. "And we have some very set standards in that regard. And I'm not certain that we would have been able to offer a significant amount of university credit for some of the on-the-job training that was provided there."

    Awarding credit for college-level learning gained outside the classroom is a long-standing practice, one embraced by about 60 percent of higher-education institutions, according to the most recent survey by the Council for Adult And Experiential Learning. A student might translate any number of experiences into credit: job training, military service, hobbies, volunteer service, travel, civic activities.

    Pamela J. Tate, president and chief executive of the council, said what's important isn't the percentage of credits students get from prior learning—a number that can vary widely. What's important, she said, is that students can demonstrate knowledge. Workers might know how they keep the books at a company, she explained. But that doesn't automatically mean they've learned the material of a college accounting course.

    Karan Powell, senior vice president and academic dean at American Public University system, said credit evaluation at her institution "is a serious, rigorous, and conservative process." But will the credits transfer? "Every college or university establishes its own transfer-credit policies as they apply to experiential learning as well as credit from other institutions," she said in an e-mail. "Therefore, it would depend on the school to which a Wal-Mart employee wanted to transfer."

    Affordable on $12 an Hour? Then there's the question of whether low-wage workers will be able to afford the degrees. One of the key features of this deal is the discount that Wal-Mart negotiated with American Public.

    "Wal-Mart is bringing the same procurement policies to education that it brings to toothpaste," said John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, a distance-learning institution based in New York.

    American Public University's tuition was already cheap by for-profit standards and competitive with other nonprofit college options. It agreed to go even cheaper for Wal-Mart, offering grants equal to 15 percent of tuition for the company's workers. Those employees will pay about $11,700 for an associate degree and $24,000 for a bachelor's degree.

    But several experts pointed out that public colleges might provide a more affordable option.

    The Western Association of Food Chains, for example, has a partnership with 135 community colleges in the western United States to offer an associate degree in retail management completely online, Ms. Tate said. Many of the colleges also grant credit for prior learning. Though the tuition varies by state, the average tuition cost to earn the degree is about $4,500, she said. By contrast, she said, the American Public degree is "really expensive" for a front-line worker who might make $12 an hour.

    "What I couldn't figure out is how they would be able to afford it unless Wal-Mart was going to pay a substantial part of the tuition," she said. "If not, then what you've got is this program that looks really good, but the actual cost to the person is a whole lot more than if they were going to go to community college and get their prior learning credits assessed there."

    How the retailer might subsidize its employees' education is an open question. In announcing the program, Wal-Mart pledged to spend up to $50-million over the next three years "to provide tuition assistance and other tools to help associates prepare for college-level work and complete their degrees."

    Alicia Ledlie, the senior director at Wal-Mart who has been shepherding this effort, told The Chronicle in an e-mail that the company is "right now working through the design of those programs and how they will benefit associates," with more details to be released later this summer.

    One thing is clear: The deal has a big financial impact on American Public. Wal-Mart estimates that about 700,000 of its 1.4 million American employees lack a college degree.

    Sara Martinez Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart's external advisory council, suggests 10 or 15 percent of Wal-Mart associates could sign up.

    "That's 140,000 college degrees," she told The Chronicle. "Imagine three Ohio State Universities' worth of graduates, which is huge in American higher education."

     

    Jensen Comment
    This Wal-Mart Fringe Benefit Should Be Carefully Investigated by Employees
    It does not sit well with me!

    "Inspector General Keeps the Pressure on a Regional Accreditor," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Inspector-General-Keeps-the/65691/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education has reaffirmed a recommendation that the department should consider sanctions for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations. In a report this week, the Office of Inspector General issued its final recommendations stemming from a 2009 examination of the commission's standards for measuring credit hours and program length, and affirmed its earlier critique that the commission had been too lax in its standards for determining the amount of credit a student receives for course work.

    The Higher Learning Commission accredits more than 1,000 institutions in 19 states. The Office of Inspector General completed similar reports for two other regional accreditors late last year but did not suggest any sanctions for those organizations.

    Possible sanctions against an accreditor include limiting, suspending, or terminating its recognition by the secretary of education as a reliable authority for determining the quality of education at the institutions it accredits. Colleges need accreditation from a federally recognized agency in order to be eligible to participate in the federal student-aid programs.

    In its examination of the Higher Learning Commission, the office looked at the commission's reaccreditation of six member institutions: Baker College, DePaul University, Kaplan University, Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the University of Phoenix. The office chose those institutions—two public, two private, and two proprietary institutions—as those that received the highest amounts of federal funds under Title IV, the section of the Higher Education Act that governs the federal student-aid programs.

    It also reviewed the accreditation status of American InterContinental University and the Art Institute of Colorado, two institutions that had sought initial accreditation from the commission during the period the office studied.

    The review found that the Higher Learning Commission "does not have an established definition of a credit hour or minimum requirements for program length and the assignment of credit hours," the report says. "The lack of a credit-hour definition and minimum requirements could result in inflated credit hours, the improper designation of full-time student status, and the over-awarding of Title IV funds," the office concluded in its letter to the commission's president, Sylvia Manning.

    More important, the office reported that the commission had allowed American InterContinental University to become accredited in 2009 despite having an "egregious" credit policy.

    In a letter responding to the commission, Ms. Manning wrote that the inspector general had ignored the limitations the accreditor had placed on American InterContinental to ensure that the institution improved its standards, an effort that had achieved the intended results, she said. "These restrictions were intended to force change at the institution and force it quickly."

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The most successful for-profit universities advertise heavily about credibility due to being "regionally accredited." In some cases this accreditation was initially bought rather than achieved such as by buying up a small, albeit still accredited, bankrupt not-for-profit private college that's washed up on the beach. This begs the question about how some for-profit universities maintain the spirit of accreditation acquired in this manner.

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm


    "Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College:  A 50-year rise in grade-point averages is being fueled by private institutions, a recent study finds," by Catherine Rampell. The New York Times, April 19, 2010 ---
    http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109339/want-a-higher-gpa-go-to-a-private-college?mod=edu-collegeprep

    Over the last 50 years, college grade-point averages have risen about 0.1 points per decade, with private schools fueling the most grade inflation, a recent study finds.

    The study, by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, uses historical data from 80 four-year colleges and universities. It finds that G.P.A.'s have risen from a national average of 2.52 in the 1950s to about 3.11 by the middle of the last decade.

    For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s, grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers -- based on SAT scores and other measures -- at public schools.

    In other words, both categories of schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more.

    Based on contemporary grading data the authors collected from 160 schools, the average G.P.A. at private colleges and universities today is 3.3. At public schools, it is 3.0.

    The authors suggest that these laxer grading standards may help explain why private school students are over-represented in top medical, business and law schools and certain Ph.D. programs: Admissions officers are fooled by private school students' especially inflated grades.

    Additionally, the study found, science departments today grade on average 0.4 points lower than humanities departments, and 0.2 points lower than social science departments. Such harsher grading for the sciences appears to have existed for at least 40 years, and perhaps much longer.

    Relatively lower grades in the sciences discourage American students from studying such disciplines, the authors argue.

    "Partly because of our current ad hoc grading system, it is not surprising that the U.S. has to rely heavily upon foreign-born graduate students for technical fields of research and upon foreign-born employees in its technology firms," they write.

    These overall trends, if not the specific numbers, are no surprise to anyone who has followed the debates about grade inflation. But so long as schools believe that granting higher grades advantages their alumni, there will be little or no incentive to impose stricter grading standards unilaterally.

     

    Buying grades is also common in some foreign universities ---
    http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=vincent_johnson

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
    And http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor


    Government Aid Will Still Flow to For-Profit College Programs of Dubious Quality
    "Education Dept. Will Release Stricter Rules for For-Profits but Delays One on 'Gainful Employment'," by Kelly Fields and Jennifer Gonzalez, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2010 --- http://chronicle.com/article/Education-Dept-Will-Release/65958/

    After an intense lobbying effort by for-profit colleges, the Education Department announced Tuesday that it will postpone the release of a rule that proprietary institutions said would shutter thousands of their programs.

    The rule, which would cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates carry high student-loan debt relative to their incomes, is one of 14 that the department and college stakeholders have been negotiating over the past eight months. The other regulations, including one that would tighten a ban on incentive compensation for college recruiters, will be made public Friday.

    In a call with reporters Tuesday, an Education Department official said the agency still plans to hold for-profits accountable for preparing their graduates for "gainful employment," but needs more time to develop an appropriate measure of that outcome. The official said the proposal will be released later this summer, and will most likely be included in a package of final rules due out in November.

    "We have many areas of agreement where we can move forward," Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, said in a statement. "But some key issues around gainful employment are complicated, and we want to get it right, so we will be coming back with that shortly."

    The delay gives for-profit colleges more time to fight the department's proposal to bar aid for programs in which a majority of students' loan payments would exceed 8 percent of the lowest quarter of graduates' expected earnings, based on a 10-year repayment plan. The colleges have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing an alternative that would require programs to provide prospective students with more information about their graduates' debt levels and salaries.

    Their lobbying and public-relations blitz has met with mixed success. While the department has not yet abandoned plans to measure graduates' debt-to-income ratios, the rules that will be released Friday would require programs to disclose their graduation and job-placement rates and median debt levels—the approach favored by for-profits.

    A Welcome Delay Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, said the delay in releasing the rest of the rule suggested that "the department has heard the message from industry and Congress, and that there was some overreaching."

    "Clearly, trying to gather more data before proceeding is being responsible," he added.

    For-profit colleges have complained that the department has refused to release the data it used to justify drafting the rule, and have questioned whether they even exist.

    The fight over gainful employment comes amid increased federal scrutiny of the for-profit sector, which educates a growing share of students and is highly dependent on federal student aid. On Thursday, the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a hearing to examine whether accrediting agencies are doing enough to ensure that students studying online are getting an adequate amount of instruction for the degrees they earn. The hearing will focus on a recent report by the Education Department's Office of Inspector General that questioned the decision of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations, to approve accreditation of American InterContinental University, a for-profit college owned by the Career Education Corporation. The Senate education committee follows with a hearing next week focused on the growth of the for-profit sector and the risks that may pose to taxpayers.

    In a statement issued Tuesday, the chairman of the Senate committee praised the proposed rules. "The federal government must ensure that the more than $20-billion in student aid that these schools receive is being well spent and students are being well informed and well served," said Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. "For-profit colleges must work for students and taxpayers, not just shareholders."

    Meanwhile, a top Republican on the panel, Sen. Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, called the disclosures that would be required by the rules that will be released on Friday "much better than the first approach on gainful employment." Mr. Alexander, a former secretary of education, had threatened to offer an amendment to withhold the funds needed to put the rule into effect if the department followed through with its original proposal.

    "Secretary Duncan is focusing on a real problem," he said. "Some students are borrowing too much and not getting enough value for what they are paying."

    Tougher Stance on Recruitment But if the department is showing signs that it may soften its stance on gainful employment, it has dug in its heels on another controversial issue: recruiter compensation. During negotiations over the rules, the department proposed striking a dozen "safe harbors" from a ban on compensating recruiters based on student enrollment. It followed through with that proposal in the rules due out Friday, while promising to provide guidance on what is—and isn't—allowed under the ban.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges operating in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    You can read the following at http://www.capella.edu/GATEWAY.ASPX 

    Capella University Overview In Brief Capella University is an accredited online university that offers courses, certificates and degree programs, including MBA, doctorate, graduate and undergraduate degrees in business, technology, education, human services and psychology. Founded in 1993, Capella is the world's fastest-growing e-learning institution.

    A pioneer in online learning, Capella University is a results-oriented educational institution geared specifically to the goals and lifestyles of adult learners. Capella redefines the higher education experience for non-traditional learners, thereby offering an accessible and flexible education program that allows technology to remove the barriers of time and place.

    Accreditation Capella University is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), the same body that accredits Big Ten universities. The NCA has recognized Capella for "its pioneering role in translating an adult learning model into action." Capella is the first and only online academic institution to participate in the NCA of Colleges and Schools Academic Quality Improvement Project.

    Enrollment Capella University's student body currently comprises students from all 50 states and more than 40 countries. The majority of Capella's learners are working adults who often are balancing family, work and educational achievement. 

    More than 600 corporations provide tuition reimbursement to employees enrolled at Capella University. Check the Capella Learner Organizations list for your employer's name.

    Additionally, some Organizations have signed Corporate Alliance Partnership Agreements with Capella University. Employees of our Corporate Partners receive several additional benefits such as tuition discounts, streamlined enrollment process and cohort learning opportunities. Our programs are designed to have an immediate impact on the individual learner and the organization, positioning both for greater success.

    Capella is also a leading provider of courses in all branches of the U.S. Military --- http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/military_index.aspx 

    Corporate partnerships and alliances are listed at http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/corp/index.aspx 

    An Enduring Story for a Pioneering For-Profit Distance Learning Institution
    60,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees through its distance learning program

    Administrators say that one of the state’s top universities — either the University of Michigan or Michigan State — will soon partner with Central on a distance-based business program, thanks to its strong and solid history. Likewise, leading giants in the distance education field, including Phoenix, have turned to the relatively small Midwestern campus for advice.
    "Distance Ed Pioneer Reassesses Itself," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher Ed, May 3, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/03/central

    “People are very devoted to our campus,” says Terry Rawls, interim vice president and executive director of professional education at Central Michigan University, “but I’m embarrassed to say that most have never been to a Chippewa football game.”

    That’s because — long before for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, Strayer University and Capella University made Internet-based education a widespread phenomenon — the institution has been churning out a variety of long distance degrees for individuals who live nowhere near Michigan. The university, located in Mt. Pleasant, smack dab in the middle of the state, has awarded about 60,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees through its distance learning program since 1971, and about 7,000 students now enroll in distance learning courses during any given term, according to the university. Central has 60 satellite campuses total, with a majority of sites in Michigan, Georgia, Virginia and Ontario.

    About 10 percent of regular fulltime instructors from the Central Michigan campus teach both online and satellite courses. A total of over 200 faculty and staff members administer the distance education programs. New instructors must pass a strict review by faculty members from the main campus in order to be hired. Of all institutions in the country, Central is the second largest granter of master’s of business degrees to African Americans.

    Administrators say that one of the state’s top universities — either the University of Michigan or Michigan State — will soon partner with Central on a distance-based business program, thanks to its strong and solid history. Likewise, leading giants in the distance education field, including Phoenix, have turned to the relatively small Midwestern campus for advice.

    But as more institutions — publics, privates and for-profits — get into the arena that Central first started researching in the early 1970s, administrators at the university are trying to cope with the competition. Like many other pioneering distance education institutions, including the University of Maryland University College, the institution is trying to figure out how to position itself for growth, while remaining focused on offering high quality education.

    Phoenix, in particular, has recently opened several campuses in Michigan, where Central currently has 14 satellites. There has been concern among administrators at Central Michigan that enrollment growth would wane, which hasn’t happened yet.

    “It’s difficult for a school like CMU to say that they’re a leader in this field in the Midwest when you’ve got all kinds of Phoenixes popping up,” says Charles Baker-Clark, a director with the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education, who notes that one Phoenix campus has recently opened in his hometown of Grand Rapids. “As a business, these kinds of shops can be much more adaptable than a traditional university.”

    For-profits aren’t the only competition. Rawls says that many smaller public universities have created programs similar to Central’s in various regions of the country. “It’s the state schools that are trying to do what we’ve been doing for 35 years now. Everybody is having problems with state appropriations,” he says. “So more people are saying, ‘Let’s reach out to adult learners to make some money.’ ”

    Alan Knox, an education policy expert with the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cautions that institutions that think of distance learning as a money-making venture would be wise to explore failures like Columbia University, which spent millions of dollars on a widely heralded distance education program that failed to take off. “When you look at the cost-benefit ratio, some assume that distance learning will be profitable,” says Knox. “But in actuality, it is not hugely different if you ignore the costs of building and operating bricks and mortar campuses.”

    Rawls also says that Central Michigan is trying to be proactive on the recruitment and retention front. Not an easy task, considering the fact that the off-campus division of the university is limited in its budget abilities to spend money on marketing. Some for-profits spend up to 25 percent of their revenue on glossy marketing campaigns that have nationwide appeal. “There’s no way that we can afford to play that game,” says Rawls, even though his division is self-supporting and provided about $5 million in profits back to the Mt. Pleasant campus over the past year.

    The off-campus programs, to date, have largely depended on word-of-mouth advertising, but administrators are currently upping their e-marketing efforts and working with Web-based companies on how to optimize keyword searches.

    Administrators, too, have reached out to Eduventures, a consulting firm that focuses on the education industry, to help the institution communicate its strengths and learn from its weaknesses. That firm has suggested that Central focus on efforts that help them stand out from other institutions.

    “Why are we successful?” asks Rawls. “Because we have been doing it longer than most and we are as good as or better than anyone in the country.”

    In Rawls’s book, being “good” means implementing programs that work for adult learners, who make up the majority of consumer of Central’s distance learning programs. The university offers a variety of courses to meet the divergent needs of individuals, including Web-based programs as well as traditional distance learning programs where a student can take evening courses at a Central campus — in, for instance, Hawaii. In Atlanta alone, Central has 12 learning centers, which makes it easier for commuters to not have to deal with as much traffic, says Rawls.

    “Our goal is to deliver the same academic experience in terms of educational quality in both on- and off- campus efforts,” says Cheri DeClercq, associate director of enrollment management for Central’s off-campus programs.

    DeClercq also says that Central is competitive in terms of pricing. For most distance learning programs offered by the institution, the cost is $345 per credit hour, whether the classes are offered online or at satellite campuses. Many for-profit institutions charge substantially more for online courses than they do for in-person courses because they tend to be more attractive to students who need flexible scheduling.

    Rawls also hopes to expand the number of online offerings vastly in the short term. About 15 percent of the classes currently offered in the off-campus programs are online, and he wants to be more competitive with other institutions on this front. “Central and many other institutions around the country are trying to respond to the for-profit market by embracing technology in ways that help students,” says Knox.

    Deborah Ball, dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Education and an expert on distance education, says that Central should be careful what programs can and should be offered online and what needs to be done in person. Rawls says he realizes that one of the strongest aspects of the program to date has been the one-on-one interaction that Central has been able to offer thousands of students at satellite campuses.

    Central Michigan’s Board of Trustees has kept a watchful eye over the growth and development of the off-campus programs. In the early part of this decade, they explored a plan to largely expand the off-campus program to try to create more funds. They determined that accreditation and other concerns put the idea out of reach at that time.

    “We are such a different and unique beast,” says Rawls. He sees Central going one of two routes over the next 35 years. “We could have a damned good extended learning program in Michigan because of our infrastructure here already and really focus on that,” he says. “Or we could have a worldwide online operation, leveraging on our face-to-face presences already.”

    He seems to favor a combination of the two.

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and education technology are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

     


    "CPEs Can Lead to MBA," AccountingWeb, August 19, 2005 ---
    http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101218

    The Ohio Society of Certified Public Accountants (OSCPA) has partnered with Franklin University in Columbus, Ohio, to allow CPAs to apply CPE credit toward the Franklin MBA. The Applied Leadership Focus allows CPAs to apply qualifying CPEs towards as many as eight credit hours in the Franklin MBA Program. CPAs applying CPEs toward their MBA can obtain their degree in as little as 14 months, reducing the usual 17-month duration by up to three months. Four credit hours are the equivalent of 120 CPEs.

    “CPAs are committed to lifelong learning and fulfill a stringent continuing education commitment requiring 120 hours every three years,” explains J. Clarke Price, CAE, President and CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs in announcing the partnership. “Through this unique partnership with Franklin University, Ohio Society members can apply their CPE credits toward an MBA. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to create value-added benefits fo rour members.”

    CEO Leaderboard reports that the Franklin MBA is the largest MBA Program in central Ohio. The Franklin MBA is unique in the choices and flexibility it offers. Students can select from two academic formats: the new Life Cycle format and the traditional Discipline-Based format. Further tailoring is available through seven Focus Areas, including the accounting-focused Financial Leadership Focus. Students can also choose to complete their MBA online or on-site. Finally, Franklin’s rolling admission and flexible start dates all students to begin the MBA Program at multiple pints during the year.

    Continued in article

     

     


    Banks and Credit Derivatives
    From Jim Mahar's blog on August 17, 2005

    Minton, Stulz, and Williamson have an


    Oracle Business Suite http://www.netledger.com/portal/products_1.jsp?product=osbs&promocode=O_Google_IMP 


    Resources to prevent and discover fraud from the Association of Fraud Examiners --- http://www.cfenet.com/resources/resources.asp 

    Self-study training for a career in fraud examination --- http://marketplace.cfenet.com/products/products.asp


    New in 2003 from The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education --- the Keystone University Network --- http://www.keystoneu.net/ 

    HARRISBURG (April 4, 2003) - More than 1,900 workforce-training and professional-development courses, adult basic education, and specialized training areas for healthcare, maintenance technology and government employees are among the first offerings of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education's online university, Keystone University Network.

    Affordable, high-quality education is the hallmark of the 14 universities of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Keystone University Network brings the educational offerings of those great universities to you - anywhere - anytime. For organizations seeking to enhance employees' skills, we offer a robust portfolio of online job training and professional development. We also are growing to be your lifelong learning partner - from preparing you for a GED to earning a master's degree. Bookmark our site - many new programs will be coming online for you!


    The University of Texas has an extensive online training and education center --- http://www.utexas.edu/conted/ 

    Those Longhorns also have some short informal courses --- http://www.utexas.edu/student/txunion/ae/iclass/ 

    Not to be outdone, Texas A&M University (TAMU) also has an extensive training and education center --- http://www.tamu.edu/ode/disted/ 
    TAMU even offers a doctoral (Ed.D.) degree in Agricultural Education.

    But the number of degree programs online is larger from Wisconsin --- http://www1.uwex.edu/topics/Degree_programs.cfm 
    The UW Distance Education homepage is at http://learn.wisconsin.edu/ 


    Boston Learning --- http://www.bostonlearninginc.com/cc.php 

    Our Online classrooms provide a more conventional group learning environment, while still offering the benefits of direct, live instructor led education. Multiple students join simultaneous web and telephone conferences with a live instructor who takes them through a class. Students can follow along in the web conference as the instructor demonstrates the lessons, and ask questions of the instructor via a live chat application. Accompanying sample files and courseware allow students to review the lessons and try out sample problems on their own time, at their own pace.

    The Online Classroom can be delivered in one of two ways: Via Boston Learning's standard interface or through a branded "Corporate Classroom." In either case, students can view upcoming class schedules and sign up through an automated interface. Students who have signed up for a class will be sent web and phone conference information, as well as the accompanying courseware and sample files ahead of the class.


    Academy of Art University

    http://www.academyart.edu 

    http://online.academyart.edu/about.html


    Some Parts of the Corporate Online Distance Learning Business Model Are Thriving

    From Syllabus News on February 28, 2003:

    Online Provider Grows Curriculum to 1,700 Courses

    RedVector.com Inc. said its library surpassed 1,700 online courses, double the number of courses it offered 12 months ago. The company works with international subject matter experts to develop online courses for continuing education, certification, and licensing exam preparation. The company specializes in online education for professionals in the engineering, architectural, construction, land surveying, interior design, building inspection, and landscape architecture industries. Its library includes courses on a wide range of subjects from toxic mold to wetlands to project management. The company recently expanded to include areas devoted to online certification courses and online licensing exam prep courses.

    One of the fastest growing online training and education sites is RedVector.com --- http://www.redvector.com/default.asp 

    RedVector.com (www.RedVector.com) is the global leader in online education for professionals in the engineering, architectural, interior design, construction, land surveying, building inspection and landscape architecture industries. The web site course library includes over 1,700 online courses including continuing education courses, certification courses and licensing exam prep courses, authored by more than 200 exclusive subject matter experts. Courses are designed to meet state board and professional organization requirements. RedVector.com attracts over 500,000 unique visitors from 50 states and 20 countries. The company has been featured on CNN, WallStreetReporter.com and in hundreds of trade magazines, newspapers and industry journals. RedVector.com’s top-rated client services department employs a bilingual staff of full time Account Managers dedicated to helping customers seven (7) days a week.

    RedVector.com’s distinct clientele includes individual licensees, as well as Corporations. A few of RedVector.com’s most recent corporate partners include; PBS&J University, URS Corp, The Shaw Group Inc., Earth Tech, TECO Energy, O’Neal, Inc., EDG Inc., Fluor Corporation, The Ren Group, TBE Group, CH2MHill and SSOE, Inc. RedVector handles the full implementation of these programs including setup, tracking reports and scheduled invoicing.

    RedVector.com's strong relationships with numerous international professional organizations and universities are also a big draw. Its list of partnerships and affiliations include Indiana State University, Clemson University, Valencia Community College, the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the Institute of Engineers of Ireland (IEI), the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC), the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), the International Interior Design Association (IIDA), the American Institute of Constructors (AIC), the National Drilling Association (NDA), the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) and Professional Surveyor Magazine. RedVector.com also has an agreement with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

    RedVector.com offers numerous FREE client services designed to benefit our customers and add to their learning experience:

    RedVector.com's Mission is to provide our customers with the ability to manage their own time by offering quality online education, backed by a commitment to superior customer service.

    RedVector.com's Vision is to become the leading Internet resource internationally for online education, information and communication, the essential tools our clients need to be successful in the business world.

    Contact:
    Brent A. Craven
    President and Chief Operating Officer
    Two Urban Centre
    4890 West Kennedy Boulevard
    Suite 530
    Tampa, FL 33609
    TOLL FREE 1-866-546-1212
    Fax: 813-286-7992
    International Phone: 001-813-207-0012
    International Fax: 001-813-286-7992
    Contact Mr. Craven

    The LRN Center's business model is to provide legal and ethics training courses online to corporations, law firms, and other organizations who generally pay for employees to take courses in law and ethics.  For example, Dow Chemical contracted with LRN to train 50,000 employees.  LRN has similar contracts with many other corporations around the world.  I learned about the LRN Center from W. Michael Hoffman, the Director of the Bentley College Center for Ethics.  Dr. Hoffman writes course modules for LRN in the field of ethics.  After the recent corporate scandals, LRN's prospects for the future are very bright indeed.

    LRN Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC)™ --- http://www.lrn.com/ 

    LRN Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC)™ is the Web-based system that sets the standard for workplace ethics, legal and compliance education. With innovative technology, a powerful learning management system and a curriculum of more than 140 courses, LCEC offers your enterprise a complete workforce education solution.

    Backed by a global network of 1,700 legal experts, LRN®, The Legal Knowledge Company™ offers an integrated legal knowledge management system that encompasses Expert Legal Research and Analysis, LRN KnowledgeBank®, proactive law services and much more. See how LRN is redefining the practice of law with innovation, efficiency and unparalleled expertise.

    LRN® , The Legal Knowledge Company TM has been the country's leading purveyor of expert legal knowledge since 1994, with products that include sophisticated legal research and analysis for lawyers, databases of legal memoranda and other materials for corporate law departments and law firms, Web-based ethics and legal compliance education for corporate employees, ethics and compliance consulting, and proactive law services.

    The LRN mission is to bring expertise and innovation to the creation, management and dissemination of knowledge that helps make a critical difference to businesses, lawyers and their clients. To accomplish this, LRN has built itself on a firm foundation of expertise. We feature a network of more than 1,700 of the world's finest legal minds, organized into more than 3,000 substantive areas of the law and expertly managed by our own team of highly experienced lawyers. Together, our research network and management team bring expertise to every step in the creation, capture and distribution of legal knowledge products. Our services include:

    Successful companies all over the world have grasped the power of LRN's expert-driven approach and used it to their advantage. Contact us to learn about how we can put our resources to work to meet your company's business challenges.

    UNext also seems to be adopting the online business training model in a big way.  One of the first major contracts obtained by UNext was a contract to educate and train over 90,000 employees of General Motors Corporation.  You can read more about what is happening at UNext at http://www.unext.com/ 

    Thomson Enterprise Learning Takes Cardean University to Large Businesses Worldwide

    Exclusive Agreement with Thomson Brings Cardean University's Award-Winning Online Courses and M.B.A. to Large Businesses

    American Marketing Association Partners with Cardean University

    Special Offer Provides Professional Business Education Online to 38,000 Members

    I had two speakers from UNext in my Atlanta workshop last year.  You can listen to their presentation and view their PowerPoint show at  http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


    Online Continuing Education from the Institute of Internal Auditors --- http://www.theiia.org/ 

     http://education.smartpros.com/main/welcome.asp?qs=iia   Issues and Answers - From Experts

      Accounting/Auditing - DEMO   

       Skills Training

       Accounting/Auditing

       Ethics

       Financial Planning

       Information Systems and Computer Applications

       Management

       Taxation

        Issues & Answers - From Experts
        See Most Recent Updates

       Auditing

       E-commerce

       Economics

       Finance

       Financial Reporting

       Information Systems

       Management

       Managerial Accounting

       Security & Control

       Tax 

     


    The AT&T Learning Network Community Guide http://www.att.com/communityguide/index.html 

    Welcome to the AT&T Learning Network Community Guide. AT&T developed this Guide as part of its ongoing effort to help communities take advantage of the many benefits of information technology. As part of that effort, AT&T funded a variety of organizations to develop public community access centers for community members who do not have other means to connect to the Internet. This Guide is intended to be a companion document for those centers and other technology access centers around the country. Whether you’re involved in running a community access center or you’re a community member interested in learning the uses and benefits of the Internet, this Guide will help get you started. If you’re a community member looking for ways to begin planning your own access center, you’ll find tips on how to “kickstart” that effort.

    Community access centers take many forms and take place in many sites within the community where people gather to communicate with and learn from one another. You may find Internet access points in a library, a church or a senior citizen-center. Perhaps your children attend a summer camp that has an area where they can learn about and use these technology resources. Many organizations, like the NAACP and the National Urban League, provide many types of services for community members and are now branching out to bring the reach of the Internet to their centers as well. The point is that there are many organizations, many types of centers and many opportunities to “get connected”— often from places that may have seemed unlikely in the past.


    April 22, 2004 message from Rob [rob@coursejunction.com

    Bob,

    We’ve created a free site that allows anyone to search for a course or list a course for free. The name of the site is http://www.coursejunction.com . We offer a number of high quality courses and would appreciate a link from your continuing education contact page.

    Our link instructions are here: http://www.coursejunction.com/link2us.cfm  . Please feel free to email me with any questions.

    Thank you,

    Rob

    CourseJunction.com is an online community that brings course providers and course participants together. Any one can list their courses on CourseJunction.com and anyone can search for a course on CourseJunction for free. http://www.coursejunction.com 


    From Syllabus News on November 11, 2003

    Georgia Tech to Offer eCommerce Professional Certification

    Georgia Tech's Electronic Commerce Resource Center will offer an eCommerce Professional Certificate Program, designed to give participants the opportunity to learn from industry and educational professionals the framework for eCommerce integration. Instructors include an eCommerce attorney, a spokesman on Internet security, large portal planner and developer, and university financial and marketing professionals. The program includes the role of eCommerce in the business organization, eCommerce as a sales tool, the latest search engine techniques, and financial eCommerce security.


    Bloomberg University --- http://www.bloomberguniversity.com/index.jsp?cookieProbe=true 

    Bloomberg University exists to provide you with the best financial and investing information possible through its expanding list of online courses.

    From picking funds for a 401(k) program to saving up for a first home, the choices facing the public can be daunting. Our goal at Bloomberg University is to provide you with a solid foundation of knowledge and empower you to make the right decisions in your financial life.

    Bloomberg University is a natural extension of Bloomberg.com. After taking the courses on our site, we hope you will continue to turn to Bloomberg.com as you implement your investment strategies, whether it's to research a new stock or to find the best funds for your retirement portfolio.


    College Credit on the Phone? This makes me suspicious!

    "Community-College System Offers Distance Education by Cellphone," by Sara Lipka, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3458&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Universities in Japan and Canada unveiled courses by cellphone last year, and now, in the midst of National Distance Learning Week, the United States has too.

    The Louisiana Community and Technical College System yesterday announced the creation of LCTCSOnline, a new program built in collaboration with AT&T and Pearson Custom Solutions, a branch of the publishing and education company.

    Beginning in January, students can register on a single Web site for online courses offered — at $63 per credit hour — by any community college in Louisiana. And they’ll be able to complete their coursework on desktops, laptops, or mobile phones.

    “The top barriers for students in obtaining their degrees are geographic access, cost of higher education, and scheduling conflicts,” said Joe D. May, the college system’s president, in a written statement. “We’re excited to be able to bring a greater level of access to potential students.”

    Louisiana ranks last among the 50 states in the percentage of adults with associate’s degrees, according to the college system, which hopes to solve workforce shortages by enrolling nearly three times as many students as it does now.

    “This initiative embodies the type of thinking we need,” Sally Clausen, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education, said in a written statement.

    A $500,000 grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents financed the program, which the college system developed in nine months with AT&T and Pearson, The Town Talk, a local newspaper, reported

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


    Online and Other Nontraditional Doctoral Degrees

    2U Education Technology (for-profit education courses) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2U_%28company%29

    "U. of Southern California and 2U Offer Online Doctoral Degree," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 23, 2014 --- Click Here
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-u-of-southern-california-and-2u-offer-online-doctoral-degree/51981?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    There are still some accreditation and USC final approval issues pending. But if this program becomes operational this could be the start of traditional university partnerships with for-profit companies. The first 2U venture of offering prestigious faculty online courses that were accepted by some top universities recently faltered.

    2U Distance Education Course Provider --- http://www.study2u.com/
    2U (The Anti-MOOC Provider) ---  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology

    "3 Universities (Baylor, Southern Methodist, and Temple Universities) Will Grant Credit for 2U’s Online Courses," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/3-universities-will-grant-credit-for-2us-online-courses/45143?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    That was July 30, 2013. It's unclear what role the new 2U will play in terms of providing transfer credit accepted by Baylor, SUM, Temple, and other universities after May 2014.

    "2U Ends Semester Online," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, April 3, 2014 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/03/online-education-provider-2u-disband-semester-online-consortium 

    The online education provider 2U will this summer eliminate its online course pool initiative in favor of developing fully online undergraduate degree programs, ending a high-profile effort to offer scalable, credit-granting online courses at residential colleges.

    The consortium, known as Semester Online, was initially marketed as a platform for top-tier universities to offer online courses to paying students at participating universities. During the 2012 media storm surrounding massive open online courses, it emerged with a distinctive message, promising small course sizes and live, interactive videoconferencing sessions.

    But before the launch of last fall’s pilot, Duke and Vanderbilt Universities and the University of Rochester had backed out, and Wake Forest University remained on the fence. At the colleges that dropped out and at Wake Forest, the decisions came after intense faculty debate; Duke, for example, rejected joining the consortium in a 16-14 vote by the Arts & Sciences Council. Although Wake Forest eventually joined the consortium, which this spring expanded with new courses and international partners, the universities and 2U reached a mutual decision to end the initiative.

    “Semester Online was always an experiment,” Chance Patterson, 2U’s senior vice president of communications, said in an email. “The pilot program experienced significant challenges related to the complexities of a consortium structure.”

    In addition to losing some of its founding members, Semester Online’s fall pilot also struggled with low enrollment. Some participating universities were unable to sign up students until mid-June -- several months after fall registration -- meaning some courses were left with single-digit enrollments.

    Patterson described Semester Online as an “informative” experience that has “helped 2U develop its instructional model for the undergraduate population.” And along with Wednesday’s announcement that it would disband the consortium, 2U also unveiled its first undergraduate degree program, an RN to BSN program developed in partnership with Simmons College.

    In an email, Claire E. Sterk, provost of Emory University, described her institution's participation in Semester Online as a learning experience, and thanked the faculty "for being open to academic innovation."

    "From my perspective, it was a great experiment led by our dean of arts and sciences and the faculty," Sterk wrote. "We also learned important lessons about the ways in which universities teach and are able to compare traditional versus more innovative modes of teaching."

    Ed Macias, provost emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, said via email that he was "proud to have been part of this experiment in online education," and that courses had been "top quality."

    2U, fresh off a successful initial public offering last week, is better-known for developing fully online master’s degree programs for institutions such as Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina, among others. 

    Those programs have generally been well-received among graduate school faculty. Writing about his experiences with the University of North Carolina's online M.B.A. program, Scott Cohen, a professor with more than three decades of teaching in graduate-level business courses, described the online experience as "more intimate than 90 percent of the seminars I’ve taught in or taken."


    Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/03/online-education-provider-2u-disband-semester-online-consortium#ixzz2xpZqS1kg
    Inside Higher Ed

     

    Jensen Comment
    Some universities claim that they do not accept distance education transfer credit. However, in some instances it's impossible on a transcript to know whether a student took one or more courses from a highly regarded university online or onsite. Universities like the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University have multiple sections of courses where some sections can be taken on campus and other sections can be taken online. The transcripts may not differentiate between those sections when students from those universities are seeking to transfer to other universities.

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education courses and degree programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     

     


    Accounting Doctoral Programs

    May 3, 2011 message to Barry Rice from Bob Jensen

    Hi Barry,

    Faculty without doctoral degrees who meet the AACSB PQ standards are still pretty much second class citizens and will find the tenure track hurdles to eventual full professorship very difficult except in colleges that pay poorly at all levels.

    There are a number of alternatives for a CPA/CMA looking into AACSB AQ alternatives in in accounting in North American universities:

    The best alternative is to enter into a traditional accounting doctoral program at an AACSB university. Virtually all of these in North America are accountics doctoral programs requiring 4-6 years of full time onsite study and research beyond the masters degree. The good news is that these programs generally have free tuition, room, and board allowances. The bad news is that students who have little interest in becoming mathematicians and statisticians and social scientists need not apply --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms 

    As a second alternative Central Florida University has an onsite doctoral program that is stronger in the accounting and lighter in the accountics. Kennesaw State University has a three-year executive DBA program that has quant-lite alternatives, but this is only available in accounting to older executives who enter with PQ-accounting qualifications. It also costs nearly $100,000 plus room and board even for Georgia residents. The DBA is also not likely to get the graduate into a R1 research university tenure track.

    As a third alternative there are now some online accounting doctoral programs that are quant-lite and only take three years, but these diplomas aren't worth the paper they're written on --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#CommercialPrograms  Cappella University is a very good online university, but its online accounting doctoral program is nothing more than a glorified online MBA degree that has, to my knowledge, no known accounting researchers teaching in the program. Capella will not reveal its doctoral program faculty to prospective students. I don't think the North American academic job market yet recognizes Capella-type and Nova-type doctorates except in universities that would probably accept the graduates as PQ faculty without a doctorate.

    As a fourth alternative there are some of the executive accounting doctoral programs in Europe, especially England, that really don't count for much in the North American job market.

    As a fifth alternative, a student can get a three-year non-accounting PhD degree from a quality doctoral program such as an economics or computer science PhD from any of the 100+ top flagship state/provincial universities in North America. Then if the student also has PQ credentials to teach in an accounting program, the PhD graduate can enroll in an accounting part-time "Bridge Program" anointed by the AACSB --- http://www.aacsb.edu/conferences_seminars/seminars/bp.asp 

    As a sixth alternative, a student can get a three-year law degree in addition to getting PQ credentials in some areas where lawyers often get into accounting program tenure tracks. The most common specialty for lawyers is tax accounting. Some accounting departments also teach business law and ethics using lawyers.

    Hope this helps.

    Bob Jensen

    PS
    Case Western has a very respected accounting history track in its PhD program, but I'm not certain how many of the accountics hurdles are relaxed except at the dissertation stage.

    Advice and Bibliography for Accounting Ph.D. Students and New Faculty by James Martin ---
    http://maaw.info/AdviceforAccountingPhDstudentsMain.htm

    "So you want to get a Ph.D.?" by David Wood, BYU ---
    http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=So_you_want_to_get_a_Ph.D.%3F

    Why accountancy doctoral programs are drying up and why accountancy is no longer
    required for admission or graduation in an accountancy doctoral program ---

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

    Bob Jensen's threads on what went wrong with "accountics research" can be found at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

     


    Controversies surrounding nontraditional and online doctoral programs are discussed at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NontraditionalDoctorates

    Online Doctoral Programs --- http://www.distance-learning-college-guide.com/doctorate-degrees-online.html

    There are several types of doctoral degrees online:

    1. Diploma mills where you can simply buy a PhD and have a diploma within a matter of days. Warnings about Type 1 programs can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
       
    2. Diploma frauds that give a lot of credit for life experience and perhaps have some minimal course or paper writing assignments that in reality are a sham.  Warnings about Type 2 programs can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
       
    3. Diligent-effort programs that may require several years to complete but admit virtually anybody and have dubious academic standards even though a few teachers may try ever so hard to make it work.  Warnings about Type 3 programs can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
       
    4. Diligent-effort programs have some admission standards and varied faculty participants that try to make the program respectable. Many of these faculty participants are moonlighting in online doctoral programs but are also full-time faculty in respected colleges and universities. A listing of Type 4 doctoral programs is provided at
      http://www.distance-learning-college-guide.com/doctorate-degrees-online.html
       
    5. Major universities that have extended their onsite doctoral programs to online or partly online programs.

    Type 5 programs are highly limited in number, especially programs that do not require at least one or two years of onsite residency. But there are a few programs such as the University of Colorado's online doctoral program in pharmacy. I do not know of any major universities that offer a similar doctorate in accounting and business.

    Type 1, 2, and 3 programs are virtually frauds and are wasting the student's money and perhaps her/his time.

    Type 4 programs are problematic. They offer genuine learning opportunities to students who, due to life's circumstances, are not able to enroll in onsite programs. But Type 4 programs do not yet have the status of degrees comparable with doctoral degrees of onsite programs of major universities.

    A phony argument against Type 4 programs is that students enrolled in the same program cannot learn from each other like students in onsite programs learn from each other. About the only thing that students in Type 4 programs cannot do is have beer together and otherwise socialize face-to-face. Communications technology today makes it possible to get inside the head of a professor or a student better than face-to-face in many instances.

    In fact a student may graduate from a Type 4 program and become a better teacher and/or researcher as a result of germination in a Type 4 program. But it is misleading to say that starting opportunities are equivalent to a Type 5 Program doctoral degree. They are not equivalent, and it will be quite some time before they have a chance of becoming equivalents.

    The term "accreditation" is highly misleading. An online university that has a regionally accredited undergraduate program does not make its doctoral program accredited. In fact the same is true of onsite universities. For example, the AACSB is the premiere accrediting body for colleges of business within major colleges and universities. But the AACSB limits accreditation to undergraduate and masters of business or accounting programs. The AACSB has never had an accreditation program for doctoral programs within AACSB accredited colleges.

    When it comes to doctoral programs, everything rides on the general reputation and prestige of the entire university is the most important factor. The reputation of the college or department offering the doctoral degree is the second most important factor. What goes into that college's reputation is the research reputation of the faculty involved in the doctoral program. Admissions standards are also very, very important. Any doctoral program that is easy to get into becomes suspect. This was especially the case of some major universities that during some years admitted most military retirees who applied as long as the applicant had 20 or more years of service with the military. These programs generated some fine teachers for regional colleges, but the market generally recognized that these graduates had little prospects of establishing research reputations. I think most universities no longer give such ease of admission to veterans.

    Doctoral programs should probably be judged more on the quality of the dissertations. Fortunately or unfortunately, many  dissertations are pretty well ignored unless papers published from them are accepted by major research journals. A dissertation may be important for landing that first faculty job in a prestigious college or university. This depends heavily on level of competition. In fields like accounting and finance there is such a shortage of doctoral graduates from major universities that applicants can usually get great job offers before the quality of the dissertation can really be judged. Job offers are frequently made in the very early stages of a mere dissertation proposal subject to huge changes later on before the degree is granted. Sadly, many great dissertation proposals are never carried to fruition.

    In any case, you might be interested in the new online Type 4 doctoral degree alternatives listed at http://www.distance-learning-college-guide.com/doctorate-degrees-online.html


    "The Growth of For-Profits," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 18, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/carnegie_releases_revised_classifications_of_colleges_and_universities

    Jensen Comment
    The Devil is in the details. Especially note the tables in this article.

    The article does not really deliver on one of the things I worry a lot about --- the growth in cheap shot graduate degrees awarded by for-profit universities, especially at the doctoral level. These universities are very secretive about their admission standards such as GRE and GMAT expectations. Credit for life experience is an instant turn off for me, because all God's children had life experiences.

    These universities are generally quite secretive about their faculty who deliver those degrees. It's difficult to evaluate the research credentials of those faculty. Secondly, most of these doctoral degrees can be earned with fewer years of full-time study and interactions with teaching and research faculty. For example, the average onsite accounting doctoral program takes over five years, most of which is spent on campus interacting with faculty and other doctoral students. Capella offers an accounting doctoral program that can be completed in less than three years and has a curriculum more like a masters program. There is a doctoral thesis at Capella but who signs off on each accounting doctoral thesis? Do graduates of this program publish later on in our accounting research journals? Are these graduates making names for themselves in tenure track positions at major universities?

    I'm a long time advocate of distance education, but I'm suspicious of for-profit university academic standards. If a major research university having AACSB accreditation commences a distance education that the research faculty at that institution deems equivalent to the onsite degree program, them I'm all for expanding degree opportunities for business higher education. But I'm a snob when others adopt such programs, especially at the masters and doctoral levels.

    For Profit Universities in the Gray Zone of Fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    Accounting Degree Guide --- http://myaccountingdegree.org/
    Warning some of the for-profit degrees alternatives  aren't worth the time and money, especially the doctoral degrees. The job market pretty well does not recognize accounting PhD degrees unless the university has AACSB accreditation.

    For-profit universities in general should be viewed skeptically ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    New Online PhD Program in Nursing

    Jensen Comment
    I have a friend who has a PhD in nursing. She's also a trauma nurse in a major medical center and a Colonel in the Army Reserves. She got her nursing PhD in a traditional manner from the University of Texas. From her I learned that doctoral degrees in nursing are infrequent relative to most other academic disciplines. Getting a nursing doctorate is less of a requirement for tenure in most nursing programs in part because they've not been required for tenure. I also suspect that defining a research niche for nursing is a bit difficult since there are so many overlapping medical research disciplines in medical and biological science.

    Respectable online PhD programs in most any discipline are infrequent, although I mention a few of them at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#CommercialPrograms
    I know of no respectable doctoral program in accountancy.

    Hence it surprised me somewhat that there would be an online PhD program for nursing --- http://www.convergemag.com/story.php?catid=422&storyid=107594

    Capella University, an accredited, online university based in Minneapolis, announced a new PhD in education specialization in nursing education that aligns with the National League for Nursing (NLN) competencies.

    Capella's new specialization was developed to help address the growing shortage of nursing faculty. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), U.S. nursing schools turned away more than 40,000 qualified applicants in 2007. Nearly three-fourths of the nursing schools surveyed cited faculty shortages as one of the reasons they could not accept all qualified applicants.

    "Capella has launched this new nursing education specialization to help meet this important need," said Kimberly Spoor, Ph.D., who is faculty chair of Postsecondary and Adult Education for Capella's School of Education and will lead the university's nursing education faculty. "The lack of nursing faculty is an issue that is affecting our country's ability to educate enough registered nurses to meet the needs of our health care system. The AACN projects a shortfall of 340,000 nurses by the year 2020. The U.S. Department of Education has also identified nursing as an 'area of national need.'"

    Applicants to the School of Education's Ph.D. nursing education specialization must have a current license as a registered nurse and a master's degree in nursing
    .

    Click here for more of the latest news in education technology.

    If a new new online PhD program is introduced for accountancy, it may well be that Capella University will be the first to offer such a degree that has a chance of being recognized (for hiring purposes) by AACSB-accredited colleges and universities. Note that the AACSB does not even accredit onsite doctoral programs and has not yet accredited any online undergraduate or masters online business programs that do not also have AACSB accreditation for their onsite programs. For example, quite a few major colleges like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland have onsite AACSB-accredited business programs that by extrapolation apply to their own online business undergraduate and masters programs. But I do not know of any online business education program that has AACSB accreditation without first having such accreditation for an onsite program. I don't think there is even a process getting separate accreditation for the online portions of business education programs at such places as the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland.

    Questions
    Do schools like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland have separate designations on the transcript whether a course like Principles of Accounting was taken onsite or online?

    If a student earns an online accounting degree or MBA degree from the University of Wisconsin or the University of Maryland, do these universities even designate that the degree was earned online? Personally I doubt it, especially since some students my combine onsite courses with online courses such that it's almost impossible to designate a degree as being online versus onsite.


    Grenoble Ecole de Management's MBA program in France has AACSB accreditation. Once again I remind readers that the AACSB has never accredited doctoral programs in the U.S. or elsewhere.

    The DBA program (administered jointly with Newcastle University in the U.K) is apparently a management technology doctoral program without tracks in functional fields like accounting. I do not think there are any accounting DBA tracks such as you will find in the Harvard Business School’s DBA program. I still do not know of any respectable online doctoral programs in accounting. Of course some Grenoble/Newcastle DBA students may have prior degrees and work experience in accounting. Admission requires an MBA degree plus three years of qualified business experience.

    Purportedly there are nearly 100 DBA candidates which would make this program larger than most U.S. business doctoral programs. No PhD students are reported to date ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/04/full_time_profiles/escgrenoble.htm
    This is a joint DBA program in partnership with Newcastle University in the U.K. ---
    http://www.ncl.ac.uk/nubs/postgrad/dba/

    It is not clear how many faculty are available to work closely with so many DBA students, especially at the thesis stage where it is very difficult for a faculty member to supervise more than two or three doctoral theses at any one time

    You can read the following at
    http://www.grenoble-em.com/460-dba-with-university-of-newcastle-upon-tyne-business-school-2.aspx


    Begin Quote
    ***************************
    Delivery enables a work and study balance

    ·                 a research portal based on a proven virtual learning platform,

    ·                 a wide range of e-journals and other on-line information and data sources,

    ·                 an e-portfolio system for managing reflective learning.

     
    During the first part of the programme four workshops are shared between Grenoble and Newcastle. This helps to maximise the sharing of ideas between students and faculty and provides cross cultural and global insights.

    Research Benefits for Organisations

    Each candidate conducts a doctoral thesis on a management of technology, innovation or change issue which can be taken directly from their work experience. Organisations sponsoring candidates can therefore benefit directly from the research and study undertaken by their staff. Candidates are able to draw upon the research expertise of senior academics from both institutions. As research topics are usually based on organisations current and anticipated needs, the research outcomes of the thesis can provide real insight for the sponsoring organisation.


    The DBA programme is structured to facilitate part-time study. Research training is provided in four one week blocks and research supervision is provided throughout the period. This innovative approach makes it easier for students to combine demanding careers with their doctoral research. The programme also provides a range of web-based resources including:
    ************************
    End Quote


    April 5, 2007 reply from Mitchell A Franklin [mifrankl@syr.edu]

    Dear Bob,

    One of my colleagues on your ACEM listserv forwarded me the below E-mail, and I wanted to add to some of your responses. This past month, I completed my PhD in accounting from Walden University, one of the schools that you classify into category 4 of online programs. A few things I’d like to add based on personal experience:

    Though called an ‘online’ program, the program is more than just online independent study via the internet. As part of the degree requirements, students are required at various points in the program to attend mandatory face to face residencies in which they attend intensive format classes/seminars and take part in research based colloquia with other students in the same program. Students are in close interaction with each other on an academic and social level, including your reference of ‘having a beer together’ which some type 4 programs may lack. A vast majority of the faculty I worked with all have PhD’s from schools that are considered ‘top tier’ business schools. Not only did they hold their degrees from ‘top tier’ schools, but they also hold full-time senior faculty appointments at other top tier major business schools. These faculty members have their own reputations to uphold, and wouldn’t be involved in this type of program signing off on dissertations if they didn’t believe in the quality of the work and quality/merit of this type of program. I would also agree that at present, many people may not recognize this type of education as comparable and put someone starting out at a disadvantage if looking at major schools for tenure-track placement, but the number of people who DO recognize it as comparable is growing at a good clip. Over the long-run I do feel that at some point it will be equally recognized. As anything different, it will just take time and a concentration of alumni to show that their teaching/research skills are comparable, if not better, as you state in your post.

    As someone who has been through this program, I would wholeheartedly recommend it for someone who needs/desires a PhD but can’t enroll into an onsite program because of whatever the personal reason may be.

    Regards,

    Mitch Franklin

     April 6, 2007 reply from Steve Doster [sdoster@SHAWNEE.EDU]

    I graduated from Argosy’s DBA program (management major—the accounting major was added a few years later) in about 2002 and was very pleased with the program. My experience was that the 1 to 2 week on-site course format that involved a considerable amount of pre and post study was much more useful, less work, and more satisfying than the exclusively on-line courses. Two of my colleagues have since enrolled Argosy’s DBA—Accounting program and are satisfied with program.

    Steve Doster, DBA, CPA, CMA
    Professor, Accounting & Management
    Shawnee State University
    Portsmouth, OH 45662

    Nontraditional Doctoral Degree Programs: Some With No Courses

    "New Ideas for Ph.D. Education," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, August 18, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/18/grad

    For educators and state officials who want to reform doctoral education, “it’s easy if you just want to make it easier,” said E. Garrison Walters, interim chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents.

    The challenge, he said, is to undertake reforms that don’t sacrifice quality. “It’s difficult to keep the core values of a Ph.D. and keep it flexible,” he said. Walters spoke this week at a conference in Chicago of the State Higher Education Executive Officers — the officials who approve new Ph.D. programs in their states and periodically review such programs, sometimes with an eye toward saving money by eliminating them.

    At a session on new approaches to doctoral education, state officials were briefed on two new approaches — both of which were warmly received. One involves non-residential Ph.D. programs for students who are older than most who earn doctorates. The other involves doctoral programs that are run by more than one university — and that sometimes cross state lines and public/private distinctions. Officials at the meeting said they believed there was strong demand for both kinds of programs, and wanted to find ways for their agencies to encourage such innovations.

    Laurien Alexandre, director of Antioch University’s Ph.D. program in leadership and change, said it was easy to see that there is interest in the kind of non-traditional doctorate her institution has created. The students are already far along in their careers and lives — 85 percent are over 40, with many in their 50s and 60s — and they don’t need the doctorate as a credential. “No one is coming at 55 because they need it for their job,” she said. “So why are people paying $80,000 for a doctorate?”

    Her answer is that Antioch’s doctoral students are on an “evolved path” in which they are seeking to take their understandings of organizations to a higher level, and want to conduct the kind of in-depth research associated with doctoral programs. The program attracts students from all over the country, who periodically meet in person at Antioch’s campuses around the country, but conduct much of their work in close collaboration with faculty members, who are also spread out around the country and communicate with students via phone and videoconferencing.

    The program is “courseless,” Alexandre said, and students must demonstrate their competencies in knowledge and research skills after completing “multiyear learning paths” that are supervised by faculty members. Only then, Alexandre said, can they write their dissertations. And while Alexandre clearly relishes the way Antioch is “pushing the envelope” on most aspects of the program, she said that the dissertation process is traditional: committees, chapters, defense, and so forth. “The dissertation is the gold standard,” she said.

    The concept underlying this approach, she said, is “rigor without rigidity,” and that approach may be what it takes to encourage doctoral education from older students. She noted that Antioch just graduated its first students in the program and that retention rates are well above the typically low rates for many Ph.D. programs.

    If the Antioch model demonstrates flexibility within a graduate program, two new biomedical engineering programs may represent the ability of universities to be flexible in how they put together a graduate program in a hot science field — and one that can be expensive to support. One program joins forces of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, and the other combines offerings at Virginia Tech with Wake Forest University. Both programs have one institution with a medical school (Chapel Hill and Wake Forest) and one institution with an engineering school (N.C. State and Virginia Tech).

    Stephen Knisley, director of the North Carolina program, said that it grew out of a stand-alone program at Chapel Hill that officials there felt would be strengthened with more ties to engineering. To make the program effective, Knisley said, real partnerships are needed. That means admissions decisions, curricular requirements and the like are all decided jointly. And to really have students be able to move back and forth to the two campuses, officials have also had to make sure they can get dual ID cards, parking spaces, and access to all facilities. There are currently 103 graduate students in the program, and North Carolina hopes to double that number in the next few years.

    In a similar approach, Wake Forest and Virginia Tech decide matters together — and have managed to do so even though the former is private and the latter is a public university in another state. Brian J. Love, a professor at Virginia Tech, noted that the two universities don’t observe the same holidays or have the same class schedules, so everything must be negotiated. “This program now has its own calendar,” he said.

    But he said that’s a small price to pay to have combined resources that neither institution could otherwise create. “This can really be a win-win situation.”

    One difficulty such collaborations sometimes face is with accreditation. Gail Morrison, interim executive director of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, said that the Medical University of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina recently merged their pharmacy schools. While both entities had been accredited, they needed an entirely new review, even though it seemed to Morrison that the new school was clearly stronger than the two separate ones of the past.

    Her story brought knowing nods from the audience of state officials, several of whom said later that specialized accreditation was a barrier to the kinds of collaboration being encouraged at the session.

    Of course some collaborations don’t require any accreditors’ approval. Morrison said that generally breaking down institutional boundaries was a great way to encourage more efficiency and that formal units aren’t always needed. For example, the state’s three doctoral institutions are opening a building in Charleston that will bring professors together. No outside approval needed.

    Jensen Comment
    The problem with the some of these is that, when students are allowed to customize a curriculum, they often take the easiest way out. Success of these nontraditional doctoral programs rests heavily upon admission standards for getting into the programs and a successful track record of graduates from the programs. If low GRE (or GMAT) students are accepted, the schools will have a difficult time overcoming image flaws. Older adults seeking nontraditional doctoral programs often do not have strong admission test scores.


    A Bridge Too Far
    I discovered that Capella University is now offering an online Accounting PhD Program
    --- 
    http://www.capella.edu/schools_programs/business_technology/phd/accounting.aspx

    Although I have been recommending that accountancy doctoral programs break out of the accountics mold, I don't think that the Capella's curriculum meets my expectation ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

    On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
    For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    Even in lean times, the $400 billion business of higher education is booming. Nowhere is this more true than in one of the fastest-growing -- and most controversial -- sectors of the industry: for-profit colleges and universities that cater to non-traditional students, often confer degrees over the Internet, and, along the way, successfully capture billions of federal financial aid dollars.

    In College, Inc., correspondent Martin Smith investigates the promise and explosive growth of the for-profit higher education industry. Through interviews with school executives, government officials, admissions counselors, former students and industry observers, this film explores the tension between the industry --which says it's helping an underserved student population obtain a quality education and marketable job skills -- and critics who charge the for-profits with churning out worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt.

    At the center of it all stands a vulnerable population of potential students, often working adults eager for a university degree to move up the career ladder. FRONTLINE talks to a former staffer at a California-based for-profit university who says she was under pressure to sign up growing numbers of new students. "I didn't realize just how many students we were expected to recruit," says the former enrollment counselor. "They used to tell us, you know, 'Dig deep. Get to their pain. Get to what's bothering them. So, that way, you can convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.'"

    Graduates of another for-profit school -- a college nursing program in California -- tell FRONTLINE that they received their diplomas without ever setting foot in a hospital. Graduates at other for-profit schools report being unable to find a job, or make their student loan payments, because their degree was perceived to be of little worth by prospective employers. One woman who enrolled in a for-profit doctorate program in Dallas later learned that the school never acquired the proper accreditation she would need to get the job she trained for. She is now sinking in over $200,000 in student debt.

    The biggest player in the for-profit sector is the University of Phoenix -- now the largest college in the US with total enrollment approaching half a million students. Its revenues of almost $4 billion last year, up 25 percent from 2008, have made it a darling of Wall Street. Former top executive of the University of Phoenix Mark DeFusco told FRONTLINE how the company's business-approach to higher education has paid off: "If you think about any business in America, what business would give up two months of business -- just essentially close down?" he asks. "[At the University of Phoenix], people go to school all year round. We start classes every five weeks. We built campuses by a freeway because we figured that's where the people were."

    "The education system that was created hundreds of years ago needs to change," says Michael Clifford, a major education entrepreneur who speaks with FRONTLINE. Clifford, a former musician who never attended college, purchases struggling traditional colleges and turns them into for-profit companies. "The big opportunity," he says, "is the inefficiencies of some of the state systems, and the ability to transform schools and academic programs to better meet the needs of the people that need jobs."

    "From a business perspective, it's a great story," says Jeffrey Silber, a senior analyst at BMO Capital Markets, the investment banking arm of the Bank of Montreal. "You're serving a market that's been traditionally underserved. ... And it's a very profitable business -- it generates a lot of free cash flow."

    And the cash cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government. Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools, leading to serious questions about one of the key pillars of the profit degree college movement: that their degrees help students boost their earning power. This is a subject of increasing concern to the Obama administration, which, last month, remade the federal student loan program, and is now proposing changes that may make it harder for the for-profit colleges to qualify.

    "One of the ideas the Department of Education has put out there is that in order for a college to be eligible to receive money from student loans, it actually has to show that the education it's providing has enough value in the job market so that students can pay their loans back," says Kevin Carey of the Washington think tank Education Sector. "Now, the for-profit colleges, I think this makes them very nervous," Carey says. "They're worried because they know that many of their members are charging a lot of money; that many of their members have students who are defaulting en masse after they graduate. They're afraid that this rule will cut them out of the program. But in many ways, that's the point."

    FRONTLINE also finds that the regulators that oversee university accreditation are looking closer at the for-profits and, in some cases, threatening to withdraw the required accreditation that keeps them eligible for federal student loans. "We've elevated the scrutiny tremendously," says Dr. Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits many post-secondary institutions. "It is really inappropriate for accreditation to be purchased the way a taxi license can be purchased. ...When we see any problematic institution being acquired and being changed we put it on a short leash."

    Also note the comments that follow the above text.

    But first I highly recommend that you watch the video at --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    May 5, 2010 reply from Paul Bjorklund [paulbjorklund@AOL.COM]

    Interesting program. I saw the first half of it and was not surprised by anything, other than the volume of students. For example, enrollment at University of Phoenix is 500,000. Compare that to Arizona State's four campuses with maybe 60,000 to 70,000. The huge computer rooms dedicated to online learning were fascinating too. We've come a long way from the Oxford don sitting in his wood paneled office, quoting Aristotle, and dispensing wisdom to students one at a time. The evolution: From the pursuit of truth to technical training to cash on the barrelhead. One question about the traditional university though -- When they eliminate the cash flow from big time football, will they then be able to criticize the dash for cash by the educational entrepreneurs?

    Paul Bjorklund, CPA
    Bjorklund Consulting, Ltd.
    Flagstaff, Arizona

    I wonder if the Secretary of Education watched the College Inc Frontline PBS show? I doubt it!
    "Duncan Says For-Profit Colleges Are Important to Obama's 2020 Goal," By Andrea Fuller," by Andrea Fuller, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Duncan-Says-For-Profit/65477/ 

    Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, expressed support on Tuesday for the role that for-profit colleges play in higher education at a policy forum here held by DeVry University.

    For-profit institutions have come under fire recently for their low graduation rates and high levels of student debt. A Frontline documentary last week focused on the for-profit sector, and a speech by Robert Shireman, a top Education Department official, was initially reported as highly critical of for-profit colleges, even though a transcript of Mr. Shireman's remarks showed that he actually spoke more temperately.

    Mr. Duncan said on Tuesday in a luncheon speech at the forum that there are a "few bad apples" among actors in the for-profit college sector, but he emphasized the "vital role" for-profit institutions play in job training.

    Those colleges, he said, are critical to helping the nation achieve President Obama's goal of making the United States the nation with the highest portion of college graduates by 2020. Mr. Duncan also praised a partnership between DeVry and Chicago high schools that allows students to receive both high-school and college credit while still in high school.

    Mr. Duncan's comments come at a time when for-profit college officials are anxiously awaiting the release of new proposed federal rules aimed at them. A proposal that would tie college borrowing to future earnings has the sector especially concerned.

    The rule is not yet final, but the Education Department is considering putting a cap on loan payments at 8 percent of graduates' expected earnings based on a 10-year repayment plan and earnings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    Supporters of for-profit colleges say the rule would basically force them to shut down educational programs and as a consequence leave hundreds of thousands of students without classes.

    On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
    For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm


    "High-Profile Trader's Harsh Critique of For-Profit Colleges," Inside Higher Ed, May 27, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/27/qt#228602

    Steven Eisman, the Wall Street trader who was mythologized in Michael Lewis's The Big Short as that rare person who saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming and made a killing as a result, thinks he has seen the next big explosive and exploitative financial industry -- for-profit higher education -- and he's making sure as many people as possible know it. In a speech Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, an exclusive gathering at which financial analysts who rarely share their insights publicly are encouraged to dish their "best investment ideas," Eisman started off with a broadside against Wall Street's college companies.

    "Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry," said Eisman, of FrontPoint Financial Services Fund. "I was wrong. The For-Profit Education Industry has proven equal to the task." Eisman's speech lays out his analysis of the sector's enormous profitability and its questionable quality, then argues that the colleges' business model is about to be radically transformed by the Obama administration's plan to hold the institutions accountable for the student-debt-to-income ratio of their graduates. "Under gainful employment, most of the companies still have high operating margins relative to other industries," Eisman said. "They are just less profitable and significantly overvalued. Downside risk could be as high as 50 percent. And let me add that I hope that gainful employment is just the beginning. Hopefully, the DOE will be looking into ways of improving accreditation and of ways to tighten rules on defaults." Stocks of the companies appeared to fall briefly in the last hour of trading Wednesday, after news of Eisman's speech made the rounds.

    On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
    For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    Bob Jensen's threads on many of the for-profit universities are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Although there is a gray zone, for-profit colleges should not be confused with diploma mills ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


    Brainstorm on What For-Profit Colleges are Doing Right as Well as Wrong

    "'College, Inc.'," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/College-Inc/23850/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    PBS broadcast a documentary on for-profit higher education last week, titled College, Inc. It begins with the slightly ridiculous figure of Michael Clifford, a former cocaine abuser turned born-again Christian who never went to college, yet makes a living padding around the lawn of his oceanside home wearing sandals and loose-fitting print shirts, buying up distressed non-profit colleges and turning them into for-profit money machines.

    Improbably, Clifford emerges from the documentary looking OK. When asked what he brings to the deals he brokers, he cites nothing educational. Instead, it's the "Three M's: Money, Management, and Marketing." And hey, there's nothing wrong with that. A college may have deep traditions and dedicated faculty, but if it's bankrupt, anonymous, and incompetently run, it won't do students much good. "Nonprofit" colleges that pay their leaders executive salaries and run multi-billion dollar sports franchises have long since ceded the moral high ground when it comes to chasing the bottom line.

    The problem with for-profit higher education, as the documentary ably shows, is that people like Clifford are applying private sector principles to an industry with a number of distinct characteristics. Four stand out. First, it's heavily subsidized. Corporate giants like the University of Phoenix are now pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars per year from the taxpayers, through federal grants and student loans. Second, it's awkwardly regulated. Regional accreditors may protest that their imprimatur isn't like a taxicab medallion to be bought and sold on the open market. But as the documentary makes clear, that's precisely the way it works now. (Clifford puts the value at $10-million.)

    Third, it's hard for consumers to know what they're getting at the point of purchase. College is an experiential good; reputations and brochures can only tell you so much. Fourth—and I don't think this is given proper weight when people think about the dynamics of the higher-education market—college is generally something you only buy a couple of times, early in your adult life.

    All of which creates the potential—arguably, the inevitability—for sad situations like the three nursing students in the documentary who were comprehensively ripped off by a for-profit school that sent them to a daycare center for their "pediatric rotation" and left them with no job prospects and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The government subsidies create huge incentives for for-profit colleges to enroll anyone they can find. The awkward regulation offers little in the way of effective oversight. The opaque nature of the higher-education experience makes it hard for consumers to sniff out fraudsters up-front. And the fact that people don't continually purchase higher education throughout their lives limits the downside for bad actors. A restaurant or automobile manufacturer that continually screws its customers will eventually go out of business. For colleges, there's always another batch of high-school graduates to enroll.

    The Obama administration has made waves in recent months by proposing to tackle some of these problems by implementing "gainful employment" rules that would essentially require for-profits to show that students will be able to make enough money with their degrees to pay back their loans. It's a good idea, but it also raises an interesting question: Why apply this policy only to for-profits? Corporate higher education may be the fastest growing segment of the market, but it still educates a small minority of students and will for a long time to come. There are plenty of traditional colleges out there that are mainly in the business of preparing students for jobs, and that charge a lot of money for degrees of questionable value. What would happen if the gainful employment standard were applied to a mediocre private university that happily allows undergraduates to take out six-figure loans in exchange for a plain-vanilla business B.A.?

    The gainful employment standard highlights some of my biggest concerns about the Obama administration's approach to higher-education policy. To its lasting credit, the administration has taken on powerful moneyed interests and succeeded. Taking down the FFEL program was a historic victory for low-income students and reining in the abuses of for-profit higher education is a needed and important step.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The biggest question remains concerning the value of "education" at the micro level (the student) and the macro level (society). It would seem that students in training programs should have prospects of paying back the cost of the training if "industry" is not willing to fully subsidize that particular type of training.

    Education is another question entirely, and we're still trying to resolve issues of how education should be financed. I'm not in favor of "gainful employment rules" for state universities, although I think such rules should be imposed on for-profit colleges and universities.

    What is currently happening is that training and education programs are in most cases promising more than they can deliver in terms of gainful employment. Naive students think a certificate or degree is "the" ticket to career success, and many of them borrow tens of thousands of dollars to a point where they are in debtor's prisons with their meager laboring wages garnished (take a debtor's wages on legal orders) to pay for their business, science, and humanities degrees that did not pay off in terms of career opportunities.

    But that does not mean that their education did not pay off in terms of life's fuller meaning. The question is who should pay for "life's fuller meaning?" Among our 50 states, California had the best plan for universal education. But fiscal mismanagement, especially very generous unfunded state-worker unfunded pension plans, has now brought California to the brink of bankruptcy. Increasing taxes in California is difficult because it already has the highest state taxes in the nation.

    Student borrowing to pay for pricey certificates and degrees is not a good answer in my opinion, but if students borrow I think the best alternative is to choose a lower-priced accredited state university. It will be a long, long time before the United States will be able to fund "universal education" because of existing unfunded entitlements for Social Security and other pension obligations, Medicare, Medicaid, military retirements, etc.

    I think it's time for our best state universities to reach out with more distance education and training that prevent many of the rip-offs taking place in the for-profit training and education sector. The training and education may not be free, but state universities have the best chance of keeping costs down and quality up.

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

     


    Commercial Distance Programs That Include Online Doctoral Degrees

    I want to warn you that the site below links to commercial "universities" of varying quality and does not link to most major colleges and universities that are now offering various online education and training alternatives that are more extensive.  'There are also some alternatives that you will find at the commercial "universities" that you will not yet find at most major colleges and universities such as doctorates online, including DBA doctoral degrees in business administration.  I really cannot speak to the quality of some of these programs and was surprised to learn that the largest and most noteworthy University of Phoenix now offers a DBA online --- http://www.universities.com/Distance_Learning/University_of_Phoenix_Doctor_of_Business_Administration.html 

    April 2, 2004 message from Support At Universities [support@universities.com

    Our new website lists colleges and universities around the world, as well as the degrees they offer.

    Here is our link:

    http://www.universities.com/Distance_Learning 

    We would like to have more people visit us, so we would appreciate your adding our link to your site.

    Sincerely,

    Stephanie Universities.com

    My links to these and to the online training and education alternatives at more main stream and traditional colleges and universities online are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

     


    Unaccredited Distance Education Programs

    "AAUP Defends a Professor's Web Site About Unaccredited Distance Programs," bu Andrea L. Foster, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2003, Page A28

    The American Association of University Professors has come to the defense of a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was pressured by administrators to take down his Web site on unaccredited distance-learning institutions.

    An AAUP representative suggests that the professor's case was mishandled and is asking the university provost to clarify the institutions' policies on academic freedom and public service.

    The professor, George Gollin, said administrators ordered him to remove his material from the university's server after Illinois was threatened with lawsuits from proprietors of some of the online institutions cited on his Web site.  Mr. Gollin's material is now available on the State of Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization Web site ( http://osac.state.or.us/od/oregon_north_dakota/index_or.html ).

    Mr. Gollin said that administrators justified their demand, however, by telling him that his research into the controversial institutions did not meet the "public service" obligation for faculty members.

    A Public Service?

    Matthew W. Finkin, a law professor at the university and the institution's AAUP representative, sent a letter last month to Richard H. Herman, the provost, asking him to make clear to faculty members that academic freedom applies to the use of university computers and networks.  Faculty members should also be reminded that academic work, even work outside their discipline, qualifies as public service, Mr. Finkin wrote.

    Continued in the article


    Those Deceptive For-Profit University Promotional Websites

    Almost daily I get requests to link to commercial sites disguised to be academic helper sites. Over half these requests are on behalf of for-profit universities, although the sites themselves are getting more and more clever about hiding the fact that they are promotional sites for for-profit universities. At the same time, I'm getting smarter about detecting these sites and no longer link to them on my Website or on the AECM.

    I think that for-profit universities pay people to promote their sites on some basis such as pay-per-click.

    To get more eyeballs, these for-profit university promotion sites are adding so called helpers that I've discovered in some cases have simply plagiarized material from other sites such as the History of Pacioli. In some instances the efforts to provide helpers are more legitimate. Nevertheless it galls me to link to these deceptive for-profit university sites. By "deceptive" I mean such thinks as providing links to distance education programs in selected fields like accounting, nursing, pharmacy, etc. Even though there are better and nearly always cheaper distance education degree programs from state-supported universities, those universities are excluded from the for-profit distance education promotional sites. For example, the only distance education degree programs in accounting will those degree programs available from for-profit universities.

    Having said this there are some useful for-profit university promotion sites. For example, the "40 Essential Links for CPA Exam Prep & Practice" is a rather helpful site at AccountingDegree.com ---
    http://www.accountingdegree.com/blog/2012/40-essential-links-for-cpa-exam-prep-practice/

    At the same time, there is much misleading information at this AccountingDegree.com site. For example, consider the various rankings of online universities at
    http://oedb.org/rankings
    In most cases the various better and cheaper non-profit colleges and universities are not even mentioned by AccountingDegree.com.

    Hence I am torn about posting links to for-profit university Websites. It's helpful to have the "40 Essential Links for CPA Exam Prep & Practice" is a rather helpful site at AccountingDegree.com ---
    http://www.accountingdegree.com/blog/2012/40-essential-links-for-cpa-exam-prep-practice/

    But it's deceptive when those sites never mention that there are cheaper and better distance education degree programs from nonprofit state universities. Some of the better and cheaper non-profit distance education programs have been highlighted by US News are listed below. You will never find these programs mentioned by AccountingDebree.com or most any for-profit university promotional Website.

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.


    Online Graduate Business (mostly MBA) Programs (look first for AACSB accreditation)

    There are many online MBA degree programs available from for-profit universities. However, they are expensive and lack the quality reputation of AACSB-accredited programs. There are no for-profit universities that have AACSB accreditation. I highly recommend first looking for AACSB accreditation before enrolling in any MBA Program in North America.

    Only a few top AACSB MBA programs have introduced online options.
    The University of North Carolina’s MBA@UNC  is a newer online alternative --- http://onlinemba.unc.edu/about/mba-at-unc/ 
    Indiana University now has the Kelley Direct program --- http://kd.iu.edu/programs/mba/overview.htm


    QS Quacquarelli Symonds:  The 25 Best Online MBA Programs Worldwide ---
    Click Here

    01 (Best Online) IE Business School (Spain)
    02 Imperial College Business School (UK)
    03 Warwick Business School (UK)
    04 Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales Business School
    05 Alliance Manchester Business School (UK)
    06 Politecnico di Milano School of Management (Italy)
    07 Indiana University (Kelley Direct Programs) (USA)
    08 Marshall Business School at the University of Southern California (USA)
    09 Vlerick Business School (Belgium)
    10 Florida International University (USA)
    11 Durham University Business School (UK)
    12 Oxford Brookes Business School (UK)
    13 Birmingham Business School (UK)
    13 University of Otago Business School (NZ)
    15 Warrington College of Business at University of Florida (USA)
    16 Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas (USA)
    17 CENTRUM PUCP Graduate Business School (PERU)
    18 George Washington University (US)
    19 Macquarie Business School (Australia)
    20 EU Business School (Spain)
    21 Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland (USA)
    22 Kogod School of Business at American University (USA)
    23 Colorado State University's College of Business (USA)
    24 Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University (USA)
    25 Whitman School of Management at Syracuse (USA)

    Jensen Comment
    The first thing that struck me in this ranking is that the purportedly top online programs are mostly not (with a few exceptions)  among the top (elite) international MBA programs ranked by QS Quacquarelli Symonds ---
    https://www.businessinsider.com/best-mba-programs-in-the-world-2020-9?op=1

    Also see the US News ranking of top (elite) MBA programs ---
    https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/international-business-rankings

    One reason may be that the top onsite programs target different applicants than the online programs. The onsite programs target full-time and younger students that are not necessarily fresh out of undergraduate studies but tend to be under 30 years of age.

    The online applicants I suspect are older and possibly are studying part-time rather than full time. Sometimes online programs are viewed as cash cows for universities, and as such these online programs have lower admission standards.

    Scandinavia is often held out as a top part of the world for education beginning a pre-school (think Finland). It struck me as odd that Scandinavia did not fare very well among the world's top onsite or online MBA programs. Keep in mind that all Scandinavian nations are proudly capitalist such that we would expect them to rank higher among prestigious business schools.

    Aside from the UK (that is no longer part of the EU) it struck me as odd that most EU nations did not rank as high among onsite or online MBA programs as I would have expected. Part of the reason here is that traditionally business programs either do not exist or are relatively weak in outstanding and prestigious EU universities. In many cases business courses are buried among economics courses in EU universities.

    Another thing to note is how poorly Asian universities are represented among top online and onsite MBA programs. In many instances Asian universities don't have separate business majors. Also Asian programs in general (think China) have poor reputations for academic standards (think cheating). In some instances (think Japan) academic rigor is excellent before college but not so great in college where a lot of partying often takes place.

    Another thing to note is that there are some business study programs that are not adapted well to MBA programs. MBA programs target admissions of non-business majors from mathematics, engineering, science, and humanities. Some business study programs require undergraduate as well as graduate studies, notably accountancy where there are many more required courses for licensure (think CPA) than can possibly be covered in a two-year MBA program. CPA firms rarely recruit auditors and tax accountants among students who were not undergraduate accounting majors.


    "Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online) Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 6, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online 

    Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took its relationship with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of the Internet.

    “I don’t know of anything else like this,” says Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online course].”

    Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May 2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford, and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.

    “We really want to create the high-engagement, community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she says.

    The classes will be offered on a platform supplied by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program: About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.

    “This is by far the most serious and most significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.

    People go to business school for more than just lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer skills and build a network of peers.”

    The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including Harvard Business Schools $1,500 nine-week online program and the Wharton School’s entirely free first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera last fall.

    The program may seem less pricey, though, to the company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus program costs executives $62,500.

    To Novoed, which also provides technology to Wharton, the Haas School of Business, and the Darden School of Business, the Internet is an obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive education programs.

    Saberi says companies are interested in elite training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We expect that programs like this are going to grow.”

     

    "Disruption Ahead: What MOOCs Will Mean for MBA Programs," Knowledge@wharton Blog, July 16, 2014 ---
    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/moocs-mba-programs-opportunities-threats/

    In a new research paper, Christian Terwiesch, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and Karl Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at the school, examine the impact that massive open online courses (MOOCs) will have on business schools and MBA programs. In their study — titled, “Will Video Kill the Classroom Star? The Threat and Opportunity of MOOCs for Full-time MBA Programs” — they identify three possible scenarios that business schools face not just as a result of MOOCs, but also because of the technology embedded in them. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Terwiesch and Ulrich discuss their findings.

    An edited transcript of the interview appears below.

    Knowledge@Wharton: Christian, perhaps you could start us off by describing the main findings or takeaways from your research?

    Terwiesch: Let me preface what we’re going to discuss about business schools by saying that Karl and I have been in the business school world for many, many years. We love this institution, and we really want to make sure that we find a sustainable path forward for business schools.

    Continued in article

    "What Georgia Tech’s Online Degree in Computer Science Means for Low-Cost Programs," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/What-Georgia-Tech-s-Online/149857/?cid=wc

    Among all recent inventions that have to do with MOOCs, the Georgia Institute of Technology’s online master’s program in computer science may have the best chance of changing how much students pay for a traditional degree.

    The program, which started last winter, pairs MOOC-like course videos and assessments with a support system of course assistants who work directly with students. The goal is to create a low-cost master’s degree that is nonetheless "just as rigorous" as the on-campus equivalent—producing graduates who are "just as good," to quote one of the new program’s cheerleaders, President Obama. The price: less than $7,000 for the three-year program, a small fraction of the cost of the traditional program.

    It’s too early yet for a graduating class. But researchers at Georgia Tech and Harvard University have studied the students who have enrolled in the program, in an effort to figure out "where the demand is coming from and what it’s substituting for educationally," says Joshua S. Goodman, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard.

    By understanding what kinds of students are drawn to the new program, Mr. Goodman and his fellow researchers think they can begin to understand what competitors it might threaten.

    Here is what they found out about those students:

    How They Are Different

    The enrollees are numerous. The online program this year got as many applications as Georgia Tech’s traditional program did during two recent semesters. But while the traditional program accepted only about 15 percent of its applicants, the online program accepted 50 percent, enrolling about 1,800 in its first year. That might not qualify as large in light of the 50,000-students-per-course figures often quoted in reference to MOOCs, but it does make the online program three times as large as the largest traditional master’s programs in computer science, according to the researchers.

    They’re older (and they already have jobs). The people enrolling in the online program are 35 years old, on average, and are far more likely to report that they are working rather than studying full time. (The average age of the students in Georgia Tech’s traditional program is 24, with only half indicating that they are employed.) That should not surprise anyone who has even a passing familiarity with online education. Online programs have pitched themselves to adults who are tethered to work and family, and who want to earn degrees without rearranging their lives around a course schedule.

    They’re from the United States. Online education is supposed to make geographic borders matter less. But this online master’s program has drawn 80 percent of its students from within the country. By contrast, in the traditional program, 75 percent of the students are foreign, mostly from India and China.

    Most of them did not study computer science in college. In the traditional graduate program, 62 percent of students have completed an undergraduate major in computer science. That is true of only 40 percent of the online students. The percentage of undergraduate engineering majors, 27 percent, remained constant.

    How They Are Similar

    They’re good at school. Unlike San Jose State University’s MOOC-related pilot program, which tried and failed to help underperforming students, Georgia Tech’s online program appeals to students with a proven academic track record, specifically those who earned bachelor’s degrees with a grade-point average of 3.0 or higher. (The university told The Chronicle last year that its first group of applicants averaged a 3.58 GPA—about the same as the students in the traditional program.) They seem to be doing well so far: Courses held last spring and summer saw pass rates of about 88 percent, according to the university.

    They’re mostly men. The online program had a lower rate of female applicants than the traditional program did, but there were precious few in either pool: 14 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Among American applicants, the rates were similar: 13 percent and 16 percent.

    Over all, the first enrollees in Georgia Tech’s MOOC-like master’s program fit the profile of students who are applying to online graduate programs at institutions across the country.

    Continued in article


    Business Insider:  The Best 2016 Online MBA Programs ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/best-online-mba-programs-2016-1

    New From US News
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Online Fraud Management MBA at Utica College ---
    http://programs.online.utica.edu/programs/mba-fraud-course.asp

     


    "Harvard Business School Will Venture Into Online Teaching," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 10. 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/harvard-business-school-will-venture-into-online-teaching/47345?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    Since the HBS is the poster child for case method teaching this either spells two things for pedagogy at the HBS. It may be that if online courses are relatively small, the distance education pedagogy can accommodate the case method as effectively as in a classroom of roughly 90 students (common on campus at the HBS). However, it could also mean that the the HBS online program will be a departure for its beloved case method. It's probably a combination of both changes across a variety of courses.

    It should be noted that the HBS venture is intended to earn "profits" unlike the MOOC programs at prestigious universities, including Harvard's MOOC courses. To be a MOOC the course has to be free by definition. However, fees may be charged to students who also want transcript credits.

    Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs (free), SMOCs (not free), and OKIs (free) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on case method teaching and research ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Cases


    "NYU (Law School) to Offer Online Masters in Tax for Non-Lawyers," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, October 7, 2013 ---
    http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/10/nyu-to-offer-.html


    Online MBA Rankings --- http://onlinemba.com/

     
    Rank School Business School Name Based In
    1 Indiana University - Bloomington Kelly School of Business Bloomington, IN
    2 Thunderbird School of Global Management Thunderbird School of Global Management Glendale, AZ
    3 University of Illinois - Springfield College of Business and Management Springfield, IL
    4 University of Tennessee - Martin College of Business & Global Affairs Martin, TN
    5 Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick and Newark Rutgers Business School Newark, NJ
    6 North Carolina State University Poole College of Management, Jenkins Graduate School Raleigh, NC
    7 George Washington University George Washington University School of Business Washington, DC
    8 University of Florida Hough Graduate School of Business Gainesville, FL
    9 Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business University Park, PA
    10 Arizona State University W.P. Carey School of Business Tempe, AZ

    Jensen Comment
    For some reason the above ranking leaves out the University of North Carolina ---
     http://onlinemba.unc.edu/about/mba-at-unc/ 
    Richard Sansing later pointed out that UNC comes in at Rank 11.

     


    New From US News
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

     

    Also see http://howtomba.com/

    There are many online MBA degree programs available from for-profit universities. However, they are expensive and lack the quality reputation of AACSB-accredited programs. There are no for-profit universities that have AACSB accreditation. I highly recommend first looking for AACSB accreditation before enrolling in any MBA Program in North America.


    Masters of Accounting and Taxation Online Degree Programs

    Discover Business
    Fee-Based Online MBA Programs and Online MBA Programs in Accounting ---
    http://www.discoverbusiness.us/education/online-mba/accounting/


    2017:  Coursera Partners with Leading Universities to Offer Master’s Degrees at a More Affordable Price
    Includes University of Illinois masters degrees in entrepreneurship, MBA, accountancy, and data science programs---
    http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/coursera-partners-with-leading-universities-to-offer-masters-degrees-at-a-more-affordable-price.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    For students looking for a broader education in business, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has launched an entire MBA program through Coursera. Consisting of 18 online courses and three capstone projects, the iMBA program covers the subjects usually found in b-school programs--leadership, strategy, economics, accounting, finance, etc. The complete curriculum should take roughly 24 to 36 months to complete, and costs less than $22,000--about 25%-33% of what an on-campus MBA program typically runs.

    (The iMBA is actually one of three degree programs the University of Illinois has launched on Coursera. The other two include a Masters in Accounting (iMSA) and a Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS).)

    Now, in case you're wondering, the diplomas and transcripts for these programs are granted directly by the universities themselves (e.g., the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and HEC Paris). The paperwork doesn't carry Coursera's name. Nor does it indicate that the student completed an "online program." In short, online students get the same transcript as bricks and mortar students.

    Finally, all of the degree programs mentioned above are "stackable"--meaning students can (at no cost) take an individual course offered by any of these programs. And then they can decide later whether they want to apply to the degree program, and, if so, retroactively apply that course towards the actual degree. Essentially, you can try things out before making a larger commitment.

    If you want to learn more about these programs, or submit an application, check out the following links. We've included the deadlines for submitting applications.

    Online Master's in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from HEC Paris

    Application deadline, December 7

    Master of Business Administration (iMBA) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Application deadline, November 17

    Master of Science in Accountancy (iMSA) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Application deadline, December 4

    Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    (Application deadline, October 15

    Top Accounting Education Programs (many have masters of accounting degree programs and some have online degree programs)

    Top Accounting Undergraduate Programs Ranked by US News (most now have masters in accounting programs as well)---
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-accounting

    AACSB-accredited programs that also have specialized accounting accreditations as well ---
    http://www.aacsb.edu/en/accreditation/accounting/

    Top Accounting MBA in Accounting Specialty Programs Ranked by US News
    http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/accounting-rankings

    If we were to just rank the accounting doctoral programs in terms of research performance the rankings might be quite different from the rankings shown above for MBA specialty  and Master of Accounting Programs ---
    http://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/rankings.php 

    US News Best Undergraduate Business Programs ---
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-accounting
    Many of these top programs are much more affordable than those chosen by The Accounting Degree Review.

    Guide to Online Community Colleges --- http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/online-colleges/community-colleges/
    Jensen Comment
    Online community college courses are good for things like training certificates and associate degrees. However, for students wanting four-year and graduate online courses, there are usually better alternatives such as the ones listed below.

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Question
    What accredited law schools offer online tax LL.M. degrees?

    Answer (these degrees typically take three years to complete for full-time students unless students already have law degrees)
    http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/09/nine-law-schools.html

    Selected Online Masters of Accounting and Masters of Taxation Programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#MastersOfAccounting
    Time between enrollment and graduation depends a great deal on meeting prerequisite requirements in accountancy, and business core (including economics and ethics). I'm biased in recommending such degrees from only AACSB-accredited business programs, although not necessarily AACSB-accredited accounting programs. Some of the most prestigious AACSB-accredited universities do not have the added accountancy specialized accreditation.

     

     


    University of Maryland

    University of Maryland University College offers 3 Accounting-oriented masters degrees--MS in Management, Accounting Track; MS in Accounting and Financial Management; MS in Accounting and Information Technology. All coursework can be done online. There is a centralized website that has links to get more information at http://info.umuc.edu/acct-fin/center . Or you can email me and I'll be glad to answer any questions.

    Bruce H. Lubich, Ph.D., 
    CPA Program Director, 
    Accounting Graduate Management Program 
    University of Maryland University College

    The University of Connecticut has an online MSA program --- http://www.business.uconn.edu/msaccounting/

    Some other online Masters of Accounting Programs are listed at http://www.online-masters-degrees-programs.org/masters-of-accounting.htm 

    Others are listed at http://www.masters-degrees-online-programs.com/ 

    Programs for Masters of Accounting and Masters of Taxation are listed at http://www.itss.fau.edu/programs.htm 


    Masters of Science in Accounting and Taxation at Northeastern University ---
    http://taxation.neu.edu/taxa-2010/


    Forensic Accounting Degree Programs

    There are some online forensic accounting degree programs.  For example, you can choose and online or onsite program at Florida Atlantic University ---
    http://www.masters-in-forensic-accounting.com/


    Find your online degree with the SUNY Learning Network --- http://sln.suny.edu/

    Online SUNY Graduate Programs

    Online Master Degree Programs

    MBA | MS | MA | MLS | M.Ed. * denotes SLN Affiliated campus

    Online Master of Business Degree Programs

    Online Master of Science Degree Programs

    Online Master of Arts Degree Programs

    Online Master of Library Science

    Online Master of Education

    Online Doctoral Degree Programs

    DNP * DENOTES SLN AFFILIATED CAMPUS

    Online Doctor of Nursing Practice

    The SUNY Learning Network program is administered by the Office of the Provost.

     

    "Open SUNY Unites Online Ed Offerings Across 64 Institutions," by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, January 21, 2014 ---
    http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/01/21/open-suny-unites-online-ed-offerings-across-64-institutions.aspx?=CT21

    The State University of New York (SUNY) has formally introduced a new online program that allows students to access courses, degrees, professors and academic resources from any of SUNY's 64 campuses. Open SUNY, as it's called, is a mix-and-match service that offers access to 400 "online-enabled" degrees, 12,000 course sections and eight full degrees. The system's expectation is that people from inside and outside the state will attend courses, including international students.

    Students can use the program to start a degree, finish a degree or just take a single course. The Open SUNY Navigator allows a potential student to specify what type of program he or she wants in categories such as entirely online or hybrid, synchronous or asynchronous, experiential, accelerated and so on — and the navigation tool provides potential online offerings to fit the criteria.

    "Open SUNY will provide our students with the nation's leading online learning experience, drawing on the power of SUNY to expand access, improve completion, and prepare more students for success," said Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. "In addition to these new, fully-online degree programs, Open SUNY will take every online course we offer at every SUNY campus...and make them easy to find and accessible for every SUNY student and prospective learners around the globe."

    Along with providing a central application through which to locate course offerings, SUNY is offering Open SUNY+, which adds additional layers of support for online students and instructors. Specific additions include a 24/7 help desk for technical support, a "concierge" service to act as a single source for getting all program questions answered, and extended hour tutoring services. Faculty will have access to training programs and online forums where they can broaden their knowledge about developing effective online courses or share best practices.

    Eight Open SUNY+ degree programs debuting this month were chosen based on a number of factors, including student interest, accreditation, and their capacity to meet current and future workforce demand throughout New York State.

    Among the institutions involved are:

    "We are proud of our collaboration and success in serving a qualified student population that may not otherwise be able to pursue a degree in electrical engineering," said Stony Brook President Samuel Stanley Jr. "We are joining forces with our colleagues at Binghamton University and the University at Buffalo to make a difference. We look forward to implementation of Open SUNY. This is truly an exciting time to be involved in higher education in New York State."

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     


    This Makes Me Really Sad

    Although the Fathom Website does not seem to act like anything is wrong, it is reported on Page A30 of the January 17, 2003 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education that "After Losing Millions, Columbia University Will Close Online-Learning Venture."  That learning venture was called Fathom --- http://www.fathom.com/ 

    Fathom seemed to have most of the crucial ingredients for an online training and education venture.  The positives included the following:

    And now we must speculate where Fathom's business model failed and why it continued to hemorrhage cash in spite of doing so many great things in the design of its business model.  Part of the problem may have been timing combined with a world that seems more connected online than is really the case when trying to match adult learners with online opportunities.  Fathom is not the only failed for-profit online education ventures that have failed.  Prominent failures include the ventures listed at the following quotation from the Chronicle article cited above:

    "I think Fathom was a great experiment," said James L. Hilton, associate provost for academic information and instructional technology affairs at Michigan.  "The problems that Fathom was trying to address--how to connect with lifelong learners, how to provide authenticated information--are an important challenge...I wish that the national economics could have supported a longer experiment."

    Ann G. Kirschner, president and chief executive officer of Fathom, said the flagging economy had put pressure on the venture.  In May, the Columbia University Senate recommended cutting back on the institution's investment in Fathom, although the university reportedly had already cut back.

    In 2001, Columbia gave Fathom $14.9 million, while the venture earned $700,000 from fees from other institutions and sales revenue.

    "The reality is, we're in tough economic times," Ms. Kirschner said.  "No institution, particularly the ones involved in the Fathom consortium, wants to do anything without the highest academic quality."

    She added: "Fathom was an expensive vehicle for innovation.  In tough economic times, it's natural that our investor would look for ways to reduce that investment."

    "I think we're going out on a high," Ms. Kirschner said.  "We've outlasted nearly everybody."

    Indeed, for-profit online-learning ventures already have closed at New York University, Temple University, and the University of Maryland University College.

    It is important to note that the failures of the online ventures mentioned above do not imply that many other somewhat similar ventures have failed.  Some ventures like UNext are still in business because of large training and education contracts with industry.  Some like Army University and IRS University are thriving because government has contracted to pay the course costs delivered from major universities.  

    Who's Succeeding in Online Education?
    The most successful online programs at this point in time seem to be embedded in large university systems that have huge onsite extension programs as well as online alternatives.  Two noteworthy systems in this regard are the enormous University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas extension programs.  Under the leadership of Jack Wilson, UMass Online has thrived with hundreds of online courses.  I think Open University is the largest public university in the world. Open University has online as well as onsite programs. The University of Phoenix continues to be the largest private university in the world in terms of student enrollments.

    From the University of Wisconsin
    Distance Education Clearinghouse ---  http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html

    The Distance Education Clearinghouse is a comprehensive and widely recognized Web site bringing together distance education information from Wisconsin, national, and international sources. New information and resources are being added to the Distance Education Clearinghouse on a continual basis.

    The Clearinghouse is managed and maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Extension, in cooperation with its partners and other University of Wisconsin institutions.

    Jensen Comment
    This site has glossaries and many links to other distance education sites.

    Bob Jensen's links to distance education sites are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Open2 portal to learning
    BBC News and Open University combined forces to create the Open2 portal to learning and news --- http://www.open2.net/
    There are also various forums.


    UMassOnline Revenues, Enrollments Up, Up, Up

    UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts's Web-based learning division, announced that online education program revenues and enrollments grew 40 percent and 33 percent, respectively, in 2003. Revenues from the combined online programs at the university exceeded $11 million, up from $7.8 million in 2002, while enrollments reached 13,375, up from 10,039 in 2002. More than 90 percent of the revenues are retained by the UMass campuses to support education and research programs.

    The school attributes its rapid growth to the continued addition of new online programs that serve community needs, high levels of online student satisfaction, and its recognition in the national distance learning market due to factors such as winning several national distance learning awards.

    "Distance learning is critical to the future of UMass and all of higher education," UMass interim President Jack M. Wilson said. "Without it, we cannot adequately serve students who live far from our campuses or whose work and family lives make traditional higher education an unattainable goal. Also, at a time when we are expected to do more with less state funding, UMassOnline is mobilizing our five campuses to create entrepreneurial revenue-generating online programs, multi-campus collaborations, innovative faculty training, increased national visibility and significant cost savings for the university."

    Read more: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=3725 


    Success of online courses in some way is more noteworthy in terms of the hundreds of thousands of online students enrolled in courses delivered by developing countries like India and Indonesia.  See the recent United Nations report at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001284/128463e.pdf 

    There seems to be a sufficient level of success for some prestige universities like Harvard and MIT to make plans for greatly expanding its online training and education programs.  See http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6388  

    "U. of Wisconsin Will Develop Online Advanced-Placement (AP) Courses for High-School Student," by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2002 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2002/11/2002111901t.htm 

    The University of Wisconsin at Madison plans to develop online advanced-placement courses for Wisconsin high-school students. The online format is meant to help rural and inner-city students who go to high schools that do not provide advanced-placement courses.

    The courses should be available next fall. Between now and then, the university will create the online versions of the courses and train high-school teachers to administer them.

    Earlier this month, the Center on Education and Work in the university's School of Education began working with Wisconsin school districts to create an organization called the Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Learning Consortium. Next fall, the organization plans to provide 50 online sections of 12 different advanced-placement courses, enrolling a total of 500 to 700 high-school students.

    About a quarter of the state's public high schools do not offer advanced-placement courses, said Wendy L. Way, acting director of the Center on Education and Work. Others only provide one or two of the 35 courses for which advanced-placement tests are available through the College Board.

    Continued at - http://chronicle.com/free/2002/11/2002111901t.htm  

    The UW Distance Education homepage is at http://learn.wisconsin.edu/  

    From the University of Wisconsin
    Distance Education Clearinghouse ---  http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html

    The Distance Education Clearinghouse is a comprehensive and widely recognized Web site bringing together distance education information from Wisconsin, national, and international sources. New information and resources are being added to the Distance Education Clearinghouse on a continual basis.

    The Clearinghouse is managed and maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Extension, in cooperation with its partners and other University of Wisconsin institutions.

    Jensen Comment
    This site has glossaries and many links to other distance education sites.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online learning can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 
     

    You can listen to the MP3 audio of Mike Kirschenheiter from Columbia University discussing Fathom at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm 

    January 17, 2003 reply from Bruce Lubich [blubich@UMUC.EDU
    (Note that Dr. Lubich is the
    Graduate Program Director in Accounting at University of Maryland University College.)

    I would add University of Maryland University College to the list of successful, diverse, and growing online education programs. Please feel free to check out the website at www.umuc.edu

    Bruce Lubich

    January 17, 2003 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU

    James Madison University is enjoying great success with our on-line "InfoSec MBA" program. It is so successful (both learning as well as monetarily) that we are expanding it to cover additional cohorts. It is tiny compared to the programs being discussed (we limit a cohort to 25 students, and we have three staggered cohorts running at any given time, expanding to five or six next year). But it is a cash cow for the College even though it is relatively expensive to run. Maybe inflatable rafts do better than supertankers in these uncharted waters right now...

    David R. Fordham 
    PBGH Faculty Fellow 
    James Madison University

    January 17, 2003 reply from J. S. Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU

    Bob,

    I too am saddened. However, as you suggest, some programs seem to be surviving (not sure if thriving). One of the earliest online education programs that seems to have survived rather very well is the SUNY Learning Network, which was initially funded by the Sloan Foundation. You can find information about the outfit at

    http://sln.suny.edu/sln/public/original.nsf 

    Many campuses in the SUNY system do use this. The model seems to be working. It is my understanding that any course offered by any campus in the SUNY system can also be offered through SLN. The department offering a course through SLN is charged a fee (I am told, fairly modest).

    This may be a viable model, where the network provides the infrastructure that faculty can use to deliver online education. I don't think they have an explicit "business model" or strategy. The administration provides the infrastructure, and lets the faculty determine how to deliver it. The SLN is slowly evolving, and I am getting more and more confident that it will succeed in the long run.

    I have not used SLN, but chat with colleagues who have used it in the past is encouraging me to offer some of my graduate courses online through them, of course, provided the administration in the department and the school will let me (and I am confident they will).

    You can not run an education enterprise like a business. The fault of Fathom, like Unext and Cardean, I think is this ridiculous notion that "business" aspects of education predominate. It also confirms my suspicion (have known it for a long time when it comes to IT) that marks of "high quality" and prestige can not substitute for deep faculty involvement and initiative. A dean at my university, exasperated at the independence of the faculty, is fond of saying that "managing" faculty is like herding cats. I say, thank goodness we have a hand at determining our own fate.

    It is my feeling that online education will succeed only when the administration provides a good infrastructure, provides technical support, gets out of the way of the faculty, and lets the faculty use it as they see fit.

    I would be interesting in knowing if the other systems that seem to have survived well also have similar attributes.

    Jagdish


    September 9, 2003 message from Abigail [ady@TELESTRAINING.COM

    A new and revised version of the Certificate In Web-based Instruction (CWI) will be offered by Simon Fraser University ( www.sfu.ca/lidc/telestraining/ ) this Fall. This version was redesigned based on feedback received from previous participants in the program. CWI is an innovative online program that teaches participants how to design, produce, and teach online courses.

    The Certificate in Web-Based Instruction combines the teaching of both conceptual and technical skills. The program uses messaging, chat, videoconferencing, video mail and covers current eLearning topics. A maximum of 20 participants are supported by two instructors and create their own online courses during the program.

    The Certificate in Web-Based Instruction is offered entirely online beginning September 15, 2003. If you need more information or have questions, please contact Jill Jodrey via email at jajodryey@sfu.ca  or by phone at 604-268-6728.

    Abigail Dy 
    Communication Specialist Certificate In Web-based Instruction
    Simon Fraser University


    Fathom users will have the opportunity to interact and collaborate with the leading experts in their field. Fathom's unique architecture will provide a powerful "search and explore capability" that will allow users to follow their interests, independently or with expert guidance, across the widest possible range of subjects.
    http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/00/04/fathom.html 

    Fathom:  A must see for looking into the crystal ball of knowledge portals:  http://www.fathom.com/ 

    Things keep happening at Fathom.  There are over 60,000 authenticated references to experts and this knowledge portal is growing exponentially.  Fathom deepens as academia's top knowledge portal --- http://www.fathom.com/  

    Fathom's member institutions present their immense wealth of knowledge across every area of interest—from business to global affairs, from arts to technology.

    Fathom brings you:

    Lectures, interviews, articles, performances and exhibits by faculty, researchers and curators from our member institutions. Reference content spanning all disciplines and fields of study. Trails, a new visual way of organizing knowledge thematically by topic. You can use Trails to intuitively navigate content according to your own interests. A community of knowledge seekers gathering in Fathom's Forums. Online courses from Fathom's course partners, offering the best in online education from top research institutions. Recommended books and products to deepen your knowledge. 

    Don't miss Fathom's Online Course Demonstration and Learn About Knowledge Trails

    Knowledge is never neatly organized.

    Founders and Partners of Fathom are High in Prestige

    Member Institutions
    Columbia University
    Cambridge University Press
    London School of Economics
    The New York Public Library
    University of Chicago
    University of Michigan
    The British Library 
    RAND
    Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
    Victoria & Albert Musume
    Science Museum
    Natural History Museum
    American Film Institute

    http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/00/04/fathom.html 

    Fathom, a for-profit spin-off, implements one aspect of Columbia's three-part digital media strategy, which also includes Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning and Columbia Media Enterprises.

    Fathom will address the most serious weakness of information on the Worldwide Web, the inability to authenticate the bulk of its content. All Fathom original content will be authenticated, meaning that the knowledge will be attributed to the appropriate educational or cultural institution and its faculty or professional staff. Fathom's standards of academic and editorial integrity will be monitored by the Fathom Academic Council, a panel of selected senior faculty and curators from participating institutions, which will be chaired by Columbia Provost Jonathan Cole.

    Offering the best free content of universities, libraries, and museums, Fathom will enable a worldwide audience of students, working adults, and lifelong learners to explore subjects of professional or personal interest. Much of Fathom's content has never been available outside of the participating institutions.

    Examples of Fathom content currently in development include:

    A "Main Street" for knowledge and education, Fathom will include a comprehensive directory of related online courses offered by universities and cultural institutions, plus textbooks and other academic titles, specialized periodicals, individual articles and other publications, CD-ROMs, academic travel, and learning resources. Users will enroll in online courses through Fathom, with tuition fees, accreditation, and admission policies set at the discretion of the offering university or cultural institution.

    Fathom users will have the opportunity to interact and collaborate with the leading experts in their field. Fathom's unique architecture will provide a powerful "search and explore capability" that will allow users to follow their interests, independently or with expert guidance, across the widest possible range of subjects.

    Yahoo! Internet Life Names Fathom as 'Best Learning Portal'

    Unique Interactive Knowledge Site Selected as One of the 100 Best Web Sites for 2001 NEW YORK, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Yahoo! Internet Life has named Fathom ( http://www.fathom.com ) as the ``Best Learning Portal'' in its 5th Annual ``Top of the Net'' issue (on sale December 19). As the leading consumer lifestyle magazine covering the Internet, Yahoo! Internet Life praised Fathom's dynamic e-knowledge site for its vast collection of intellectual resources, convenience, degree of user interactivity, and prestigious member institutions. These institutions include Columbia University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, The British Library, The New York Public Library, The University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, American Film Institute (AFI), RAND, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum (UK), and The Natural History Museum (UK).

    Award-winning Web sites appear in the ``100 Best Sites for 2001'' feature of Yahoo! Internet Life's January 2001 issue. The sites were chosen not only for excellence in past and present performance, but because the magazine's editors believe they represent the best of the Internet as it will unfold in the upcoming year.

    As the ``Best Learning Portal,'' Fathom offers visitors a wide array of online education opportunities. Fathom provides visitors with access to free content, including lectures, interviews and articles, from the world's leading creators and sources of knowledge. Visitors can also register and enroll in online courses, offered for a fee, that complement their specific interests, as well as participate in provocative online forums with experts on favorite subjects. All content on the site meets Fathom's exemplary quality standards and is authenticated, meaning that the knowledge is attributable to the appropriate academic or cultural institution and its faculty or research staff.

    ``It is unprecedented for us to bestow an accolade of this nature to a site that has not even officially launched,'' said Yahoo! Internet Life Editor Cree McCree. ``We thought it would have been remiss not to include Fathom because we truly believe Fathom is going to become the leader in its field.''

    ``We are honored to be recognized by such an esteemed publication,'' said Ann Kirschner, Ph.D., Fathom's President and CEO. ``Our goal has always been to create a site that gives users greater access to some of the world's rich intellectual resources and offers a unique, quality educational experience. It is extremely satisfying to know that Yahoo! Internet Life has selected Fathom as one of the Web's top sites.''

    About Fathom

    Fathom Knowledge Network Inc. is a unique interactive enterprise dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge. The company's Web site ( http://www.fathom.com ) offers unprecedented opportunities for discovery through authenticated free content, overseen by an advisory board selected from its members, as well as related knowledge and education e-commerce opportunities. Composed of the world's leading universities, museums, libraries, publishers and research institutions, Fathom includes Columbia University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, The British Library, The New York Public Library, The University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, American Film Institute (AFI), RAND, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum (UK), and The Natural History Museum (UK).

    About Yahoo! Internet Life

    Yahoo! Internet Life ( http://www.yil.com ), the world's largest consumer lifestyle magazine covering the Internet, is a monthly publication of Ziff Davis Media. With its mission to entertain, engage, educate and empower Internet enthusiasts, Yahoo! Internet Life serves the New American Consumer(TM). Reaching one in nine of all daily Internet users in America and read monthly by over 5.3 million people, Yahoo! Internet Life chronicles the culture, content and community of the Internet. In January 2001, the four year-old magazine will surpass a circulation of 1.1 million copies per month, solidifying its place as one of the fastest-growing magazines in the history of publishing. Notable accolades include recognition as one of Advertising Age's Best Magazines of 1998; a Circulation Excellence Award from Circulation Management magazine; inclusion as one of Folio magazine's Top 10 Launches for the 90s; as three consecutive Top 10 Hottest Magazine citations from Adweek; and an award from Capell's Circulation Report as Top 10 Best Performer of 1999.

    SOURCE: Fathom Knowledge Network Inc


    BBC Learning --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/courses/ 

    BBCi are launching a new way of learning. As this is a new service we only have a small (but perfectly formed) list of courses on offer. If you experience any problems with them, or have any suggestions for future courses send us an email.

    Our list of online courses is always growing, so sign up for our Learning Update if you would like us to tell you when new courses are launched.

    What is an Online Course?

    Whether you want to build your confidence, learn how to do your own historical research or discover the Internet, you can develop your skills and increase your understanding from the privacy of your own PC.

    Whatever your subject, learn online at your own pace and get a solid start in an area that interests you.

    Computers & the Internet
    Becoming Webwise Get to grips with the Internet and find out about getting connected, e-mailing, searching, bookmarking, making your own address book and the very basics of building your own web page. Learn at your own pace and it could lead to a nationally recognised qualification.

    Design & Technology
    Build-A-Bot Techlab Enter the Build-A-Bot Techlab. Discover the basic skills needed for building robots and get started building a unique breed of robots including roller-robots and walkers. Discover the technology behind sensors and circuits with Sensor-Bot and Robo-Voyageur, your latest robot building assignments.

    Gardening 
    How to be a gardener This online resource, prepared in collaboration with the Royal Horticultural Society, will bring life to your learning in the garden in eight practical modules.

    Health 
    First Aid Action Would you know how to react to a road accident, a case of food poisoning or a diabetic emergency with a child? People's lives could depend on your knowledge so take some First Aid Action today.

    Get Confident An online course with information, quizzes and tools to help you develop a greater understanding of yourself and make better use of your strengths in challenging situations.

    History Top History Trail 
    Follow one of the seven trails and see how postcards, cartoons, ancient manuscripts and official documents all have a story to tell.

    Archaeology Join Julian Richards on a guided tour of archaeology that takes in its origins and tracks its progress to the present day.

    Conquest When was England, England? Find out more about the crisis that sparked off the catastrophic events of 1066.

    Family history Unravel your family tree and get an insight into some of the specialist fields that will help you unlock the secrets of your ancestoral past.

    How to do history Follow in the footsteps of professional historians and find out how they do history. Discover how documents, tapestries and people's memories of the past are all valuable sources for the historian.

    Local history On this trail you can get first hand tips from enthusiasts and experts who have already taken their first steps as local historians.

    Victorian Britain Find out how heroic cartoons and the novels of Charles Dickens can help the historian piece together a picture of the past.

    Wars & Conflict Discover more about the personal experience of battle and how life changed for those left behind on the Home Front. You can also chart the emergence of a British standing army.

    Languages 

    Top French French Fix Motivational language learning which takes whatever knowledge of French you have and challenges you to improve it on the spot. French Steps Learn how to converse, order in a restaurant and ask for directions in French with this online beginners course that's easy-to-use. Language Gauge - French Find your level in French. This tool will let you find out how much you know and what's best for you to take your it further. Talk French A language course for absolute beginners, with video and audio clips and activities to help you learn. The French Experience A series of multimedia activities for beginners, building on the absolute basics of Talk French, but can be used on its own to learn and practise the language.

    German Language Gauge - German Find your level in German. This tool will let you find out how much you know and what's best for you to take your it further. Deutsch Plus A dynamic introduction to German taking you through the basics of the language.

    Italian Language Gauge - Italian Find your level in Italian. This tool will let you find out how much you know and what's best for you to take your it further. Talk Italian The ideal introduction to Italian. Basic language covering essential topics in manageable chunks. Italianissimo Multimedia activities for beginners, using video and audio clips to teach the basics of Italian.

    Spanish Language Gauge - Spanish Find your level in Spanish. This tool will let you find out how much you know and what's best for you to take your it further. Spanish Steps Kick-start your Spanish with this short course for beginners. With video clips, online activities and a personal progress chart that keeps track of the activities you have completed. Talk Spanish A language course for absolute beginners, with video and audio clips and activities to help you learn. Suenos World Spanish A series of multimedia activities for beginners, building on the absolute basics of Talk Spanish, but can be used on its own to learn and practise the language.

    Nature 
    Top Blue Planet Challenge Your chance to travel across open oceans and into the deep abyss, with seven challenges that explore places you can only imagine, and connect you with an amazing wild world that comes right to your doorstep.


    The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) launched the Lifelong Learning Center, an online resource for accounting and financial continuing education --- http://imalearningcenter.org/imacatalog/?usca%5fp=t 


    Kaplan Declares Online Financial Planning Program a Success --- http://www.smartpros.com/x34754.xml 

    The company attributes the success of the program to high retention rates (90 percent) and a unique diagnostic and prescriptive approach.
     
    "Kaplan College's outstanding online student services make our program attractive to aspiring financial planners who want the personal support of a traditional program as well as the convenience of online learning," said Keith Fevurly, Executive Director of Kaplan College's Financial Planning Program.
     
    Students hail from 49 US states as well as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and includes a number of military professionals serving in the US and abroad as well as employees of top insurance companies, securities firms, brokerage houses and banks. Its student body is more than 40 percent female, surpassing the financial planning industry average of 24 percent female.
     
    The national trend toward individual retirement accounts and innovations in estate planning have fueled a growing demand for financial planners who can advise clients on appropriate investment and savings strategies.
     
    Kaplan College is part of the higher education division of Kaplan, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, and is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA).
     
    For more information, visit www.Kaplancollege.edu or go directly to its Financial Planning certificate program.

     


    Increasingly popular among the PC-literate crowd, Internet-based training is helping hundreds, if not thousands, of accountants to balance their work schedules and their personal lives. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/74824 


    Training programs that are taken on a large scale multinational companies that offer courses to employees in multiple countries.  Examples include international public accounting firms, MacDonalds, Microsoft Corporation, Motorola, Corporation, and most any multinational firm.  See http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

    Increasingly, trade associations are getting more sophisticated in combinations of onsite and online training and education.  One such association is the Mortgage Bankers Association of America (MBA) --- http://www.mbaa.org/ 

    The Campus MBA's Learning Center for Real Estate Finance has a simple and effective web design.

    Need to train your staff?
    CampusMBA Introduces e-Ticket
    Will you be compliant?
    Get up to speed on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
    Originator in Maryland?
    MBA Web Courses Get You Recertified

    Training programs that are taken from international training specialists.  

    The International Distance Learning Course Finder is the world's largest online directory of e-learning courses from 127 countries. This universal distance education resource has information on over 50,000 distance learning courses and programs offered from a multitude of universities, colleges and companies.

    This directory has been developed jointly by the Association of Business Schools and Biz/ed. It offers, in a user-friendly format, a comprehensive and unique resource for anyone considering studying Business and Management in the UK.

    All Business and Management courses offered by ABS members are included in a fully searchable database.

    The recently created DELTA programme (Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications) aims to help in the modernization of training systems, principally by studying, systematizing and disseminating the ways in which information and communications technology (ICT) is used in multi-media, flexible and distance learning.

    Today, training systems throughout the world are facing a major challenge, because their current teaching approaches fail to meet the needs of the different sectors of society. The ever-swifter changes in the technology of production and in the organization of work are generating an exponential increase in the production sector's training needs, for which training systems lack qualitatively and quantitatively effective responses. The nature of this challenge is such that it affects the labour market, the job competence of workers and employers, the employment situation and hence society in general.

    The University of Texas Distance Education:  A Primer (Glossary) --- http://www.utexas.edu/cc/cit/de/deprimer/glossary.html 


    National Technological University fell on hard times with poor timing to create a for-profit company for engineering training courses.  It has phased out its own for-profit company and has been acquired by Sylvan Learning Systems.  It will continue to offer engineering courses for SLS --- http://www.kmutt.ac.th/organization/Research/national.htm 

    Sylvan is one of the leading providers of training programs and also offers over 300 testing sites that can be utilized for its own and other training and education programs.  Its homepage is at http://syl.hrdpt.com/ 

    The Dark Side of the 21st Century:  
    Concerns About Technologies in Education
    The main navigation page is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen at Trinity University

    Table of Contents
    ALN is defined as Asynchronous Learning Network(s) or Networking

    "A Virtual Revolution: Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education"

    The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing 
    (Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)

    Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

    Shrinking Customer Base for eLearning?

    Millions of Web Documents are Not Being Archived for Future Scholars

    Are Universities Becoming EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organizations)?

    Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics and Student Ethics 

    Barriers to Distance Education 

    How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change and Mutation  
    Teachers Must Adapt to Changed Mindsets of Incoming Students Who Grew Up With Computers

    Concerns About Faculty Workloads and Burnout 

    Online Cheating and Reduced Social Interaction 

    Legal Concerns 

    Email and Teaching Evaluations Place Heavy Burdens on Teachers

    Student Concerns  

    Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students? 
    Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

    The Digital Divide is Real

    Lots of Hype and Not Much Profit 

    Institutions, Reward Structures, and Traditions That Defy Changes in Higher Education

    Websites Failing Disabled and Handicapped Users 

    Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education

    Concerns About High Attrition Rates in Distance Education

    Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus

    Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian

    Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Easy

    Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Hard

    Concerns About Corporate Influences on Traditional Missions

    Concerns About Library Services 

    Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics and Student Ethics 

    Concerns About Messaging Overload

    Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout

    Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites

    Concerns About CyberPsychology

    Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability

    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

    Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes

    Other Concerns  

    Students’ Distress with a Web-based Distance Education Course: An Ethnographic Study of Participants' Experiences

    New Foes 

    A Message from Peter Kenyon on November 18, 1999

    The Force and the Darkside

    The Sanford Report in the Stanford Report 

    David Noble's Articles on Digital Diploma Mills

    David Noble's Concerns for Students' Privacy Rights 

    Update Messages on Trends in Corporate Education

    Daring Professors

    Growing Up is More Anxiety-Provoking/Stressful

    Generation Gaps, Collegial Apathy or Hostility, and Loneliness --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DarkSide

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

    The Downside of Electronic Commerce and Technology:  Psychological Implications --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#Psychology 

    The main navigation page is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Other Documents

    Starting Page

    Education

    Learning

    Table of Contents


    Note from Bob Jensen:  This article delves rather deeply into the pedagogies of online programs such as programs at the University of Phoenix and UNext's Cardian University.

    "A Virtual Revolution:  Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education," by Thomas J. Kriger, USDLA Journal (a refereed journal of the United States Distance Learning Association," November 2001 --- http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html 

    This report describes four major trends leading the growth of distance education. The purpose is not to cover every provider but to draw a picture of the types of organizational structures and educational activities that are on the rise. These include:

    Corporate-university joint ventures. those that provide course management systems such as Blackboard, Campus Pipeline, eCollege and Web CT, as well as those who package and distribute courses or content from existing institutions such as UNext.com, Cenquest, Fathom, Global Education Network, Quisic and Universitas 21;

    What do we learn from these descriptions? First, we learn that the variety of new ways to organize DE and reach new students is enormous, as is the talent that can be brought to bear in making education attractive in the new medium. But we also find that the way distance education is being organized and conducted often poses serious questions.

    Much of the distance education under study here, whether non-profit or for-profit, is built on corporate ideas about consumer focus, product standardization, tight personnel control and cost effectiveness (maximizing course taking while minimizing the "inputs" of faculty and development time). These concepts are contrary to the traditional model of higher education decision-making which emphasizes faculty independence in teaching and research, academic control of the curriculum, academic freedom in the classroom and collegial decision-making.

    While traditional practices are not sacrosanct, academic decision making processes have been very successful in producing quality higher education the best in the world. Our concern is that some of the new trends and practices described in this report may inhibit rather than promote good education. A number of specific concerns arose:

    It is appropriate, indeed essential, to present information for the DE marketplace in an attractive, computer-friendly fashion. But over-attention to drawing "customers" may result in technology driving the way teaching is conducted-leading, for example, to models centered around bite-size, "point and click" accumulations of facts rather than a more reflective, less easily measured search for knowledge.

    In the year 2000, AFT published Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. The guidelines lay out 14 specific standards which, if observed, ensure high quality distance education. (A synopsis of the guidelines appears in the report's conclusion.) The guidelines advance AFT's belief that broad academic content, high standards, personal interaction and professional control are the key elements of educational quality. College faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions.

    Education, among other things, is about broadening intellectual horizons, relying on facts and reason when confronting life issues and learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. That is why education is the foundation of a working democracy. Because distance education is ubiquitous and offers so much promise, faculty are obligated to carry the banner for quality and good practice while recognizing that this will sometimes require challenging current trends and practices

    Continued at  http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html  

    Bob Jensen's documents on distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    Online Pedagogy at the University of Phoenix

    Phoenix faculty work in a highly structured environment. Course facilitators in traditional classes are forbidden to lecture. Faculty are, instead, expected to closely follow Phoenix's "teaching/ learning model," which begins with course syllabi and detailed teaching modules developed by fulltime faculty on the main campus. In this way, faculty responsibilities are broken down into a series of discrete steps, such as when course development is detached from teaching. Phoenix course modules "include guidelines for weekly assignments, group activities and grading."  Some course modules contain classroom time-management guidelines broken down into 15-minute intervals.

    Phoenix defends its practice of using these restrictive guidelines in the name of standardization. The university's online catalog declares: "The standardized curriculum for each degree program provides students with specified levels of knowledge and skills regardless of the delivery method or classroom location."

    Critics argue, however, that Phoenix's course modules violate academic freedom because they don't allow faculty members sufficient discretion. Milton R. Blood, managing director of the American Assembly of the Collegiate Schools of Business, has characterized Phoenix's standardized curriculum as "McEducation." He explained, "It's a redefinition of how we go about delivering higher education. The question is whether it's really higher education when it's delivered in a franchised way."

    Thomas J. Kriger, quoted from the article cited above.


    Dark side questions about distance education from the Kriger article cited above.

    Evaluation of Distance Coursework Should Be Undertaken at all Levels:

    Questions about DE trends and practices

    1. The marketplace and the curriculum: Most of the models outlined in this report emphasize meeting immediate market demands for coursework as well as treating students primarily as "customers." It is entirely appropriate to consider student and industry preferences in designing curricula, particularly in the corporate training arena. However, we believe that the pre-eminent perspective should be that of academic professionals rather than the marketplace. One concern is that the pure "student as consumer" model rests on the questionable assumption that student-consumers know what they want when they begin an educational program and can confidently decide what courses will lead to the desired educational "product." Another concern is that broad-based liberal arts coursework, as well as high academic standards, could take a back seat if market models become dominant.

    2. Technological capabilities and the curriculum: In one of the stories cited earlier, a distance education advocate explained that professors will have to curb their lectures in order to fit their ideas into a 256-character dialogue box. This raises serious questions. Technological capabilities and limitations should not be the primary factor driving the curriculum and research required of distance education students, rather than the rich interplay among research, curriculum and good pedagogy.

    3. Faculty decision-making: To ensure that academic decisions are made for academic reasons, a key characteristic of quality in distance education is ensuring that faculty are in control of shaping and approving courses and integrating them into a coherent curriculum. This is the number one item in AFT's Guidelines for Good Practice. Another basic precept is academic freedom; an individual faculty member should have the authority to determine how the class will be taught.

    We are concerned, however, that many of the programs described above appear to keep authority to develop course content confined to a very narrow circle. Some models directly challenge the idea of academic freedom in the classroom. For example, at

    the University of Phoenix, we saw that course "facilitators" (they are not called teachers) not only are forbidden to lecture, but also must follow detailed teaching modules.

    4. Disaggregation: Many of the institutions reviewed here are moving to a model of curriculum development and teaching that "unbundles" the many roles of the faculty member. A process that has traditionally been maintained from start to finish by the individual faculty member is being parted into specializations-curriculum developers, content deliverers, assessment specialists, etc. This can be seen most starkly in movements such as "The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative" (NLII) created in 1994 by Educom (now Educause), a coalition of technology corporations, public and private colleges and universities and higher education organizations.

    Specifically, the NLII would increase student access through the construction of a broadband network modeled on the Internet. The program would be characterized by self-paced study instead of academic calendars, fixed class meetings or a traditional curriculum. Students would pursue their studies via new instructional software that breaks down complex subjects into individual components or modules.

    In 1996, Educom released a report on "The Virtual University," which envisions the resulting new role for faculty and the benefits for the institution.

    [In the virtual university], the many roles previously combined in a single faculty member are now disaggregated. Faculty may specialize as developers of courses and courseware wherein they move from being content experts to being a combination of content expert, learning-process design expert, and process-implementation manager; as presenters of that material; as expert assessors of learning and competencies; as advisors; or as specialists in other evolving roles.[43]

    In this view, one of the main advantages of the NLII is that it would "reduce faculty intervention, thereby containing costs."[44] As Massy and Zemsky explain:

    Workstations don't get tenure, and delegations are less likely to wait on the provost when particular equipment items are "laid off." The "retraining" of IT equipment (for example, reprogramming), while not inexpensive, is easier and more predictable than training a tenured professor .[45]

    As our report indicates, many providers in all four categories have embraced this vision to differing extents, but the AFT believes this is not the best route to quality. Quoting directly from the AFT Guidelines. A number of studies have demonstrated the importance to student learning of establishing a feedback loop between classroom teaching, curriculum development and scholarly research. That loop becomes inoperative when teaching faculty operate from workbooks based on a prefabricated curriculum that the faculty member has little role in developing, a curriculum that was not shaped directly by the practitioner's experience in teaching these classes or conducting research on these subjects. Students deserve teachers who know all the nuances of what they are teaching and who can exercise professional judgment and academic freedom in doing so.

    5. Course standardization: Many of the providers outlined above are attracted to the idea of creating consistent and transferable courses by utilizing course management software and course development specialists. The idea is that an institution or set of institutions can make all of their courses have the same look and feel, and that courses can and should be designed for longevity and transferability. If course management software such as Web CT or Blackboard simply provide faculty with greater technical support and facilitate the faculty member's pedagogy, then they will be powerful teaching aids. But standardization in programming and teaching is the wrong way to go; academic good practice requires a faculty with differing points of view and presentation styles, freewheeling discussion and academic freedom.

    6. Class Size: AFT's distance education practitioners report that good DE generally requires more teacher preparation time than a traditional class as well as more time devoted to interacting with students (through e-mail, chat rooms, etc.) Therefore, it is important to maintain a workable class size. The concern, however, is that commercially minded DE will expand class sizes too greatly in order to maximize enrollments. The move on the part of some providers to concentrate on offering high-enrollment introductory courses (such as introductory psychology) is of particular concern because DE practitioners tell us the students best suited to succeed in a distance education environment are not the newcomers but those who are more mature, better prepared and able to work independently.

    Increasing class size is an integral part of the Pew grants at Rio Salado College cited earlier. Introductory algebra, which had the third highest enrollment of the top 25 courses in the district, was selected for redesign. Course content was delivered via interactive software. The restructuring increased the student/faculty ratio from 35 to 100 students per instructor, although each faculty member was assigned teaching assistants to help with technology questions, and students had access to a help desk.[46] AFT's Guidelines recommend that class size be established through normal faculty channels, with a view to maintaining a high level of interactivity. "Given the time commitment involved in teaching through distance education," say the Guidelines, "smaller class size should be considered, particularly at the inception of a new course."

    7. "Outcomes" and Class Time: Some providers cited in the previous chapter shift more of the educational assessment to "outcomes." The Western Governors University emphasis on "proficiencies" is the most extreme version of this shift. A greater emphasis on outcomes may be warranted, but a critical question remains: Will an exclusive focus on measurable outputs shortchange the importance of process and interactivity in higher education?

    Distance education advocates often deride what they call "seat time"-the practice of requiring students to be together and work together for periods of time before passing their courses. Under their theory, if a student can demonstrate "competencies," it should not matter how much time is spent achieving these competencies. The AFT, however, believes that deep knowledge of a subject is not simply a matter of passing a competency test. It does in fact require time-time in the same room or in cyberspace-with teachers and other students chewing over ideas, hearing contrary points of view and defending conclusions. There is reason for concern if time on task comes to be viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity in DE on the corporate model.

    8. Same-time, same-place interaction: There is no denying that rich interaction can take place in distance education classes, but we believe it is equally untenable to argue that same-time, sameplace interaction has no legitimate role in an undergraduate education. We believe distance education should utilize every available opportunity to bring students and faculty together at some time during an academic program. Our concern is that providing such opportunities does not appear to be a consideration for most of the providers we have stud-

    led. It is particularly troubling to have no sametime, same-place interchange through an entire undergraduate program. AFT faculty who teach by distance education have reported to the union that they believe same-time, same-place interaction should be part of any undergraduate program. In fact, more than 70 percent say that no more than half of a full undergraduate program should be delivered via distance education.

    In conclusion, it is proper, even necessary, for higher education faculty to make distance education work, but that may often mean contradicting current DE practice to affirm academic values. Faculty must mobilize behind the principle that democratic governance rather than top-down management produces better, more credible education. Faculty must ensure that college degrees are awarded in the context of a coordinated curriculum with broad-based content. Faculty must see to it that students have the equipment, training and support to succeed in the distance education environment and that they have appropriate academic counseling. Faculty must make the case that time does matter-that education is not simply a matter of passing a competency test but, whether in the same room or far apart, being with other teachers and students chewing over ideas, hearing contrary points of view and defending conclusions. Faculty must assert and find ways to implement the notion that same-time, same-place interchange is an important part of a college education. Faculty must always affirm the importance of free exchange of ideas.

    In short, faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions the things that can be easily "sold." Education is about broadening one's intellectual horizons, learning to rely on facts and reason rather than on prejudices when confronting life issues. It is about learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. It is about learning respect and acquiring open mindedness, and as such, education is the foundation of a working democracy.

    Distance education can make an important contribution toward achieving these goals if it is organized around practices such as those in AFT's Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. However, no one should imagine that implementing these guidelines will be easy in a world where the promise of big dollars and big enrollments constantly beckons. AFT and its members, other organizations representing the faculty and, of course, individual faculty members themselves, will have to be prepared to take up

     


    The U.S Digital Millennium Copyright Act  (DMCA)
     Undermines Public Access and Sharing
    DMCA Link:  http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf 


    Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

    Harvard Study:  Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools
    Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools in schools and colleges, according to a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University.
    Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt

    From the AAUP (with higher education in mind)
    Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations --- http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/Campus_Copyright.pdf

    New Guidelines for Copyright Policies in Universities
    Four associations have released a guide for colleges to use in reviewing whether their copyright policies reflect recent legal and technological developments. The guide notes that colleges and their faculty members are major producers of copyrighted material, and that professors and students also are big users of such material — sometimes in ways that create legal difficulties. The groups that prepared the guide are the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers.
    Inside Higher Ed, December 7, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/07/qt

    A report released yesterday by a pair of free-expression advocates at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice claims Web site owners and remix artists alike are finding free-expression rights squelched because of ambiguities in copyright law. The study argues that so-called "fair use" rights are under attack. It suggests six major steps for change, including reducing penalties for infringement and making a greater number of pro-bono lawyers available to defend alleged fair users. BNA's Internet Law News (ILN) - 12/6/2005
    Coverage at http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-5983072.html"> 
    Report at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/WillFairUseSurvive.pdf">a>
    From the University of Illinois Scholarly Communication Blog on December 7, 2005 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/ 


    Patents can be obtained for most inventions and DNA discoveries,
    but patenting tax plans borders on being rediculous

    August 15, 2006 message from Scott Bonacker [aecm@BONACKER.US]

    "Widgets, soft-drink formulas, new drugs: They can all be protected by patents. But did you ever think the clever tax-saving strategy your financial adviser is offering up could be patented as well? Don't dismiss the notion. Unauthorized use of a patented method might get you into hot water.

    John Rowe, executive chairman of health insurer Aetna, knows that all too well. Within the past three years, at the suggestion of his advisers, Rowe set up two trusts and funded them with nonqualified stock options. An independent options valuation expert estimated their value for BusinessWeek at $28.5 million. Rowe's so-called grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) would pay him an annual income for a specific time and reserve whatever is left for family members. Plus, he could achieve dramatic gift-tax savings, says Carlyn McCaffrey, a lawyer with Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York who is an expert on GRATs, though not involved in the case.

    But in January, Rowe was sued in U.S. District Court in New Haven for patent infringement by Wealth Transfer Group, an Altamonte Springs (Fla.) firm that obtained a patent on this strategy in 2003. Apparently, the plaintiff learned of Rowe's GRATs when, as a corporate insider, he reported the transfer of the options.

    Read the rest at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20060727/bs_bw/id20060726214792 

    or when size matters:  http://tinyurl.com/qrnf8 

    My impression is that as a matter of public policy patents on things like this shouldn't be granted, if indeed the underlying tax laws are worthy of passage by our legislators.

    Scott Bonacker, CPA
    Springfield, MO

     

    Question
    Are you confused by the nuances of the "Fair Use" section of U.S. Copyright Law under the DMCA?

    From the Scholarly Communications Blog at the University of Illinois on June 19, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

    New Fair Use Site

    The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has created a Web site on fair use.

    Called The Fair Use Network, the site says it attempts to alleviate the "mass of confusion for artists, scholars, journalists, bloggers, and everyone else who contributes to culture and political debate."

    The site guides people on what to do if they get a letter from a copyright owner demanding that they cease and desist from making use of the owner's work. And the site also explains how much people can borrow, quote or copy from another's work.

    Jensen Comment
    The Fair Use safe harbors are frequently violated by professors who really do not want to know the limitations of these provisions in the law.


    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Question
    How popular are these open sharing sites and what are the issues of copyrights?

    June 26, 2006 message from Jagdish S. Gangolly [gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]

    Bob,

    I wanted to pitch for an article by my good friend and colleague, Terry Maxwell:

    "Universities, Information Ownership, and Knowledge Communities"

    The Journal of the Association of History and Computing http://www.mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/maxwell/maxwell.html

    Here is the teaser:

    _________________________________________

    The recent decision by MIT to post the information from all its 2,000 courses free to the Web has generated tremendous excitement online, with more than 42 million hits recorded in the first month, according to MIT statistics 1.

    The project, entitled OpenCourseWare, was initiated by MIT professors and funded by $11 million in grants from two foundations. As of March, 2004, 700 courses, encompassing all five schools and two-thirds of the faculty on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus, have been added to the site (ocw.mit.edu).

    The project did not start as an effort to populate the information commons. On the contrary, in 1999, Robert Brown, MIT's provost, asked a faculty committee to study the idea for an online for-profit equivalent to the physical school.

    However, after researching the issue, the faculty committee concluded that a profit-making venture was not viable, suggesting instead that the university and its faculty make its course material available for free online 2.

    As reported by Charles Vest 2, the university's president, the OpenCourseWare initiative has had impacts both inside and outside the university. Within MIT, professors have begun using one another's materials to supplement their own teaching efforts, and are discovering interdisciplinary connections that could lead to new innovations inside the institution. Outside the university, MIT alumni, interested individuals, and other educators from around the world are using the courseware as a means to keep current in their fields and as models for new courses and curriculum.

    The effort has generated interest in other areas, particularly among Intellectual Property legal commentators, who questioned the relationship between faculty-generated course notes and university property rights 3. Given the fact that the project is faculty-initiated and voluntary, intellectual property issues in the curricular area between the university and professors have not yet come to a head at MIT. However, the project has had to navigate the murky waters of copyright in other respects, particularly with regard to the negotiation for permissions with other information providers 4.

    Nevertheless, the project still leaves open the question of the relative information rights of professors and universities.

    In addition, it raises broader questions of the roles both of professional disciplines and the institutional structures developed to support them in a technological world in which traditional boundaries between information transformation, production, and dissemination are under strain. The following attempts to lay out some of the relevant issues, focusing particularly on the role of the university in an online world.

    A Brief Look at the University in Society

    Lying at the center of questions about university and academic information ownership is a deeply contested vision of the role of both scholarship and the institutions designed to support research. Do scholars labor primarily as individual authors and inventors, or are they members of what Enlightenment scholars termed a res publica, loosely defined as a republic of ideas operating beyond institutional and political boundaries? Are universities places of sanctuary for ideas, separated from the marketplace, or information dissemination institutions situated squarely in the market?

    In her book "Who Owns Academic Work?," Corynne McSherry 5 traces the history of modern American universities and makes a strong case that these questions are largely unanswerable, because they assume a stability in self-conception that is historically missing. She argues that medieval universities and guilds were primarily envisioned as mechanisms for monopoly control over ideas, with the former focusing on professional control and the latter on control over invention. With the coming of the Enlightenment, voluntary academic societies sought to break down university monopolies on knowledge, constructing a meritocracy based on open communication and communal enquiry, and existing in cooperation with the growing commercial marketplace. At the institutional level, nineteenth-century German conceptions of the university, based on Kant's ideas in Conflict of the Faculties, envisioned the university as a place apart from the marketplace, yet poised to provide knowledge based on reason to political rulers. In the United States, German models of scholarly independence blended with the British tradition of liberal arts and informed citizenship, leading to a tension between disinterested scholarship and community. This admixture was further complicated by the presence of private schools funded through religious and other associations sitting cheek-and-jowl to land-grant public universities, developed to provide practical assistance in the development of new agricultural and mechanical techniques.

    By the twentieth century, the split between theoretical and practical knowledge within universities was institutionalized through a separation of faculties of arts and science from engineering and professional school. At the same time, the continued compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines supported the rise of self-contained academic communities with different standards of scholarship and practice.

    To support the engagement of the university in the marketplace, during the 1920's several American universities, particularly those with large engineering components, inaugurated small offices dedicated to technology transfer, particularly the processing of patent applications for professors. However, in a major shift, the end of the Second World War saw a major increase in government grant programs for basic research, insulating the academy from a necessity to rely on private funding sources and enhancing the traditional notion of universities as the preferred site for basic objective research separate from the commercial marketplace. At the same time, a greater integration of the university into public life occurred, with the provision of GI Bill grants to returning members of the military. University enrollments doubled during the next 15 years, doubling again within another 8 years.

    By the 1990s, the position of universities within society began to shift again. Federal funding for research slowed, along with other public financing sources. Pressure developed to seek private financing through partnerships with foundations and corporations. Universities undertook attempts at more aggressive management of intellectual assets, often bringing them into conflict with academic communities. The rise of the Internet signaled the potential for developing new resource streams through the development of online courses and degrees, but no one was sure where the dividing line stood between individual and institutional ownership of course materials.

    Academic publishing, long a backwater in the publishing industry, showed strong growth and consolidation as publishers embraced electronic dissemination and new models of product bundling.

    Here is another Terry Maxwell piece:

    Toward a Model of Information Policy Analysis: Speech as an Illustrative Example by Terrence A. Maxwell FM10 Openness http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/maxwell/

    Jagdish

    Jagdish S. Gangolly
    email: gangolly@infotoc.com

    Fax: 831-584-1896
    skype: gangolly

    URL: www.infotoc.com
    Blog: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/gangolly

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     


    "Your Photos, Your Rights, and the Law: Answers to questions about copyright and your rights as a photographer," by Dave Johnson, PC World via The Washington Post, May 31, 2006 --- Click Here

    Ironically, the answer to this simple question is not so simple anymore. But for almost any digital photo you take today, you can count on the copyright lasting for 70 years.

    Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has pioneered a new way to share creative works. The group offers a number of licenses with names like Attribution, NoDerivs, NonCommercial, and ShareAlike.

    If you choose to share your photos with a Creative Commons license, you're telling the world that you're offering to let other people use your photos in ways that are traditionally not supported by standard copyright law. Using an Attribution license, for example, is like releasing your photo in the public domain, though it requires anyone using your photo to give you credit. Attribution-NonCommercial is similar, but specifically prohibits people from using your photo for commercial use.

    While using a Creative Commons license is a nice idea, and you'll find a lot of people using them on sites like Flickr.com, keep in mind that Creative Commons has no legal teeth. Only copyright law has that.

    There are three ways to copyright a photo (or any other creative work).

    Here's the easy way: Any work you create is automatically copyrighted. In other words, you don't need to do anything at all to receive some protection under copyright law.

    However, there are copyrights--and then there are copyrights. While technically you never have to take action to copyright a creative work, simply putting a copyright notice on your work strengthens your copyright protection. To assert your claim to a digital photo, for example, just place a copyright notice somewhere on the picture. Commonly, photographers use the text tool in a photo editing program to do this in the lower-right corner.

    The most aggressive copyright action you can take is to register your photo with the Registrar of Copyrights in Washington, DC. There is a form to fill out and a $30 fee to pay, but this approach provides you with the highest level of protection available. For more info go to the U.S. Copyright Office's Web site.

    Continued in article

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 

     


    From Duke University
    Arts Project:  Comics about video, academe, and the law --- http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

    “Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine... restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor?” -Paul Bonner, The Herald-Sun

    “Bound By Law lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield.” -Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

    “Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic's heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean 'Rights Monster' - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.”

    I learned about this from the Scholarly Communications blog at the University of Illinois on March 16, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

    Bound by Law Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has just released "BOUND BY LAW?" - a comic book on copyright and creativity -- specifically, documentary film. It is being published today under a Creative Commons License. The comic, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins explores the benefits of copyright in a digital age, but also the threats to cultural history posed by a “permissions culture,” and the erosion of “fair use” and the public domain. Berkman Blog 3/15/06

    Free digital versions are available here. http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.html 

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


    The Access Principle’
    The book reviews the various models to bring the dissemination of knowledge online and to make it free, and along the way, the book criticizes plenty of publishing practices, copyright interpretations and scholarly traditions. John Willinsky, professor of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia, has devoted much of his scholarship to the ideas behind the book. Among other things, he directs the Public Knowledge Project, which is financed by the Canadian government to promote the free exchange of information. Willinsky responded to questions about the themes of his book.
    Scott Jaschik, "‘The Access Principle’," Inside Higher Ed, December 20, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/20/access


    A computer scientist at Trinity University told me that a great source for legal studies of copyright and patent law is Eben Moglen at Columbia University --- http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

    He runs a blog called "Freedom Now" at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog
    Entries are relatively infrequent and date back to April 2000
    There are also a few links to audio and video presentations.

    Here's a March 7, 2005 entry at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog 
    The United States Department of Justice announced today that it would be making a radical purchasing decision: stop dealing with the firm it considers an illegal monopoly. No more Microsoft Word at Main Justice. So they will spend $13 million to acquire Word Perfect licenses from Corel. Did they consider OpenOffice at $0? Why bother—Let’s just cut Social Security benefits instead.

    The February 16, 2005 entry contains the following quote from "Freedom and the Robot Army"
    The twenty-first century will be different. The United States will lead the way.
    The Pentagon is investing heavily in the development of robot infantry. Given the resources it will bring to bear, within two decades we will see the introduction of machines that remove all sense of consequences, personal and social, from the business of killing. Robot infantry may or may not prove valuable battlefield soldiers. In specialized roles they will probably succeed in being more cost-effective than human combatants. But at the violent suppression of political unrest they will be unparalleled. A brigade or two will be within the budget of every autocrat faced with a green or orange or red revolution. We won’t need them to be torturers, however. For that, as we have learned, human volunteers are always available.

    From one of the leading law school advocates of open sharing
    Many of Eben Moglen's papers on patents and copyrights can be downloaded from http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

    My good friend John Howland, a professor of computer science, recommends these particular papers for starters:

    Bob Jensen's threads on OKI ,DSpace, and SAKAI: Free sharing of courseware from MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Duke Law & Technology Review --- http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/


    Copyright Information and Dead Links

    Copyright Information --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm 

    Journals Associations, 
    Councils and Organizations 
    Education 
    General Issues 
    Permission 
    Intellectual Property 
    Government Law 
    Publishing Concerns 
    Libraries and Copyright 
    Mega Sites Music 
    Dead Link Archive --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm#dead 

    DEAD LINK ARCHIVE 
    For Dead Links, use Internet Archive to find a version of these sites. Highlight and copy the URL, then go to the Way Back Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.html  and then paste the URL into the web address box. Often icons are not available and the most recent listed version may not bring up the page. Go to an earlier date on the archive list for that site. Also, if you do not find it archived, try the Google Search Engine at http://www.google.com  and check their archive. Songwriter and Music Copyright Resources, http://www.npsai.com/resources.htm 

    Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 


    This message is from the Director of the Trinity University Library.

    Bob Jensen

    -----Original Message----- 
    From: Graves, Diane J. 
    Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 9:22 AM 
    To: Trinity Faculty 

    A number of you have asked about the legal use of copyrighted material on your websites and Blackboard courses. I just learned about this site, prepared at the CUNY Baruch College, which will help. It’s an interactive guide in a flow chart format that shows the steps you need to take to use copyrighted media in teaching. It’s very easy to follow.

    http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/copyright/ 

    Both the library and IMS are providing links to this guide from our sites, but you might find it helpful to review it now and bookmark it for later use.

    Diane

    Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
    Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
    One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212

    February 2, 2005 reply from Dr. Jagdish Pathak [jagdish@UWINDSOR.CA

    I liked the presentation. It opened in my lotus notes browser without any problem. It is knowledge enhancing and equally enjoyable stuff!

    Jagdish Pathak, PhD 
    Guest Editor- Managerial Auditing Journal (Special Issue) 
    Accounting Systems & IT Auditing Faculty 
    Accounting & Audit Area 
    Odette School of Business 
    University of Windsor 
    401 Sunset Windsor, N9B 3P4, ON Canada


    February 3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    COPYRIGHT AND LEARNING

    "Like evil trolls guarding the gates, the copyright controllers are trying to hold sway over our actions and create walled gardens around knowledge repositories so that they can maintain full control over who uses applications or accesses content and when, where, and how they use it."

    In "Stealing the Goose: Copyright and Learning" (IRRODL, November 2004) Rory McGreal calls for taking back education's "fair use" and "fair dealing" rights that are in jeopardy as some intellectual property owners seek to tighten control and maximize profits. The article is available online at http://www.irrodl.org/content/v5.3/mcgreal.html 

    International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. 

    For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672; email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ; Web: http://www.irrodl.org/ 


    Money Can Buy You Anything You Want in the U.S. Senate
    You May Go to Jail for Taping and Skipping
    No Fair Going to the Refrigerator During Commercials

    As early as this week, the Senate may try to quickly pass a bill that would radically change copyright law in favor of Hollywood and the music industry. One provision: Skipping commercials would be illegal. Michael Grebb reports from Washington.
    Wired News, November 16, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 

    A number of influential lawyers, scholars and activists are increasingly concerned that copyright law is curbing our freedoms and making it harder to create anything new. This could be the first new social movement of the century.

    "The Tyranny of Copyright?" by Robert S. Boynton, New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004 ---  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html 

    Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.

    Continued in the article


    Dentists in Canada discover they have to pay fees to Canadian music publishers for the right to play copyright music in their offices. U.S. dentists may be surprised to find out that similar rules apply in their country.
    Katie Dean, Wired News, August 2, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64397,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 
    Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 


    November 29, 2004 message from Diane Graves

    You may have already heard of the Creative Commons licenses, but if not, take a look at this site: http://creativecommons.org/  Creative Commons licenses allow the author/creator to retain some rights, but don’t lock down the rights the way the traditional copyright agreements do. Here is how the site describes the options: “With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit -- and only on the conditions you specify here. If you want to offer your work with no conditions, choose the public domain.” You may want to look at the EDUCATION section on the site: http://creativecommons.org/education/ 

    The Creative Commons has been enormously successful since it debuted in 2001. It has the potential to be very helpful in the higher education arena; it is already in use at MIT’s Open CourseWare and DSpace projects and at Rice University’s Connexions Project.

    I encourage you to browse through the Creative Commons site and think about how you could use their licensing options with your own work. It’s an exciting development with the potential to revolutionize the way we share information in higher education.

    Diane

    P.S. Here are two short videos that describe the philosophy behind the Creative Commons: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/ 

    Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
    Elizabeth M. Coates Library,
    Trinity University
    One Trinity Place
    , San Antonio , TX 78212
    email: diane.graves@trinity.edu

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 

    Bob Jensen's threads on global online training and education alternatives --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

     


    Customer Base

    The Shining Star in the Beleaguered World of  For-Profit Educational Corporations
    "Will Apollo Hold On to Medals, by Jesse Eisinger, The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2004, Page C1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,long_and_short,00.html 
    (Note that Among other schools, Apollo owns the University of Phoenix.)

    Last week, Apollo Group saved the for-profit education sector. At least for the moment.

    Other big companies in the group -- ITT Educational Services, Career Education and Corinthian Colleges -- have been battling lawsuits and dealing with various investigations into their recruitment and placement practices, sending their stocks plummeting. Apollo Group, which has skirted such problems thus far, has nevertheless skidded about 20% from a June high of $98.

    But a week ago today, the company shined. It said online-enrollment growth for the fiscal year ending August 2005 would top 40%, relieving investors who had been worried the toll of the investigations and lawsuits were slowing growth across the sector.

    The fight between the longs and the shorts in education stocks has been one of the market's fiercest, with some of the most influential and sophisticated investors taking opposing sides. Apollo hasn't been targeted by shorts as much -- until recently. Its short interest rose almost two million shares in the most recent month, but is still relatively low compared with other education stocks.

    Apollo, which declined to make executives available to comment, has been a stunning success story. The stock is up 9,800% since December 1994 and now has just under a $14 billion market capitalization. It trades at a nosebleed 32.5 times next year's earnings estimate of $2.40 a share.

    Apollo sells education at bricks-and-mortar campuses and online. To date, the company has mainly focused on thirty-somethings, most of whom already are earning salaries of around $55,000 to $60,000 a year. The compelling growth story is online, so enrollment figures are watched closely.

    In giving its upbeat outlook last week, Apollo also completed the conversion of its online-division tracking stock, University of Phoenix Online, into parent company shares. The move, while welcome by good-governance types, could also obscure what the true growth rate for the University of Phoenix Online will be.

    Apollo will report that UOP online had 118,000 students by the end of fiscal 2004, which ended yesterday, analysts forecast. The company, which often underpromises and overdelivers, said last week it expected "online degree enrollments to grow in excess of 40%" in fiscal 2005. At a 40% growth rate, the online enrollment would be 165,000 by the end of next August. However, that figure isn't only for UOP online. The company has launched a pilot effort to go after 18- to 21-year-olds through its Western International University online unit.

    WIU online growth is included in that 40% growth figure, according to Credit Suisse analyst Greg Cappelli. Apollo declined to break out its expectations for WIU online enrollment.

    Continued in the article


    July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?

    "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 complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf.

    The Learning Alliance is "a provider of educational research and leadership support services to presidents of accredited, non-profit

    two- and four-year colleges and universities. The Learning Alliance serves the mission of higher education institutions by providing its senior administrators with timely access to expertise, current research, and market data." For more information, contact: The Learning Alliance, 1398 Wilmington Pike, West Chester, PA 19382 USA; tel: 610-399-6601; fax: 815-550-8892; Web: http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/index.php.

    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."

     

    In my opinion, the Weatherstation Project is biased from the start by skeptics who do not balance the successes against the failures to date --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 
    For example, the report fails to even mention one of the world's most successful e-Learning endeavors in his own institution, the Master's of Engineering (ADEPT) distance learning program at Stanford University even though one of the two authors is a long-time faculty member and top administrator at Stanford.

    Here are some counter examples.

    New and Expanding Market Motivations
    Example 1 --- Stanford University --- http://ww.stanford.edu/history/fulldesc.html 

    Stanford University shook up the stuffy Ivy League and other prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge when it demonstrated to the world that its online training programs and its online Masters of Engineering (ADEPT) asynchronous learning degree program became enormous cash cows with nearly infinite growth potentials relative to relatively fixed-size onsite programs.  In a few short years, revenues from online programs in engineering and computer science exploded to over $100 million per year.

    The combined present value of the Stanford University logo and the logos of other highly prestigious universities are worth trillions.  Any prestigious university that ignores online growth opportunities is probably wasting billions of dollars of potential cash flow from its logo.  

    Virtually all universities of highest prestige and name recognition are realizing this and now offer a vast array of online training and education courses directly or in partnership with corporations and government agencies seeking the mark of distinction on diplomas.


    Example 2 --- University of Wisconsin --- http://webct.wisc.edu/ 
    Over 100,000 Registered Online Students in The University of Wisconsin System of State-Supported Universities

    Having a long history of extension programs largely aimed at part-time adult learners, it made a lot of sense for the UW System to try to train and educate adult learners and other learners who were not likely to become onsite students.

    The UW System is typical of many other large state-supported universities that have an established adult learning infrastructure and a long history of interactive television courses delivered to remote sites within the state.  Online Internet courses were a logical extension and in many instances a cost-efficient extension relative to televised delivery.


    Example 3 --- Harvard University

    In light of new online learning technologies, Harvard University changed its long-standing residency requirement in anticipation of expanding markets for "mid-career professionals" according to Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2002, Page 4.  Harvard has various distance education programs, including those in the Harvard Business School that currently cost over $4 million per year to maintain.


    Example 4
    From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002

    Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program

    Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a "fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees. The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and access interactive multimedia course content.

    For more information, visit: http://www.babson.edu/mba/fasttrac


    Example 5 --- Texas A&M Online MBA Program in Mexico --- http://olap.tamu.edu/mexico/tamumxctr.pdf 

    Some universities view online technologies as a tremendous opportunity to expand training and education courses into foreign countries.  One such effort was undertaken by the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University in partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico.  For example, Professor John Parnell at Texas A&M has been delivering a course for several semesters in which students in Mexico City take the online course in their homes.  However, once each month the students meet face-to-face on a weekend when Dr. Parnell travels to Mexico City to hold live classes and administer examinations.

    You probably won't have much difficulty making a guess as to what many students say is the major reason they prefer online courses to onsite courses in Mexico City?


    Example 6 --- The University of Phoenix --- http://www.phoenix.edu/index_open.html 

    The University of Phoenix became the largest private university in the world.  Growth came largely from adult learning onsite programs in urban centers across the U.S. and Canada.  

    The popular CBS television show called Sixty Minutes ran a feature on the growth and future of the newer online training and education programs at the University of Phoenix. You can download this video from http://online.uophx.edu/onl_nav_2.asp# 

    The University of Phoenix contends that online success in education depends upon intense communications day-to-day between instructors and students.  This, in turn, means that online classes must be relatively small and synchronized in terms of assignments and projects.


    Example 7 --- Partnerships 
    Lucrative partnerships between universities and corporations seeking to train and educate employees.

    The highly successful Global Executive MBA Program at Duke University (formerly called GEMBA) where corporations from around the world pay nearly $100,000 for one or two employees to earn a prestigious online MBA degree --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html

    UNext Corporation has an exclusive partnership with General Motors Corporation that provides online executive training and education programs to 88,000 GM managers.  GM pays the fees.  See http://www.unext.com/ 

    Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 
    This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.   The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 

    Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation.  It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000 more students in 2002.  It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities.  The consulting arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system. 

    The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a program for online training and education for all IRS employees.  The IRS pays the fees for all employees.  The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 

    Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an online MBA program for Deere employees.  Deere pays the fees.  See "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html 

    The University of Georgia partnered with the consulting division of PwC to deliver a totally online MBA degree.  The program is only taken by PwC employees.  PwC paid the development and delivery fees.  See http://www.coe.uga.edu./coenews/2000/UGAusnews.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the bright and the dark side of education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    "Your Right to X-Rated Sites"
    The ACLU and the government butt heads over privacy, free speech, and protecting kids online--again
    By Anush Yegyazarian, PC World, April 7, 2004 --- http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115531,00.asp 

    In early March, the Supreme Court again heard arguments concerning the 1998 Child Online Protection Act. That act was intended to protect children from viewing online what the law calls "material that is harmful to minors."

    There are qualifications about how such material must also lack any redeeming scientific, artistic, political or literary value for minors. In other words, this shouldn't affect a teen's ability to see full-frontal pictures of Michelangelo's David or the armless and topless Venus de Milo, or even to read explicit excerpts from anatomy texts.

    What COPA intends to target is pornography. We all know that the Web is full of it, and that it's fairly easy to access.

    Aside from what's truly obscene--which the law and the courts have sort of, kind of, defined--what's classified as porn or material harmful to minors tends to differ depending on whom you ask and the age of the minor in question. But no matter how you define it, according to the First Amendment, adults have the right to create and to view sexually explicit material--even if that material may be deemed pornographic or harmful to minors.

    So the question before the Supreme Court, lawmakers, and every parent is: How do we keep sexually explicit material available to adults but away from children?

    Burden on Creators or Consumers?

    Let me get a couple of disclaimers out of the way first: I'm not a parent; I'm also not a consumer of so-called adult entertainment.

    But I like the HBO show Sex in the City, and discussing it is a lot of fun. There are chat rooms and sites devoted to the show, some of which may at various times include commentary that's naughty at best and harmful to minors at worst, offering little or no redeeming value for those minors. Do such sites have to require proof of age for access? You can argue that they do, according to COPA.

    In large part, it's the proof-of-age requirement that has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and other like-minded organizations to oppose COPA before the Supreme Court. Under the act, sites that have "prurient" (legalese for sexually explicit material that lacks redeeming value) material harmful to minors must require some form of ID--such as a credit card, an adult ID, a digital certificate, and so on--to prove that the person who wants access to the content is over 17 years old.

    So what's the problem? Well, there are a couple issues.

    First, requiring an ID removes anonymity, which would deter at least some people from going to a site. They may be concerned about the potential stigma because they don't trust the site to protect their privacy, or they may want to limit the number of sites that have personal information about them. COPA does include some privacy provisions, but whether they're sufficient is debatable.

    Second, the people running such a site may decide to self-censor, avoiding a subject--even something they're legally allowed to discuss--because they don't want to risk running afoul of COPA or don't want to shoulder the additional cost of implementing an age-verification method.

    The ACLU and other groups have persuaded lower federal courts (most recently the Third Circuit Court of Appeals) that reasons such as these are enough to shelve COPA or send it back to the congressional drawing board. And let's not forget that a too-broad definition of indecency helped in striking down the 1996 Computer Decency Act.

    But most importantly, adult IDs are not the only way to protect children online. Other methods could be just as effective without triggering self-censorship or creating problems with free speech or privacy rights.

    Other Methods of Protection

    COPA required the creation of a commission to investigate and evaluate various child-protection methods, and to assess any adverse impact on adults who want to access adult materials. That commission made its report in October 2000.

    Guess what? According to the report, no single protection method is best. And requiring IDs has a negative impact on adult access, our First Amendment rights, and privacy, among other things. However, user- and ISP-based filtering and "greenspaces" (domains or sites that are specifically kid-friendly, such as the recently approved .kid domains) scored better as protection mechanisms, while avoiding many of the negatives of requiring adult IDs.

    Continued in the article


    We may have to wave goodbye to streaming media.

    "Colleges That Transmit Sound and Video Online Reluctantly Discuss Strategy for Answering Patent Claim, by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 2004, Page A27.

    Colleges, along with pornography distributors and mainstream businesses, are struggling for ways to refute claims by Acacia Research Corporation, which says it owns patents on the streaming technology that allows Web users to transmit and play sound and video.  In letters to companies and to many colleges, Acacia is seeking licensing deals that would pay it 2 percent of the gross revenue the recipients derive from such online media.

    Acacia has had some successes recently.  It was just granted another patent for streaming technology in Europe.  It signed up a hotel pay-per-view company and, in a coup, a pornography company that had been part of a small group of adult-entertainment sites fighting the patent claims in court.

    Acacia has also started sending letters to major corporations.  General Dynamics, the billion-dollar aerospace-and-defense contractor, signed a licensing deal in late December.

    Meanwhile, colleges are reluctantly trying to decide whether to band together to challenge Acacia's claims.  Among higher-education providers, only 24/7 University, a for-profit distance-learning company based in Dallas, is known to have agreed to a deal.

    Robert A Berman, senior vice president for business development at Acacia, said colleges had "panicked" and "assumed that we're asking for more than we're really asking for."

    Acacia, he said, is seeking royalties from colleges only on revenues from their distance-learning courses.  The company is willing to waive royalties on revenue from other classes that use streaming technology.  "We're talking about licenses in the $5,000-to-$10,000-a-year range--at least for now," he said.

    Acacia officials won't say how many colleges, or which ones, they have written to.  Institutions of all sizes have received the letters, but it is unclear what criteria the company used in choosing them.

    'BUSINESS DECISION'

    24/7 University struck an agreement with Acacia early this month.  Delwin Hinkle, chief executive officer of the university, called the deal "simply a business decision."

    "They tell you that they have $55-million in the bank and that they are willing to spend that to enforce their patents," he said.  "We looked at it and said it's just another tweak to our cost structure, and we don't have the money, the time, or the inclination to mess with them."

    Mr. Hinkle said he had tried to contact major universities to discuss a collective defense but never got a response.  He did not consider joining in the pornography companies' litigation.  "You're known by the company you keep," he said.  "No disrespect to their business, but I'm a Baptist deacon, and I can't hang with those boys."

    E. Michael (Spike) Goldberg, chief executive of HomegrownVideo.com, is leading the pornographers' fight against Acacia.  He has been frustrated by higher education's unwillingness to work with him or join his case.

     Continued in the article.


    February 12, 2004 message from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU

    Bob, 

    In the IT circles, my experience has been that Acacia has the same reputation as a shirtless, tattooed, multi-pierced skinhead who walks up to your car at a stoplight, splashes Coke on your windshield, wipes it off with a paper towel and demands $5 for cleaning your car.

    According to what I've heard at a lot of IT conferences, Acacia is a firm of sleazebag lawyers whose only claim to business legitimacy is the buying of semi-worthless patents which are vague enough to be stretched and convoluted and contorted to cover some activity that the general population is already engaged in (such as breathing, eating, etc.) and then doing a lot of research to find a hapless victim who is too clueless or too poor to afford a decent lawyer to find knowledgable expert witnesses so the Acacia team can snow-job a clueless jury into believing that the vague patent has been infringed. Then, Acacia uses their "success" to scare (e.g., legal extortion?) a lot of other clueless companies into settling for "licensing fees", which they then hold up in other court cases as "legitimizing" their claim to the vague patent covering the activity. They only take an interest in activities which have become such an integral part of society as to cause great hardship if they cease, since Acacia's goal is not to stop patent infringement as much as it is to extort licensing fees from others who are doing all the work.

    Acacia's streaming video claim is based on a patent issued to an individual in 1992 for transmitting music electronically. But MP3 (the Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Level 3) file format was invented in 1989 and released to the public in 1991. The Acacia claim is that any file which can be used to reconstruct any music or video image is covered by their patent and cannot be transmitted electronically (e.g., like a CD player playing in your living room while you are talking to your grandma on the phone!) unless Acacia receives royalties. In other words, if you sing a jingle on your digital answering machine, you are violating the same Acacia patent which Acacia is using to sue college and universities.

    From the scuttlebutt at IT conferences, Acacia's only business is filing lawsuits. They do not invent anything, they don't manufacture anything, they only file lawsuits and collect royalties and fees.

    I don't have any first-hand knowledge of any of this, but I have heard many times of their questionable business practices at conferences, and several of my student groups over the last few years have done some research and reported on this phenomenon. One of them described Acacia's relationship to the IT industry as the "Nigerian Treasure Scam" is to the banking industry.

    Although Acacia may have some institutions cowed, I'm not sure based on what I've read, that it is much more than a paper tiger that was able to snow-job some juries. (Having served on five juries, I have positively no confidence in a jury to make a good decision on something like this, and the judges of my experience are only marginally better!) I know our legal people here have turned up their nose at Acacia's "success", and aren't the least bit worried.

    Check out: http://www.streamingmedia.com/patent/ 

    My reference to "Acacia's Flying Circus" was a reference to Monte Python's antics, shenanigans, and sheer ludicrousness, engaging in activities which are so bizarre as to be almost beyond belief. (The dead parrot sketch, for example -- involving the Acacia pet store, and their customer, the very first gullible jury they snowed.)

    David R. Fordham 
    PBGH Faculty Fellow 
    James Madison University


    July 2004 Update on the Fair Use Controversy in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law

    Unlike many other countries such as Canada, educators have the luxury of "fair use" in copyright law, although some aspects of this safe harbor are in question under the "new" DMCA copyright law --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

    Under fair use provisions in the DMCA, educators can keep one photocopy of a journal article and large portions of a book even though they did not purchase those items. What I think is less clear is how to interpret the spontaneity test for sharings with other colleagues and students.  If three colleagues want to each have copy of an article from your private library, they can do so under the fair use safe harbor statutes provided there is not sufficient time to get the item from the publisher.  There is a spontaneity test discussed below.  Probably the most violated part of the fair use statute arises when educators share their photocopied journal articles, magazine articles, and multimedia files with other educators or place these items on library reserve or in Blackboard/WebCT online files for students without regard to the spontaneity test. 

    You can read more about fair use and the spontaneity test at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

    July14, 2004 Update
    Colloquy Live from The Chronicle of Higher Education --- http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2004/07/copyright/ 

    "Fair Use and Academic Publishing Wednesday, July 14, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

    Indiana University Press's withdrawal of a scholarly book is just the latest example of copyright claims trumping scholarship. Just what use are "fair use" provisions in copyright law if presses lack the wherewithal to challenge such claims? What steps can be taken by scholars to protect fair use?

    Richard Byrne (Moderator):
        Good afternoon. Welcome to this week's Colloquy Live. My name is Richard Byrne. I am the editor of the Chronicle's research and publication section. Our chat today concerns Fair Use and Academic Publishing.

    Copyright laws protect the rights of authors, but at times they also have bedeviled scholars' research efforts. The "fair use" provisions of copyright law should provide scope for scholars to do their work and stay on the right side of the law, but changes to copyright law and strong challenges to fair use have made both scholars and academic presses skittish about asserting fair use.

    Our guest today, Wendy Seltzer, is a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She will be answering questions today about the uses that fair use can be put to in an academic setting, and she will also discuss a few ideas that she has been kicking around about how scholars and academic presses might assert fair use provisions of copyright law in a more active fashion.

    Thank you, Wendy, for agreeing to appear on our chat today. Welcome.




    Wendy Seltzer:
        Thanks for inviting me to join you.

    First let me give a few notes about fair use, an important part of the public-private balance of copyright. It is now codified at Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act as a limitation on the exclusive rights of copyright holders. Fair uses are fair without the permission of the copyright holder, even against that permission.

    The law sets out a four-factor test:
    1) the purpose and character of the use (non-commercial or commercial; transformative or mere duplication)
    2) the nature of the copyrighted work (fiction or nonfiction, published or unpublished)
    3) the amount used in proportion to the whole
    4) the effect on the market for the work
    (See http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html )

    More factors in your favor makes a finding of fair use more likely, but the law gives us no bright lines or percentages. That's part of the reason why Lawrence Lessig has been saying that "fair use is merely the right to hire a lawyer."

    I should also note that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other public interest organizations do try to make it easier to hire a pro bono lawyer in fair use cases. We think it's critically important to preserve fair use as an actual, not merely hypothetical defense.

    Continued in the Transcript


    Under the fair use safe harbor, campus libraries do not have to own subscriptions to journal articles placed on reserve. U.S. educators can make photocopies from their private collections and make copies of just about anything for reserve reading purposes. They can also put their own books on reserve whether they are hard-copy (paper) or electronic copies.  Things  they can never place on reserve are original copies of items (such as books) that are borrowed via Interlibrary Loan (ILL).  The ILL code dictates that libraries may not lend or borrow for this purpose. There also is a timing spontaneity test under fair use statutes that is commonly violated by educators and libraries.

    Fair Use statutes allow educators to share multimedia, such as video tapes of television shows, for educational purposes. However, these items must also pass the spontaneity test, which requires that there wasn't a great deal of time to obtain copyright permissions. . For example, I may make a home-recorded segment from last night's television broadcast available to students, but fair use safe harbor does not allow me to share with other students or educators after the network makes copies available for sale.

    For practical purposes, the Trinity University library interprets the  spontaneity test to mean that, the first semester a copy of an item (journal article, chapter from a book, videotape, CD, etc.) is placed on reserve, the library will not seek copyright permissions. Virtually all materials used in subsequent semesters will need those permissions unless there are blanket permissions by the publisher. For example, all publications of the American Accounting Association can be used for non-commercial education purposes at any point in time without getting express copyright permissions.

    In a November 18, 2003 message, the Director of the library at Trinity University (Diane Graves) wrote the following:

    The other test we must apply deals with how much of the material used. In the case of a book, for example, we can't copy in its entirety a full book, or even ½ of one, if it is still in print. Even if the book is out of print, we must be able to show that we did everything possible to find an out-of-print dealer to sell it to us. If that fails, we can make a full copy. In the case of copies made from journal articles, we can most certainly make copies of articles from our originals, your originals, or even copies we have obtained from other libraries. Any of those can be placed on reserve. 

    Keep in mind that the law makes it pretty easy for active educators to go outside the fences of "fair use."  For example, suppose an educator ignores the spontaneity test and shares materials with other educators and students term after term.  The copyright holder must first file a complaint with that educator cease and desist. . In theory, the educator cannot be sued for damages until receiving a warning from the copyright holder.   Also monetary damages for this educator's free sharing are probably too small to warrant a lawsuit.  If the educator or the educator's employer profits from this sharing, however, then lawsuits may come crashing down.  It is unlikely, however, that The Wall Street Journal will come crashing down on Professor X who puts a copy of a Wall Street Journal article on reserve every semester.  Her/his employer, however, will object if this act violates the employer's policy of requiring that permissions be received after the spontaneity period has passed.  

    Actually, most publishers of journals and magazines have made it quite easy for educators to obtain permissions online.  Also keep in mind that some things do not require permissions.  These include quotations of reasonable length (I generally take liberties here) and up to thirty seconds of an audio or video recording.  These safe harbors apply to all persons and not just educators.  The purpose is to allow the works to be evaluated and criticized in public.  For example, if a publisher would not allow even a short quotation to be published, this denial could deny critics to effectively air their criticisms.  For example, recall the furor over the CBS Reagan Movie.  Selected lines from that movie were published by critics (e.g., in Time Magazine) before the movie became public.  It is my understanding that those critics need not obtain permission to quote small portions of the dialog of the movie.  Of course there are limits to most anything in U.S. courts.  Television news stations that aired 20 seconds of the knock out scene from a Mike Tyson Pay-for-View prize fight a few minutes after the loser hit the deck got  into trouble.


    November 23, 2003 message from Bob Woodward [rsw@WUBIOS.WUSTL.EDU

    One of the issues relating to self publishing is how to protect your intellectual property.

    Based on his battles with record industry, Larry Lessig has proposed Creative Commons, an alternative to Copyright.

    http://creativecommons.org 

    While his computer seems to be off or disconnected or something this Sun eve, Larry's blog is usually found at

    http://www.lessig.org/blog/  

    Bob Woodward


    Critics fear consumers may be shortchanged by an agreement between the technology and recording industries over the future of digital copyright policy.
    "Downside to Digital Rights Pact," by Katie Dean, Wired News, Janaury 15, 2002 ---  http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57211,00.html 

    A new agreement between the technology and recording industries -- touted as a boon for consumers and businesses -- is not as rosy as it sounds, say some digital rights groups.

    On Tuesday, the Business Software Alliance, Computer Systems Policy Project and the Recording Industry Association of America pledged to follow a set of principles that address digital content issues like piracy and copy protection while rejecting government technology mandates.

    "It's sort of a guidebook for how we all want to act in the public policy arena," said Hilary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA.

    The agreement calls for technology and record companies to promote consumer awareness about Internet usage and digital copying issues. It also pledges support for technical measures that limit the illegal distribution of copyrighted material and opposes government-imposed technical mandates.

    The agreement "minimizes the distracting public rhetoric and needless legislative battles," she said. "Our industries need to work together for the consumer to benefit and for our respective businesses to grow."

    "There will be continued investment in new products and new music delivery methods," she said. "Consumers' interest in music is served if the investment in creativity can be protected."

    But some digital rights groups said the agreement attempts leave the public without much input on crucial issues about digital content rights.

    "It is not good news for the consumer," said Wendy Seltzer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    "They are trying to take the legislative process out of the legislature and put it in the hands of a few industry groups," Seltzer said. "There's a lot of public debate that has to go on and we do need Congress to step in and undo the mess that has been created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

    Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57211,00.html 

    Also see http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57205,00.html 

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


    "New Ways to Skirt DMCA … Legally!" by Katie Dean, Wired News, October 29, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60996,00.html 

    Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions.

    The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, prohibits, among other things, bypassing any technology that controls access to copyright material. This provision is criticized frequently by digital-rights groups because they say it stifles many legitimate activities in the process, including academic research, competition and innovation.

    the controversial law also recognizes that there are certain cases when circumvention should be permitted. Thus, it mandates that every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress review and grant exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision.

    Those who are exempt from the rule are those who are "adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make non-infringing uses of that particular class of works," according to the DMCA.

    Basically, those who have a non-infringing, fair-use reason to circumvent copy protections should be allowed to do so.

    On Tuesday, the U.S. Copyright Office released the four "classes of works" exempted from the anti-circumvention rule. People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

    One programmer who testified at the Copyright Office rule-making proceedings in April was jubilant that the filtering exemption was renewed.

    "How sweet it is," said Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and anticensorship activist. "Without the exemption, the DMCA would make it a violation to decrypt the blacklist to find out what (filtering companies) are actually censoring. The actual contents of these blacklists are an important censorship issue.

    "The Copyright Office has recognized the importance of fair use in this area affected by the DMCA," Finkelstein said. "It's not a blanket declaration of being legal, but it's an ability to argue fair use."

    Filtering advocates had hoped the exemption would be dropped.

    "I'm disappointed because I thought we had made it clear that the exemption is unnecessary to conduct meaningful evaluations of filters," said David Burt, a spokesman for Secure Computing, which purchased N2H2, a filtering company.

    He cited extensive studies from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Consumer Reports and the Department of Justice, among others, in his testimony and said that "these methods are adequate for evaluating filters."

    Gwen Hinze, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the group was pleased that the Librarian of Congress renewed and granted important exemptions, but was disappointed that exemptions the EFF proposed on behalf of consumers were not granted.

    Continued in the article.


    Question
    What do garage door openers and copyright law have in common?

    Answer

    "Garage Doors Raise DMCA Questions," by Katie Dean, Wired News, September 17, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60383,00.html 

    Manufacturers of a seemingly innocuous product -- a garage door opener -- are embroiled in a battle that tests the limits of a controversial copyright law.

    Skylink Technologies manufactures a universal garage door opener that can be used to open and shut any type of garage door. Its competitor, the Chamberlain Group, claims that Skylink violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, by selling such a product.

    Chamberlain alleges Skylink's handheld portable transmitter can activate Chamberlain's garage door openers and, in doing so, unlawfully bypasses a technology-protection measure built into the device's software.

    Skylink disagrees, and recently filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois for summary judgment, whereby a judge decides the case instead of going to trial.

    "When Chamberlain sells (its) garage door openers, there is no restriction prohibiting the consumer from operating the garage door with a third-party transmitter," said David Djavaherian, an attorney for Skylink. "For a violation to occur under the DMCA, access to the copyright work must be unauthorized."

    Neither representatives of Chamberlain nor its lawyers returned repeated calls for comment.

    The case has been closely monitored by digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has argued that the DMCA is being abused by companies that want to stifle their competitors. The DMCA, the groups contend, also impedes innovation.

    Continued in the article.


    In using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an excuse to sue third parties that dare to make inexpensive consumables, tech equipment makers also cheat consumers. It's reminiscent of the telcos' fight for dominance in the '50s --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57268,00.html 


    January 15, 2003
    The Supreme Court rules that the 20-year extension on copyrights included in a 1998 law is not unconstitutional. It's a big win for media corporations --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57220,00.html 

    Also see http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,830856,00.asp 

    The result of the ruling is that works copyrighted by creators are extended until 70 years after the death of the creator, which protects heirs of the creators. Corporations who own copyrighted works have most of their copyrights protected for 95 years. The ruling is already being referred to as "the Eldred decision" because Eric Eldred, who owns a public Web library, had challenged the decision by Congress to uphold copyright extension.


    December 17, 2002 message from Davidson, Dee (Dawn) [dgd@MARSHALL.USC.EDU

    An article in yesterday's LA Times describes another approach to the Copyright laws debate. A new company, comprised mostly of academics, proposes there be several copyright laws that loosen the rules for some uses of published material while strengthening the rules for other uses. Board members of the company include Eric Elder, an Internet publisher who was outraged by the 1998 copyright extension ruling, Lawrence Lessig, who was at Harvard in 1998, Hal Abelson of MIT, James Boyle of Duke, and Eric Saltzman, a former filmmaker.

    Excerpts from the article, which is quite long, are below. I have the web link at the bottom, but if anyone can't get to the site and wants the article, I can copy and paste.

    **************************
    "Into this messy and acid-edged situation comes Creative Commons, a new nonprofit organization that will launch its first projects today. Based at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, Creative Commons has a high-profile board and an ambitious mission. The goal is to promote creativity and collaboration by developing new forms of copyright while reinvigorating the ever-shrinking sphere of copyright-free works: the public domain.

    "Using the copyright system, we will make a wider, richer public domain for creators to build upon and individuals to share," said Stanford law professor and Creative Commons Chairman Lawrence Lessig. "Walt Disney built an empire from the riches of the public domain. We'd like to support a hundred thousand more Walt Disneys."

    As a first step, Creative Commons has developed a group of licenses that will allow copyright holders to surrender some rights to works while keeping others.

    One license, for instance, allows people to copy or distribute a work as long as they give the owner credit. Another allows a work to be copied, distributed or displayed as long as it is for a noncommercial purpose. A third license permits copying but forbids using the work to make another, derivative work. (The licenses are legal documents, although that doesn't guarantee that people will honor them.) .......... The notion of loosening the bounds of copyright isn't new. For more than a decade, the Free Software Foundation has used for its own programs and offered others a license that guarantees the freedom to share and change software. O'Reilly & Associates, a leading computer manual publisher, uses the Web to publish a number of books under open-publication licenses.

    Still, the notion that creation confers ownership and that ownership is practically eternal is embedded in the system.

    Since 1978, copyright protection has been automatic on any new work -- which has made it very hard to purposely free it. 

    In response, Creative Commons has developed what it is calling the Founders' Copyright. A creator agrees to a contract with Creative Commons to guarantee that a work will enter the public domain after just 14 years, which was the span granted by the first copyright law in 1790. O'Reilly said it will be the first to publish under these terms. ........ 

    Another license puts work into the public domain immediately. One of the first works to have a public domain license will be "The Cluetrain Manifesto," an influential book on Internet marketing that was published three years ago. It was a natural evolution, considering that the text of "Cluetrain" was posted on the Web awhile ago by the authors. .......... 

    Critics already are wondering why a creator would donate anything to the public domain beyond, for example, an unpublished or unpublishable novel. Are people so altruistic as to create things for free? "The same thing was said about the whole Internet a few years ago," Eldred observed. "The existence of the Web is the answer."

    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-copyright16dec16.story 

    http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2Dfi%2Dcopyright16dec16&section=%2Fbusiness 

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


    December 2002
    The U.S. Copyright Office asked for public comment on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it got it. Critics worry about everything from losing great art to restricting blind people's access to information --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56963,00.html 

    The responses are available at http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2003/comments/index.html 

    Also see http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978497.html?tag=fd_lede1_hed 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dreadful DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 


    Some Good News From CIT Infobits on October 31, 2002

    ONLINE TEACHING AND COPYRIGHT

    The provisions of the Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH), which are likely to be passed this fall, would amend the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 to give schools and higher education institutions new rights to use copyrighted materials for distance education. The bill would give educators "fair use" rights that are already in place for regular classroom use.

    New rights covered include:

    -- "Expanding the range of works that may be transmitted over electronic systems to nearly all types of materials -- although only portions of some works could be transmitted."

    -- "Allowing the content to be transmitted to students at any location, rather than just to classrooms, as is legal under current law."

    -- "Allowing educators to store transmitted content and give students access to it, if only for short periods."

    -- "Allowing the conversion to digital form of analog works, such as printed or videotaped material, but only in cases where the material is not already available in digital form, such as on DVD."

    For more information about TEACH, read Andrew Trotter's article, "Bill Would Ease Copyright Limits For E-Learning" (EDUCATION WEEK, October 30, 2002), available online at http://edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=09copyright.h22 


    Really Bad News from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

    "EFF Whitepaper: Unintended Consequences Three Years under the DMCA --- http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.html  

    1.  Executive Summary

    Since they were enacted in 1998, the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright pirates from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works, and to ban “black box” devices intended for that purpose.1

    In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright piracy. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to three important public policy priorities:

    Section 1201 Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research.

    Experience with section 1201 demonstrates that it is being used to stifle free speech and scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten’s team of researchers, and prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have chilled the legitimate activities of journalists, publishers, scientists, students, program­mers, and members of the public.

    Section 1201 Jeopardizes Fair Use.

    By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, section 1201 grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public’s fair use rights. Already, the music industry has begun deploying “copy-protected CDs” that promise to curtail consumers’ ability to make legitimate, personal copies of music they have purchased.

    Section 1201 Impedes Competition and Innovation.

    Rather than focusing on pirates, many copyright owners have chosen to use the DMCA to hinder their legitimate competitors. For example, Sony has invoked section 1201 to protect their monopoly on Playstation video game consoles, as well as their “regionalization” system limiting users in one country from playing games legitimately purchased in another.

    This document collects a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate comp­etitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. The latest version can always be obtained at www.eff.org.

    2.  DMCA Legislative Background

    Congress enacted section 1201 in response to two pressures. First, Congress was responding to the perceived need to implement obligations imposed on the U.S. by the 1996 World Intellectual Property Or­ganization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty. Section 1201, however, went further than the WIPO treaty required.2 The details of section 1201, then, were a response not just to U.S. treaty obligations, but also to the concerns of copyright owners that their works would be widely pirated in the networked digital world.3

    Section 1201 contains two distinct prohibitions: a ban on acts of circumvention, as well as a ban on the distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention.

    The first prohibition, set out in section 1201(a)(1), prohibits the act of circumventing a technological measure used by copyright owners to control access to their works (“access controls”). So, for example, this provision makes it unlawful to defeat the encryption system used on DVD movies. This ban on acts of circumvention applies even where the purpose for decrypting the movie would otherwise be legitimate. As a result, if a Disney DVD prevents you from fast-forwarding through the commercials that preface the feature presentation, efforts to circumvent this restriction would be unlawful.

    Second, sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b) outlaw the manufacture, sale, distribution or trafficking of tools and technologies that make circumvention possible. These provisions ban not only technologies that defeat access controls, but also technologies that defeat use restrictions imposed by copyright owners, such as copy controls. These provisions prevent technology vendors from taking steps to defeat the “copy-protection” now appearing on many music CDs, for example.

    Section 1201 also includes a number of exceptions for certain limited classes of activities, including security testing, reverse engineering of software, encryption research, and law enforcement. These exceptions have been extensively criticized as being too narrow to be of real use to the constituencies who they were intended to assist.4

    A violation of any of the “act” or “tools” prohibitions is subject to significant civil and, in some circumstances, criminal penalties.

    3.  Free Expression and Scientific Research

    Section 1201 is being used by a number of copyright owners to stifle free speech and legitimate scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten’s team of researchers, and prosecution of the Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have imposed a chill on a variety of legitimate activities.

    For example, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research on existing security protocols. Foreign scientists are also increasingly uneasy about traveling to the United States out of fear of possible DMCA liability, and certain technical conferences have begun to relocate overseas.

    These developments will ultimately result in weakened security for all computer users (including, ironically, for copyright owners counting on technical measures to protect their works), as security researchers shy away from research that might run afoul of section 1201.5

    Professor Felten’s Research Team Threatened

    In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music. Princeton Professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks.

    When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however, SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA. The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers’ employers, as well as the conference organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn and a portion of the research published at a subsequent conference, but only after the researchers filed a lawsuit in federal court.

    After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided to forgo further research efforts in this field.

    Pamela Samuelson, “Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science,” 293 Science 2028, Sept. 14, 2001.
    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/293/5537/2028

    Letter from Matthew Oppenheim, SDMI General Counsel, to Prof. Edward Felten, April 9, 2001.
    http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm

    Dmitry Sklyarov Arrested

    Beginning in July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States after speaking at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas.

    Prosecutors, prompted by software goliath Adobe Systems Inc., alleged that Sklyarov had worked on a software program known as the Advanced e-Book Processor, which was distributed over the Internet by his Russian employer, ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. The software allowed owners of Adobe electronic books (“e-books”) to convert them from Adobe’s e-Book format into Adobe Portable Document Format (“pdf”) files, thereby removing restrictions embedded into the files by e-Book publishers.

    Sklyarov was never accused of infringing any copyrighted e-Book, nor of assisting anyone else to infringe copyrights. His alleged crime was working on a software tool with many legitimate uses, simply because third parties he has never met might use the tool to copy an e-Book without the publisher’s permission.

    In December 2001, under an agreement with the Department of Justice, Sklyarov was allowed to return home. The Department of Justice, however, is continuing to prosecute his employer, ElcomSoft, under the criminal provisions of the DMCA.

    Lawrence Lessig, “Jail Time in the Digital Age,” N.Y. Times at A7, July 30, 2001.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/opinion/30LESS.html

    Jennifer 8 Lee, “U.S. Arrests Russian Cryptographer as Copyright Violator,” N.Y. Times at C8, July 18, 2001.

    Scientists and Programmers Withhold Research

    Following the legal threat against Professor Felten’s research team and the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, a number of prominent computer security experts have curtailed their legitimate research activities out of fear of potential DMCA liability.

    For example, prominent Dutch cryptographer and security systems analyst Neils Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in an Intel video encryption system known as High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). He declined to publish his results and removed all references on his website relating to flaws in HDCP, on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of “prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law.”

    Neils Ferguson, “Censorship in Action: Why I Don’t Publish My HDCP Results,” Aug. 15, 2001.
    http://www.macfergus.com/niels/dmca/cia.html

    Neils Ferguson, Declaration in Felten & Ors v R.I.A.A. case, Aug. 13, 2001.
    http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20010813_ferguson_decl.html

    Lisa M. Bowman, “Researchers Weigh Publication, Prosecution,” CNET News, Aug. 15, 2001.
    http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6886574.html

    Following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, Fred Cohen, a professor of digital forensics and respected security consultant, removed his “Forensix” evidence-gathering software from his website, citing fear of potential DMCA liability.

    Another respected network security protection expert, Dug Song, also removed content from his website for the same reason. Mr. Song is the author of several security papers, including a paper describing a common vulnerability in many firewalls.

    Robert Lemos, “Security Workers: Copyright Law Stifles,” CNET News, Sept. 6, 2001.
    http://news.com.com/2100-1001-272716.html

    In mid-2001 an anonymous programmer discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft’s proprietary e-Book digital rights management code, but refused to publish the results, citing DMCA liability concerns.

    Wade Roush, “Breaking Microsoft's e-Book Code,” Technology Review at 24, November 2001.
    http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation11101.asp

    Foreign Scientists Avoid U.S.

    Foreign scientists have expressed concerns about traveling to the U.S. following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. Some foreign scientists have advocated boycotting conferences held in the U.S. and a number of conference bodies have decided to move their conferences to non-U.S. locations. Russia has issued a travel warning to Russian programmers traveling to the U.S.

    Highly respected British Linux programmer Alan Cox resigned from the USENIX committee of the Advanced Computing Systems Association, the committee that organizes many of the U.S. com­puting conferences, because of his concerns about traveling to the U.S. Cox has urged USENIX to hold its annual conference offshore. The International Information Hiding Workshop Conference, the conference at which Professor Felten’s team intended to present its original paper, has chosen to hold all of its future conferences outside of the U.S. following the SDMI threat to Professor Felten and his team.

    Will Knight, “Computer Scientists boycott US over digital copyright law,” New Scientist, July 23, 2001.
    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns00001063

    Alan Cox of Red Hat UK Ltd, declaration in Felten v. RIAA, Aug. 13, 2001. http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20010813_cox_decl.html

    Jennifer 8 Lee, “Travel Advisory for Russian Programmers,” N.Y. Times at C4, Sept.10, 2001.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/10/technology/10WARN.html?searchpv=past7days

    IEEE Wrestles with DMCA

    The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which publishes 30 per cent of all computer science journals worldwide, recently was drawn into the controversy surrounding science and the DMCA. Apparently concerned about possible liability under Section 1201, the IEEE in November 2001 instituted a policy requiring all authors to indemnify IEEE for any liabilities incurred should a submission result in legal action under the DCMA.

    After an outcry from IEEE members, the organization ultimately revised its submission policies, removing mention of the DMCA. According to Bill Hagen, manager of IEEE Intellectual Property Rights, “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has become a very sensitive subject among our authors. It’s intended to protect digital content, but its application in some specific cases appears to have alienated large segments of the research community.”

    IEEE press release, “IEEE to Revise New Copyright Form to Address Author Concerns,” April 22, 2002.
    http://www.ieee.org/newsinfo/dmca.html

    Will Knight, “Controversial Copyright Clause Abandoned,” New Scientist, April 15, 2002.
    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992169

    2600 Magazine Censored

    The Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes case6 illustrates the chilling effect that section 1201 has had on the freedom of the press.

    In that case, eight major motion picture companies brought a DMCA suit against 2600 magazine seeking to block it from publishing the DeCSS software program, which defeats the encryption used on DVD movies. 2600 had made the program available on its web site in the course of ongoing coverage of the controversy surrounding the DMCA. The magazine was not involved in the development of software, nor was it accused of having used the software for any copyright infringement.

    Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, the district court permanently barred 2600 from publishing, or even linking to, the DeCSS software code. In November 2001, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision.

    In essence, the movie studios effectively obtained a “stop the presses” order banning the publication of truthful information by a news publication concerning a matter of public concern—an unprecedented curtailment of well-established First Amendment prin­ciples.

    Carl S. Kaplan, “Questioning Continues in Copyright Suit,” N.Y. Times, May 4, 2001.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/04/technology/04CYBERLAW.html

    Simson Garfinkel, “The Net Effect: The DVD Rebellion,” Technology Review at 25, July/Aug. 2001.
    http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/garfinkel0701.asp

    Xenia P. Kobylarz, “DVD Case Clash—Free Speech Advocates Say Copyright Owners Want to Lock Up Ideas; Encryption Code is Key,” S.F. Daily Journal, May 1, 2001.

    Continued at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.html 


    Question
    Murat Tanju (with respect to one-time fair use under U.S. copyright law) asked the following question:
    >>"Isn't first time fair use applicable to the reader (students) who change each time a course is given rather than the faculty who put it on reserve every time?">>

    Answer
    The answer is no. Diane Graves explains this below. Long-term use of full articles in repeated courses without copyright holder permission is definitely not allowed. I did, however, remind all of you that the American Accounting Association and many other academic associations does not require written permission for articles used in education courses. See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

    Of course, fair use still allows quotations and excerpts without permission, and the gray zone centers upon what proportion is fair. The real issue concerns whether revenues of the copyright holder are seriously impaired by unfair use. For example, I often take liberties with large cited quotations, but some of my citations probably generate more revenues for the copyright holders if users adopt the original works in courses. For example, if I place a long quote from Magazine X in my New Bookmarks or messages on the AECM, professors who would never have otherwise have known about the article and/or would not purchase the article for themselves are not depriving the copyright holder of revenue. If they freely distribute the article or even my long quotation to an entire class of students, however, they are depriving the copyright holder of revenue. Loss of revenue is the real issue! The revenue market for many publishers is the student market. Fair use was placed into copyright law for education speed and convenience, but it was not put there for long-term damages to publishers.

    For example, I serve up a short "teaser" clip from one of my favorite segments of in the CBS show called Sixty Minutes. My teaser video clip is at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000overview/mp3/133summ.htm#Introduction   I also have my downloaded entire segment that I played in class soon after I downloaded a live broadcast. However, for use in subsequent semesters, I used a purchased segment exactly like the segment I already had on my shelves.

    Bob Jensen

    -----Original Message----- 
    From: Graves, Diane J. 
    Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 4:07 PM 
    To: Jensen, Robert 
    Subject: RE: Re: Copyright Compliance Service

    Bob, 

    Your understanding is correct. Our interpretation of Fair Use (which is fairly common in the academic library world) is this: the first time (first semester) a copy of an item is placed on Reserve, it falls within the Fair Use category, so there is no need to seek permission for its use. However, if the item is used for subsequent courses in other semesters, we will require evidence that permission has been requested. So if you have any items on reserve this fall semester that you intend to use again in the spring, we'll call it fair use for the fall and seek copyright permission for any use you'll have in subsequent semesters for those same items. The Fair Use designation has to do with spontaneity--if you find something you just HAVE to use in your class this term, you don't need to ask permission to assign it. If you choose to use it again, it's premeditated, in effect. You have time to plan to use it, and must request permission to do so from the copyright holder. There is a good guide to thinking through this process at IUPUI's website. You might want to look at it: http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/fuchecklist.htm l Lately, the focus in the courts has been on the economic impact of repeated, long term use of the same item, and the availability of permissions. (See under Effect on the IUPUI site). The fact that new students cycle through the course doesn't seem to be a factor in the eyes of the courts. Does that answer your question? Roger Horky is our new Manager of Copyright and Reserves. He can answer any additional questions you have. He's at x8189; rhorky@trinity.edu . Thanks for your interest!

    Diane J. Graves


    Written Permission to Use Some Articles in Courses is Not Required

    I thought that the following message from the Director of the Trinity University Library might be of more general interest in this era of uncertainty over the DMCA mess.

    She does not go into issues of material placed by instructors under courses in the Blackboard server, but I assume the same policies extend to the Blackboard server. I do remind you that many academic associations have policies that allow distributions of their journal articles to students. For example, all American Accounting Association journals are subject to the following policy statement:

    ***************************************

    Permission is hereby granted to reproduce any of the contents of _[Name of the AAA Journal] ___ for use in courses of instruction, as long as the source and the American Accounting Association copyright are indicated in any such reproductions.

    Written application must me made to the American Accounting Association, 5717 Bessie Drive, Sarasota, FL 34233-2399, for permission to reproduce any of the contents for use other than courses of instruction.
    ***************************************

    I suspect that all we must do is notify our library and/or our Blackboard master of the above policy that is printed in the back of all AAA journals. Check with other academic associations for similar policies.

    But then again, who can trust an accountant these days?

    Bob Jensen

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Graves, Diane J.
    Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 2:30 PM
    To: Trinity Faculty/Staff
    Subject: Copyright Compliance Service

    To all Trinity faculty and departmental secretaries:

    Trinity has recently reviewed its compliance with current copyright guidelines, particularly as they relate to the library’s course reserves service. In the past, the library accepted any and all materials faculty members wished to place on reserve without regard for copyright compliance issues, often in violation of copyright. Beginning this year, we have resolved to meet our obligations to intellectual property rights holders and the law more diligently.

    Trinity’s need to abide by copyright laws will affect the teaching faculty in many ways, the most significant of which will be that we are changing library procedures for placing items on reserve.

    Library staff have composed a new and formal copyright compliance policy. Please take the time to read it; at http://lib.trinity.edu/servcols/circ/cpyrghtp.shtml . Some of its more important elements are:

    1. When an item is placed on reserve for the first time (ever) copyright compliance will usually not be necessary. First-time use of an item is generally considered to be “fair use” of that item as permitted by the US Copyright Code. However, the library will require copyright permission for all items placed on reserve a second or later time.

    2. Faculty members are welcome to seek copyright permissions for their reserve materials themselves. If you obtain permission on your own, you will need to provide proof of that permission to the reserves manager before the material can be placed on reserve. Be aware, however, that library resources—time and money—are limited. Please plan ahead so you have time to identify alternatives.

    3. The library has set aside a small fund for royalty payments. At the present time, this amounts to just $50 per instructor. We suspect that this will not be sufficient; this is a new experience for us and we may have grossly underestimated the budgetary requirements of full copyright compliance. Any royalty fees beyond this amount will be charged to the appropriate department.

    4. Because the library’s resources are so limited, instructors should designate the maximum royalty payment they are willing to incur on each reserve item. They should also rank their reserve requests in order of importance to the class so that the library staff charged with obtaining copyright permissions can prioritize the processing of their requests.

    5. Any item submitted without proof of copyright permission will not be placed on reserve for two weeks, to permit time to process copyright permission requests. At the end of the two-week period, the item will be placed on reserve with the understanding that it will be removed if permission to use it is denied. Please take into account this two-week delay when submitting reserves.

    6. To expedite the process of securing copyright permissions, we will need as much bibliographic information about the item as is possible. We have designed a new reserves submission form that asks for the pertinent information. The more complete the citation, the more quickly we can process the reserve item.

    Please note that the library now offers an electronic reserves capability, which will affect how we process reserves materials. We will be sending you all a short message describing some of the more significant changes.

    If you have any questions, please contact . . [Deleted]

    Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
    Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
    715 Stadium Drive, San Antonio, TX 78212


    "FAIR USE" IS GETTING UNFAIR TREATMENT 
    Two recent federal court rulings in Hollywood's favor could undermine consumers' historical rights to use the content they buy http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2002/tc20020514_1528.htm?c=bwtechmay17&n=link13&t=email 

    To hear the entertainment industry tell it, a wave of digital piracy threatens to destroy the future of movies, records, and other media. While the danger of piracy is real, the other side of the story is that Hollywood has been on a remarkable legislative and legal winning streak in its campaign to win increased protections (see BW Online, 4/18/02, "High Tech vs. Hollywood on Capitol Hill"). Along the way, some long-established consumer rights may disappear. And the message from the courts so far seems to be "Get used to it." 

    The invention of digital media has made it possible for people without any special skills or equipment to make copies that are essentially indistinguishable from the originals. It has also given the creators of media the technical means not only to prevent copies from being made but to limit the ways consumers use products they have purchased, for example, by blocking the playing of U.S. DVD movies in Europe or preventing certain music CDs from being played in computers.

    Copyright law has always tried to strike a delicate balance between the rights of content creators to be compensated for their work and the rights of consumers to use what they have paid for. But the development of digital media and Big Media's attempt to completely control it have destroyed the delicate equilibrium that is copyright law.

    UNDER ASSAULT.  Two legal doctrines, called "first sale" and "fair use" are threatened by these technical changes. Under first sale, the buyers of copyrighted works in the U.S. may dispose of their purchases as they see fit (this isn't true in all countries). If you own a book, record, or DVD, you can sell it, lend it, or give it away. Fair use is a broader and vaguer concept, but it covers such things as quoting from a book in a review, copying part of a work for classroom use, or, most relevantly, making a copy of a music recording for personal use.

    Both doctrines are now under assault. The most recent blow came in a May 8 ruling by U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte in San Jose, Calif., in which he upheld the constitutionality of key provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

    This criminal case, U.S. v. Elcom Ltd., is a curious one. It began last July when FBI agents, acting on a complaint from software maker Adobe Systems, arrested Elcom employee Dmitry Skylarov at a hackers conference in Las Vegas. He was charged with "trafficking" in software designed to circumvent copy protections in Adobe's eBook Reader software, a criminal violation of the DMCA. The case against Skylarov were eventually dropped, and he returned to Russia, but the charges against Elcom are moving forward.


    Continued at  http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2002/tc20020514_1528.htm?c=bwtechmay17&n=link13&t=email 


    David Takes on Goliath

    "'Politics of Control' Leads a Law Student to Challenge Digital-Copyright Act," by Andrea L. Foster, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2, 2002 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2002/08/2002080201t.htm 

    Benjamin G. Edelman, a first-year student at Harvard University's law school, is the latest academic researcher to challenge the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

    The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Edelman, last month filed a lawsuit against N2H2 Inc., a Seattle-based Internet filtering company, in U.S. District Court in Boston. The suit asks a judge to prevent N2H2 from suing Mr. Edelman under the digital-copyright law should he decide to bypass the company's encryption, which prevents him from discovering its complete list of blocked Web sites. (See an article from The Chronicle, July 26.)

    Q. How did you become interested in Internet filtering?

    A. I had been aware of it generally for some years. It's hard to say when it all started. But the ACLU contacted me two years ago as they were preparing to challenge a variety of state laws requiring the use of filtering software in libraries. Alaska, for example, had such a law, and there were some other states. ...

    These laws were unconstitutional and they were preparing to bring challenges to various state courts. Then the Children's Internet Protection Act was passed, mandating the use of such software nationally in all libraries and public schools receiving federal funding. And that became the ACLU's priority and mine.

    Q. How did the ACLU hear about you?

    A. I had done some expert work in at least one, maybe a few other cases prior to that time. I had been working at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society here at Harvard Law School, where I guess my name had gotten some exposure. Two years ago, of course, I was a sophomore in college. But nonetheless, I guess they called up and asked for me by name.

    Q. Were you already interested in computers before you came to Harvard?

    A. I had been interested in computers for about as long as I can remember. I had been doing some computer-related work in junior high school and high school, helping people choose computers, putting them together, designing databases and networks. And so I came to Harvard with a particular interest in that subject.

    Q. When the lawsuit was filed, you talked about how it concerned "technology and the politics of control." What did you mean by that?

    A. First, I should credit the phrase to Professor [Jonathan] Zittrain of the law school, who used it as a subtitle of his course, "Internet and Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control." And I think he would say it's his research interest, and it certainly is mine.

    The core idea is roughly as follows: The Internet has a certain appearance to it, when you first connect to it, when people were first learning about it. And I suppose in 1996, 1997, 1998, it seems like the Internet could be whatever you wanted it to be, that no one could particularly change what it was, and no one could stop you from doing what you wanted to do. If you wanted to put a death threat on the Internet about your neighbor or your enemy, you could do that, and no one could really get you. If you wanted to steal music using the Internet, you could do that, and no one could get you. ...

    The later idea -- my idea, and Zittrain's -- was that, in fact, there were a variety of forces that for economic gain, for political gain, for other reasons, might seek to restrict what people could and couldn't do on the Internet.

    Continued at http://chronicle.com/free/2002/08/2002080201t.htm 


    Take a quiz on your knowledge of the changes in fair use and copyright laws?

    "The Educator's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use," by Hall Davidson, Tech-Learning, October 16, 2002 --- http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright.html 
    The summary chart is at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_chart.pdf 

    This is the way it happens: You're a teacher. You find the perfect resource for a lesson you're building for your class. It's a picture from the Internet, or a piece of a song, or a page or two from a book in the library or from your own collection. There's no time to ask for permission from who owns it. There isn't even time to figure who or what exactly does own it. You use the resource anyway, and then you worry. Have you violated copyright law? What kind of example are you setting for students?

    Or you're the principal. You visit a classroom and see an outstanding lesson that involves a videotape, or an MP3 audio file from the Web, or photocopies from a book you know your school doesn't own. Do you make a comment?

    The Original Intent Were the framers of the Constitution or the barons of Old English law able to look over your shoulder, they would be puzzled by your doubts because all of the above uses are legal. Intellectual property was created to promote the public good. In old England, if you wanted to copyright a book, you gave copies to the universities. According to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors...but encourage others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work." In other words, copyright was created to benefit society at large, not to protect commercial interests.

    Nowhere is this statement truer than in the educational arena. In fact, educators fall under a special category under the law known as "fair use." The concept, which first formally appeared in the 1976 Copyright Act, allows certain groups to use intellectual property deemed to benefit society as a whole, e.g., in schools for instructional use. However, it deliberately did not spell out the details. Over the years, fair use guidelines have been created by a number of groups-usually a combination of educators, intellectual property holders, and other interested parties. These are not actual laws, but widely accepted "deals" the educational community and companies have struck and expect each other to follow.

    What follows is a new version of "The Educators' Lean and Mean No FAT Guide to Fair Use," published in Technology & Learning three years ago. As you take the quiz on page 28, you will learn that no matter the technology-photocopying, downloads, file sharing, video duplication-there are times when copying is not only acceptable, it is encouraged for the purposes of teaching and learning. And you will learn that the rights are strongest and longest at the place where educators need them most: in the classroom. However, schools need to monitor and enforce fair use. If they don't, as the Los Angeles Unified School District found out in a six-figure settlement, they may find themselves on the losing end of a copyright question.

    Know Your Limitations-and Rights It has never been a more important time to know the rules. As a result of laws written and passed by Congress, companies are now creating technologies that block users from fair use of intellectual property-for example, teachers can't pull DVD files into video projects, and some computers now block users from inputting VCRs and other devices. In addition to helping schools steer clear of legal trouble, understanding the principles of fair use will allow educators to aggressively pursue new areas where technology and learning are ahead of the law, and to speak out when they feel their rights to copyright material have been violated.

    Now, take a quiz that will assess your knowledge of what is allowable-and what isn't-under fair use copyright principles and guidelines. There's also a handy chart that outlines teachers' fair use rights and responsibilities. Good luck.

    The quiz is at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_quiz.html 

    The chart is at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_chart.pdf 


    From Syllabus News on October 18, 2002

    MIT, Elsevier, Wiley Sue Coursepack Producer

    MIT Press, Elsevier Science Inc., and John Wiley & Sons Inc., three major publishers of scientific, technical, and medical materials, filed suit against Gainsville, Fla.-based Custom Copies Inc., charging the company with unauthorized mass photocopying of material from the publishers' books and journals. The complaint alleges that Custom Copy produces coursepacks for sale on the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville, without authorization from the copyright holders. "When a coursepack producer engages in mass photocopying of rightsholders' materials for its own profit, without clearing rights … [it] severely harms both the creators and the publishers of those materials," said Mark Seeley, general counsel of Elsevier Science. The suit is being coordinated by Copyright Clearance Center Inc., a licenser of text reproduction rights.

    For more information, visit: http://www.copyright.com 


    Powerful commercial interests and tort lawyers combined forces in engineering the DMCA legislation in the U.S that throws education and information use into a turmoil of risk and uncertainty.  An article with frightening examples is provided by Georgia Harper, "Copyright Endurance and Change," Educause Review, November/December 2000, pp. 20-26.  She states the following on Page 21"

    Some of these changes --- licenses, access controls, certain provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) --- have the potential to drastically undermine the public right to access information, to comment on events, and even to share information with others.

    Section 107 on "fair use" continues to, with increased ambiguity, provide safe harbors for use of small amounts of material, material not yet available for purchase when needed for students, and material that should be open to criticism and review without fear of reprisals in copyright infringement lawsuits.  Nevertheless, the DMCA has provisions that erode Section 107.  Georgia Harber states the following on Page 24:

    Even though fair use is a key "stress point," there has been no change to Section 107.  The stresses on fair use result from other things:  technological "fixes" that control dissemination of copyrighted works; legal frameworks, established to control dissemination, that marginalize fair use; and license terms that ignore fair use as well as other public rights protected in the Copyright Act.  Ultimately, I am concerned that the basic goal of copyright --- to improve our society by fostering creativity, encouraging the dissemination of information, and supporting the development of knowledge --- is endangered by the erosion of fair use in the digital environment.

    Remember, fair use embodies a balance between the competing interests of owners and users, between control and access, between control and the First Amendment, and it bridges the gap between a willing seller and a willing buyer of rights to use.  A diminishing role for fair use may well mean less public access and less ability to speak, to criticize, and to comment.

    An ERIC Digest from the ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education (ERIC-HE) addresses some complex copyright questions related to distance education. "Copyright Concerns in the Age of Distance Education," by law librarian James H. Walther, is available online at http://www.eriche.org/digests/2000-9.pdf 


    Things are not a whole lot better on the international scene.  An international copyright treaty proposal is stirring up U.S. opposition from open-source developers to ISPs --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,43820,00.html 

    It appears disastrous for program developers," Stallman said. "Many countries have laws about what kinds of software can be developed.... Everything relating to information should be taken out of this convention."

    The treaty in question is a heretofore obscure proposal known as the Hague Convention, which European nations generally support, but the U.S. State Department has criticized. If countries agree to the convention, they'd be required to enforce judgments in certain type of civil lawsuits brought in another jurisdiction.

    That prospect lightens the hearts of entertainment lobbyists, who fear increasingly widespread piracy and the possibility of Napster clones arising in countries that don't have laws restricting online file-sharing.

    Currently the Hague Convention includes copyright offenses in a section that Stallman, Internet providers, and consumer groups are lobbying to remove. Stallman, for instance, claims countries that are even more permissive about awarding software patents could sue U.S. programmers for violating them -- and thereby wreak havoc on the free software movement.

    But Robert Raben, who spoke on Tuesday as a representative of the recording industry, warned that excluding copyright from the draft convention would be a mistake: "Its intentional exclusion at this point would be a terrible message to send to the world."

    This dispute eerily mirrors a similar spat between the entertainment industry and open source and hacking groups that also involves copyright law. At the behest of business lobbyists, Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which limits programmers' ability to circumvent copy protection schemes and was the recent subject of an appeals court hearing.

    Other speakers cautioned that it's too late to perform radical surgery on the Hague Convention, which has been under discussion since 1992 and was tentatively adopted by the 49 member nations of the Hague Convention in June 1999. A two-stage diplomatic summit is scheduled to begin in June 2001 and resume in 2002.

    "You can't take it out of the convention, you just can't do it," said Marc Hankin, of Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal, a law firm that deals with intellectual property disputes.

    Only recently, however, have American businesses and nonprofit groups appeared to realize the sweeping scope of the treaty. (A U.S. Patent and Trademark Office request for comments last year went largely unheeded.)

    Sarah Deutsch of Verizon said her employer opposed the Hague Convention. "I do think the convention is an expansion of the rights of copyright holders," she said. In an earlier letter, Verizon said it had "significant concerns" with the measure.


    Millions of Web Documents are Not Being Archived for Future Scholars

    I find this to be an enormous problem in scholarship and research.  I download and store almost any article that I deem important in my work and teaching.  For example, I have some really important FASB documents on FAS 133 that are no longer available at the FASB Website.  It becomes discouraging to quote and cite works that are not longer available to readers.  This is a real bummer modern scholarship.

    "A crisis for Web preservation Fugitive documents published on the Web are not being preserved." by Florence Olsen, FCW.com, June 21, 2004 --- http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0621/pol-crisis-06-21-04.asp 

    A crisis for Web preservation Fugitive documents published on the Web are not being preserved — From FCW.com The Federal Depository Library Program has fallen behind in cataloging and preserving access to government documents published only on the Web. As a result, public access to those publications is spotty at best.

    "This is not a problem; this is a crisis," said Daniel Greenstein, head of the California Digital Library, which serves the 10 universities in the University of California system. He said information is disappearing from government Web sites at an alarming rate.

    At the Government Printing Office, which runs the depository library program, officials are struggling with the problem, known as fugitive documents, said Judith Russell, superintendent of documents. Fugitive documents are electronic publications that remain outside the federal depository collections in 1,300 libraries nationwide.

    To capture those publications automatically, GPO officials may turn to Web-harvesting technologies. In May, agency officials published a notice asking vendors to submit information about Web-crawler and data-mining technologies that could assist in locating fugitive government publications…

    Continued in the article

     

    Are Universities Becoming EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organisations)?

    Some of us may be interested in these two fascinating sites that address questions such as:

    Are universities becoming EMOs (educational Maintenance Organisations)? Are faculty being reduced to hired help? Are university administrators becoming vendor-agents and corporate managers (rather than Scholar-administrators?) Are faculty losing control of the product of their labour? ... ...

    http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/  

    http://www.coolclass.com/newsletter/vol01no02-clarke.html 

    While I did not get into teaching to get rich (in fact I got out of the rich corporate world and into teaching, to escape intellectual drudgery), and I am glad that I am not at the beginning of my career, I do feel sad about the passing of an era.

    The society has to clarify what our rights as academics are just as it is grappling with the issues of intellectual property rights in this electronic age. Nowadays I find that school administrators smell money a lot faster than they do intellectually stimulating ideas. What a pity the age of scholar-administrators is coming to an end, supplanted by that of pencil-pushing career manager-bureaucratic education merchants. Is this the intellectual equivalent of the supplanting of the age of chivalry by that of book-keepers?

    Respectfully submitted,

    Jagdish 
    Jagdish S. Gangolly, 
    Associate Professor
    (j.gangolly@albany.edu ) State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222. Phone: (518) 442-4949 Fax: (707) 897-0601 URL: http://www.albany.edu/acc/gangolly 

    An Editorial by Bob Jensen

    HMOs and health clinics often deliver inferior medicine because there is no competition or very little competition in a geographic market.  EMOs (see above) will not have such advantages of geographic monopoly.  Education, unlike heath care, is no longer bound by geography.  EMOs face exploding global competition to a point where only the best can thrive.  To date this is not the case with HMOs.

    I tend to disagree with the EMO doom and gloom outlook for the future of online education programs.  In my opinion, such claims as "redundant faculty" are not rooted in communications with faculty in experimenting in quality distance education --- faculty that are nearly burned out by the increased communications between themselves and students in respected online programs.  Online faculty in major universities are biting their knuckles because of the increased intensity of communication in online courses and the demands of being more creative and more of an expert to online students seeking something akin to one-on-one tutorials with instructors.  In a sense, the distance education courses are reverting to the Oxford tutorial system.  Many of the online courses are highly Socratic.

    Of course it is possible to put up an online course of the EMO variety that has virtually no communication between instructors and students. But it is also possible to put up a high quality, prestigious distance education course in which the communications between faculty and students and the communications between students and other students are much greater than in traditional courses.  This is what the SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois try to study in much greater rigor than the off-the-wall doom and gloom soothsayers  seem to ever discover or comprehend.  For links to the SCALE experiments and an audio commentary by Dan Stone, go to MP3 audio presentation at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    I predict that the problem of online education is that the eventual rewards from great online teaching will draw the brightest and the best of our new educators into more teaching and less research.  In the past 50 years, major universities have placed the highest rewards and honors on research and publication performances.  It is not surprising that teaching and learning are not focused upon in doctoral programs that center 100% on research skills and experience.  It is not surprising that the American Accounting Association Doctoral Consortium virtually ignores education technologies and the changing times in online education.  It is not surprising that researchers strive to teach only researchers (i.e., doctoral students) and not have to face the great unwashed (undergraduate students).  It is not surprising that researchers tend to avoid teaching undergraduates whenever possible.  It is not surprising that great teaching is not a priority for researchers who are assigned (punished?) to teach undergraduate courses.  It is not surprising that researchers are often the least skilled in education technologies and the least interested in taking on online courses that are very demanding in terms of time and creativity and will draw them away from their research and publication in top journals.

    Times will be changing with respect to corporate education and online delivery of courses.  Corporations will soon be offering up compensation packages and lifestyle packages that will attract the brightest and the best of new talent, including newly minted doctoral students.  At the moment, Sarah Supercharged with her new Stanford University diploma in hand places highest priority on going to a prestige university to conduct research and minimize teaching.  In was and still is a great honor for her to get her new assistant professorship at Rochester and only have to teach one course a year.  

    But there will soon be a new employer on the block.  Rather than endure the strains of tenure uncertainty and stress of research and publication at the University of Rochester, Sarah Supercharged will soon have an alternative of making ten times as much in earnings (due to stock options and other compensation incentives) to focus on online creativity, student communication, and quality delivery of courses in executive education from some education corporation (possible a corporation owned by a prestige university).  And she will be able to deliver the courses from her ocean front home in Big Sur (California) or her horse ranch in Idaho or cattle farm in New Zealand rather than have to endure a daily grind to her research lab in Rochester, NY.  Her students around the world will receive a wonderful ("Supercharged") education, because she is so motivated and talented.  She brings to each of them her very best, partly because the value of her stock options depend upon her online performance. 

    My worry is not that the "EMOs" will be worse than our present prestige universities.  My worry is that they will be much better, in part because they will draw away the top talent and change priorities from research to teaching.  Research will suffer in the long run, because it will be much more difficult to fund and to subsidize with large undergraduate lectures on campus that in the 20th Century were the cash cows that fed research.  Education corporations will start milking those cash cows, and for-profit corporations will be less inclined to fund basic research not tied to the bottom line of profit.

    I repeat what I said at the beginning of this editorial.  HMOs and health clinics often deliver inferior medicine because there is no competition or very little competition in a geographic market.  EMOs  will not have such advantages of geographic monopoly.  Education, unlike heath care, is no longer bound by geography.  EMOs face exploding global competition to a point where only the best can thrive.  To date this is not the case with HMOs.


    Institutions, Reward Structures, and Traditions 
    That Defy Changes in Higher Education

    The military has a chain of command and a tradition for carrying out orders promptly throughout the system.  A university is the antithesis of the military.  There is very little chain of command in a tenure system that allows faculty to ignore many edicts from their "superiors" in the administrative chain of command.  Probably more at fault than tenure is the tradition of allowing faculty to make independent decisions concerning what they put into "their" courses and what topics they will pursue in "their" research.

    Funds are rewarding innovation and change are scarce in university budgets.  Even more constraining is the comfort a faculty member takes in student evaluations at present and the risk and fear that hovers over innovation and risk taking.

    Be assured that most faculty members in universities are not lazy.  It may appear to be a cushy job with only nine or twelve contact hours in the classroom, but it is not at all uncommon for faculty to put in sixty hour weeks staying abreast of the new knowledge of their disciplines and contributing to this new knowledge with research and writing.  A huge effort is made to build and maintain a reputation for scholarship and research.  This means that there is precious little time to carve out for learning new educational technologies.

    Universities seeking to offer online courses must often hire new faculty or attempt to make deals with existing faculty by providing release time, summer grants, and other incentives that often fail to have a lasting impact on genuine commitment to change and genuine long-term contributions to innovation and online education.

    University policies, resource constraints, and promotion and tenure traditions stand in the way of competing with corporations such as UNext that will treat instructors more like professional employees.  The salaries and benefits will be greater in the corporations, but there will not likely be any tenure or job security.  Indeed the reward packages may be so great as to provide very real competition to universities seeking to hire the best new faculty or retain the best tenured faculty.


    Barriers to Distance Education

    Students surf to class, but there's no online deluge
    — From the Los Angeles Daily News

    Once expected to revolutionize higher education as the Internet transformed mass media, online education has disappointed its early enthusiasts but has found a valuable niche serving working adults, educators say.

    "Once upon a time, in the go-go '90s, the thought was that online education would eventually supplant (traditional university education)," said David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

    "But it's hard to replicate some of the things a real classroom can offer -- those face-to-face interchanges that people often want."

    Nearly a decade after the Internet became a household fixture, the University of California system does not offer a single online course for undergraduates during the regular school year…

    For the full story, visit:
    http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2266845,00.html


    July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?

    "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 complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf.

    The Learning Alliance is "a provider of educational research and leadership support services to presidents of accredited, non-profit

    two- and four-year colleges and universities. The Learning Alliance serves the mission of higher education institutions by providing its senior administrators with timely access to expertise, current research, and market data." For more information, contact: The Learning Alliance, 1398 Wilmington Pike, West Chester, PA 19382 USA; tel: 610-399-6601; fax: 815-550-8892; Web: http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/index.php.

    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."


    From Syllabus News on July 20, 2004

    For-Profit Institution Popularity Slipping, Says Online Consortium

    Job candidates from traditional universities with online programs are more likely to be hired and promoted by corporations than candidates from for-profit providers of online education and degree programs. That’s the conclusion of a study by the Online University Consortium, a group of traditional universities which describes its mission as providing “access to reputable universities that have online degree programs you can trust.”

    The OUC looked at data compiled over a recent 12-month period, gathered through surveys of corporate decision-makers attending major trade events such as Society for Human Resource Management and American Society for Training & Development. When compared to the previous year's findings, OEC said it found the number of companies preferring traditional universities is up 15 percent, with 65 percent selecting traditional schools compared to 50 percent in 2003. OUC said it also found that the number of companies choosing for-profit businesses declined, with 14.3 percent now indicating they would select a for-profit compared to 22 percent in 2003.

    Deborah Besemer, president and CEO of recruitment services provider BrassRing, said employers are avoiding schools that have flooded the market with online degree programs and which have questionable regard for quality. "We see this when they search for candidates and specifically eliminate certain schools from their search. Reputation of the educational institution is what matters the most," said Besemer. "Employers want to hire students who have a full college experience whether online or in the classroom. They are looking for well-educated individuals to join their companies."

    For more information on the OUC’s findings, visit http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=8543 


    In my opinion, the Weatherstation Project is biased from the start by skeptics who do not balance the successes against the failures to date --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 
    For example, the report fails to even mention one of the world's most successful e-Learning endeavors in his own institution, the Master's of Engineering (ADEPT) distance learning program at Stanford University even though one of the two authors is a long-time faculty member and top administrator at Stanford.

    Here are some counter examples.

    New and Expanding Market Motivations
    Example 1 --- Stanford University --- http://ww.stanford.edu/history/fulldesc.html 

    Stanford University shook up the stuffy Ivy League and other prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge when it demonstrated to the world that its online training programs and its online Masters of Engineering (ADEPT) asynchronous learning degree program became enormous cash cows with nearly infinite growth potentials relative to relatively fixed-size onsite programs.  In a few short years, revenues from online programs in engineering and computer science exploded to over $100 million per year.

    The combined present value of the Stanford University logo and the logos of other highly prestigious universities are worth trillions.  Any prestigious university that ignores online growth opportunities is probably wasting billions of dollars of potential cash flow from its logo.  

    Virtually all universities of highest prestige and name recognition are realizing this and now offer a vast array of online training and education courses directly or in partnership with corporations and government agencies seeking the mark of distinction on diplomas.


    Example 2 --- University of Wisconsin --- http://webct.wisc.edu/ 
    Over 100,000 Registered Online Students in The University of Wisconsin System of State-Supported Universities

    Having a long history of extension programs largely aimed at part-time adult learners, it made a lot of sense for the UW System to try to train and educate adult learners and other learners who were not likely to become onsite students.

    The UW System is typical of many other large state-supported universities that have an established adult learning infrastructure and a long history of interactive television courses delivered to remote sites within the state.  Online Internet courses were a logical extension and in many instances a cost-efficient extension relative to televised delivery.


    Example 3 --- Harvard University

    In light of new online learning technologies, Harvard University changed its long-standing residency requirement in anticipation of expanding markets for "mid-career professionals" according to Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2002, Page 4.  Harvard has various distance education programs, including those in the Harvard Business School that currently cost over $4 million per year to maintain.


    Example 4
    From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002

    Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program

    Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a "fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees. The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and access interactive multimedia course content.

    For more information, visit: http://www.babson.edu/mba/fasttrac


    Example 5 --- Texas A&M Online MBA Program in Mexico --- http://olap.tamu.edu/mexico/tamumxctr.pdf 

    Some universities view online technologies as a tremendous opportunity to expand training and education courses into foreign countries.  One such effort was undertaken by the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University in partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico.  For example, Professor John Parnell at Texas A&M has been delivering a course for several semesters in which students in Mexico City take the online course in their homes.  However, once each month the students meet face-to-face on a weekend when Dr. Parnell travels to Mexico City to hold live classes and administer examinations.

    You probably won't have much difficulty making a guess as to what many students say is the major reason they prefer online courses to onsite courses in Mexico City?


    Example 6 --- The University of Phoenix --- http://www.phoenix.edu/index_open.html 

    The University of Phoenix became the largest private university in the world.  Growth came largely from adult learning onsite programs in urban centers across the U.S. and Canada.  

    The popular CBS television show called Sixty Minutes ran a feature on the growth and future of the newer online training and education programs at the University of Phoenix. You can download this video from http://online.uophx.edu/onl_nav_2.asp# 

    The University of Phoenix contends that online success in education depends upon intense communications day-to-day between instructors and students.  This, in turn, means that online classes must be relatively small and synchronized in terms of assignments and projects.


    Example 7 --- Partnerships 
    Lucrative partnerships between universities and corporations seeking to train and educate employees.

    The highly successful Global Executive MBA Program at Duke University (formerly called GEMBA) where corporations from around the world pay nearly $100,000 for one or two employees to earn a prestigious online MBA degree --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html

    UNext Corporation has an exclusive partnership with General Motors Corporation that provides online executive training and education programs to 88,000 GM managers.  GM pays the fees.  See http://www.unext.com/ 

    Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 
    This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.   The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 

    Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation.  It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000 more students in 2002.  It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities.  The consulting arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system. 

    The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a program for online training and education for all IRS employees.  The IRS pays the fees for all employees.  The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 

    Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an online MBA program for Deere employees.  Deere pays the fees.  See "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html 

    The University of Georgia partnered with the consulting division of PwC to deliver a totally online MBA degree.  The program is only taken by PwC employees.  PwC paid the development and delivery fees.  See http://www.coe.uga.edu./coenews/2000/UGAusnews.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the bright and the dark side of education technologies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    Barriers to Distance Education --- http://www.emoderators.com/barriers/index.shtml 
    Principal Investigator: Zane L. Berge

    Cho, S.K. & Berge, Z.L. (2002). Overcoming Barriers to Distance Training and Education. Education at a Distance [USDLA Journal] (16)1. Retrieved February 8, 2002 from http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/JAN02_Issue/article01.html

    When people within an organization plan for using distance training and education, there are several barriers to their efforts that they are likely to encounter. Consideration of barriers faced by other organizations may help leaders find solutions to reduce or to minimize obstacles in their own organization. Using a content analysis of thirty-two, in-depth case studies of leading organizations, this study begins to explore solutions to the barriers faced by organizations when they use distance education.

    Berge, Z.L. & Muilenburg, L.Y. (2001). Obstacles faced at various stages of capability regarding distance education in institutions of higher learning. Tech Trends 46(4): pp. 40-45.

    While distance education is on a fast growth curve right now, there are many barriers that must be overcome. The results reported here are from persons working in higher education (n=1276). The perspective taken is that various organizations are at different stages or levels of capabilities with regard to distance education-from never using distance education to other organizations in which distance education is how they do business.

    The research questions reported on in this article are:

    1. do educators perceive different barriers depending upon the maturity of their organization's capabilities in distance education, and
    2. as the organization' distance education competency as a whole matures, will the overall number or intensity of perceived barriers to distance education be reduced? There are additional observations included.

    Muilenburg, L.Y. and Berge, Z.L. (2001). Barriers to distance education: A factor-analytic study. The American Journal of Distance Education. 15(2): 7-22.

    While numerous studies have discussed barriers to the successful implementation of distance education, many are based on the examination of one instructor’s experience, one distance learning environment, or one type of distance learning program. The findings provide useful information, but it is difficult to piece these studies together to create a holistic picture of the barriers to distance education.

    Some quantitative studies have been conducted (Berge 1998; Cegles 1998; Dickinson et al. 1999; Rockwell et al. 1999; Yap 1996), but they tap a small or very focused population group. A larger-scale study was still needed to consider simultaneously the many dimensions of barriers to distance education as perceived by people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

    The survey study reported in the following presentations and articles sought to represent the perceptions of people who differed on six demographic variables: (1) workplace (e.g., community college, government, nonprofit organization, K–12 education); (2) job function (e.g., support staff, manager, researcher, student); (3) type of delivery system used (e.g., audiotape, computer conferencing, interactive television [ITV]); (4) expertise regarding distance education; (5) the stage of the respondent’s organization with regard to capabilities in delivering distance education (from no distance education activity to distance education being the way the organization does business); and (6) the area in which the respondent primarily works (e.g., fine arts, engineering, education). These studies represent the responses of over 2500 persons.

    Berge, Z.L. and Muilenburg L.Y. (2000). Barriers to distance education as perceived by managers and administrators: Results of a survey. In Melanie Clay (Ed.), Distance Learning Administration Annual 2000.

    A survey was conducted to help better understand and more systematically study barriers to distance education. The survey addressed six demographic variables: 1) work place (e.g., community college, government); 2) job function (e.g., support staff; manager, researcher, student); 3) type of delivery system used (e.g., audio-tape, computer conferencing, ITV); 4) expertise of the individual regarding distance education; 5) the stage of the respondents organization with regard to capabilities in delivering distance education; and 6) the area in which the respondent primarily works (e.g., fine arts, engineering, education). The focus of this presentation is on barriers to distance education as perceived by managers and administrators.

    Berge, Z.L. & Mrozowski, S. (1999) Barriers to Online Teaching in Elementary, Secondary, And Teacher Education. Canadian Journal of Educational Communication, 27(2): 59-72.

    A review of the literature regarding the barriers to the use of educational technology in primary and secondary education was conducted. An emphasis was placed on the diffusion of computers in the schools, since the focus of this study is to determine what should be expected as computer-mediated communication (CMC) is used in schools to teach in online environments. A categorical framework, similar to one used by the first author for analysis of barriers to the use of CMC in higher education, was used (Berge, 1998).

    The nine categories of barriers are: academic, fiscal, geographic, governance, labor-management, legal, student support, technical, and cultural. The literature review of barriers to the use of educational technology in K-12 using this framework suggested the primary areas of concern are academic, cultural, and technical. Secondary areas of concern are labor-management and fiscal issues, with little or no mention of geographic, governance, student support, or legal aspects of diffusion of technology.

    To test whether the use of CMC as one important area of educational technology entering K-12 teaching and learning, a recently published four volume series of books titled, "Wired Together: Computer-Mediated Communication in K-12" was analyzed. Taken together, the seventy-two (72) chapters in these four books, mostly case studies, represent a considerable body of experience in online teaching and learning in K-12, pre- and in-service teacher training.

    This content analysis was conducted:

    1. to determine how many different barriers to online teaching were mentioned across all the contributors, i.e., to indicate the range of the obstacles, and,
    2. to determine how often each particular category of barriers was mentioned, i.e., to indicate the perceived severity of these issues. The results are quite consistent when compared to the more general review of literature regarding educational technology.

    Berge, Z.L. (1998). Barriers to online teaching in post-secondary institutions. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration. 1(2). Summer. Retreived February 8, 2002 from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/Berge12.html

    Combined with demographic trends, political forces, economic factors, the need for lifelong learning, and the changing emphases in teaching and learning, there is a resurgence of interest in distance education both at traditional institutions of higher education and in organizations whose sole mission is distance education. Can higher education at "traditional" universities change to meet the new student demands and the intense competition among education providers that distance education brings?


    Just a couple of years ago, every major game company was developing a massively multiplayer online game, based on the attractive business premise. But after many disappointments in recent months, the industry is realizing these games can become tar pits.

    "Online Games a Massive Pain," by Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, July 16, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,64153,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

    Electronic Arts' decision to shut down development of Ultima X: Odyssey -- the sequel to its long-running online game Ultima Online -- may force the game industry to re-examine what it takes to be a successful developer of massively multiplayer online games.

    Electronic Arts joins a growing list of companies -- Cyan Worlds, Games Workshop, There Inc. -- that invested millions of dollars in online games, only to see disappointing sales or unfinished projects. But what's surprising about EA's setback is that it is the world's biggest video-game software company, with plenty of cash, talent, marketing muscle and patience to develop a franchise. Despite that, it pulled the plug on UXO.

    What's more, over the past few years EA has pulled the plug, or announced plans to pull the plug, on a string of MMO games: Ultima Online II, Motor City Online, an online Harry Potter adventure game and Earth & Beyond. Most surprising of all, The Sims Online -- an online version of the biggest video-game franchise in history -- has been a disappointment for the company, by most accounts.

    MMO games are notoriously hard to develop, much harder than traditional shrink-wrapped, single-player video games. Most MMOs create huge online worlds where thousands of players, each sitting in their homes, interact with each other -- exploring, trading and pillaging. The business premise to game companies is enticing: Players have to buy a copy of the game for about $50 at a retailer, then pay an additional monthly charge of $10 to $15 to gain entrance to the virtual world. But the companies have to pay a lot of attention to keep the online environments compelling and the players interested. And things that single-player games don't need as much -- like customer support and service -- are key to keeping subscriptions active.

    "Maybe what we're learning is that (a traditional game company) is not going to be set up perfectly to run big online games," said Ed Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University, and a moderator of Terra Nova, a blog that discusses virtual worlds.

    In contrast to EA, Sony set up an independent division, Sony Online Entertainment, to focus exclusively on virtual worlds, Castronova pointed out. The result: Sony Online has had huge success with its EverQuest franchise, with at least half a million subscribers, and its Star Wars Galaxies world has had more than 300,000 players.

    Of course, EA is not the only company that has had problems keeping MMOs afloat. For example, Games Workshop recently announced plans to close down Warhammer Online, as did Cyan Worlds with Uru Live. And There Inc. is on the verge of abandoning its metaverse in favor of becoming a platform builder, some speculate.

    For its part, EA disputes the notion that it has had problems developing MMOs. Instead, it said the UXO move was a strategic realignment of resources.

    Continued in the article

    Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment 


    How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

    Question
    How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

    "Going Hybrid," by Kristin L. Greene, Inside Higher Ed, July 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/20/strategist

    Too many college and university leaders think, “We have an online program and we have a campus program, so we can probably just combine the two to create a hybrid program.” This usually doesn’t work well because online and on-campus programs often appeal to different people for different reasons, and the delivery challenges for each are also quite different.

    We’ve seen some great successes, and a few spectacular failures, in the hybrid market model (in which 20-80 percent of content is delivered online). From these examples, we’ve learned that planning up front and being clear about objectives are preconditions for success. Institutions considering hybrid models for a program, or even several courses, must first create a “business plan” and clearly state what they want to achieve, which students they plan to serve, and how they plan to compete. When building this plan for your institution, you should keep the following in mind:

    The Goal. Why are you considering a hybrid model? What is the business rationale? Are you trying to reach different, or more, students, or trying to solve space constraints? Are you doing it because you see an unmet need in your marketplace or because your competitors are going hybrid and you feel the need to keep up? Are you looking for a local, regional, or national audience? The national market is becoming quite competitive, and programs in this space are becoming more commodity like, so a program focusing on the regional or local market may position your program for success.

    Philosophy. A program with 20 percent of delivery online and 80 percent on-campus is quite different from a program with 80 percent online and 20 percent on-campus, yet they both qualify as hybrid. Will you use the online component only for communication purposes or for content delivery as well? How will you use adjunct faculty members — to create the content, deliver it, or both? The philosophy you choose should provide a blueprint or roadmap for how you will achieve your goals. Too often in our work, we have seen institutions miss this step — they did not identify their philosophy before jumping into the hybrid model, and later found that it significantly impeded success. Without a philosophy, it is difficult to communicate the value proposition internally or externally, and it becomes challenging to make some of the difficult trade-offs inherent in any new venture.

    Target Consumer. What type of consumer is your hybrid offering designed to attract? Adult learners tend to be more open to an online experience because it allows them to balance their professional and personal lives with their educational pursuits. Traditional students — those aged 18 to 24 – tend to want face-to-face, classroom-based learning. Corporations may prefer a little of both, to allow employees to work and study at the same time. Segmenting the market by consumer types and needs — adult, traditional, current, new, credit, non-credit — and designing programs that fit these segments and needs are important early steps.

    Integration. Integrating between bricks and clicks is probably the single biggest point of failure for institutions pursuing a hybrid model. Where does campus-based learning begin and end relative to the online component? How do student services coordinate with these components? What do you need to change about your student information system? The challenges range from technology and training, to content design and delivery, to student services. Be sure to prepare by thinking through the entire system and how it will affect the students, the faculty, and the staff.

    Programs. Some courses and programs have done very well online and would be logical candidates for a hybrid model (e.g., business, IT, education), but not every course or program is well-suited to a hybrid approach. It’s best to begin with an audit of existing programs, dissecting the curriculum to determine how a hybrid model might be applied. At the same time, you should do an external evaluation of market demand and supply to determine where the best opportunities are for introducing new programs. Again, if you consider local versus national distribution, you may find that, on a local level, a particular hybrid program may provide a competitive advantage in attracting students.

    Core Competencies. What is your institution known for? What do you do better than most of your peer schools? Focus your efforts on maximizing the benefit of these core competencies and consider outsourcing those areas that are not strengths, such as marketing, lead management, student services, or technology.

    Faculty Buy-In. Faculty members have a large stake in content delivery because most of the time they supply the curriculum. Whether you plan to offer incentives for faculty to adapt content to a hybrid model or to outsource this function, faculty should be involved in the discussions.

    Hybrid courses and programs represent more of an evolution than a revolution in educational content delivery. Hybrid delivery represents a natural progression for many campus-based institutions to investigate and perhaps pursue, and often can serve as a competitive advantage in reaching a wider student population. Rigorously thinking through process design and delivery components and planning carefully for implementation will make the difference between those programs that succeed in the hybrid arena and those that invest a lot of resources with little to show for it.

     


    Online Cheating and Reduced Social Interaction

    July 30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    NEW BOOK OF ONLINE EDUCATION CASE STUDIES

    ELEMENTS OF QUALITY ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C. Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness, blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp. You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.

    The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.


    COMBATING CHEATING IN ONLINE STUDENT ASSESSMENT

    In "Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VII, no. II, Summer

    2004) Neil C. Rowe identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously" and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:

    -- Getting assessment answers in advance

    It is hard to ensure that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.

    -- Unfair retaking of assessments

    While course management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.

    -- Unauthorized help during the assessment

    It may not be possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online test.

    You can read the entire article, including Rowe's suggestions to counteract the problems, at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/summer72/rowe72.html.

    The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.


    SOCIAL INTERACTION IN ONLINE LEARNING

    Among the reasons Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that "students often have less commitment to the integrity of distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education. In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online learners:

    1. The use of synchronous communication

    "Chat-rooms and other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."

    2. The introduction of a forming stage

    "Discussion on almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,

    etc.) can be utilized by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is essential to any successful online experience."

    3. The adherence to effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course web site."

    The complete article is online at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/7_3/8.html.

    Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.

    The International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.

    ......................................................................

    ONLINE COURSES: COSTS AND CAPS

    Two articles in the July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and "How many students can we have in a class?"

    In "Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.

     

    In "Online Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.

    Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/ for more information.

    Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education in general are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

     

    Legal Concerns

    July 1, 2005 email message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/ 

    "The Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) is an online legal publication that focuses on the evolving intersection of law and technology. This area of study draws on a number of legal specialties: intellectual property, business law, free speech and privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law -- each of which is undergoing doctrinal and practical changes as a result of new and emerging technologies. DLTR strives to be a 'review' in the classic sense of the word. We examine new developments, synthesize them around larger theoretical issues, and critically examine the implications. We also review and consolidate recent cases, proposed bills, and administrative policies."

    "However, DLTR is unique among its sister journals at Duke, and indeed among all law journals. Unlike traditional journals, which focus primarily on lengthy scholarly articles, DLTR focuses on short, direct, and accessible pieces, called issue briefs or 'iBriefs.' In fact, the goal of an iBrief is to provide cutting edge legal insight both to lawyers and to non-legal professionals. In addition, DLTR strives to be the first legal publication to address breaking issues. To that end, we publish on the first and fifteenth of every month during the school year (September until April) and less frequently during the summer."

    Duke Law & Technology Review is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet.

    Bob Jensen's threads on the future of education technology and distance learning are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

     


    Email and Teaching Evaluuations Place Heavy Burdens on Teachers

    Fearing your student evaluations, how much time and trouble should you devote to email questions from your students?
    For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility. The stakes are different for professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick, chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts, explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com  and describe their impressions of their professors on blogs.
    Jonathan D. Glater, "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me," The New York Times, February 21, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on controversies over student evaluations are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation


    "Email Etiquette an Oxymoron? Perhaps Not," by Sanford Pinsker, The Irascible Professor, March 1, 2006 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-01-06.htm

    It is no secret that technology has had its impact on teaching, but it is also no secret that there are times when the "impact" is unwelcome, if not downright unpleasant. I am referring to the habit, by now well established, in which students email their professors at the click of a mouse -- and then expect the professor to respond in a heartbeat. No request is too outlandish, as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrated: One first-year student emailed a calculus professor asking "If I should buy a binder or a subject notebook?"; another explained that she was late for Monday's class because she "was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party." The war stories rattled on and on as the article explored the ways in which student e-mail have made professors not only "approachable" but also "on call" 24/7.

    Untenured professors have good reason to worry if students perceive them as not responding swiftly enough -- no matter how inappropriate or downright outlandish student requests might be. After all, most students fill out evaluation forms at the end of the semester and woe to the professor who is perceived as dragging his or her heels when replying to student email. As a person who was once chided for not returning student papers promptly -- this, long before email became a fact of academic life -- I was glad that there was room on the form for the student to explain that he expected his paper returned at the end of the class in which he had turned it in. That, for him, defined "promptly," and I didn't meet his definition.

    No doubt every professor who skimmed the New York Times article had an example or two drawn from personal experience. I am hardly an exception. I remember, for example, the first-year student who email me -- this, before our first meeting -- that she was a member of the field hockey team and that she would be leaving class early on a number of occasions (they were listed) and missing class altogether for away games. No doubt she thought this was thoughtful of her and only thought otherwise when I informed her that, at the college she was now attending, academic work took precedence over athletics, and that we ought to discuss the matter further in my office. I am happy to report that my reply got her thinking but unhappy to report that her "solution" to the problem was "make-up classes," ones I'd teach her privately during moments when she wasn't chasing a ball with a stick.

    Ironically enough, the last email I received from a student had to do with the grade he got on a term paper (B-) that was headed “A Grave Injustice.” I resisted the opportunity to tell him that, if this was the largest 'grave injustice ' the world handed him, he was a fortunate young man indeed. Instead, I began with the formulaic, "I'm sorry you're upset but. . ." and went on to explain that it is my job to assign grades and that is what I'd done, to the best of my ability, in his case -- as my typed, half-page comments made clear. My point in relaying this exasperating tale is to remind professors not to get exasperated themselves. Volleying emails back and back is, well, unseemly, something that immature students do but that professional teachers don't.

    My hunch is that the student email problem will only get worse. That's why it will, I believe, become crucial to establish an email policy -- call them guidelines, rules of etiquette, whatever you will -- and add it to course syllabi. I was hardly alone in making it clear on my syllabi that "Adults do not like to be called after 10 PM" (some prefer 7), and if I were still teaching I would add email to the mix.

    Further, I would discourage students from emailing me drafts of papers not only the night before they are due, but also two or three nights before they are due. My policy, one that usually worked well, was to inform students that, under normal circumstances, I would be happy to comment on a one-page summary that included a working title, abstract, and up to three paragraphs -- if the single page document were turned in a week before the paper itself was due. "Unusual cases" (papers with grades below a C-) were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes I would require that the paper be rewritten after an office conference, sometimes I would ask that a draft of the next paper be submitted at a mutually agreeable time.

    Moreover, I think my etiquette rules would vary depending on the class. First-year students are often nervous Nellies; they want to do well but they lack confidence, sometime for good reason. My advice would be to cut them some slack, at the same time that you make it clear, in class, that some behavior is cheesy rather than classy. Because I'm something of a ham, I'd ham it up from time to time in my first-year seminar with tales, some real, some just made up, about what I called "students from hell." Everybody laughed but got the point about what not to do. If I were still teaching, I'd probably borrow the example about the student who emailed about what binder to buy.

    Continued in article

     


    Student Concerns

    "Three Criticisms of the Online Classroom: An examination of a higher education online course in computer-mediated communication,"
    by Jennifer A. Minotti Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) Newton, Massachusetts, USA  --- 
    http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/october2002/index.html#3
     

    Learning Technology [ISSN 1438-0625] is published quarterly by the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available at no cost in HTML and PDF formats at http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/ 

    Technological expertise, access to technology, additional time associated with participation, and the changing role of the instructor a just a few of the many issues the online classroom has changed (and often times inhibited) the ways students learn (Baym, 1995, Berge & Collins, 1996, Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1996). The three largest issues found to affect the way students participated in a single graduate level online course, are described below.

    1.  Large Time Commitment

    Too much time was the biggest complaint heard by students. Nearly every participant in the class commented about the large time commitment the course required. Most all of the students also seemed surprised at how much more time the online class took up over traditional face-to-face courses. In addition, I observed that nearly every participant was late in completing at least one assignment. In fact, many students were late multiple assignments.

    "Having taken previous online courses in addition to this one, I definitely feel that online courses, though they provide access otherwise not available, require much more of a time commitment than face-to-face classes. Not only do we have weekly assignments, but the added 'checking in,' dialoguing through the week, and often troubleshooting our technology is much more demanding than in a traditional classroom setting, where the class meets once or twice per week."

    "…We might think it would be more convenient to participate in class wherever and whenever we wanted by means of the Internet. However…we are not free of having a location in learing--in fact we are more hinged to one spot (in front of the computer), because it is there that we must do all of our work for the class (course exploration of web sites, class projects, particpation in the newsgroup, reading of submissions to newsgroup). It does also seem to take more time to accomplish all that needs doing for an on-line course."

    2. Dealing with Technical Problems

    Technical and access issues remained the second largest criticism and a major challenge to students, despite the best laid plans for designing this course. In this class, students knowledge of and access to technology varied greatly. This presented huge obstacles to students, some of whom experienced trouble accessing the course right from the beginning. Other students experienced problems at different points in the class, which often made their learning experience frustrating.

    "I'm a bit frustrated and caught by the technical setup and requirements. Feedback on the process of the course to date: We could have used the month of February to get this behind us. I have allocated 10 hours a week to this course, using a formula of three times the amount of face time, assuming a typical three hour per week class. My time has been eaten up by the technical setup. I'm having a technical glitch with my company firewall."

    "Ugh…I feel like I have overcome some HUGE obstacles just by getting into this newsgroup. The frustration and anger levels have been high and I have recently caught myself yelling at my computer."

    3. Lack of Facilitation by the Instructor

    Lastly, a lot has been written about the critical role the instructor plays in ensuring online courses are successful (Baym, 1995, Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1996, Jones, 1995). In this class, students really wanted, needed, and valued an active instructor, one who was visible online providing feedback to their work, supporting and questioning their statements, encouraging participation, and keeping the class on track. When not online for several weeks at a time, several classmates become disheartened. In response to the survey question, "What were you most disappointed/surprised by?" two students wrote:

    "The lack of interaction from the professor. We really only got 'guidelines' twice this semester which was odd. Given the topic of our class, computer-mediated communication with the professor should have been examined. …I never knew if I was 'wrong' or totally off-base."

    "…It's lonely out here in VirtualLand. …I am missing our teacher in this space. I understand his desire for a logos however I'm not exactly sure that this group in in syn and heading toward the same goal."

    Conclusion

    Indeed, we have a long way to go before the higher education online classroom is as successful as our face-to-face classroom. This will of course take time and perseverance. It will also take a critical evaluation of what is working and not working in each course we design, deliver, and participate in.

    References

    Baym, N. (1995). The emergence of community in computer-mediated communication. In S. Jones, CyberSociety: Computer-mediated communication and community. California: Sage.

    Berge, Z.L., & Collins, M.P. (Eds.) (1996). Computer mediated communiation and the online classroom, Volume III: Distance learning. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

    Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L., Turoff, M. 1996). Learn/ing networks: A field guide to teaching and learning online. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    Jones, S.G. (1995). CyberSociety: Computer-mediated communication and community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Jennifer A. Minotti Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) Newton, Massachusetts, USA jminotti@edc.org 

    Student Technology Assessment at the Global Level

    Executive Summary

    The goal of the Computer Literacy Project is to gain a better understanding of student perceptions on the nature of computer literacy. The Computer Literacy Project Survey was developed over the last three years as the foundation of research into advanced technology use in education research. I have been particularly interested in the nature of computer literacy at the university level and in differential notions of computer literacy across disciplines. The survey has been electronically distributed to universities in nine states in the U.S and five countries outside the U.S., see Table 1. This is the first time in the history of education research that such a systematic study on computer literacy has been carried out using the Internet and web-based technology that has reached international proportions. Reported here are preliminary results from two Australian universities, one university in Hong Kong and one university in the US.

    Continued at http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/october2002/index.html#3  


    "What's wrong with PowerPoint--and how to fix it," by David Coursey, Executive Editor, AnchorDesk September 10, 2003 --- http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2914637,00.html 
    (Thank you Ed Scibner for pointing to this link.)

    Are PowerPoint slides making us stupid? Are all problems really just a few bullet points away from their solutions? Or is the medium having a bad effect on the message? I'm no Marshall McLuhan or Edward Tufte (I will pause here to let you all shout, "Damn straight!"), but I do know something about business presentations and how they're put together. And I know that PowerPoint too often gets in the way of the message, replacing clear thought with unnecessary animations, serious ideas with 10-word bullet points, substance with tacky, confusing style.

    I DON'T KNOW what McLuhan would think about PowerPoint, him being dead and all. But Tufte is very much alive and, in an essay appearing in the September issue of Wired, minces no words: "PowerPoint is evil," says the Yale professor whose books have set the standard for graphic presentation in the computer age.

    Tufte says that slideware programs like PowerPoint (there aren't many others left) "may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for speakers can be punishing to both content and audience." The standard PowerPoint deck, he says, "elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."

    This is especially true given that many presenters--who really shouldn't be presenting in the first place--use PowerPoint as a crutch. PowerPoint becomes a tool to separate the presenter from the audience and from the message.

    But it doesn't have to be this way. It's possible to use PowerPoint as a tool (just like the projector you probably use to display your presentation), and as a real complement to what you're saying, without dumbing down your ideas. Today I'd like to offer some advice to help you do just that.

     

    • Do the presentation first, then the slides. Many people draft and write their presentation in PowerPoint itself. It's far better to prepare the presentation in Word (or whatever other tool you use to write)--including all the detail you want to present--and then transfer the highlights to PowerPoint. The one problem with using Word for this: It doesn't have a very good outlining tool.

       

    • Artwork has killed more presentations than it's saved. You're not a graphic artist, and neither am I. PowerPoint makes it too easy to add confusing graphics to presentations. Use restraint.

       

    • Animation is for cartoons. Animation tends to take over the presentation, which then becomes more about the presenter trying to make all the builds and transitions work properly than actually presenting the content.

       

    • Present more than the slide. Don't you hate it when presenters stand at the front of a room and read their slides ?  Slides are supposed to convey the major points of the presentation, reinforcing the speaker's points. Use them as prompts to talk about specific topics, as an outline, not as the substance of the presentation itself.

       

    • Use the notes pages. Many people are unaware that PowerPoint lets you attach notes to slides, which can then be printed and used to guide you or to give to the audience. Search for "notes" in the Help file to find out more about this feature.

       

    • Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. No, you don't have to stand in front of a mirror and do your entire presentation. But a sit-down with some colleagues can answer the questions, "Do these slides make sense?" and "Is this the information people care about?"--before you find out the hard way.
    My point here is that PowerPoint glitz alone does not an effective presentation make. While your decks shouldn't be boring, they aren't entertainment, either. A few staging and showbiz skills help, but most presentations are won or lost in the actual content. Your job is to control PowerPoint. If you don't, PowerPoint will control your presentation.

    The Digital Divide is Real

    In the 15th Century when the printing press was invented, the majority of the world's population was illiterate and could not make use of the books that poured forth.  Six hundred years later, a large proportion of the world's population still can neither read nor write.  In the 21st Century when the printing press gives way to digital storage and networked distribution, the hardcore illiterate will not benefit by virtue of being illiterate.  An even larger number who can read and write will still not have access anywhere close to the privileged populace having access to modern technologies.

    One day, modern technologies will be the main agent in eradicating illiteracy and ignorance.  But in the interim decades, or even centuries, these technologies will exacerbate the divide between those who can benefit directly from technologies and those who are denied access for one reason or another (poverty, isolation, religious constraints, cultural constraints, etc.)


    Websites Failing Disabled Users

    "Websites 'failing' disabled users," by Geoff Adams-Spink, BBC News Online, April 14, 2004 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3623407.stm 

    An investigation by the Disability Rights Commission shows that most websites are unusable by disabled people.

    This means that many everyday activities carried out on the internet - booking a holiday, managing a bank account, buying theatre tickets or finding a cheaper credit card - are difficult or impossible for many disabled people.

    Bert Massie, DRC Chairman described the situation as "unacceptable", and said the organisation was determined not to allow disabled people to be left behind by technology

    A thousand websites were tested for the survey using automated software, and detailed user testing was carried out on 100 sites, including government, business, e-commerce, leisure and web services such as search engines.

    The results showed that the worst affected group were those with visual impairments.

    Blind people involved in testing websites were unable to perform nearly all of the tasks required of them despite using devices such as screen readers.

    "The web has been around for 10 years, yet within this short space of time it has managed to throw up the same hurdles to access and participation by disabled people as the physical world," said Mr Massie.

    "It is an environment that could be made more accommodating to disabled people at a relatively modest expense."

    Mr Massie warned website owners to improve accessibility or be prepared to face legal action.

    The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act requires information providers to make their services accessible.

    The problems most commonly encountered by the disabled website testers were cluttered pages, confusing navigation, failure to describe images and poor colour contrast between background and text.

    Researchers at London's City University, who carried out the study for the DRC, also found that many web developers were unaware of what needed to be done to make sites accessible.

    Continued in the article

    Good Website Design Checklist

    • Provide text equivalence for non-text elements 
    • Ensure good color contrast between foreground and background 
    • Pages must be usable when scripts and applets are turned off or not supported 
    • Avoid movement in pages 
    • Avoid pop-ups and don't change window without telling user 
    • Divide large blocks of information into manageable chunks 
    • Clearly identify the target of each link 
    • Use the clearest and simplest language possible

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    DRC

     


    Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students?
    Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

    Accessibility in Distance Education A Resource for Faculty in Online Teaching --- http://www.umuc.edu/ade/ 

    Common Questions
    What does the word "accessibility" mean? (What is Accessibility?)

    What disability laws should I know about if I teach online? (Legal Issues)

    What do I need to consider if I have a student with a disability in my online course? (Understanding Disabilities)

    How do I make my Web site accessible to everyone, including students with disabilities? (How-To)

    What does an accessible Web site look like? Does it have to be text based? (Best Practices)

    You can download the MP3 audio file of Susan Spencer's August 2002 presentation on this at one of my workshops --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002 

     


    Lots of Hype and Not Much Profit

    From customer to analyst to investor, the consensus is that E-learning still has a few things of its own to learn. Until last month, the online-training sector wasn't as hard hit by the IT spending slump as most of the tech industry because it lets companies with tight travel and training budgets train workers inexpensively. But all that's changed. http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eHIP0BcUEY04e0Bcm70A1 

    "E-Learning Struggles To Make The Grade," by Elisabeth Goodridge, Information, May 13, 2002 --- http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020509S0011 

    From customer to analyst to investor, the consensus is that E-learning still has a few things of its own to learn. It's a technology that's being re-evaluated across the board. There are plenty of problems, as early adopters discovered. "Many people have been burned," Meta Group analyst Jennifer Vollmer says. "And they're advising others to hold off if it isn't necessary."

    Some of the stumbling blocks that trip up users of E-learning technologies are integration and interoperability problems among elements of E-learning systems; product limitations; inadequate support services; and vendors' financial woes.

    But until last month, the online-training sector wasn't as hard-hit by the IT-spending slump as most of the technology industry. What E-learning had going for it was an ability to let companies with tight travel and training budgets train workers inexpensively.

    For about a year and a half, many providers saw double-digit revenue growth, and several quickly became leaders in a field of hundreds. Docent, Plateau Systems, and Saba Software emerged as top developers of learning-management systems. Centra Software and Interwise became known for live-collaboration software, and NetG, SmartForce, and SkillSoft gained popularity as course-content designers.

    Now, weakening demand is evident. Centra, SmartForce, and learning-management system makers Click2learn and DigitalThink warned in April of revenue shortfalls. On Wall Street, many suppliers' shares have lost more than 50% of their value since January.

    Still, E-learning has a future; what it lacks is maturity. So, while there are businesses seeking the E-learning advantage, many are taking their time doing so. Before investing in these systems, they want to make sure they fully understand their own training needs, what works and doesn't in an E-learning format, and their product options. "People are slowing down on jumping into E-learning with both feet," says Larry Carlile, E-learning manager at consulting firm A.T. Kearney. "From cost savings to effectiveness, there's a better analysis these days."

    Companies know that E-learning is no longer just about immediate cost savings but about increasing worker productivity, driving operational efficiencies, and streamlining corporate training. "With all of these benefits, E-learning is going to work, but we haven't found the best way to go about it," says Giga Information Group analyst Claire Schooley.

    A number of deals in recent weeks show that many companies still believe they can make E-learning work. The American Red Cross and learning-management system supplier Plateau Systems cut a seven-year deal worth more than $10 million; Pathlore Software Corp. implemented a system for Delta Air Lines Inc.; and Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. said last month that its use of the Vuepoint Learning System to consolidate training departments will save the automaker more than $11.9 million in five years.

    Continued at  http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020509S0011  


    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change and Mutation

    Fearing your student evaluations, how much time and trouble should you devote to email questions from your students?
    For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility. The stakes are different for professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick, chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts, explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com  and describe their impressions of their professors on blogs.
    Jonathan D. Glater, "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me," The New York Times, February 21, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on controversies over student evaluations are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation


    "Fulfilling Technology's Broken Promise: A Perspective on Educational Technology,"
    by Robert Bilyk, co-founder of lodeStar Learning Inc. and Cyber Village Academy, T.H.E. Journal, February 2006 ---
    http://www.thejournal.com/articles/17933/

    The Broken Promise of Technology
    The one inarguable difference between now and then has been the promise that technology holds for the classroom teacher. In the early 1980s, I worked with stand-alone machines that could render stick figures on the screen and display text and numbers. The state of the art in audio was a few timely beeps. Nevertheless, I could envision the promise and began creating things that I could use in the classroom to help kids.

    Over the course of time, more and more educators have turned to technology to help kids—but only to be disappointed time and again. Computers were expensive, they broke or became obsolete, they didn’t talk to one another, and they divided teachers’ allegiance through the great schism of Macs vs. PCs. Then there was the software that sat in shrink-wrapped packages unused. Integrated Learning Systems (ILS) were also expensive and inflexible. If a teacher didn’t like the pedagogy or content of a particular lesson, she could do little to change, add, or delete content. Teachers had to accept the bad with the good: ILS perpetuated the existence of the stick figure; computers threatened the existence of the teacher. At least, that was a common apprehension.

    And despite the greater use of technology, studies such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study from the National Center for Education Statistics have shown that our students still weren’t achieving well in math and science compared to their European and Asian counterparts. Fortunately, today’s educators are on the cusp of a tremendous realization: The promise that computers held for increased student achievement are finally being realized.

    The New Promise of Technology
    A teacher today who dares to imagine the possibilities that current technology affords won’t be disappointed: The total cost of ownership of a computer continues to decrease. Software is cheap and oftentimes free. Access to the Internet and all of the educational content that it holds is practically ubiquitous in American schools. Standards permit dissimilar computers to communicate with one another, and for educational content to be searched and shared. Therefore, technology needs to be met halfway. Lead teachers, mentor teachers, curriculum directors and administrators—teachers in general—must dare to dream again. Schools must place networked computers in classrooms, libraries, lobbies, and wherever else they can be safely accessed. Accessibility to computers is essential. Teachers need to be trained—not once but often. Professional development is also essential because teachers need to support each another. Ideally, teachers from common disciplines would network with one another. The use of instructional technology by teachers to improve student achievement must become habitual. And finally, all roads must lead to the teacher. That is, all student performance data must flow effortlessly to the teacher.

    To fulfill the promise, computer use by teachers must become habitual, and computer use to improve student achievement must become habitual. The advent of learning management systems like Microsoft Class Server, Blackboard and Desire2Learn has enabled teachers to manage the student online learning experience. Often, school districts direct this usage to the exception—offering activities to children who are ill, replacing snow days with online days, and providing a class to a home-schooled child.

    The snow day example was my favorite. The online snow day was designed by well-intentioned educators, but it had its flaws. In this example, the school trained its entire staff on an LMS so that one day, when it snowed, students could access their courses online. On the day it snowed, the untested system failed; staff were out of practice in creating, assigning, and grading; and students could hardly remember how to log on. This example might seem a little extraordinary, yet variations on this same theme are commonplace. Rather than integrating online curriculum into the example, schools flirt with technology at the edges, addressing the “unusual situation” so that the business of integrating the class with technology does not become “habitual” and second nature for teachers.

    Continued in article

    February 24, 2006 reply from Robert Holmes Glendale College [rcholmes@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]

    I have spent time in these classes reflecting on the role of the teacher. (I am mostly retired and teach one accounting class online.) The most effective classes are those that invlove two way communication with the students. Technology and lectures are poor substitutes for this dialogue. The electricity that sparks in the classes as the students offer ideas, the instructor says give me more, other students say "I never thought about that" is something to behold. I feel sorry for those (including my students) who have to try to get an education without this kind of enriching excitement.


    One damaging effect of the clash between the academic and IT cultures is that teaching and scholarship have remained relatively untouched by the new information technologies.
    Edward L. Ayers (, "The Academic Culture and the IT Culture: Their Effect on Teaching and Scholarship," EDUCAUSE Review, December 2004 --- http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm04/erm0462.asp 
    Edward L. Ayers is Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and is Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

    A year ago, my colleague Charles Grisham and I wrote an EDUCAUSE Review article entitled "Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Hoped (Yet)." In short, we argued that information technology has not yet transformed higher education because the areas of teaching and scholarship, the "heart" of colleges and universities, have remained relatively untouched by the new technologies. In this article, I’d like to continue the discussion and also go further, exploring not only why these two areas continue to be, for the most part, resistant to the changes but also how technology can successfully address these core missions of higher education.1

    The Invisible Success of IT Those of us who have been involved for a while in the long courtship between higher education and information technology can recall many ups and downs in the last thirty years or so.2 We remember when we first saw Mosaic, Netscape, and the World Wide Web. At each step along the way, some of the more impressionable among us thought that one innovation or another would push us over the top, that we would have finally gained the critical mass that would channel the undeniable power of information technology into higher education. We watched as commerce was transformed, as entertainment was transformed, as personal communication was transformed, and we kept waiting for the moment when higher education would be transformed in the same way.

    In particular, we waited for the time when the very heart of education—the classroom and the scholarship taught in that classroom—would be transformed. Yet despite the tremendous investment that all institutions of higher education have made in information technology, despite the number of classrooms wired and the number of laptops mandated, the vast majority of classes proceed as they have for generations—isolated, even insulated, from the powerful technologies we use in the rest of our lives. Moreover, the form in which scholarship appears has barely changed. Across almost every field, researchers, no matter how sophisticated the technology they use in discovery, translate their discoveries into simple word-processed documents. Sure, they sometimes add JPEG images and other illustrations; and in the sciences, pre-prints rush around the world long before print journals would be able to publish the articles. But producing scholarly discourse in HTML and PDF formats has not changed scholarship in any significant manner. The nature of argument has remained remarkably resistant to innovation in rhetoric or form in every field of scholarly endeavor.

    Very real technological accomplishments have tended to become invisible because they have been so successful. If you had told people a decade ago that card catalogs would virtually disappear within ten years and would be replaced by our current information-management systems, they would not have believed you. Librarians have been the real heroes of the digital revolution in higher education. They are the ones who have seen the farthest, done the most, accepted the hardest challenges, and demonstrated most clearly the benefits of digital information. In the process, they have turned their own field upside down and have revolutionized their professional training. It is testimony to their success that we take their achievement—and their information-management systems—for granted.

    Similarly, college and university IT professionals have done more than anyone has asked them to do. The speed with which they have built networks and infrastructure, trained people, and created new student-registration and fiscal-management systems has been remarkable. And again, their success is taken for granted, with IT becoming almost as invisible as the electricity on which it runs. In a cruel irony, few faculty think "Ah, I will now use technology" whenever they check to see whether a book is in the library, or whether a student is enrolled, or whether their paycheck has been posted. And yet many do think: "I don’t want to use technology, or I can’t use technology, to teach in the classroom or to disseminate my scholarship." Those faculty who have ignored all the excitement up to this point have decided that they can withstand whatever else is put before them until the end of their careers. They go to their professional scholarly meetings and see only a few workshops and talks on the new technologies; they read the job ads and see that the jobs require exactly the same credentials as were required a quarter century ago.

    The bottom line is that despite all the work and successes of IT professionals, teaching and scholarship at leading institutions of higher education remain relatively resistant to the possibilities of information technology.

    The Academic and IT Cultures From the viewpoint of a dean who would love to see the transformation of higher education accelerated, and from the viewpoint of a long-time laborer in the technology vineyard who would love to see some of the fruit come to harvest, I’m struck by many faculty members’ resistance to the obvious benefits of the maturing technologies. From the viewpoint of a professor, however, I understand some of the more obvious reasons for this resistance: shortages of time, money, and energy. In addition, I see more systemic reasons, ones that we might call "cultural": deeply patterned, deeply entrenched habits of thoughts and behavior. The problem is that the academic culture and the IT culture simply do not mix together well.

    Nobody seems to like the word academic. "That’s merely academic" is used as a dismissive description of something irrelevant to real life, something as pointless as counting angels on the head of a pin or writing an English composition paper on Beowulf. Any mention of the word academic in a book review is a kiss of death. In a particularly cruel twist, even when a nonacademic praises a book by a professor, the reviewer often dismisses the academy in the process: "Not the boring, self-indulgent, impenetrable, dithering book we always expect from an academic, this book is almost as good as one written by someone who knows a lot less about the subject."

    When asked to identify ourselves, almost no professors choose "academic" as their first choice. "College teacher" can sometimes sound good, with its shades of the movie Dead Poets Society. "Professor" can be OK on occasion, bringing to mind John Houseman in the movie The Paper Chase. Saying that you work "at the college" or "over at the university" can usually get you through a casual conversation without too much loss of status at the tire store or supermarket.

    But being more specific can often cause problems. When I’m on an airplane and tell someone that I teach history, all too often the response is: "Boy, I always hated history—all those names and dates." I got some notion of this when I started to work on the subject of the Civil War, and my mother-in-law, a very sweet woman, introduced me to one of her friends as a "Civil War buff." I carefully tried to explain the difference between a historian and a buff, with the main difference seeming to be that I don’t have another job from which the Civil War is merely a hobby.

    As problematic as disciplinary nomenclature can be, adding "academic" makes it even more toxic. The title of "dean" sounds imposing, if faintly scary (satisfyingly enough), since so few people, including deans, know exactly what a dean does. But even I cringe when I think about defining myself as what I actually am during most of my waking hours: an "academic administrator." It’s hard to think of many job descriptions (for legally paying work) that have more negative connotations than that. The title conjures up all the mustiness of "academic" along with all the bureaucratic, paper-pushing, rubber stamp–wielding, red tape–entangling connotations of "administration."

    On the other hand, as someone who has served on IT committees dominated by IT staff, I know how IT people speak about academics. I’ve seen the eye-rolling and heard the chuckling at some of the more clueless of my academic colleagues who can’t figure out how to empty the trashbin on their desktop computer. Still, my friends in information technology have their own struggles. You know the stereotypes. You’ve heard the whispers: "geek." As for me, I represent the worst of all worlds: I’m both a lifelong academic and a longtime IT geek. But perhaps this does give me the credentials to delve into the nomenclature of both the academic culture and the IT culture.

    For a definition of geek, I turn to a very convenient authority, the dictionary function of Microsoft Word:

    geek (n.): 
    1. somebody who is considered unattractive and socially awkward (insult) 
    2. a carnival performer whose act consists of outrageous feats such as biting the heads off live animals 
    3. somebody who enjoys or takes pride in using computers or other technology, often to what others consider an excessive degree (informal disapproving) 

    Leaving aside "biting the heads off live animals"—an activity that, in my experience, is indulged in by only a few academic administrators, and usually in private—I rest my case. When your own computer program tells you that by using that very program to "an excessive degree," you are becoming increasingly "unattractive and socially awkward," you might suspect that you’re in trouble. If you brush that warning aside to finish writing an article with that same program, you really are a geek.

    As is often the case with oppressed groups, the disdain faced by those in the IT arena and those in the academic arena has not always brought the two together in a shared bond. The two cultures have so much to offer one another, so much to teach one another, if they would only look past the tweed and elbow patches on the one hand and the pocket protectors on the other. The IT industry and the academy share some obvious and important characteristics. Both deal with intangibles, especially ideas. Both are focused on networks and on the information those networks carry. Both are dedicated to innovation and competition. Both are extensible structures: build something once, and you can apply it everywhere.

    But taking a clear-eyed view reveals that there’s more to the story. As shown in Table 1, information technology and the academy display competing characteristics.

    Table 1.
    Competing Characteristics

    Information Technology The Academy
    • everywhere and nowhere
    • strongly identified with a very specific location
    • brash young industry
    • a self-consciously ancient institution
    • highly unstable
    • the most stable institution across the world
    • new competitors continually emerge
    • impossible to break into top ranks
    • possibility of great profits
    • no possibility of profit at all
    • work performed by anonymous teams
    • centered on scholarly stars
    • obsolescence built in
    • designed to deny obsolescence
    • virtually instant results necessary     
    • patience a central virtue
    • designed to be transparent
    • opaque and labyrinth

    Since information technology has infiltrated every nook and cranny of other parts of life, it seems to me that it must be the academy that resists. That is because several basic paradoxes lie at the heart of the modern American university—basic conflicts that make the academy a fascinating place to live and a hard place to administer:

    Continued in the article


    Teachers Must Adapt to Changed Mindsets of Incoming Students Who Grew Up With Computers

    "How do you communicate with students who have grown up with technology? Schools are looking to technology for the answer," by Kevin Delaney, The Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2005, Page R4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110556110781524378,00.html?mod=todays_us_the_journal_report 

    Forget the computer lab. To hold the attention of the tech-savvy PlayStation 2 generation, educators are working digital technology into every corner of the curriculum.

    Pioneering teachers are getting their classes to post writing assignments online so other students can easily read and critique them. They're letting kids practice foreign languages in electronic forums instead of pen-and-paper journals. They're passing out PDAs to use in scientific experiments and infrared gadgets that let students answer questions in class with the touch of a button. And in the process, the educators are beginning to interact with students, parents and each other in ways they never have before.

    The issue is, "how do we communicate with students today who have grown up with technology from the beginning?" says Tim Wilson, a technology-integration specialist at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, Minn. "The traditional linear approach...often seems too slow and boring to students used to MTV, instant messaging and MP3s."

    Permanent Record

    Boosting this grass-roots tech effort is a new wave of free and low-cost technologies and services. Online forums and Web logs, or blogs, are simple to set up and free to use. So are "wikis" -- Web pages that can be written on as well as read, making it easy for teachers to make notes in the digital margins. Hardware, too, is getting cheaper: Prices have fallen for everything from wireless-networking equipment to hand-held gadgets to personal computers. And thanks to a computerization drive of the past decade or so, 99% of public schools now have Internet access, with an average of one computer for every five students, according to the Department of Education.

    The department recently concluded that schools on the whole aren't doing enough with that infrastructure. But in schools across the country, a corps of tech-savvy educators are showing how to get the job done. Students in journalism classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J., for example, never turn in hard-copy assignments. They post them on blogs -- which allows their teacher, Will Richardson, and their fellow students to read and post comments about the articles.

    Mr. Richardson says students like the blogs especially as an organizing tool, letting them easily search through past assignments. More broadly, he believes the blogs have "really profound implications" for education: Students discuss each other's work in new ways, such as linking to relevant information on the Web to support their comments. In some cases, people outside the school can access the blogs, providing students with a platform for disseminating their views. The blogs also let parents keep up to date on their kids' assignments more easily than ever before.

    Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., also uses Web-based publishing technology to open up new possibilities in communication. Fifth-graders send classwork, and essays and articles for their monthly newspaper, to a wiki over the school's network. Teacher Kathy Gould goes to the Web page and writes corrections and comments directly into the text -- instead of posting a note in a separate "comments" section, as with a blog. Students can then access the wiki to read and respond to her comments.

    Meanwhile, students in John Unruh-Friesen's advanced-placement government class at Hopkins High School conduct running debates on an online forum outside of the classroom. The students, mostly 12th-graders, tackle issues including the presidential election, the possibility of a military draft and the Middle East conflict.

    "Some students are reluctant to participate in class discussions," says Mr. Wilson, the technology-integration specialist at Hopkins. "Some of those kids feel much more comfortable interacting when they have time to craft a response."

    Students in advanced foreign-language classes at Hopkins use forums to keep online journals and interact with each other. For example, the instructor of the fifth-year French course, Molly Wieland, used to require students to keep paper journals in French. Since moving those to an online forum, she says the students write more than they did before.

    The fact that they're writing for an audience larger than just their teacher makes a difference, and what they're saying tends to be more conversational and relevant to the students' lives. A recent exchange between the students involved college choices and the wisdom of rooming with your best friend in the dorm -- all in French.

    Continued in the article

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    Concerns About Faculty Workloads and Burnout

    Question
    Why should teaching a course online take "twice as much time" as teaching it onsite?

    Answer
    Introduction to Economics:  Experiences of teaching this course online versus onsite

    With a growing number of courses offered online and degrees offered through the Internet, there is a considerable interest in online education, particularly as it relates to the quality of online instruction. The major concerns are centering on the following questions: What will be the new role for instructors in online education? How will students' learning outcomes be assured and improved in online learning environment? How will effective communication and interaction be established with students in the absence of face-to-face instruction? How will instructors motivate students to learn in the online learning environment? This paper will examine new challenges and barriers for online instructors, highlight major themes prevalent in the literature related to “quality control or assurance” in online education, and provide practical strategies for instructors to design and deliver effective online instruction. Recommendations will be made on how to prepare instructors for quality online instruction.
    Yi Yang and Linda F. Cornelious, "Preparing Instructors for Quality Online Instruction, Working Paper --- http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/spring81/yang81.htm

    Jensen Comment:  The bottom line is that teaching the course online took twice as much time because "largely from increased student contact and individualized instruction and not from the use of technology per se." 

    Bob Jensen's threads on the positive side are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    SURVEY ON QUALITY AND EXTENT OF ONLINE EDUCATION

    The Sloan Consortium's 2003 Survey of Online Learning wanted to know would students, faculty, and institutions embrace online education as a delivery method and would the quality of online education match that of face-to-face instruction. The survey found strong evidence that students are willing to sign up for online courses and that institutions consider online courses part of a "critical long-term strategy for their institution." It is less clear that faculty have embraced online teaching with the same degree of enthusiasm. The survey's findings are available in "Sizing the Opportunity: The Quality & Extent of Online Education in the U.S., 2002 and 2003" by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, Sloan Center for Online Education at Olin and Babson Colleges. The complete report is online at http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/sizing_opportunity.pdf 

    The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/ 

     

    July 1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu

    STUDY OF ONLINE TEACHING WORKLOAD

    In "Faculty Self-Study Research Project: Examining the Online Workload" (JOURNAL OF ASYNCHRONOUS LEARNING NETWORKS, vol. 8, issue 3, June 2004), Melody M. Thompson, Director of the American Center for the Study of Distance Education at Penn State, reports on a workload study that was designed to go beyond anecdotal testimony. In the project six faculty who were teaching online courses "strove to identify those tasks that consumed a disproportionate amount of faculty time -- particularly time taken away from actual teaching/learning interactions with students." The study indicated that their workload "as measured by time on task, was comparable to or somewhat less than that for face-to-face courses." The article is available online at http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v8n3/v8n3_thompson.asp .

    The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) [ISSN 1092-8235] is an electronic publication of The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C). Current and back issues are available at http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln .

    Accounting professors who teach online discuss their workloads at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/cepSanAntonio.htm 

    "Teaching Courses Online:  How Much Time Does It Take," by Belinda Davis Lazarus, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, September 2003 --- http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v7n3/v7n3_lazarus.asp 

    ABSTRACT 
    Studies show that temporal factors like workload and lack of release time inhibit faculty participation in developing and teaching online courses; however, few studies exist to gauge the time commitment. This longitudinal case study, presented at the Seventh Annual Sloan-C International Conference on ALN, examined the amount of time needed to teach three asynchronous online courses at The University of Michigan-Dearborn from Winter 1999 through Winter 2000. Twenty-five students were enrolled in each course. Self-monitoring was used to measure the amount of time required to complete the following activities: 1) reading and responding to emails; 2) reading, participating in, and grading 10 online discussions; and 3) grading 15 assignments. Using a stopwatch, the investigator timed and recorded the number of minutes needed for each activity. Also, all messages and assignments were archived and frequency counts were recorded. The weekly, mean number of minutes and assignments was entered on line graphs for analysis. The data showed that teaching each online course required 3 to 7 hours per week, with the greatest number of emails and amount of time required during the first and last 2-weeks of the semesters. Participation in and grading of the discussions took the greatest amount of time and remained steady across the semester. However unlike many live courses, the students participated more in the discussions than the instructor did. The number of assignments that were submitted each week steadily increased over each semester. This case study indicates that the time needed to teach online courses falls within the range of reasonable expectations for teaching either live or online courses and represents the beginning of this area of inquiry. Consequently, additional studies are needed with a variety of instructors across a variety of courses and disciplines to further pinpoint faculty time commitment.

    KEYWORDS Online Courses, Longitudinal Experiment, Faculty Workload, Teaching Online Courses


    Personal E-mails Can Overwhelm

    "Please Learn From My Mistakes," by David G. Brown, Syllabus, August 2002 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6592 

    I have come to the sad realization that many of the innovations designed to keep my course fresh have failed. My memories of failures are so poignant that it may be constructive to share them here. They can serve as warnings to others.

    Unstructured chat room discussions don’t work. Chats lack depth. Someone new is always interrupting the online conversation with his or her own topic just when the discussion is getting interesting.

    Ungraded assignments are usually ignored. I used to ask two students to search the Web for two or three sites that provided alternative ways to learn the “topic of the day.” They shared information on these sites in annotated bibliographies. An end-of-the-course evaluation, however, revealed that their classmates never went to these sites.

    My current practice is to require each student to e-mail me with an evaluative comment regarding the sites. They know that their comments will factor into the participation portion of their course grades. A recent end-of-the-course evaluation now shows that the students regard the alternate Web sites as important and useful components of the course.

    Personal e-mails can overwhelm. One semester, I asked all of my students to send me an e-mail answer to an assigned question each time we reached the end of a textbook chapter. The responsibility for reading and evaluating all those submissions just about ruined my family life. Now I have Student A e-mail a proposed answer to Students B and C. Students A, B, and C must settle on a single answer. They teach one another, and I have only one-third as much grading to do.

    Students need to know in advance what their responsibilities are if the computer network goes down on the eve of an important deadline. Networks do go down. Students will panic, unless there are instructions in the syllabus that anticipate forgiveness or outline their alternatives.

    Another semester, several weeks before the final, I accidentally deleted all my students’ grades from the electronic grade book. Fortunately, the syllabus stressed that each student is expected to keep a copy of every assignment submitted and also of every grade-related message sent to him or her. With help from the class and substantial effort, I was able to reconstruct the gradebook. Now I print out a backup copy of grades about every two weeks.

    I’ve come to realize that students accessing materials from course Web sites using a dial-up modem from a shared apartment off campus cannot, or will not, wait for long downloads. I had the bright—and well-received—idea of personalizing the list of course assignments. For each of our 34 assignment days I added thumbnail photos of the students responsible for presenting their special reports. Although student reaction to this personalization was quite positive, I noticed that they were consulting the list of assignments less frequently. A focus group session revealed that the list was now taking longer than a minute to open. Consulting the list was an increased burden.

    My students bring their laptops to class everyday. Even so, I’ve learned that it’s wise to exchange e-mail messages before class when anything out of the ordinary is to occur. If, for example, my plan for the day requires that every student have their computer, I send the class an e-mail message.

    I suspect that others have made mistakes from which we can all learn. If you have a brief story you’d like me to share in a future column, please e-mail me. Let me know if it’s OK to mention your name or if you’d prefer to remain anonymous.


    Online Faculty Workloads

    The CIT Infobits May 2002 article "Online Teaching and the 24-Hour Professor" ( http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitmay02.html#1 ) described how the Internet is changing professors' workdays and workloads. John Messing, Director of the Research Centre for Innovation in Telelearning Environments at Charles Sturt University, continues this topic in "Can Academics Afford to Use E-mail?" (E-JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 5, no. 2, August 2002). Messing reports on a study that began as "an attempt to quantify what many educators have suspected . . . that the workload associated with the use of online tools is considerably higher than with conventional technologies. In the process of trying to make sense of the data, it became clear that there are a number of issues such as increased expectations on the part of students and the disproportionate load that administrative use of e-mail places on academics that are rarely, if ever, considered as part of the debate.

    he study analyzed the author's administrative and course-related email messages from 1991-2001. Some of his observations:

    Regarding course-related email: "While the number of students in [his Graduate Diploma of Applied Science] course has doubled, the volume of communication has increased 11 fold. . . ."

    Regarding administrative email: "It might take a secretary 10 to 15 minutes to duplicate and distribute meeting papers to 20 people [via email]. If it takes each recipient just 5 minutes to read, extract, print and collect the meeting papers, that represents a total of 100 minutes. The secretary saves 10 minutes but the recipients collectively lose 100 minutes."

    He concludes, "Just how much extra time an individual is prepared to sacrifice in order to also receive the benefits of the use of such tools is debatable. From a personal perspective, the limit has been reached. With well over 3000 e-mails to contend with in one semester, the system has become a scourge rather than a blessing."

    The article is available online at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol6No_1/messing_frame.html  (HTML format) and http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol6No_1/Messing%20-%20Final.pdf (PDF format).

    e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is published by the Distance Education Centre, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland 4350, Australia; Web: http://www.usq.edu.au/dec/  Current and back issues of e-JIST are available at no cost at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/ 


    Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout

    Barbara Brown wrote the following:

    There are many myths and tacit assumptions about computer-mediated learning that can be explored in the Fielding context. Much has been written about technological efficiency and the potential of the Internet as an educational medium to save time and money or increase productivity. The author’s experience inspires a healthy skepticism in this regard. Having taught students in conventional classrooms for two decades, I experienced the computer-mediated mode of instruction as more time-consuming, at least initially, both from the standpoint of up-front course design and later, painstaking, labor intensive hours online - designing messages for the classroom forum, reading and downloading from the screen, posting new material, providing feedback, checking community bulletin boards, e-mailing student comments and grade reports, etc. In fact, there were many times when I felt torn between my real life and my virtual life on-screen, in an identity challenging  [Turkle, Sherry (1995), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.] sort of way, simply because there did not seem to exist enough hours in the day to do justice to both. This was the case even in an "asynchronous" environment where I had the flexibility to conduct electronic office hours in my bathrobe over morning coffee or post feedback in the dead of night.

    Moreover, absent face-to-face contact and ordinary non-verbal clues, even very mature students on the Internet demand more frequent interaction and reassurance in dialogue with their professors, an observation confirmed in student course evaluations. Students demand more feedback; and the more feedback they receive, the more interaction they want. There are at least two possible interpretations of this phenomenon: One is that it reflects the way students compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction. Or, it may be that this medium disinhibits student communication, thereby stimulating the message exchange process. As the intellectual excitement of these conversations grows, so does the amount of interactivity in the virtual community.[See Rafaeli, Sheizaf and Fay Sudweeks (1998), "Interactivity in the Nets," in Network & Net Play: Virtual Groups on the Internet,
    Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press/The MIT Press]

    I estimate this mode of instruction requires roughly 40% to 50% more work on the teacher’s part in comparison with conventional classroom delivery. For example, where I might put approximately 36 hours of work per week routinely into a regular course load with a total of 120 students in four traditional class sections at a large public university, online instruction at Fielding required 50 hours or more per week - with only 24 students in just three sections of my digital classes. It also takes longer for faculty members and administrators to reach consensus in electronic group meetings.

    B.M. Brown
    "Digital Classrooms:  Some Myths About Developing New Educational Programs Using the Internet,"
    T.H.E. Journal, December 98, p. 57
    The online version is at
    http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/current/feat04.html

    Also see Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change


    Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education

    Concerns About High Attrition Rates in Distance Education

    From Infobits on December 21, 2001

    HOW TO KEEP E-LEARNERS FROM E-SCAPING

    Institutions that offer e-learning courses are reporting high levels of student attrition and a wide gap between student enrollments and completions. The authors of "How to Keep E-Learners from E-scaping" (by Jim Moshinskie and the eLITE Think Tank, JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTION DEVELOPMENT, vol. 14, no. 1, Summer 2001, pp. 8-11) present some techniques for getting, motivating, and keeping online students. Although the paper focuses primarily on online corporate trainers, the ideas are transferable to any online learning environment.

    Some of the techniques outlined in the paper are common to all instruction delivery methods; some are specific to online teaching and learning. Here are a few of the authors' strategies:

    Before the Online Course "What's in it for me?" Before the course begins, course providers must help learners see the benefit of taking the course and taking it online. Instructors must know their learners' goals, work environments, and connection capabilities. If the course is for in-service professional development, the students' employers need to get involved in providing peer coachers and by creating opportunities for practice and feedback.

    During the Online Course Online learning can be an isolating experience for students. During the online course, instructors need to pay attention to feedback and human interaction to make up for the lack of in-person contact. Strategies include giving legitimate feedback that focuses on an individual's progress and specifically addresses individual performance. "Chat rooms, E-mail, electronic office hours, audio streaming, and online mentoring" all can provide the "human touch" between instructor and student and among fellow students.

    After the Online Course Recognizing that learning is a process, not an event, instructors can support the student who completes the course by offering follow-up communication, virtual mentoring, and help in applying the learning in the student's workplace.

    Note: the article is not available on the Web. Check with your college or university library to obtain copies.

    Journal of Interactive Instruction Development [ISSN 1040-0370] is published quarterly by the Learning Technology Institute, 50 Culpeper Street, Warrenton, VA 20186 USA; tel: 540-347-0055; fax: 540-439-3169; email: info@lti.org ; Web: http://www.lti.org/ 


    Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus

    In 1997, I listened to an address by Robert S. Sullivan, Directory of the IC2 Institute, University of Texas at Austin. He was extremely positive about opportunities for ALN networking and bridging of curriculum gaps with web courses that in many instances will become much higher in quality than a single university will normally be able to develop only for its own campus. At the end of his address, in response to a question from the audience, he did raise two very serious concerns (that I paraphrased below from my videotape of his remarks):

    Problem 1: One day a "university" may only be left with onsite faculty and programs that distributed education vendors are not willing to "pay for." There is an important debate going on that focuses on the issue of whether the "university concept" might be undermined.

    Problem 2: Students, especially undergraduate students, cannot have a complete learning experience without being physically present on a campus. The interpersonal and social dynamics of a campus may be put at risk with distributed learning.

    Robert S. Sullivan, August 20, 1997 Plenary Session
    Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association

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    Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian

    One of my students, Elizabeth Eudy, coined the phrase "irrevocably Orwellian."  At http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/eeudy/aln.htm she writes the following:

    Although it is too far fetched to say that we will turn into cold, heartless robots as a result of ALN and that our society has become irrevocably Orwellian, the lack of face-to-face social interaction could potentially do more harm than good in our education. Will graduates of ALN degree programs be left wondering how they will cope in an actual job interview? Students need social interaction as vital component of maturation and professional development. The most successful use of ALN thus presents itself as a combination of online courses and real classroom interaction. The classes do not necessarily have to meet twice or three times a week as most do now, but rather as needed by the demands of students or by the judgment of the professor. In any case, as the market for ALN courses expands (as it is doing) traditional universities will have to upgrade their curriculum to ALN in order to remain competitive.

    At a later point she writes the following:

    ALN courses can be dehumanized to such an extent that students will no longer feel as if they belong to a learning community. Community is a key concept for the learning process, and enables students to gain support from each other. This concept is taken to the limit in traditional universities where students belong to a university community--they live in the dorms, they eat together at the cafeteria, they join various student organizatons, and most importantly, they learn together. The professors and students ideally belong to the same community of learning; although in some universities students feel that professors are too inaccessible. Many proponents of ALN still agree that the human component of education and university life is necessary. Degerhan Usleul, the chief operating officer of Interactive Learning International Corporation (ILINC), is quoted as saying: The importance of an instructor's physical presence, complete with body language, as well as the rapport one builds with classmates, are not easily replaced. Jo Ann Davy continues in the article, writing that Usluel recommends holding a physical event to help relationships, before connecting online.
    Davy, Jo Ann. "Education and Training Alternatives." Managing Office Technology: Cleveland. April 1998.

    Another student named Katie Lawrence lists drawbacks of ALN in a term paper as follows:

    • There are more dropouts than in actual on-campus courses
    • Loss of commuinty/campus atmosphere
    • There are no current standards for program assessment, so it is difficult for students to know which courses will be worth the money they are spending
    • Often, the high fees charged for some ALN courses go to fund actual campus courses rather than the virtual courses being offered.
    • Due to the large number of students taking ALN courses and their tendency to contact professors frequently, more professors or teaching assistants are required to adequately teach a cyber course.
    • "Learning ceases to be about analysis, discussion, and examination, and becomes a product to be bought and sold, to be packaged, advertised, and marketed." (taken from Dangers of Global Education)
    • Students loose out by not actually reading published books.
    • Because the courses are developed in the Western world, Western views are spread to all parts of the globe, which may inhibit the cultural growth of other societies, thus creating a unified, undiverse world. Computer access and availability and modem speed are problems for ALN courses given on college campuses - students are often times unable to log on due to slow modems or busy network lines.

    Barbara Brown discusses the myth of asynchronous learning impersonality:

    Another myth one frequently encounters about computer-mediated instruction is that of impersonality. People assume that in the absence of face-to-face interaction, relations automatically become more distant and impersonal. Traditional distance learning formats are said to be plagued with this problem.[9] Not so, in my experience with the interactive digital classroom. There is a type of intimacy achievable between teachers and students in this medium that is quite extraordinary, reminiscent of what Sproull and Keisler refer to as "second-level" social effects of the technology. I believe this intimacy results from a sense of shared control and esponsibility, commitment to collaboration and dialogue, and increased willingness to take risks in communications with others online. The verbal and writing-intensive nature of the text-based forum network also forces one to make one’s thoughts very explicit whenever possible; there is little room for subtlety. As one administrator put it: "In an online environment, words matter.... Words are everything."

    Also, it takes longer for groups to reach consensus in brain-storming and problem-solving situations online.[10] People’s feelings can be hurt easily, so more time and effort are put into explaining meanings and supplying detailed contextual background to enhance mutual understanding. Thus, writers get to know one another intimately over time while computer-mediated conversations - both formal and informal - unfold. Neither e-mail nor chat, the forum classroom environment at Fielding calls for and inspires thoughtful, composed (after reading and reflection) asynchronous networked interactions, without sacrificing human warmth.

    At this stage in the evolution of Internet educational technology, we are all learners. There is also a sense that we are innovators and early adopters who "crossed over" early in the technology transfer and diffusion process.[11] In the Fielding culture, this pioneer experience has come to be known as riding the waves, or embracing the "turbulence" of rough seas - a metaphor for global and organizational unrest as well. The attention given to group process online and the thoughtful nature of master’s-level conversations establish an intimacy within the group, belying the myth of impersonality.

    B.M. Brown
    "Digital Classrooms:  Some Myths About Developing New Educational Programs Using the Internet,"
    T.H.E. Journal, December 98, pp. 57-58
    The online version is at
    http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/current/feat04.html

    "The Myths Of Growing Up Online," by Henry Jenkins, MIT's Technology Review, September 3, 2004 ---  http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/09/wo_jenkins090304.asp?trk=nl 
    Alarmist and polarized rhetoric is distorting important new findings about the risks and benefits of children's use of the Internet.

    For almost a decade now, the debate about youth and new media technologies has been polarized around two conflicting myths—let's call them the Myth of the Columbine Generation and the Myth of the Digital Generation. The first is driven by fear, the other hope, but both distort the reality kids and parents must negotiate in the online world, and both exaggerate the centrality of digital media in children's lives.

    Parents, educators, and policymakers can get whiplash trying to respond to the competing pull of these two myths. One pulls us toward wiring every classroom in the country so that kids may enjoy the benefits of digital access, the other mandates filtering programs in school and library computers since kids can't be trusted once they log on.

    In a classic version of the Columbine Generation argument, Eugene Provenzo Jr., a professor of education at the University of Chicago, argues that recent school shootings are the "result" of a "social experiment" in giving children unfettered access to pornography and violence. By contrast, journalist Jon Katz, in his books Virtuous Reality and Geeks, offers a vivid version of the Digital Generation perspective, celebrating the ways that the online world has liberated children from the constraints of their own neighborhoods and the limitations of their narrow-minded parents.

    Anyone who has read my column over the past few years knows I fall much closer to Katz than Provenzo. But if we are being honest, the truth lies somewhere in the huge space in between those two overstatements. When I went into schools around the country following the Columbine shootings, it was clear that teachers, parents, and students had heard plenty about the dangers of going online and little about the benefits. The case that growing up online was going to produce a more socially connected, better informed, and more creative generation was a perspective that was needed to counterbalance the hysteria being generated by the most sensationalistic news stories. I remember one student exclaiming, "Why haven't we be told this before?"

    As time has passed, I have felt a greater need to pull back from such either-or arguments, yet to do so seems like unilateral disarmament as long as the culture warriors are ready to pounce on any concession. I have become increasingly concerned by the ways that television discussions, newspaper articles, and government hearings are structured around the assumption that this debate can be reduced to two opposing sides, usually pushed to their extremes—making it impossible for more moderate perspectives to be heard.

    A case in point: a conference held this summer at the University of London brought together educators, activists, and scholars from more than 40 different countries to examine the research on the impact of new media on children's mental and social development, and on education, family, and community life. David Buckingham, one of the event's organizers, opened the sessions by challenging us to move beyond the easy answers and to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions our research was uncovering—good advice that was hard to follow.

    A highlight of the conference was London School of Economics professor Sonia Livingstone's announcement of the preliminary findings of a major research initiative called UK Children Go Online. This project involved both quantitative and qualitative studies on the place of new media in the lives of some 1,500 British children (ages 9 to 19) and their parents. The study's goal was to provide data that policymakers and parents could draw on to make decisions about the benefits and risks of expanding youth access to new media. Remember that phrase—benefitsandrisks.

    According to the study, children were neither as powerful nor as powerless as the two competing myths might suggest. As the Myth of the Digital Generation suggests, children and youth were using the Internet effectively as a resource for doing homework, connecting with friends, and seeking out news and entertainment. At the same time, as the Myth of the Columbine Generation might imply, the adults in these kids' lives tended to underestimate the problems their children encountered online, including the percentage who had unwanted access to pornography, had received harassing messages, or had given out personal information.

    Livingstone’s report arrives at a pivotal moment: after decades of state-supported broadcasting, the British government is deregulating media content and opening the airwaves to greater commercial development. The number of media channels in British homes is expanding—and parents are being asked to play gatekeepers determining what media entered their home without being given the training or resources needed to do that job properly.

    Continued in the article

     

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    Concerns About Making Education and Training Too Easy

    It has been demonstrated in various ways in cognitive and learning science that making a training environment easier may be dysfunctional in the sense that it improves short term memory at the expense of long-term memory and performance.   Complex information needs to be multiply encoded in semantic and/or situational associations.  Computer-aided training may either enhance or detract from long-term performance.

    For example, I am inclined to make it easier for students to find answers or get leads in each course topic.  I view it as taking the Mickey Mouse drudgeries of finding things that consume time. I hope to provide my students with more time to study what they find and less time trying to find what they study.   To do so I provide as much literature as possible on CD-ROMs (many of which I record myself), my LAN hard drive, and the University's web server.  However, it is possible that the Mickey Mouse activities contribute significantly to long-term memory.  To the extent that I am making discovery less difficult and more predictable, I might in fact be improving students' short term performance at the expense of long-term memory and cognition.

    Robert Bjork states:

    It has now been demonstrated in a variety of ways, and with a variety of motor, verbal, and problem-solving tasks, that introducing variation and/or unpredictability in the training environment causes difficulty for the learner but enhances long-term performance --- particularly the ability to transfer training to novel but related task environments.

    Robert A. Bjork
    "Memory and Metamemory considerations in the Training of Human Beings,"
    Metacognition:  Knowing about Knowing
    Edited by Janet Metcalfe and Arthru P. Shimaura
    The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    ISBN:   0262132982, 1994, Page 189

    Click Here to View Working Paper 265 on Metacognition
    Concerns in Designs and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training:
    Are We Misleading Ourselves About Measures of Success?

    Other references are provided later on in this document under the section entitled "Fostering Deeper Learning:   Risks of Teaching More Than You Know."

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    Concerns About Making Education and Training Too Hard

    All courses at Trinity University are three-credit courses.  Virtually all of my students are full-time students who are taking at least five courses each semester.  On the faculty evaluation forms one of the questions reads:  "How would you rate the workload of this course?"   Another question reads:  "How difficult did you find this course?"   As I added more ALN modules in place of lectures, answers to these questions virtually all moved to "Very Heavy" and "Very Difficult."  The following quotation is representative of class concerns:

    The work load was very heavy and put a strain on my other classes.  I liked the material, but weekly quizzes and examinations plus 50-90 pages of reading per class along with other classes is too much.

    Actually I usually do not assign pages to read, but in the process of studying assigned topics, my graduate students dig out a huge amount of material that they themselves feel they must study.  In research projects constituting over 50% of the course grade, they must seek out, sift, digest, and nurture a vast amount of learning material.   Often students must spend a great deal of time building foundations to even study the material.  For example, projects entailing both design and implementation of relational databases entail learning how to make complicated software work.  Projects entailing how to account for financial instruments derivatives entail learning what those financing contracts are and how they are used in hedging strategies.

    The bottom line is that it is not be reasonable for all five graduate courses each semester to take as much time as my courses.   Students would become frustrated, angered, and seek to somehow short circuit their effort if there was not enough time each week to cover five similar ALN courses.   Their traditional lecture courses are often neat and tidy with problems assigned from the back of the textbook and sufficient material in the textbook or lectures to master the assigned materials.  Students all study the same materials and can help each other in many lecture courses.  In my asynchronous modules, students must do a lot more digging on their own and generally come away frustrated by the "loose ends" that they neither have the time nor skills to master nor the skills to master.   For example, in the process of studying risk exposures of derivatives contracts they encounter mathematically complex Value at Risk time series models.   A few of the mathematically inclined students who elect to delve into such models learn more about Value at Risk  than students who go down other avenues on their projects.  Hence, students are not all studying the same materials, and it becomes more difficult to lean on each other for help crossing troubled waters.  In many instances their instructor, me, is not sufficiently up on the particulars of each topic to bail them out.  For more on this, skip to the section entitled Fostering Deeper Learning:   Risks of Teaching More Than You Know.

    I like to force students to struggle on their own, because I think this prepares them for life after graduation.  However, there is a fine line in ALN between making ALN too easy versus making ALN too hard. I have not yet achieved the correct balance.  One example where asynchronous learning appears to achieve a good balance is the Business Activity Model (BAM) in Intermediate Accounting at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.  A portion of one of my recent email messages is quoted below:

    The mere fact that many ALN courses are shown to improve grades and/or the rate at which learning takes place does not imply that long-term performance has been enhanced. It is not clear whether better performance arises from a confounding of added sweat with ALNs. What does intrigue me, however, is how an entire year of Intermediate Accounting (typically very tough courses requiring memorization of lots of accounting rules and procedures) is now being taught at the University of Virginia totally without lectures by the two professors (Croll and Catanach) who, up until 1996, lectured (quite brilliantly) in virtually every class. Their anecdotal claims for the "BAM" non-lecture approach are that students are doing markedly better on in course examinations, the CPA examination, and on the job (which they can monitor since all students have internships with firms). I now feature a multimedia workshop module of the University of Virginia BAM ALN program. The average SAT of students in these UVA classes is over 1300. It is not clear that BAM will work so well on lesser mortals.

    One way to judge good ALN workload balance is to keep track of teaching evaluations.  Students generally voice complaints when workloads are unreasonable (they will not always complain when a course is too easy).   The BAM asynchronous courses at the University of Virginia have heavy workloads, but Professors Croll and Catanach manage to pull these courses off with some of the highest instructor evaluations in the McIntire School of Commerce.

    For more detailed information on the BAM pedagogy, I recommend the following two links:

     

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    Concerns About Corporate Influences on Traditional Missions

    There are two types of partnerings between business firms and universities.  The first type is where the university's faculty deliver a specialized degree program to employees of a business firm.  The program is often specialized calendar, courses, and mode of delivery.  For example, the PriceWaterhouse Coopers MBA program at the University of Georgia has a customized calendar, customized courses, and all courses are delivered asynchronously on the web.  

    Another type of partnering is where the business firms deliver courses for the university degree programs.  An example of this type of partnering is the AT&T partnering with Western Governors University that was announced in two magazines that I track regularly.   For example, see

    "AT&T Learning Network Hosts WGU Content," T.H.E. Journal, February 1999, 14-16.

    One of my undergraduate students, Paul Meekey, notes the rise of partnerships between universities and corporations where the universities participate in educating and training employees of companies.  Paul's paper can be found at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/pmeekey/frame2.htm wherein he states the following:

    Employers are always trying to find ways to cut costs and now with the introduction of ALN,
    they should be able to do so. Two companies that have enabled this technology are helping to reduce costs in their post graduate business training programs. CIGNA Corporation, an
    insurance company located in Philadelphia has formed a partnership with Drexell University, also in Philadelphia to create a master's program for information systems. They came up with a three year program that would train their students online. The only time they actually met offline was for a two day orientation at the Drexell campus and after that  it was totally online. After the success of the program, Metlife, another insurance company decided to form a similar partnership with Drexel University. One advantage to this program that both company enjoyed was that both companies didn't have to give up their employees to go back to a university campus for the 2 yr. graduate program.

    The employees could remain working for the company, continue working on their projects and fulfill their educational requirements after work, before work, on their days off, or on the weekends. Richard H. Lytle, dean of Drexel's College of Information and Technology, says that the he is really excited that both companies are not only using his program but applying it to software application within their own applications of everyday work. The program helps the companies to eliminate some costs and uncertainties of trying to hire full-qualified employees from major universities and also the time lost when employees have to go to these classes during normal working hours. The companies are also using what they have learned through Drexel University to eventually have all training in the company done through ALN, in all departments. New York University's School of Continuing Education also participates in online learning, and just recently formed a partnership with IBM to offer information systems courses for their professionals, on a global scale. We are sure to see a huge increase in ALN used in the business environment. Companies can keep their employees working hard and earning the profits while training them to make them more efficient at their job. Although still young, ALN is helping companies such as Citicorp, NYNEX Corp., and Sandoz to become more cost efficient in training their employees.

    The above trends are a mixed blessing.   Clearly, expansion into corporate education and training expands the market alternatives for colleges facing a shrinking and increasingly competitive environment for traditional students and traditional continuing education students.  The flip side of the coin is that the universities may sacrifice some of their independence in setting curricula and course contents since corporations paying for the education and training will dictate such matters to a large degree.

    For more discussion and references about corporate universities and partnerships between corporations and traditional universities, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#CorporatePartnerships and http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#ErnstandYoung .

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    Concerns About Library Services

    The Internet has become the world's library.   However, content pales in comparison with scholarly works found in libraries that contain vast resources that either are not or cannot be digitized.  Making centuries of literature available on networks is cost prohibitive to digitize for and deliver from web servers.  Copyright restrictions deliberately protect vast bodies of new and older literature from being digitized. 

    When asynchronous courses are delivered off campus, library access becomes a major problem that is frequently ignored in the hype of ALN promotion.  One of my students, Katie Greene, addresses this problem at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/kgreene/distanceno.htm

    In the above document, Katie provides links and references to literature on looming issues and "new roles for librarians."  She states:


    Librarians must change their role if they want to keep up with the changes in education. They will need to change in three different ways. The first way would be that "librarians will take on a more proactive role in the classroom and will work more collaboratively with the teaching faculty to develop assignments that are feasible in the off-campus/ distance environment." (Lebowitz) Secondly, distance education will bring about "greater collaboration among institutions". (Lebowitz) Because their are no constraints on location, libraries from all over can work together to create collections of works and pool their resources. A good example of this cooperation, is Western Governors University, which is a university made by the governors of the western states. Along with this cooperation, though, "the supplying of library services will become highly competitive, and libraries may choose to outsource the provision of services to other institutions" (Cavanagh). Thirdly, the librarian's role "will shift to one of facilitator/instructor, rather than provider of information." (Slade) Librarians will now be communicating with students in remote locations via e-mail, video conferencing, chat lines, or audio conferencing. One example of this is at University of Maryland University College where students can "chat" with librarians online and ask any questions they might have. Librarians will have to be proactive and learn about the new technologies and make the materials available to students all over the world.

    Many have already used these devices and made the information available. Old ways included loan programs and mailing books and other materials. Now librarians use information technology to develop online, virtual libraries. One criticism is that distant students do not have access to as much information, but librarians are now able to put entire works, full texts of books, journals, references, newspapers, as well as web searches and internet access on the internet.

    Some Examples include:

    VIVA the virtual library of Virginia - electronic collections of books, journals, newspapers , as well as internet searches.

    Online Literature Library

    Internet Public Library- references, magazines, newspapers, online texts.

    Carrie-Full-Text Electronic Library.

    Katie Greene raises other concerns and discusses the challenges of giving distance learners the same access to libraries as the access available to resident students.  One wonders how top programs such as the Duke University Global Executive MBA program and the Ohio University Online MBA Without Boundaries program  manage to provide library resources to students.

    Judy Luther provides a paper entitled "Distance Learning and the Digital Library:  What Happens When the Virtual Student Needs to Use the Virtual Library in a Virtual University," Educom Review, July/August 1998, 23-26.  Although no virtual library is going to contain the text of all books and journals in a major academic library due to copyright and impracticalities of digitizing trillions of pages of text and graphics, there are some collaborative efforts being made by various universities to aid students taking virtual courses off campus.   Judy Luther's article is available at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/edreview.html.

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    Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics, and Student Ethics

    The University of Phoenix, a network of colleges run by the Apollo Group, is drawing attention from regulators as well as Wall Street investors. 

    "Can For-Profit Schools Pass an Ethics Test?" by Eryn Brown, The New York Times, December 12, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/business/yourmoney/12school.html?oref=login 

    Over the last few years, the Apollo Group has watched its profile rise - mostly for the right reasons. It has expanded its University of Phoenix to 158 campuses, providing professional and technical degrees to working adults from Salem, Ore., to Guaynabo, P.R. Enrollment has doubled, to 255,600 students, in just the last four years. The market capitalization of the company, which earns a profit, has surged 374 percent over the same period.

    But these days, the Apollo Group, based in Phoenix, may be gaining notice of a less desirable kind. In September, it agreed to pay the federal Department of Education $9.8 million to settle charges that its recruiting practices violated Title IV of the Higher Education Act, which regulates how almost $70 billion of federal grants, loans and work-study programs are distributed to students at colleges and universities each year.

    A Department of Education report asserted that the school based its recruiters' pay on the numbers of students they brought in, and punished underperforming recruiters by isolating them in glass-walled rooms and threatening to fire them if they failed to meet management goals. Enrollment-based incentives and punishments are sometimes illegal under federal law.

    Terri Bishop, a spokeswoman for Apollo, denied any wrongdoing by the company. "We were not required to change our compensation practices, because we were not found guilty of the allegations," she said.

    Recently, a number of for-profit colleges have faced inquiries, lawsuits and other actions calling into question the way they pursue federal funds.

    In the last year, the Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. The company, which said it considered the suits groundless, acknowledged that it was under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It declined to say what the federal officials were investigating. The Justice Department and S.E.C. declined to discuss this or any other active investigation.

    In February, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems; the company has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

    A routine government audit in December 2003 of student aid programs at Bryman College in San Jose, Calif., part of Corinthian Colleges, found that it was too slow to return federal aid to the government after students withdrew from school, and it incorrectly calculated how much it owed the government and did not keep proper records, said a department spokeswoman, Jane Glickman.

    After that, the Department of Education required Corinthian, which is based in Santa Ana, Calif., to give its own money to students and then seek reimbursement from the government. The requirement was lifted on Sept. 22, but the Corinthian Web site says the S.E.C. opened an investigation on Sept. 16 into its "projections, financial performance and communications with securities analysts and investors during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2004."

    Such scrutiny may portend tough times for what has been a high-flying, profitable industry. According to Department of Education statistics, for-profit post-secondary schools, including those that grant degrees and those that do not, enrolled 765,701 students in the fall of 2001, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. That is almost 30 percent more than the 589,600 they enrolled in 1996.

    The schools say they offer practical career training in a time when job stability has vanished for many people. The Career College Association, an industry trade group in Washington, reports that 70 percent of the students at for-profit colleges are the first in their families to go to college. David Longanecker, a Department of Education official in the Clinton administration who is now the executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a research group in Boulder, Colo., said for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix "are emerging as an important part of the educational system."

    For-profit education companies also had the best run of any group on Wall Street from 2000 to 2003, said Howard Block, an analyst at Banc of America Securities in San Francisco, which does not have a financial interest in Apollo, Career Education, Corinthian Colleges, or ITT Educational Services, though the bank has advised some of those companies. Over all, he noted, publicly traded postsecondary-education stocks rose 460 percent over that period, compared with a 24 percent loss for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.


    One of my students, Sophia Mena, at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/smena/learning.htm wrote the following:

    The first thing that came to mind when I first started researching the Virtual Classroom is how professors monitor if students are doing their own work. In the Traditional Classroom a professor can easily detect if a person is cheating on their test, but how can they monitor that if someone is taking a test by way of a computer?   It seems very easy for someone to cheat in an asynchronous learning environment. To find out more about computer ethics you can visit:

    Computer Ethics - Cyberethics:
    http://www.siu.edu/departments/coba/mgmt/iswnet/isethics/index.htm

    IEEE Code of Ethics: http://www.ieee.org/committee/ethics

    In the 1900s it was common for students to take tests in the presence of the village vicar who then certified that all conditions placed upon taking an examination were followed.  Some conditions are easily met with existing technologies such as timing the examination and webcams and microphones that allow the examiners to view and hear the student from most any distance around the world.   Newer technologies such as retinal scanners are emerging to verify that the student taking the examination is truly the student who is authorized to take the examination. 

    Nevertheless, there are enormous problems with ethics and academic standards in ALN.  For example, monitoring students on chat lines becomes expensive and intrusive.  Most ALN courses assume that the email messages and chat line messages from a student are genuine without monitoring those messages with the same scrutiny that is given to course examinations.

    In some ways investigating suspected plagiarism is easier on the web.   Unhappily, I have discovered several instances where my students lifted parts of their work (in two cases the entire paper) from sources that were not cited.  Finding these instances of plagiarism was much easier in their web documents due to the ability to search for suspected phrases in web search engines. 

    Plagiarism has always been and will always be a problem in education and research.  The problem is exacerbated by computing technologies due to the ease of selecting all or part of a document and clicking on (Edit, Copy) and (Edit, Paste).  Culprits do not even have to type the text.  If they cleverly use the technologies, phrases can be easily modified so it becomes more difficult to discover that the passage was first lifted and then modified so as to escape detection.

    One problem with emerging speech recognition technologies is that spoken words (e.g., in a lecture or a session at a conference) can be recorded and digitized automatically such that text that has never appeared in print is created by speech recognition software.  How easy it becomes to beat the speaker in putting that speaker's presentation into printed text. Faculty clinging to traditional lectures and classroom case discussions may not even be aware that whatever went on in their classrooms is now available at hidden sites on the web at either a public or a private web site.  Those infamous "fraternity files" have never been so rich as they will become with speech recognition technologies.

     

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    Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites

    An emerging area of interest to me is the rate at which marginal and fraudulent asynchronous courses and programs are emerging. For example, I consider it a shame when someone other than a major university uses a domain name of that university. One of my students, Elizabeth Eudy, wrote the following at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/eeudy/aln.htm

    I may be mistaken in the specific case, but the person in Reykjavik, Iceland who owns the domain name CarnegieMellon.com seems well positioned to offer services in a way that just might be confused with services offered by a well known U.S. university. Hundreds of examples exist of domain names that seem purposely designed to be misleading...Two problems stem from this: First, there is no way for the typical user to know whether the actual location of an Internet site is in, say, Pittsburgh or Reykjavik. Second, these sites are not under any single legal jurisdiction. The FBI, for instance, probably has little clout in Reykjavik

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    Concerns About CyberPsychology

    The accelerating pace of networking for education, entertainment, research, therapy, and commerce is having profound psychological impacts on society.   IFOBITS in May 1998 made the following announcement about a new CyberPsychology journal:

     

    CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR is a new, peer-reviewed journal for the mental health community devoted to the "impact of the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society." Articles in its inaugural issue include "The Gender Gap in Internet Use," "Internet Addiction on Campus," "The Relationship Between Depression and Internet Addiction," and "A Review of Virtual Reality as a Psychotherapeutic Tool."

    Cyberpsychology & Behavior [ISSN: 1094-9313] is published quarterly by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2 Madison Avenue, Larchmont, NY 10538; tel:

    914-834-3100; fax: 914-834-3582; email: info@liebertpub.com; Web:

    http://www.liebertpub.com/

    Click Here to View Working Paper 265 on Metacognition
    Concerns in Designs and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training:
    Are We Misleading Ourselves About Measures of Success?

     

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    Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability

    This morning I went to one of our student labs to check to see if one of my new ToolBooks was being transported properly on the Internet.  I discovered that someone had wiped out both the Internet Explorer and the Netscape Communicator web browsers on the first three lab computers that I logged into.  It is terribly frustrating for faculty and students to repeatedly encounter hardware and software failures.  Student frustrations center around not having enough lab computers, wasting time on lab computers that fail, having their own computers crash during the semester, and encountering network crashes or delays due to clogged bandwidth.

    An enormous problem for universities who engage more and more in ALN courses that rely daily upon networking systems is to keep those systems efficient and reliable for students.  Faculty members occasionally miss class due to illness or scheduling conflicts, but faculty miss class much less often than computers crash on most campuses.  In addition, there are disruptions due to necessary maintenance and updating of computer systems.  Few, if any, campuses have budgets to provide backup systems for disruptions of service.

    There are increasing risks of security failures on campus computers.   Geeks hack or crack their way into systems on every college campus.  In most instances they do so without intent to cause great harm.  However, they may also be intent upon bringing down the system or parts thereof.  Equipping divisions (e.g., a College of Business within the university) with their own servers, labs, and computing maintenance centers reduces the risks of university-wide computer system failure, but the cost becomes enormous in terms of hardware and personnel costs.  However, this may also spread technician talent so thin across the campus that the risk of poor performance in some divisions may be increased.

    There are no easy solutions to the problem that ALN learning is absolutely dependent on reliability of computers and networking systems.

     

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    Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes

    Email messages from Roger Debreceny and Andrew Priest

    I do not doubt for a minute that small group, f2f teaching can be highly effective. I sure hope so, because like many of the people on this list, I have devoted many hours of my life to the pursuit of better f2f small group teaching! <g>.

    As regards large group f2f teaching, I am much less sanguine. I lecture to a group of 750 students (!!) in one large (ok, it’s enormous!) lecture theatre. There are clearly some benefits to such large group teaching (mostly sociological) but not many. In most cases, large group lectures are poorly presented, inadequately planned and almost completely lacking in challenges to the students. Large group lectures lead, in my view, to the "I attend, therefore I learn" syndrome. We all know that all the evidence points to the inability of humans to concentrate in such environments for more than a few minutes at a time. Yet we consistently ignore such evidence.

    There are many problems, however, with both small group and large group f2f teaching and learning processes. Key amongst them is the idea that we engender in our students, that they can go to a sage and receive knowledge in some structured fashion. Contrast that with our research processes. OK, we do have research tutorials (e.g. at the AAA Annual Meeting), but they are relatively rare. Research is undertaken by search for, and integration of, knowledge. Research is much, much more like the real work world that our graduates will experience than the f2f classroom.

    Where networked technology can assist us is to change the teaching and learning model from sage/pupil towards research leader/co-researcher.

    We should listen more to the ideas of thinkers such as Schank (see, for example, a short article by Schank in the July issue of Communications of the ACM).

    Now, just as an example of a colleague who has made some interesting advances in using networked technologies to move from pedagogy more towards androgogy here is a write-up on Mark Freeman at University of Technology, Sydney that was recently posted to ATeach-L by Andrew Priest. We can get a flavour of a new learning environment.

    Roger Debreceny

    =============================

    Hi Folks

    Thought this article from the Business Review Weekly http://www.brw.com.au may be of interest.

    Regards Andrew Priest

    Mass lectures, often repeated, are the usual way that university business courses cope with cost pressures and student loads. Students are bored to tears by them. Mark Freeman, a senior lecturer in finance at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and a specialist in teaching methods, thinks he has found a better way: using the Internet. "The groundswell of student interest in Web-based learning is like no other phenomenon I have seen in educational innovation," he says, after tests involving more than 2000 students.

    At 4 am students can have lively interchanges on the site.

    Business students make up 30% of the enrolment at UTS but their courses get only 15% of total UTS funding. Freeman felt an obligation to make learning better for students who are struggling to hold down a job or cope with English, pay fees, mind children and resist fatigue at night. They may travel to university and find there are 30-40 students in a tutorial. Or part-timers might visit reserved sections of the library, only to find that desperate students have torn out the pages of a book or stolen it altogether.

    Freeman began Internet-based teaching in 1996 with 800 students on a basic Internet system. Last year UTS brought in experimentally a special on-line teacher-student pack called TopClass for messages and conferences, involving 1000 students. This year 10,500 students, nearly half the UTS student population of 23,000, are using it. In one class of 100 last month, Freeman found that every student had private Internet access.

    Some academics misuse the medium by merely posting their lectures on the Web, he says. This is no better than telling students that information is in the library and "go get it".

    One of Freeman’s examples of "new learning" is an on-line role-playing exercise this year for post-graduate students of securities markets law. They take the identity of people such as John Howard, Allan Fels, or securities regulators, with their real identities staying secret until the program ends. The program was based on a method used at Macquarie University in a simulation of Middle-Eastern politics.

    In the first week the students describe their roles; then crises are provided, such as a currency slump, bank failure or misleading prospectus for a privatisation. Students must research how their character would react, and type responses to the central on-line site. The "prime minister" can even negotiate privately with the "stock exchange chairman", as occurs in the real world. Freeman is the only observer able to read the messages. Since each student researches a unique situation, cheating is difficult. In normal work, cheating is a serious problem, now that vast amounts of material can be cut and pasted into assignments or lifted from "cheat sites" on the Web.

    In team debates, groups take positions on issues such as corporate law reform, and hone their responses in private conferences before posting them on the Internet. Many students in their professional lives are already feeling the effect of corporate law reform, and have strong opinions. Even at 4am there can be lively interchanges among six students using the site.

    Freeman says: "Students get completely immersed in the role playing. In addition they do not have the hang-ups often suffered by people in face-to-face arguments, such as deferring to those of the opposite sex or those perceived to be higher in status. Shy people are not argued down, rhetorical flourishes can’t be used, and non-English students cope better with the language."

    Later there is a coming-out session at the university where the students show their real identities, often to surprise and applause. The debate is also a permanent and expandable record useful for future students. "The best part is that the students are not learning just what I tell them, but learning to think and make choices based on good information." An individual assignment is to investigate and give an assessment of a domestic and international securities regulator’s Web site, and present the results to a discussion forum.

    Freeman admits to having the usual failures of a pioneer. "Technology in teaching can operate like an unguided missile unless the goals are well specified, such as changing student understanding," he says.

    There is less staff administrative work because the Web is used for announcements, such as where to lodge assignments, errors in a text, changes to deadlines, and guides to marking. Staff have to discourage students from calling by phone and private e-mail, instead of logging on to the site.

    But there is still a huge workload in the Internet-posted queries. Some students at other universities became irate when Freeman failed to respond to their queries. Students expect staff to respond seven days a week, and mark faster. Now, without the Internet, the requests would be totally unmanageable. "I used to get 40 calls on my voice-mail before I even started work. This morning I had none," Freeman says. He predicts that in the coming decade, some universities will fail, especially those that have chased short-term economies at the expense of quality. Students are already exercising their consumer rights and demanding "just-in-time" learning, rather than conforming to university teaching schedules. University teachers failing to get average grades of "highly satisfactory" would be sacked, since students would no longer tolerate mediocrity and would take their "business" elsewhere.

    Freeman predicted six months ago that many universities would become user-pays systems where for $1000, for example, students could use a bare minimum of the facilities, and pay $100 each for a menu of add-ons such as on-line self-study material, videos and discussion groups. Replies within 24 hours would be guaranteed seven days a week, with a ceiling of ten sessions per subject and $100 per chat thereafter. There could be a $500 premium service involving time with experts face-to-face, on-line or in video-conference. "In the US, user-pays universities have already arrived," Freeman says. "It’s no longer a prediction."—

    Andrew Priest, School of Accounting, Edith Cowan University
    Mailto:a.priest@cowan.edu.au Mailto:apriest@imstressed.com
    http://www.bs.ac.cowan.edu.au/acctinfoplus/
    "Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese"- SteveWright

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    Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

    Probably the major stumbling block to education change is faculty unwillingness to venture into technology and new learning experiments.  Instead of leading the way, faculty in traditional schools and colleges are behind corporate and military/government trainers in adapting to technologies and learning experimentation.

    A funny thing happened to a campus event designed to bring our faculty together to exchange information and demonstrations of technology in the classroom. In the three years since the conference was launched, we have had steadily fewer faculty attending.

    We surveyed our faculty to find out why attendance had declined at our on-campus technology conference (scheduled during a day when classes were not in session). Results indicated that while some faculty and staff did have a disinterest in technology, more often the problem was their frustration with it. Among reasons for why they were not using technology in their work, they cited lack of the following: training, support, space, equipment, and knowledge of what was available and how items could be obtained.

    "Where Are They?": Why Technology Education for Teachers Can Be So Difficult"
    by Claudia Rebaza
    http://www.microsoft.com/education/hed/vision.htm  

    Although the barriers mentioned above by Dr. Rebaza are serious, in my viewpoint they tend to be excuses rather than reasons in many instances.  Far more serious are the lack of credit given to technology innovations in promotion, pay-raise,  publication, and tenure decisions.    In fact, I maintain messages of selected "daring professor" who are willing to take chances in adverse environments.  The web address is http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm

    Some email correspondence from a faculty member at Trinity University  is provided below:

    From: [Name Deleted]
    Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 1998 12:40 PM
    To: rjensen@trinity.edu
    Subject: Web projects

    Dear Bob,

    Thanks for sending along your web assignment and its rationale. I’m interested in doing a book-length project that has web links to my own set of materials and exercises. Or even doing the whole book in this way.

    Question is, does one receive academic credit for producing work on the internet? Have you ever discussed this with the Administration?

    Thanks,

    [Name of the Trinity University Faculty Member Deleted]

    ========================================================================

    Reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi ______

    One problem with web publishing is that if you submit your stuff to a top journal, the editor wants you to hide your research from the world until the journal gets around to publishing your work (which in a recent case took five years "in press" for an accepted Jensen and Sandlin article to finally get published). I recently had another paper accepted for publication. Then I had a long ‘fight" with the editor over whether I can keep a "live" and ever-changing version of the essence of that paper at my web site.

    I have discussed web publishing with administrators is many universities. They have not and cannot take much of an official position without action by the faculty. Matters of promotion and tenure are pretty well decided all along the way (departmental faculty, Chair, Dean, and P&T faculty) with rare administrative reversals of recommendations. Faculty bring individual biases into peer evaluation, and at the moment web publishing is a new thing to most of them. Until the peer evaluation culture is changed, web publishing will not count heavily toward promotion, tenure, or take home pay.

    The main issue is that web publishing is not refereed with the same rigor (as refereeing in leading journals) or, in most cases, is not refereed at all. This is a concern since it is pretty easy to disguise garbage as treasure at a web site. Leading journals will one day offer refereeing services for web publishing and may, in fact, do away with their hard copy editions. Until then what do we do? Most certainly we do not put up a web counter and brag about the number of hits --- Playboy probably gets more hits per day than all professors combined.

    Somewhat of a substitute for hard core refereeing is a record of correspondence that is received from scholars and students who use your web documents. This lacks the anonymity of the refereeing process. Also there are opportunities to cheat (I’ll lavishly praise your work if you will adore mine in a succession of email messages), but most scholars have more integrity than to organize that sort of conspiracy. If you have a file of correspondence from people that your peers know and respect, chances are that your peers will take notice. Include copies of this correspondence in your performance reports. But this process is more anecdotal than the genuine blind refereeing process.

    Until a rigorous web refereeing process is established, those who must evaluate a web publisher must do more work. They must study your web materials and make their own judgments regarding quality and relevance. It is much easier to simply tick off the refereed hits (For when the binary scorer comes to write against your name, he writes only ones or zeros, to him the unread articles are all the same). It is easy to become too cynical about the refereeing process. We have all had frustrations with bad referees, including acceptances of our weaker output and rejections of our best work. At my web site, I have section for my "big ones that got away." See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/#BigOnes Refereeing is a little like democracy --- it ain’t perfect, but until a better system comes along it beats the alternatives over the long haul.

    My trouble, and I suspect that Mike Kearl has the same problem, is that web publishing is addictive. The responses that you get from around the world set "your tail wagging." I have published many papers and several books (a sign of my advanced age), but I have never had the "action" following hard copy publication that I get from web publication. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that more people than you can imagine stumble on your web documents while using a search engine on the web. Not all of them send you nice messages, but a message recently received by me last week from a total stranger is reproduced be low:

    ==================================================================

    Dr. Jensen,
    Wanted to say thanks for maintaining your Technological Glossary page. I
    am currently studying for my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exams. Your page has been a god-send.

    Pacificare,Network Associate II
    Al Janetsky
    Microsoft Certified Professional

    Messages like the above message "keep my tail wagging." I even like the messages that signal items to be corrected --- at least those users found my stuff worth correcting. If you have audio on your computer, you can listen to Mike Kearl discuss what makes his "tail wag." Mike also discusses the issue that you raised in your message to me. The web address for Mike’s audio on this is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm . That particular article is entitled "Daring Professors" and contains audio and email messages from other faculty members who were willing to take some chances with their careers.

    I can offer you a wagging tail and small pay raises if you rely entirely on web publishing as evidence of scholarship. Old hounds like me can opt for more tail wagging, but young pups need more nourishment shoved into the other end. (Actually I still publish hard copy to maintain respectability, but I personally am far more proud of my "living" web research documents than my annual refereed "dead" hits over the past few years).

    Until the evaluation culture is changed in peers who hold you on leash, try to do web publishing alongside your refereed journal publishing. But don’t let the tail wag the dog or you will wind up in the dog house. If your book or journal editor objects to having your working documents published at your web site, remember who your master is at all times. His title is Editor in Chief!

    An interesting paper by William H. Geoghegan at IBM Academic Consulting is entitled "WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY?" discusses some of the issues as to why the faculty are not yet adapting to education technologies. Estimates run as high as 95% of higher education faculty are not using these technologies. Geoghegan analyses social and diffusion barriers in particular. The paper is at http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html

    Bob Jensen
    Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
    Trinity.University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
    Voice: 210-736-7347 Fax: 210-736-8134

    Also see Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

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    Other Concerns


    Forwarded on November 23, 2004 by Jagdish Gangolly [JGangolly@UAMAIL.ALBANY.EDU

    REPORT RAISES QUESTIONS OVER EDUCATIONAL BENEFIT OF COMPUTERS

    A recent study of the effects of computer use on teenage students suggests that increased computer use may result in lower academic performance. The authors of the study, Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of the CESifo economic research organization in Munich, looked at data on many thousands of students in 31 countries. Initial results indicated a positive relationship between computers and academic achievement, specifically in math and reading. When the results were adjusted, however, to compensate for the higher levels of wealth and education in homes where computers are more likely to be present, the data showed that the more computers there are in the home, the lower the student's performance. In addition, despite showing higher test scores for increased time spent using computers at home, the study showed that the more time students spent using computers at school, the lower their test scores. According to the report, "the initial positive pattern on computer availability at school simply reflects that schools with better computer availability also feature other positive school characteristics." BBC, 22 November 2004 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4032737.stm>


    "Contrarian finding: Computers are a drag on learning," by Jeffrey MacDonald, The Christian Science Monitor, December 6, 2004 --- http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1206/p11s01-legn.html 

    For all the schools and parents who have together invested billions to give children a learning edge through the latest computer technology, a mammoth new study by German researchers brings some sobering news: Too much exposure to computers might spell trouble for the developing mind. 

    From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them several times per week at school saw their academic performance decline significantly as well.

    "It seems if you overuse computers and trade them for other [types of] teaching, it actually harms the student," says lead researcher Ludger Woessmann in a telephone interview from Munich. "At least we should be cautious in stating that increasing [access to] computers in the home and school will improve students' math and reading performance."

    With the rise of computers in classrooms, has come a glut of conflicting conclusions about the actual value computers bring to timeless tasks of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. For some in education, these results indicate how thoroughly this field of research has come to resemble that of the conventional wisdom about weight loss, which seems to shift with the tide. Yet others see hopeful signs of a maturing debate, where blind faith in the educational benefits of technology is giving way to greater appreciation for an understanding when computers are useful and when they're not.

    "You could argue that's the big issue here: People need guidance in how to use [computers in education]," says Dr. Marcia Linn, professor of education and director of the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley.

    In surveying the gamut of research for his 2003 book "The Flickering Mind" (Random House), journalist Todd Oppenheimer [Editor's note: The original version misstated Oppenheimer's first name.] found most studies have overstated either the benefits or the drawbacks computers pose in education. The most thorough studies have found computers to have little effect either way, he said, although some guiding principles are beginning to emerge.

    Computer technology "is used too much and very unwisely in the younger years, and not wisely enough in the older years," says Oppenheimer. For 15-year-olds, he says, "you'd be foolish not to use the [World Wide] Web" for a research project, but only alongside conventional information-gathering techniques. The big picture goal: help students use high-quality sources.

    Against this backdrop, the German study stands out on account of two features: its unusually broad, international sample and its bid to isolate computers as a performance-shaping factor.

    Mindful that computers are more common among affluent families, whose children often outperform more disadvantaged ones, the University of Munich researchers controlled for such variables as parents' education and working status.

    When those were removed from the equation, having more than one computer at home was no longer associated with top academic performance. In fact, the study says, "The mere availability of computers at home seems to distract students from learning." Computers seem to serve mainly as devices for playing games.

    Still, there were a few exceptions: Academic performance rose among those who routinely engaged in writing e-mail or running educational software.

    To hear new questions raised about the educational value of technology is music to the ears at the Waldorf schools, an association of 350 schools where students don't touch computers until the 11th grade. There the priority lies with training students to think, says Patrice Maynard, leader for outreach and development, because problem-solving acumen and creativity lead to success and a joyful life.

    Yet for educators in Maine, computers represent something far more promising. There they seem to hold the key to the type of skills employers want to see as the state says goodbye to textiles and other antiquated industries. Maine taxpayers are investing $37 million over four years to put laptop computers into the hands of every seventh- and eighth-grader, as well as their 3,000 teachers.

    As the debate continues, consensus holds that more research is needed to know exactly where computers make the most difference in an educational process. "There's this sort of bizarre belief that computers cast a spell over students and teachers and schools," says Christopher Dede, professor of learning technologies at the Harvard School of Education. "Can you imagine what would happen if you had the same in business, asking if computers were interfering with performance? It would be a big joke."


    Full semester credit courses have not tended to sell very well, and they are very costly to produce.  It may well be that short, non-credit courses have a better market opportunity.

    Something Your (Our) College President Should be Thinking About 
    Tuition Revenue from Quality Non-Credit, Short, and Inexpensive Online Courses

    Prestigious=University of Michigan, Inexpensive=$45.

    The material for this course takes approximately 5-10 hours which you can complete at your convenience, a few minutes a day or all at once. A discussion board, moderated by a course instructor, offers learners the opportunity to express ideas, exchange opinions and post voluntary weekly assignments. Students may enroll in this course up to four weeks after the start date, until May 21. All students will have password-protected access to this seminar until June 25.
    Source:  See the message below from Fathom

    The expensive cost drivers in any credit course arise from maintaining academic standards needed to maintain reputation when granting course credits.  Admission standards, intense student-instructor communications, and performance standards must all be implemented.  Quality education for academic credit is very, very expensive.

    But in lifelong learning, it is not always necessary to take the expensive route.

    Delivering a non-credit course such as the one below is in many ways more pure and a heck of a lot more fun.  It's learning for learning's sake and the instructor can focus on what he or she probably likes best --- quality of delivery and preparation of  content!.  

    It's the free market at its best.  Students choose to pay for the content and delivery rather than the grade.  Bad courses don't sell because they offer easier A grades.  Bad courses don't sell because they're required in the curriculum plan.  Bad courses don't sell period if they are not required and/or do not offer any grades.

    What is frustrating for most of us that are teaching credit courses is that most students are more concerned with the grade than with the content.  This cannot be the case in the course described below.  Students are only paying for learning in its purest sense.  Students in the course are not driven by the quest for a grade on a transcript or a curriculum plan that requires three courses out of ten on the menu in each of seven required categories.

    This is also a way for administrators and faculty to think out of the box, to imagine new ways of generating huge amounts of lower cost tuition revenue.  In managerial accounting we call this Cost-Profit-Volume (CPV) analysis where lower cost drives up volume which in turn drives up profits.  I anticipate that prestigious colleges and universities will one day see the CPV light and begin to offer more and more courses like the one described below.  The advantage of prestige in this market will be the expectations by customers that prestigious schools are more apt to have better quality controls and better faculty to draw upon for these innovative short courses.

    May 1, 2002 message from Fathom 
    (Note that the faculty involved are purportedly some of the best specialists in the world:  Sharon Herbert , David S. Potter , Terry Wilfong , Susan E. Alcock)

    We're excited to tell you about a new e-course from the University of Michigan, "Daily Life in the Eastern Roman Empire (100 BCE-100 CE): Trade, Travel, and Transformation." To celebrate the launch of this course, we're offering a special 20% discount if you enroll before May 15. Just enter the coupon code ROMEMP at checkout to claim your discount.

    Students in this nine-week course will learn how great changes in the Roman empire, such as the stirrings of early Christianity, affected the daily lives of subjects in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Taught by a team of four University of Michigan professors of classics, archaeology, and egyptology, the course offers a fascinating look at various characters and occupations during this turbulent era. To learn more or to enroll, go to:

    http://www.fathom.com/course/35702802/romemp 

     

    If you are a college educator, think about CVP analysis if you are unhappy with your present salary level and wish that your college could generate more revenue for faculty salaries.

    May 3 reply from Gary Schneider

    The interesting state of affairs that leads Fathom.com to offer low-priced on-line courses taught by stellar faculty is explored in a New York Times article titled "Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U.":

    http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html 

    --Gary

    Gary P. Schneider, Ph.D, CPA 
    Associate Professor of Accounting and Information Systems 
    University of San Diego School of Business Administration 5998 
    Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492

    I provide an introductory excerpt from that article:

    "Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U., by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, May 2, 2002 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html 

    Go to Fathom.com and you will encounter a veritable trove of online courses about Shakespeare. You can enroll in "Modern Film Adaptations of Shakespeare," offered by the American Film Institute, or "Shakespeare and Management," taught by a member of the Columbia Business School faculty.

    The site is by no means confined to courses on Shakespeare. You can also treat yourself to a seminar called "Bioacoustics: Cetaceans and Seeing Sounds," taught by a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    Or if yours is a more public-policy-minded intellect, you can sign up for "Capital Punishment in the United States," a seminar with experts from Cambridge University Press, Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

    What's more, all are free.

    That part was not always the plan. Fathom, a start-up financed by Columbia, was founded two years ago with the goal of making a profit by offering online courses over the Internet. But after spending more than $25 million on the venture, Columbia has found decidedly little interest among prospective students in paying for the semester-length courses.

    Now Fathom is taking a new approach, one that its chief executive likens to giving away free samples to entice customers.

    Call it the Morning After phenomenon. In the last few years, prestigious universities rushed to start profit-seeking spinoffs, independent divisions that were going to develop online courses. The idea, fueled by the belief that students need not be physically present to receive a high-quality education, went beyond the mere introduction of online tools into traditional classes.

    The notion was that there were prospective students out there, far beyond the university's walls, for whom distance education was the answer. Whether they were 18-year-olds seeking college degrees or 50-year-olds longing to sound smart at cocktail parties, students would flock to the Web by the tens of thousands, paying tuitions comparable to those charged in the bricks-and-mortarboard world — or so the thinking went.

    Continued at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html 


    Virtual public schools have graduated from only a handful a few years ago to more than 30. While most have done well, a few bad apples have prompted states to ask for greater oversight authority.

    "Online Schools Under Scrutiny," by John Gartner, Wired News, May 3, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52207,00.html 

    More than 30 publicly funded virtual charter schools have launched during the past five years, and parents have largely been pleased with the results.

    But the alleged mismanagement of two academies run by for-profit companies is prompting

    Educators say the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) in Ohio and Einstein Academy in Pennsylvania, both of which are run by private companies, have ignored numerous academic guidelines while operating with questionable accounting practices.

    The Ohio Federation of Teachers joined with nine other teaching associations to sue the state's Board of Education, alleging that state officials have violated state law by allowing for-profit companies to control and operate charter schools.

    Federation president Tom Mooney said ECOT is "really being run by Bozo and Clarabell," claiming that management company Altair Learning Management had no background in education or technology. However, Mooney said they were "shrewd enough to smell a really good opportunity."

    A state audit (PDF) of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow's freshman year of 2000-2001 alleged that Altair Learning could use a few math lessons.

    The audit, which was released in April, showed that the company overcharged the state by $1.65 million for teaching hours it could not substantiate, and that $500,000 worth of computer equipment given to students who left the program were not recovered.

    The auditor's office said ECOT's net loss of $3.8 million during the school year "causes substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern."

    ECOT recently agreed to pay back $1.6 million to Ohio's department of education over the next three years. ECOT superintendent Jeffrey P. Forster, who saw 30 percent of his students leave the program during its first year, said that because of cost cutting, the academy is on solid financial footing.

    Forster, who was a high school principal for 35 years, said the online school helps students who would otherwise have difficulty in public schools. "We're not getting the captain of the football team or the prom queen here," he said.

    The federation also cites a recent charter granted directly to Akron "industrialist" David Brennan's White Hat Management company instead of to a nonprofit as required by state law.

    Mooney said that when legislators passed the charter school law, they never envisioned cyber schools and "did not set up appropriate guidelines for oversight."

    Motions for summary judgments in the case, which ask the judge to rule on the validity of the complaint, are due on May 15.

    In neighboring Pennsylvania, several pending lawsuits claim that online charter schools violate the state's constitution.

    Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52207,00.html 

    See also:
    •  Cyber School Flunking First Year
    •  Setting Standards for Web-Ed
    •  Ed-Tech Is Not Tech But Ed
    •  Rotten Links Hamper Learning
    •  E-Learning Is Good; Now What?
    •  It's time to go Back to School

    A Worst-Case MOO
    "Students’ Distress with a Web-based Distance Education Course: An Ethnographic Study of Participants' Experiences"
    http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html 

    Noriko Hara SILS Manning Hall University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599 haran@ils.unc.edu  

    Rob Kling The Center for Social Informatics SLIS Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 kling@indiana.edu  http://www.slis.indiana.edu/kling  (812) 855-9763

    Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kinds of communicative and technical capabilities and work required by students and faculty. There are few systematic analytical studies of students who have experienced new technologies in higher education. This article presents a qualitative case study of a web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a topic that is glossed over in much of the distance education literature written for administrators, instructors and prospective students: students' periodic distressing experiences (such as frustration, anxiety and confusion) in a small graduate-level course due to communication breakdowns and technical difficulties. Our intent is that this study will enhance understanding of the instructional design issues, instructor and student preparation, and communication practices that are needed to improve web-based distance education courses.

    Bob Jensen's Comments
    Th Hara and King study mentioned above focuses upon student messages, student evaluations, and instructor evaluations of a single course.  The interactive communications took place using MOO software that is sometimes used for virtual classroom settings, although the original intent of both MOO and MUD software was to create a virtual space in text in which students or game users create their own virtual worlds.  You can read more about MUD and MOO virtual environments at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#M-Terms.  In some universities, MOO software has been used to create virtual classrooms.  In most instances, however, these have given way to multimedia virtual classrooms rather than entirely text-based virtual classrooms.  

    MOO classrooms have been used very successfully.  For example, at Texas Tech University, Robert Ricketts has successfully taught an advanced tax course in a MOO virtual classroom when students are scattered across the U.S. in internship programs.  His course is not an internship course.  It is a tax course that students take while away from campus on internships.  Professor Ricketts is a veteran tax instructor and taught the MOO course under somewhat ideal conditions.  The students were all familiar with electronic messaging and they all know each other very well from previous onsite courses that they took together on the Texas Tech Campus in previous semesters.  They also had taken previous courses from Professor Ricketts in traditional classroom settings.

    In contrast to Professor Ricketts'  MOO virtual classroom, the Hara and King study reported above is almost a worst-case scenario in a MOO virtual classroom.  The instructor was a doctoral student who had never taught the class before, nor had she ever taught any class in a MOO virtual classroom.  Half the class "had only minimal experience with computers" and had never taken a previous distance education course.  The students had never taken a previous course of any type from the instructor and did not know each other well.  The course materials were poorly designed and had never been field tested.  Students were hopelessly confused and did not deal well with text messaging (graphics, audio, and video were apparently never used in the course).  This seems utterly strange in an age where text, graphics, audio, and even video files can be attached to email messages.  It also seems strange that the students apparently did not pick up the telephone when they were so confused by the networked text messaging.

    One of the most important things to be learned from the Hara and King study is the tendency for hopelessly confused students to often give up rather than keep pestering the instructor or each other until they see the light.  Instructors cannot assume that students are willing to air their confusions.  A major reason is a fear of airing their ignorance.  Another reason is impatience with the slowness of text messaging where everything must be written/read instead of having conversations with audio or full teleconferencing.

    In summary, the Hara and King study is not so much a criticism of distance education as it is a study of student behavior in settings where the distance education is poorly designed and delivered.  A similar outcome is reported in "Student Performance In The Virtual Versus Traditional Classroom," by Neil Terry, James Owens and Anne Macy, Journal of the Academy of Business Education, Volume 2, Spring 2001 --- http://www.abe.villanova.edu/tocs01.html.  An earlier report on this topic appears in entitled "Student and Faculty Assessment of the Virtual MBA:  A Case Study,"  by Neil Terry, James Owens, and Anne Macy, Journal of Business Education, Volume 1, Fall 2000, 33-38 --- http://www.abe.villanova.edu/tocf00.html.


    One of my students, Joshua Miller, lists the following concerns:

    • may require students to have "technological literacy" (I think this a
      good thing but some of the sites I visited said otherwise)

    • content may become subservient to the technology

    • poses new difficulties for program evaluation and accreditation

    • could alienate academics

    • may encounter language barriers/translation problems

    • can be obstructed by time zones

    • requires forms of institutional support to be projected to distant
      students

    • is complex in relation to copyright issues

    • often requires establishment of regional centers

    • can be costly for students to obtain equipment


    "Push for Computers in Classrooms Gathers New Foes," by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times, December 15, 1999 --- http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/cyber/education/15education.html 

    Now, a new group of educators, doctors, psychologists and others is challenging that notion. In a draft statement on technology literacy, a committee of the group, called the Alliance for Childhood, says that the American approach to technology in homes and schools has been flawed, emphasizing ephemeral vocational skills and the razzle-dazzle of educational software, rather than helping children think critically about technology and its appropriate use.

    Among other things, the committee is urging that computers have a restricted role, if any role at all, in elementary school classrooms and in later years be introduced in a way that assures children understand how computers work, can examine the appropriate place of technology in their lives and be instilled with the idea of ethical behavior online.

    The hope, said Joan Almon, coordinator of the group, is to influence policy makers, parents and teachers at a time when "there is still a window," when computers have not yet become as entrenched in life as, say, television.

    The alliance, which was formed last February, plans to incorporate as a formal nonprofit organization. Its founding members include Almon, a long-time teacher and consultant; Jane M. Healey, an educational psychologist and author of "Failure to Connect," a critique of computer use in education; Stephen L. Talbott, the editor of a well-regarded electronic newsletter examining the social implications of technology; and Bettye Caldwell, a professor of pediatrics and former president of National Association for the Education of Young People.

    The purpose of the group is to fight what its members see as a "toxic cultural environment" where they say children are buffeted by stress that is leading to a decline in their well-being and an increase in health problems like hyperactive disorders and depression. They say that stress includes academic pressures, lack of interaction with caring adults, and mass exposure to violence, sex and crass commercialism in electronic media.

    Related Articles
    Project Trains Teachers to Use Technology
    (September 15, 1999)

    Survey Finds Teachers Unprepared for Computer Use
    (September 8, 1999)

    Focus Shifts to Effectiveness of Education Technology
    (July 14, 1999)

    Non-Traditional Teachers More Likely to Use the Net
    (May 26, 1999

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    A Message from Peter Kenyon on November 18, 1999

    My own experience is with a three-semester experiment of a non-majors "survey" course. We met as a class once at the beginning of the semester and once again at the final exam. Without presuming that my experience can be generalized to others, I've made the following observations.

    It was MUCH more work to prepare and execute the course than I ever expected. I covered a little less material than in the traditional course. Assessment was very difficult. Student reaction was strong and about equally divided between those who loved it and those who hated it. DL seems better suited to mature learners with well-developed learning skills.

    In the end, I concluded their was little for me to like about this mode of instruction. It takes away the part of my job I like best (classroom interaction) and substituted mass quantities of gizmo tweaking (GT). Improved tools will reduce the need for GT, but I don't see how we maintain interesting human interaction. I use gizmos to support traditional instruction, but I have no desire to give up the classroom.

    As Barry Rice says, the traditional classroom MAY be a dinosaur in need of extinction. But when it does, I'll find other work to do because there's little joy for me as a cyber-prof.

    Peter Kenyon [pbk1@AXE.HUMBOLDT.EDU ]

    The most frequent refrain that I hear from my wife is: "Did you hear what I just said?" I am sorry to say that I often must ask Erika to repeat both that question and her comments preceding the question. In fact, my penchant for listening without hearing has become somewhat of a joke between us. She has threatened to learn about computers just to communicate with me. Her problem is that she is just too busy to learn about computers. When she does find the time, however, I'm in for big trouble. Seriously, however, when I am in the midst of concentrating on one thing, I have a bit of the same problem with student communications on other issues.

    I agree with Peter and Ron  to a point. However, the Sloan Foundation Experiments suggest that faculty/student and student/student communications increase with asynchronous courses. Students who rarely take the trouble to visit faculty during office hours will send email and chat room communications. Students have a penchant for catching us in our offices at a bad time, and they become embarrassed that it is a bad time. The trouble is that, being so busy, there is rarely a really good time for us to really communicate face-to-face. Sometimes students have to wait outside our offices, and being human, they conclude that they have better things to do with their time --- such as seeking out a teaching assistant or another student in the class. I sometimes think my "former" students know be better, via email, after graduation than while they were my students. Perhaps it is because they learn to appreciate my work more after they have graduated. But I am certain there is more to it than that.

    I taught in five universities over the years and encountered a few, surprisingly few, professors who have great face-to-face encounters with students outside the classroom. There are many (like me) who seem to do better with electronic communications. Years ago, I encountered an assistant professor from a prestigious university who reported that the only way for faculty or students to really make contact (before email was invented) with one of the superstars on the faculty was through written memos even though that superstar was located two doors down the hall.

    For more on the relation between communications and pedagogy, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/slide01.htm. For more on student evaluations, see the course evaluations at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois. What seems to be more of a problem with asynchronous courses seems to be faculty burn out that, in large measure, is caused by increased communications with students. Asynchronous courses are also more demanding on materials development. Much of what we expound in lectures comes from long-term memory that is triggered by something (patterns of association) in the midst of class. Beforehand, the same thoughts may not have surfaced in our offices that surface in the middle of a class. This makes it almost impossible to write down complete lectures for asynchronous courses having no lectures.

    Electronic communications, of course, are not as satisfactory in many respects as face-to-face encounters. However, I would argue that electronic communications are sometimes "closer." For example, there are times when I feel a bit intimidated myself in the presence of some people that I communicate freely with by email. There are people that I hate to interrupt with a telephone call, but I am rarely embarrassed to send them email messages. After a face-to-face or telephone visit, there are almost always things that I belatedly think that I should have said or not said. This seems to be less of a problem with email, and when it happens I just send out correction/addendum messages.

    My point here is to avoid associating "closeness" with "face-to-face." We can be virtual strangers face-to-face and close friends over a network. We may repeat daily greetings with colleagues in the hallways who we rarely communicate with in depth. I am less close with colleagues that I "see" in our hallways than with many of you with whom I correspond regularly. There have been some studies (one was reported in Playboy) showing that husbands and wives that see each other every day have a surprisingly small amount of genuine communication except at certain peak moments such as when they are in a car together on a long trip or awaiting a meal by candlelight in a slow-service restaurant. Would some us learn more about our spouses and kids if we communicated anonymously or openly with them via email and chat rooms? Will our kids open up more to anonymous strangers on the web than they will face-to-face with us?

    But then maybe I am just "listening" to Peter and Ron without "hearing."

    Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

    -----Original Message----- 
    From: Ron [mailto:rrtidd@MTU.EDU] 
    ent: Friday, November 19, 1999 6:55 AM 
    To: AECM@VAX.LOYOLA.EDU 
    ubject: Re: Distance Learning with traditional undergraduate students

    Peter made one comment that I suspect reflects the sentiments of many 20th century educators- any technology that detracts from our ability to physically connect with our students is going to diminish our career satisfaction. While I share this sentiment whole heartedly, I believe that we confront two inescapable realities in 21st century education.

    First, distributed education (whether distance or proximity) is going to become a more prominent feature of the academic landscape. Second, students are going to become increasingly comfortable with online social interaction and communities.

    Given those two "assumptions," most (if not all) educators must learn how to develop an appropriate classroom community in cyberspace. To me, that means having a community that fulfills all participants' needs to connect, while achieving academic objectives. A difficult challenge when the participants come from two generations that define connecting and community in such different ways.

    I have not had a chance to read it, yet, but some might find "Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace," (Palloff and Pratt) to be informative.

    Ron Tidd

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    The Future and Darker Sides of Distance Education

    Alternative Futures for Distance Learning: The Force and the Darkside 

    Murray Turoff 
    Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science Department of Computer and Information Science 
    New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark NJ, 07102, USA email: murray@vc.njit.edu  
    homepage: http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff/ Copyright Murray Turoff 1997

    Abstract 
    There are forces at work that are going to reshape the practice of distance learning and higher education in the United States. Technology only enters as an opportunity to channel these forces in very different directions. The channeling process is really that of administrative and management practices and policies that govern the utilization of educational technology and methods. While there are desirable futures possible it is becoming evident that many current practices and related economic forces can result in a future that is quite analogous to the "darkside" of the force.

    The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any organization with whom the author may have an affiliation.

    Table of Contents 
    Introduction The Force Commercialization 
    The Erosion of Tenure 
    Faculty and Adjunct Compensation and Considerations 
    Performance Throughput Rates 
    Budget Paradoxes 
    Future Alternatives 
    Accreditation of Distance Learning 
    Program Support 
    Evaluation The Nature of Learning 
    Related Administrative Practices 
    Warped Views on Distance Education 
    Faculty Developed Materials 
    The Organization of Distance Learning 
    Final Conclusion and Observations 
    References

    http://www.westga.edu/~distance/turoff11.html


    http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff


    http://eies.njit.edu/~hiltz

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    The Sanford Report in the Stanford Report

    Hi Kevin,

    Thank you for the message below.  My concern with John Sanford's report is that critics of distance education often have never tried it.  Or even if they have tried it, they have never tried it with the instant message intensity of an Amy Dunbar --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q3.htm#Dunbar 

    I just do not think the armchair critics really appreciate how the Dunbar-type instant messaging pedagogy can get inside the heads of students online.  

    But I think it is safe to day that the Sanford-type critics will never have the motivation and enthusiasm to carry off the Dunbar-type instant messaging pedagogy.  For them and many of us (actually I'm almost certain that I could not pull off what Dr. Dunbar accomplishes), it is perhaps more "suicidal" for students.

    I also think that success of distance education depends heavily upon subject matter as well as instructor enthusiasm.  But I think there is only a small subset of courses that cannot be carried off well online by a professor as motivated as Dr. Dunbar.

    I am truly grateful that I was able to persuade Professor Dunbar and  distance education expert from Duke University to present an all-day workshop in the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel on August 13, 2002.  If our workshop proposal is accepted by the AAA, this is an open invitation to attend.  Details will soon be available under "CPE" at http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/2002annual/meetinginfo.htm 

    Thanks for helping me stay informed!  Other views on the dark side are summarized at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

    Bob Jensen

    Bob, 
    Since I know you track information technology WRT education, I thought you might be interested in this. The original source is the "Stanford Report" cited below: TP is a listserv that redistributed it.
    Kevin

    Folks:

    The article below presents an interesting take on the limitations of technology, teaching, and learning. It is from the Stanford Report, February 11, 2002 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/ . Reprinted with permission.

    Regards,

    Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu  UP NEXT: Book Proposal Guidelines

     

    HIGH-TECH TEACHING COULD BE "SUICIDAL"

    BY JOHN SANFORD

    University educators largely extol the wonders of teaching through technology. But skeptics question whether something is lost when professors and lecturers rely too heavily on electronic media, or when interaction with students takes place remotely -- in cyberspace rather than the real space of the classroom.

    Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, is one such skeptic. "I think this enthusiastic and sometimes naïve and sometimes blind pushing toward the more technology the better, the more websites the better teacher and so forth, is very dangerous -- [that it] is, indeed, suicidal," Gumbrecht said, speaking at the Jan. 31 installment of the Center for Teaching and Learning's "Award-WinningTeachers on Teaching" series.

    But Gumbrecht cautioned that there are few, if any, studies either supporting or rejecting the hypothesis that traditional pedagogy is superior to teaching via the Internet or with a host of high-tech classroom aids. "If [such studies] exist, I think we need more of them," he said.

    He added that he could point only to his "intuition that real classroom presence should be maintained and is very, very important," and emphasized the need for educators to critically examine where technology serves a useful pedagogical function and where it doesn't.

    However, Gumbrecht allowed that, for courses in which knowledge transmission is the sole purpose, electronic media probably can do the job well enough. Indeed, given the 20th century's knowledge explosion and the increasing costs of higher education, using technology as opposed to real-life teachers for the transmission of information is probably inevitable, he said.

    In any case, knowledge transmission should not be the core function of the university, he added, noting that the Prussian statesman and university founder Wilhelm von Humboldt, sociologist Max Weber and Cardinal John Henry Newman all held that universities should be places where people confront "open questions."

    "Humboldt even goes so far to say -- and I full-heartedly agree with him -- they should ideally be questions without a possible answer," Gumbrecht said. He asserted the university should be a place for "intellectual complexification" and "riskful thinking."

    "We are not about finding or transmitting solutions; we are not about recipes; we are not about making intellectual life easy," he continued. "Confrontation with complexity is what expands your mind. It is something like intellectual gymnastics. And this is what makes you a viable member of the society."

    Paradoxically, "virtual" teacher-student interaction that draws out this kind of thinking probably would be much costlier for the university than real-time, in-class teaching, Gumbrecht said. The reason for this, he suggested, is that responding to e-mail from students and monitoring their discussion online would require more time -- time for which the university would have to pay the teacher -- than simply meeting with the students as a group once or twice a week.

    In addition, Gumbrecht asserted that discussions in the physical presence of others can lead to intellectual innovation. He recalled a Heidegger conference he attended at Stanford about a year ago, where he said he participated in some of the best academic discussions of his career. Heidegger himself "tries to de-emphasize thinking as something we, as subjects, perform," Gumbrecht said. "He says thinking is having the composure of letting thought fall into place." Gumbrecht suggested something similar happens during live, in-person discussions.

    "There's a qualitative change, and you don't quite know how it happens," he said. "Discussions in the physical presence have the capacity of being the catalyst for such intellectual breakthroughs. The possibility of in-classroom teaching -- of letting something happen which cannot happen if you teach by the transmission of information -- is a strength."

    Gumbrecht argued that the way in which students react to the physical presence of one another in the classroom, as well as to the physical presence of their professor, can invigorate in-class discussions. "I know this is problematic territory, but I think both the positive and negative feelings can set free additional energy," he said. "I'm not saying the physical presence makes you intellectually better, but it produces certain energy which is good for intellectual production."

    Asked to comment on some of the ideas Gumbrecht discussed in his lecture, Decker Walker, a professor of education who studies technology in teaching and learning, agreed that pedagogy via electronic media may work best in cases where information transmission is the goal -- for example, in a calculus course. In areas such as the humanities and arts, it may be a less valuable tool, he said.

    In any case, the physical presence of teachers can serve to motivate students, Walker said. "I think young people are inspired more often by seeing other people who are older -- or even the same age -- who do remarkable things," he said. "It would be hard to replace this with a computer."

    On the other hand, Walker maintained that computer technology can be a useful educational aid. One such benefit is access to scholars who are far away. "Technology can enable a conversation, albeit an attenuated online one, with distant experts who bring unique educational benefits, such as an expert on current research on a fast-moving scientific topic," Walker said. "This may greatly enrich a live class discussion with a local professor."

    Walker maintained that the university environment is not in danger of being supplanted by technology. On the contrary, he noted, large businesses have adopted aspects of the university environment for their employees' professional education. For example, General Motors started GM University, whose main campus is at the company's new global headquarters in Detroit's Renaissance Center.

    Museums also function in some ways like universities, he noted. For example, the Smithsonian Institution has numerous research, museum and zoo education departments

    And for all the emphasis high-tech companies put on developing devices and software for remote communication, many have had large campuses constructed where workers are centralized -- a nod, perhaps, to the importance of person-to-person interaction.

    Rick Reis, executive director of Stanford's Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing and associate director of the Learning Lab's Global Learning Partnerships, noted that the subject of technology in education covers a lot of territory. Few people, for example, are likely to argue that making students trudge over to the library's reserve desk to get a piece of reading material for a course, or making hundreds of hard copies, is preferable to posting it on the web, Reis said. But he added that whether the kind of teaching generally reserved for a seminar could be as effective online is an open question.

     

     

    Distance Education on the Web David Noble's Articles on Digital Diploma Mills

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    David Nobles' Concerns for Students' Privacy

    A Long-Standing Critic of Distance Education, David Noble,  Blasts it Once Again

    "New Book by Critic of Distance Education Describes Privacy Threats," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2002 ---  http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002011801u.htm 

    Distance education threatens the privacy of students and professors because online class discussions can be monitored in ways that are impossible in traditional classrooms, argues David Noble, a history professor at York University, in Toronto, and a well known critic of technology.

    Mr. Noble's latest critiques of distance education, along with revised versions of earlier salvos that first circulated online, are collected in a new book, Digital Diploma Mills (Monthly Review Press).

    Mr. Noble says the privacy of students and professors online is a particularly important issue in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, because "governments have vastly enlarged their powers of surveillance, and surveillance of electronic communication in particular."

    Some software packages for delivering online courses can automatically capture and store the texts of all online class discussions, or collect detailed information about what students look at online. That worries Mr. Noble, who says that if the material is stored and archived, it could be possible for law-enforcement officials to demand transcripts of class discussions.

    "Certainly administrators and political authorities will be in a position to monitor any and all such activities as never before, remotely and discreetly, without permission or acknowledgment," writes Mr. Noble. "And they will have ready access to extensive electronic records of course content and communications."

    Much of the new material in Mr. Noble's book focuses on the influence of the U.S. government -- and particularly the military -- on the continuing evolution of online distance education. He worries that the program could lead the military to bring greater standardization to distance education.

    In particular, Mr. Noble focuses on the U.S. military's eArmyU, a $453-million program that will allow enlisted soldiers to take courses and earn degrees online through partner colleges.

    The project was announced in 2000, just as some commercial distance-education efforts by colleges and companies were beginning to falter, says Mr. Noble. He argues that the demand for online education was not as great as colleges had anticipated, and he sees the government's project as an effort to bolster the use of technology in education.

    Continued at http://chronicle.com/free/2002/01/2002011801u.htm 


    Zuleyma Tang-Martinez apparently sides with David Noble

    "Higher Education and the Corporate Paradigm: the Students are the Losers," by Zuleyma Tang-Martinez --- http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/tang-martinez.html 

    0.1. As institutions of higher education throughout the US and abroad have adopted the corporate model, "efficiency" and profit have been emphasized, while students have been redefined as "customers", "consumers," and "clients." In reality, what we are currently witnessing, as the result of this corporate paradigm, is the destruction of American higher education. University presidents and administrators take on the roles of Chief Executive Officers, and business managers have not supported greater diversity or inclusiveness in academia, whether in terms of faculty or students. The bottom line has become making money rather than educating students or fostering an environment conducive to free intellectual inquiry and development. 

    0.2. Although faculty often object to the corporate paradigm, because of what it does to our profession and to us as individuals, it is important to keep in mind that ultimately it is the students and their education who suffer the most and have the most to lose. There are three trends, dictated by the corporate approach, that profoundly affect the quality of the education our students receive.

    For the positive side, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 

    For a summary of assessment issues, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 


     

    Update Messages on Trends in Corporate Education

    I thank Dan Gode for calling my attention to the following article.
    "Two years ago, learning portals popped up across the Internet’s landscape. Today, many are buried in the dot-com rubble. What happened?" by Kim Kiser, Online Learning --- http://www.onlinelearningmag.com/new/sept01/cover.htm 

    By the spring of 2001, learning portals had started to implode like so many of the dot-coms that came before them. Among the casualties were Headlight.com, which initially provided learning to small and medium-sized businesses; Acadio, which targeted professionals; EduPoint.com, which started out serving consumers, then switched to corporate clients; TrainSeek.com, which also targeted corporations; and consumer sites HungryMinds.com (bought by IDG Books, which adopted the name) and FreeEdu.com, to name a few.

    What went wrong? For one thing, consumers weren’t as starved for knowledge as the founders of these companies had hoped. “The idea of ‘If you build it, they will come’ hasn’t quite been the case,” says Dave Egan, one of the founders of Billerica, Mass.-based TrainingNet, now Thinq. “As individuals, we’re not likely to go to Thinq.com or HungryMinds.com on a Saturday morning and find learning — especially if we know full well that we could go back to work on Monday and have that course paid for by the corporation.” Egan adds that less than one percent of his company’s revenues came from consumers.

    Corporations were wary of the portal model, too. Michael Lodato, vice president of market development for DigitalThink in San Francisco, which provided content to several portal companies, remembers going on sales calls with TrainingNet in the early days. “We would walk in, and the client would say, ‘TrainingNet, why do you have to be in the picture? What value do you bring to the table?’ All I could see in the first iteration of portals were massive libraries with very little advice on what you should do with them,” he recalls.

    And because many portal companies failed to help buyers make intelligent choices about which courses best met their needs, they failed to create demand for the content — and brought little revenue to the organizations supplying it. “If you [as the content vendor] have 300 courses inside a portal with 60,000 choices, how often are you going to generate revenue in that environment?” Lodato asks.

    Companies like DigitalThink also found it took more work than they expected to offer courses through a portal. “It costs money to get your stuff over to these people. Then you have to have alliance managers working with them and accounting people watching over it,” Lodato says. DigitalThink, which initially signed on with about 50 portal companies, got “nothing of any significance” from most of the relationships, he says.

    Tom Brown, vice president of sales for the Americas for NETg, a Naperville, Ill., company that sells IT-related courses, saw similar results. NETg currently has courses listed on several portals, including Thinq’s, KnowledgePlanet’s and Click2learn’s. “The revenues we got out of the portals in 2000 was minimal,” Brown says. “Out of all the portals combined, it was in the low six figures.”

    Investors also soured on the idea, as they watched Internet companies of all kinds failing to live up to their expectations. By the spring of 2000, TrainSeek.com and Headlight.com were among the portal companies looking for additional funding to carry them forward until they became profitable. “In the summer of 2000, you couldn’t do second-round financing for a dot-com, even if it was in the training and education space,” says Lloyd Singer, CEO of LearnCom, a suburban Chicago firm that has been buying up training video and other content companies. At press time, LearnCom was trying to purchase TrainSeek’s Web site and customer base.

    Not all companies that boasted about their portals two years ago have fallen on hard times. Some have lived through the shakeout — and now downplay the fact that they were ever associated with the portal model.

    For the most part, those that survived — and, in some cases, thrived — did so by changing their business models or distinguishing themselves early on. TrainingNet (now Thinq) emerged as an early leader after aggressively pursuing relationships with content providers and assembling what may be the largest online listing of courses, books, audio tapes and videotapes. (Today, their catalog, which isn’t easy for the casual Web site visitor to find, has upward of 500,000 products, including more than 4,000 online courses.)

    In addition to selling courses to individuals and building learning portals for other corporations, Thinq acquired a learning management system and businesses that specialized in marketing, technology and consulting in the United States and United Kingdom. “The whole idea of marrying content, management structure, technology and services seems to be the magic elixir corporate clients are looking for,” says Egan.

    Investors seem to agree. This spring, Thinq received $20 million in fourth-round financing from CIBC Capital Partners and Mellon Ventures, bringing the two-year-old company’s total financing to $66 million.

    Click2learn, which dropped the dot-com from its name and no longer has a link to its course catalog on its Web site, also differentiated itself in several ways. Before launching its portal, the company was well-known for its course authoring software. It also had a learning management system — a feature few portal companies could offer in 1999. Says consultant Hall: “They were one of the first to have a portal, but their other businesses were able to sustain that model.”

    Kevin Oakes, president and CEO of the Bellevue, Wash., company, admits that corporate customers haven’t bought large volumes of off-the-shelf courses from the portal the way he originally hoped. However, he explains, one reason Click2learn, which works with some 50 content companies and has nearly 10,000 offerings in its catalog, has had some success with its portal business was because they could create both hosted and behind-the-firewall learning sites for corporations.

    “The difference between our model vs. Headlight or TrainSeek is that our whole business wasn’t built on the ASP (application service provider) content aggregation model,” he explains.

    Learn2.com is another company that’s hanging on after changing its name and business model several times. Originally known as 7th Level, the company first targeted consumers, then corporations, government agencies and small businesses with everything from courses on Access 2000 to free tutorials on how to hang wallpaper. They also sell courses on CD-ROM and video through retailers such as CompUSA.

    Learn2.com, whose stock was dropped from the NASDAQ in early August because of its low price, recently signed a merger agreement with E-Stamp Corp., a dot-com that has foundered in its attempts to sell postage online and later supply chain management software. If approved by shareholders later this year, the merger will give Learn2.com an infusion of cash to repay its debt and, its owners hope, stimulate growth. But analysts aren’t optimistic about the company’s future. “The cash will take them through a few more quarters,” says Weggen. “But they have too many lines of business and are in too many markets.”

    Weggen and others believe the tectonic movements that caused the shake-up in the portal market haven’t ended, and that the lessons from last century’s learning portals will become the bedrock for learning systems of the future.

    “Bringing together courses from multiple publishers is only part of the game in terms of what it takes to serve the corporate market,” says Scott Mellen, co-founder of the defunct Headlight.com. “That’s only part of the challenge training managers deal with when confronted with trying to provide skills for their employees. They want the whole suite of functionality that’s important to business. And I think a lot of things that happened with learning portals are helping build this ultimate thing.”

    For the rest of the article, go to http://www.onlinelearningmag.com/new/sept01/cover.htm 

     

    Audio and Email Messages From Daring Educators

    I have an old and sadly neglected Web page (that in some ways has become history of the early pioneers in bringing technology into accounting education) that contains messages from various professors, some who burned out and/or became overwhelmed by early efforts to bring technology into education --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Other Documents

    Starting Page

    Education

    Learning

    Table of Contents

    Growing Up is More Anxiety-Provoking/Stressful

    What is happening to the quality of our students?

    A recent meta-analysis of multiple studies which revealed that schoolchildren in the 1980s (i.e. our recent and current students) reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients did in the 1950s. Thus, our students may find life to be far more anxiety-provoking/stressful than we did as undergraduates.

    Adding to this finding is the one described below that indicates stress impairs the ability to remember and learn. Taken together, these studies suggest that significantly higher levels of anxiety/stress among the current generation of college students may help to account for the “decline” in the quality of academic performance that we lament. Perhaps most of our students are doing the best they can given their life experience just as we did the best we could given our life experience.

    Richard Reams, Ph.D. 
    Staff Psychologist Counseling & Career Services 
    Trinity University 715 Stadium Drive #78 San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

     


    Links to Bob Jensen's Workshop Documents on Education and Learning

    The Shocking Future of Education 

    First File

    Second File

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
    (Includes helpers for finding online training and education courses, certificate programs, and degree Programs)
    Detail File

    Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade

    First File

    Second File

    The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education

     Detail File

    Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research Detail File
    History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies Detail File
    Knowledge Portals and Vortals Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Advice to New Faculty (and Resources) Detail File
    Threads of Online Program Costs and Faculty Compensation Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Helper Videos and Tutorials Detail File
    Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher Education
    (both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
    Old Book
    Additional Links and Threads Threads

    Education Technology Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Bob Jensen's Homepage is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/

     

     

    Global Cross-Border Networked Education in the 21st Century
    Bob Jensen at Trinity University
    Homepage:  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
    This Page: Click on "Education Technology Updates"

    Links to Bob Jensen's Workshop Documents on Education and Learning
    Bob Jensen's Education and Learning Bookmarks

    Bookmarks

    The Shocking Future of Education 
    (Including Open-Share Course Materials From Prestigious Universities)

    First File

    Second File

    E-Learning and Distance Education's Top 
    (Award-Winning) Illustrations

    Detail File

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
    (Includes helpers for finding online training and education courses, certificate programs, and degree Programs)
    Detail File

    Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade
        
    (Including Edutainment and Learning Games)
         (Includes aids for the handicapped, disabled, and learning challenged)

    First File

    Second File

    The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education

     Detail File

    Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research Detail File
    History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies Detail File
    Knowledge Portals and Vortals Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Advice to New Faculty (and Resources) Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Threads on Electronic Books Detail File
    Threads of Online Program Costs and Faculty Compensation Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Helper Videos and Tutorials Detail File
    Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher Education
    (both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
    Old Book

    Some Earlier Papers

     

    Additional Links and Threads Threads

    Click here to search this Website if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
    For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/.

    The term "electroThenic portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. What does this mean?
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ElectronicPortfolio
     

    When you want to search for an education phrase, go to 
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#education

    Bob Jensen's Blogs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
    Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   


    Create your own Web applications with ease using this free Zoho Creater software

    August 7, 2006 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

    Is this a MS Access-killer-app?

    http://www.zohocreator.com/

    "This free Web-based software handled the job -- but without the bells and whistles of Access that had baffled Mr Hughes. And since the program stored his data on the Web, his colleagues could tap into it easily with a browser. "To me it was like a godsend" says Mr. Hughes, operations manager at SoluChem. "
    Robert A. Guth, The Wall Street Journal Online --- http://www.zohocreator.com/

    Exclusive benefits of Zoho Creator  --- http://www.zohocreator.com/
      Create Apps from scratch
    Create your web application in minutes, not days. It's just a few clicks away.

     
      Create Apps from spreadsheet
    Import your spreadsheet to create web application automatically.
      Browse, Copy & Customize
    Browse public applications. See something you like? Copy and customize to your needs.

     
        No coding required
    Create web application without coding. You don't need to have HTML or PHP skills .
      Embed Forms/Views in website
    Embed Forms and Views easily into your website and blog.
     
        Share your App
    Share your app with other users or keep it private among your friends, colleagues and clients.

     

    Zoho Creator helps you to easily create personal and business web applications on your own by structuring and presenting your data in a lot of interesting and useful ways. You can view the data as a table, calendar or just as a summary. In addition to just viewing your data in many ways, you might also want to perform one or more of the following:

    • Perform an action when a row is added successfully or detect when someone adds a row to a form. For example, you might want to receive email notifications as and when a row is added. Learn more

    • Perform an action when a row is updated. For example, in the case of a bug tracker, you might want to receive email notifications whenever the status of the issue gets modified. Learn more

    • Validate the form data before persisting it.

    • Add a row only if it satisfies a certain criteria and reject the other entries. For example, in a recruitment application, accept only those applicants who have more than two years of experience. Learn more

    • Define formulas for calculations. For example, assume a student database has marks obtained by students in all the subjects and you want to display the total and average marks also. Learn more

    • Create complex filters in views. Learn more 

     With Zoho Creator, you don't have to write code to build a simple data collection and viewing application like a Contacts list. But, scripting will be indispensable for building a full fledged application with complex logic, for example, Library Manager.

    Jensen Comment
    Although this is not course management software, it can be used for authoring presentation lessons by instructors.

    Bob Jensen's summaries of course authoring and course management software are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm


    Free Audio and Presentation Files of Three Days of Workshops on Education Technologies --- 
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/CPEshows/CPEmenu.htm
     

    Bob Jensen's Recent CPE/CEP Technology Workshops at the American Accounting Association Annual Meetings

    During the past decade, I have organized at least one all-day technology in education workshop at each of the American Accounting Association annual meetings.  In the early years, these were not videotaped.  The past three workshops were videotaped.  Both the presentation materials and the MP3 audio files of the various speakers can be downloaded from the following links:

    San Antonio on August 13, 2002 
    CPE/CEP Workshop Number 1 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm 

    Free audio and presentation files of the following speakers:
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm 

    • Dennis Beresford, University of Georgia
    • Amy Dunbar, University of Connecticut
    • Nancy Keeshan, the Global MBA and Cross-Continent MBA Programs of Duke University
    • Susan Spencer, San Antonio College
    • Bob Jensen, Trinity University

    Atlanta on August 11, 2001
    CPE/CEP Workshop Number 1 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm

    Free audio and presentation files of the following speakers:
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm

    • Don Carter, Chartered Accountancy (CA) School of Business
    • Michael T. Kirschenheiter, Columbia University
    • Robert Walsh, Prentice-Hall and Marist College
    • A team of faculty from UNext
    • Bob Jensen, Trinity University

    Philadelphia on August 12, 2000
     CPE/CEP Workshop Number 1 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    Free audio and presentation files of the following speakers:
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

    • Charles Hickman, AACSB and Quisic (formerly University Access)
    • Michael T. Kirschenheiter, Columbia University
    • Anthony H. Catanach, Villanova University
    • Dan N. Stone, University of Illinois
    • Bob Jensen, Trinity University

    Definitions:

    Distributed Education = Distance Education
    Chris Dede, Diana Oblinger, Carole Barone, Brian Hawkins and others make a distinction between distance education (that can be synchronous and delivered much like traditional classroom education) from distributed education (which is usually asynchronous and delivered over the Internet).  I don't find such a distinction useful in the dawn of high definitional television (HDTV) that will be interactive and further blur the distinction between distance and distributed education.  Furthermore, the terms are often used as synonyms in the literature.  See
    "High-Definition Television Could Change Telecourses and Online Learning," by Florence, Olsen, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 5, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2001/07/2001070501u.htm 

    More important distinctions lie in the type of interactive communications of a course

    • Students

    •  Instructors

    • Mentors

    • Consultants

    • Librarians,

    • Learning Communities

    Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm 

    • Uniform Pace versus Discretionary Pace

    • Total versus partial ALN

    Synchronous Learning Networks (SLN)

    • Virtual Classrooms

    • Instant Replays


    "Changing the Interface of Education with Revolutionary Learning Technologies,"  by Nishikant Sonwalkar, Syllabus, November 2001, pp. 10-13 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5663 

     

    The paradigm shift in the pedagogical design of online education will require much more in-depth study and analysis of existing methods and evolving technologies. Clearly, education delivery is not simply information transfer. There is much to learn, but we already know much about the potential of the technology for multimodal delivery of learning material to a variety of online learners.
    The Five Fundamental Learning Styles for Online Asynchronous Instruction
    Apprenticeship
    A “building block” approach for presenting concepts in a step-by-step procedural learning style.
    Incidental
    Based on “events” that trigger the learning experience. Learners begin with an event that introduces a concept and provokes questions.
    Inductive
    Learners are first introduced to a concept or a target principle using specific examples that pertain to a broader topic area.
    Deductive
    Based on stimulating the discernment of trends through the presentation of simulations, graphs, charts, or other data.
    Discovery
    An inquiry method of learning in which students learn by doing, testing the boundaries of their own knowledge.

    Bob Jensen's comments on how traditional classroom materials must be modified for online use are given at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm 


    From Infobits on September 30, 2002

    RECOMMENDED READING

    "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.

    Two free, electronic newsletters devoted to distance learning issues came to my attention recently:

    DESIEN [Distance Education Systemwide Interactive Electronic

    Newsletter]

    http://www.uwex.edu/disted/desien/

    Infobits subscriber Rosemary Lehman <email: lehman@ics.uwex.edu> edits DESIEN. The newsletter is published monthly by the University of Wisconsin-Extension <http://www1.uwex.edu/>. Each issue offers original articles which emphasize distance education themes. News, updates, conference information, and contributions by subscribers are also regularly included. Subscription information is included on the DESIEN homepage.

    [Note: the August 2002 issue includes the article, "Electronic Content Accessible for Distance Learners with Disabilities," by the CIT Infobits editor. The article is available at http://www.uwex.edu/disted/desien/2002/0208/focus.htm]

    ---

    SIDEBARS

    http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/index.htm

    Infobits subscriber Glenn Millar <email: Glenn_Millar@bcit.ca> co-edits SideBars. The newsletter is published by the Learning Resources Unit of the British Columbia Institute of Technology to provide "useful information and news items for instructors, course developers, educational technologists and anyone else who has an interest in distributed learning in its various manifestations." Subscription

    information: http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/subcribe.html

     

     


    Driving Factors for Corporate Distance Education
    The factors driving the growth of the alternative education market in the US, and which are likely to be relevant to Australia, are as follows: 

    • the globalised economy, with a growing demand for standardised products, services and technical infrastructure, and sophisticated communication systems; 

    • the emergence of a post-industrial information age and the explosive growth and distributed nature of new knowledge; 

    • demands for greater access to tertiary education fuelled by rapid changes in the economy, the need to maintain and upgrade skills for employment, and industry’s need for ‘work-ready’ graduates; 

    • growing reluctance on the part of governments to fund increasing demand for higher education.

    Cunningham, et al. (2000)
    The Business of Borderless Education (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000). Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 
    (pp. xii-xiii)

    To this Bob Jensen adds the following:

    fear among school administrators, faculty, government officials, and librarians that if they fall behind in education technologies they will fall behind in the learning curve, generate a luddite reputation, lose revenues to other institutions, have outmoded curricula, and give themselves, their institutions, and even their nations a declining reputation.  

    fear among school administrators, faculty, government officials, and librarians that, if they fall behind in education technologies, they will cling to expensive labor-intensive systems that will not be cost-effective in times of increasing faculty shortages and indirect costs (such as the inability of instructors to afford housing in high cost living areas such as Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Hawaii, Hong Kong, London, Paris, etc.)

    •  awareness that there are some enormous advantages to online learning over onsite learning, including the online ability to customize learning to individual aptitudes and motivations (especially for young learners) and time constraints (especially for adult learners).  Online learning also has a greater capacity to deal with language and cultural barriers.

    Enormous Advantages of Online Learning
    Ease of communicating with instructors, fellow students, mentors, experts, and libraries. Email and email attachments
    Instant Messaging
    Bulletin Boards
    Chat Rooms
    Teleconferencing
    Webcams
    Web documents
    Potential intimacy and closer bonding when online Reduces intimidation face-to-face encounters, physical presence embarrassments, and group bullying.

    Kentucky Virtual U. Adds Online Tutoring

    Kentucky Virtual University opened registration for Spring 2002 with new online services, including free online tutoring, Sunday call center hours and an online writing center. Acting chief executive officer Daniel Rabuzzi said the services "are designed to create a high- touch environment for students plugged into class over the Internet. Live tutors are now just a click away, and in some subjects, are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week." Students can schedule tutoring sessions in subjects ranging from basic math to Calculus II, accounting, chemistry, economics, Spanish and statistics. The tutoring will remain free through mid- May 2002 and is available through an arrangement with the University of Kentucky.

    For more information, visit: http://www.kyvu.org 

    Messaging can be more well thought out and carefully crafted than face-to-face or telephone conversations. Reminds me of the repeated drafts that I sometimes craft before finally sending out an intended letter or article.
    Students can access electronic libraries and knowledge portals containing text, graphics, audio, video, and animations.   For example, listen to the experts' audio files on FAS 133.

    See the U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia Database --- http://oyez.nwu.edu/ 

    Sometimes these knowledge portals have interactive audio where users can speak their requests into a telephone and receive audio or text replies from an interactive database.  
    Audio Demos at  BeVocal.

    Students can access realistic and highly educational networked simulations and networked games. For example, see the interactive networked business strategy simulation at http://www.netmike.com/ 
    Students can take courses simultaneously with students from other nations and cultures For example, read about Sharon Lightner's international accounting course at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm 
    Students can learn asynchronously using hypertext and hypermedia navigations. See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm 
    Virtual settings for learning are increasingly more realistic in terms of images and databases  
    Providers of training and education have reduced geographic or other monopoly powers.  They must face up to increasingly stiff international online sources of training and education. See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 
    Web courses are more efficient for students. Texas A&M, in partnership with Monterrey Tech, deliver an ALN Web MBA Program in Mexico City.

    According to John Parnell, what did Mexico City students claim was the main advantage of the online MBA from Texas A&M?

    Students have greater access to training and education at the time and place where they need it at the moment and across their entire lives. JITT = Just in Time Training

    Dial-Up Knowledge

    Knowledge Portals & Vortals

       

    A summary of the many disadvantages as well as advantages of education technologies --- http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245ch02.htm 

    For a summary of the Dark Side, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

    Lifelong Learning and Training Choices of the Future
     
    • shorter, often expensive, courses offered by new providers versus the more established reputation of traditional institutions; 

    • credit versus non-credit professional development education and training; and 

    • ‘just-in-case’ education versus ‘just-in-time’ training.

    Cunningham, et al. (2000)
    The Business of Borderless Education (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000). Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 
    (p. xiii)

     


    Wow Article of the Week in the December 3, 2001 Edition of New Bookmarks

    Note from Bob Jensen:  This demonstrates the growth of distance education and then questions some of the pedagogy.

    "A Virtual Revolution:  Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education," by Thomas J. Kriger, USDLA Journal (a refereed journal of the United States Distance Learning Association," November 2001 --- http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html 

    This report describes four major trends leading the growth of distance education. The purpose is not to cover every provider but to draw a picture of the types of organizational structures and educational activities that are on the rise. These include:

    • Existing higher education institutions that have or are developing distance education programs, such as e-Cornell, NYU Online, the University of Illinois On-line; University of Maryland University College, Rio Salado Community College, the SUNY Learning Network and Virtual Temple;
    • Full virtual universities, such as the University of Phoenix Online, Western Governors University, Andrew Jackson University, Cappella University, Jones International University, Kennedy-Warren University;
    • Corporate university or training institutions, such as the members of Corporate University Xchange and Click2learn.

    Corporate-university joint ventures. those that provide course management systems such as Blackboard, Campus Pipeline, eCollege and Web CT, as well as those who package and distribute courses or content from existing institutions such as UNext.com, Cenquest, Fathom, Global Education Network, Quisic and Universitas 21;

    What do we learn from these descriptions? First, we learn that the variety of new ways to organize DE and reach new students is enormous, as is the talent that can be brought to bear in making education attractive in the new medium. But we also find that the way distance education is being organized and conducted often poses serious questions.

    Much of the distance education under study here, whether non-profit or for-profit, is built on corporate ideas about consumer focus, product standardization, tight personnel control and cost effectiveness (maximizing course taking while minimizing the "inputs" of faculty and development time). These concepts are contrary to the traditional model of higher education decision-making which emphasizes faculty independence in teaching and research, academic control of the curriculum, academic freedom in the classroom and collegial decision-making.

    While traditional practices are not sacrosanct, academic decision making processes have been very successful in producing quality higher education the best in the world. Our concern is that some of the new trends and practices described in this report may inhibit rather than promote good education. A number of specific concerns arose:

    • Education based primarily on the marketplace and the model of "student as customer" is too narrow. Student and industry preferences certainly matter in designing curricula, but if pleasing the customer is the pre-eminent value, there is a real danger that the curriculum will not be coherent, rigorous enough or broad enough to meet the student's long-term interests.
    • A central characteristic of many DE providers is to "unbundle" the faculty role so that different specialists develop the curriculum, teach the course, evaluate student performance, etc. This allows for greater standardization but it may not add up to better education.
    • Standardization of coursework also inhibits students from being exposed to the diverse views of different faculty members with varying knowledge and perspectives. This diversity is important in enabling students to hone their own ideas and knowledge.
    • Some programs exhibited an inclination to increase class size as a means of increasing the financial output of a course. The only proper consideration in fixing class size is to maintain the best level to facilitate learning.
    • Some programs rely too heavily on testing for individual "outcomes" and "competencies" while downgrading the importance of class time and social interaction in developing deep knowledge about a subject. Along the same lines, distance education providers too often dismiss the importance of same-time same-place interaction rather than building it into their programs whenever possible.

    It is appropriate, indeed essential, to present information for the DE marketplace in an attractive, computer-friendly fashion. But over-attention to drawing "customers" may result in technology driving the way teaching is conducted-leading, for example, to models centered around bite-size, "point and click" accumulations of facts rather than a more reflective, less easily measured search for knowledge.

    In the year 2000, AFT published Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. The guidelines lay out 14 specific standards which, if observed, ensure high quality distance education. (A synopsis of the guidelines appears in the report's conclusion.) The guidelines advance AFT's belief that broad academic content, high standards, personal interaction and professional control are the key elements of educational quality. College faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions.

    Education, among other things, is about broadening intellectual horizons, relying on facts and reason when confronting life issues and learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. That is why education is the foundation of a working democracy. Because distance education is ubiquitous and offers so much promise, faculty are obligated to carry the banner for quality and good practice while recognizing that this will sometimes require challenging current trends and practices

    Continued at  http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html  

    Bob Jensen's documents on distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    In particular, a related article on "The Dark Side" of distance education is provided at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 


    Online Pedagogy at the University of Phoenix

    Phoenix faculty work in a highly structured environment. Course facilitators in traditional classes are forbidden to lecture. Faculty are, instead, expected to closely follow Phoenix's "teaching/ learning model," which begins with course syllabi and detailed teaching modules developed by fulltime faculty on the main campus. In this way, faculty responsibilities are broken down into a series of discrete steps, such as when course development is detached from teaching. Phoenix course modules "include guidelines for weekly assignments, group activities and grading."  Some course modules contain classroom time-management guidelines broken down into 15-minute intervals.

    Phoenix defends its practice of using these restrictive guidelines in the name of standardization. The university's online catalog declares: "The standardized curriculum for each degree program provides students with specified levels of knowledge and skills regardless of the delivery method or classroom location."

    Critics argue, however, that Phoenix's course modules violate academic freedom because they don't allow faculty members sufficient discretion. Milton R. Blood, managing director of the American Assembly of the Collegiate Schools of Business, has characterized Phoenix's standardized curriculum as "McEducation." He explained, "It's a redefinition of how we go about delivering higher education. The question is whether it's really higher education when it's delivered in a franchised way."

    Thomas J. Kriger, quoted from the Wow Article of the Week cited above.


    More from Kriger's article cited above:

    Table 1

    A Sampling of Colleges and Universities that Offer
    Online/Distance Education Programs

    Institution
    Characteristics
    Number and Type of DE Programs DE Enrollment
    Accreditation
    e-Cornell For-profit spin off; no courses offered yet Will offer certificates, not degree programs NA Not accredited as a separate entity
    NYU Online For Profit spin off primarily for corporate market Two graduate; many corporate programs 166 (in graduate programs) Not accredited as a separate entity
    University of Illinois Online Umbrella Organization for different U. of Illinois campuses One professional degree; 10 master's, bachelor's completion program 6,000 courses taken online North Central
    University of Maryland University College Claims online program is world's largest online university 12 bachelor;
    10 graduate
    7,955; UMUC now claims enrollment of 40,000 Middle States
    Rio Saldo Community College One of the first and largest online community college programs Six associate degrees; 12 certificate 200 onpine courses, 8,000 students per semester North Central
    SUNY Learning Network One of the three largest DE programs in the country (with Phoenix and UMUC) 1,500 courses from Accounting to Web design Approximately 10,000 course enrollments per semester Middle States
    Virtual Temple For profit spin off; no courses offered yet NA NA Not accredited as a separate entity
    * Figures for 1999-2000, US Department of Education, Report to Congress on the Distance Education Demonstration Programs, January 2001. Other statistics reported directly by institutions.

    Rio Salado Community College (Table 1) offers one of the largest distance education programs at the community college level. One of 10 separate institutions in the huge (9,000-plus square miles) Maricopa Community College District in the greater Phoenix area, Rio Salado was founded in 1978 as a center for adult education. With no central campus, this self-described "college without boundaries" originally offered courses in high schools, libraries and community centers in the Phoenix area. In 1996, Rio Salado began to add online programs to its extensive menu of distance learning courses and training programs. Today, Rio Salado delivers 80 percent of its general education courses via the Internet or other DE technologies. New course selections at Rio begin every two weeks and students can study at their own pace, which offers flexibility for working adults.[9] Rio Salado employs 18 full-time faculty and 600 part-timers, and every faculty member is required to teach at least one online course.

    The faculty role at Rio Salado is "unbundled," or broken down into a series of discrete tasks. Design teams-which include a technical trainer, an editor, a proofreader, and Web and content specialists create a curriculum and standardized courses that are taught primarily by adjunct faculty.

    Rio Salado College is one of a handful of U.S. institutions that participate in the Pew Learning and Technology Program's Grant Program in Course Redesign. This program was based upon ideas found in the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, in which modular, online exercises, tutorials and quizzes would replace more expensive direct contact with actual faculty in high enrollment introductory courses.

    Links to these and many other online programs can be found at the following sites:

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


    More from Kriger's article cited above:

    Table 3

    Corporate-University Joint Ventures:
    Hybrid Course or Content Providers

    Institution
    Characteristics
    Number and Type of DE Programs Affiliations
    Accreditation
    Cardean University / Unext.com Create courses in collaboration with prestigious business schools; problem-solving based curriculum MBA Programs and 80 courses offered Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the London School of Economics DETC
    Cenquest Offers graduate business degrees and training 1 certificate
    2 Master's program
    Partnered with Babson, U. of Texas, Oregon Institute, Adelaide University, Monterey Institute of Technology No
    Fathom Columbia's for-profit spin-off; niche is to provide high-quality content, courses to include arts and humanities 600 courses listed; 75,000 registered users; several hundred students enrolled in online courses 13 member institutions including U. of Chicago, American Film Institute, London School of Economics, NY Public Library No
    Global Education Network Brainchild of Weilliams professor Mark Taylor and investment banker Herbert Allen; trying to attract faculty with star power; will offer core curriculum including arts and humanities 3 or 4 courses currently in development;
    no degree programs available
    Corses by individual faculty from Williams, Wellesley, Brown, Amherst, Yale Seeking accreditation
    Quisic (formerly University Access) Offers undergraduate, graduate business courses, training; original focus undergraduate DE Clients incoluding Cisco, United, Citigroup, Lexus, IBM 200 corporate clients; university partners indlude Dartmouth, London School of Economics, North Carolina, USC No
    Universitas 21 Global network of 18 institutions; joint venture with Thompson Learning In planning stages Seeking U.S. institutional participants No

    Beginning with specialized business courses in the summer of 1999, today Cardean offers a complete online MBA and a total menu of almost 100 courses. Masters courses, which require 25 to 30 hours, cost $500 each. Shorter quantum courses, each requiring two to three hours, are priced at five for $380. Teaching at Cardean is unbundled, with "senior" faculty planning the curriculum, "advisory" faculty counseling students and supervising adjuncts, and "adjunct" faculty members working with students by grading assignments, answering e-mail and directing online discussions.

    Another ambitious online joint venture is Global Education Network (GEN) (Table 3), the product of an alliance between Williams College humanities professor Mark Taylor and investment banker Herbert Alan Jr. As with Fathom, GEN is one of the few for-profit DE providers committed

    to bringing the "soft" subjects of the humanities online. GEN, in fact, plans to offer a full undergraduate core curriculum in a few years, with faculty drawn from small, prestigious liberal arts colleges, which are not usually associated with distance education. Not surprisingly, GEN markets itself as a high-quality DE access point; currently on the Web site are courses from individual faculty at Williams, Wellesley and Brown. The privately owned GEN reportedly has institutional relationships with Wellesley, Brown and Duke, although many other institutions-including Williams (Taylor's home campus) have chosen not to affiliate with GEN. The main objection at Williams was that associating with a DE provider would hurt its quality reputation.[21]

    Other distance education joint ventures-some with significant outside funding-are attempting to capture the estimated $4 billion that corporations spend each year on DE training for their employees.[22] Founded in 1997, Cenquest (Table 3) offers business courses and graduate degree programs in partnership with a number of university MBA programs. Cenquest's original affiliates were the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology and the University of Texas at Austin.

    Working with these institutions, Cenquest adapts their courses for the DE market by dividing them into shorter units, which are then offered on a rolling schedule either for individual applications or degree and certificate programs such as accounting, which are more readily standardized and modularized. In December 2000, Cenquest affiliated with the prestigious Babson College to provide an MBA program to Intel employees. Cenquest has been successful in attracting venture capital. It began offering DE courses, which now number over 100, in 1998.

    Update from Bob Jensen:  
    I think Quisic abandoned all or most of its college courses.  You can read more about Cardian and listen to some of its faculty discuss course development and delivery from my August 2001 workshop in Atlanta --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/001cpe/01start.htm 

    Table 4 (from the Wow Article of the Week above)

    Virtual Universities

    Institution
    Characteristics
    Number and Type of DE Programs DE
    Enrollment
    Accreditation
    Andrew Jackson University Correspondence school offering textbook study 3 bachelor's
    3 graduate

    400-450

    DETC
    Capella University Offers traditional courses and corporate training; partners include Honeywell, Lawson Software 36 certificate
    1 bachelor's
    11 graduate

    1.049*

    North Central
    Jones International University First fully accredited online university 21 certificate
    1 bachelor's
    2 graduate

    1,500

    North Central
    Kennedy-Western University Markets to "mid-career professionals" 13 bachelor's
    12 graduate

    12 Ph.D.

    23,000

    Not regionally accredited; licensed by Wyoming State Dept of Ed
    University of Phoenix Online Fastest growing for-profit university; now 25% online 8 bachelor's
    10 master's
    1 Ph.D.; certificate programs under development

    18,500

     
    Western Governor's University Private university offering menu of courses from other institutions and corporations 3 certificate;
    4 bachelor's
    1 graduate

    208*

     
    * Figures for 1999-2000, U.S. Department of Education, Report to Congress on the Distance Education Demonstration Programs, January 2001. Other statistics reported directly by institutions.

     

    A typical undergraduate course at Phoenix lasts five weeks; graduate courses are six weeks. Students attend one four-hour "workshop" per week or meet for longer sessions on alternate weekends. Students also take classes sequentially-one at a time-so they can better focus on the subject matter while working full-time. An additional requirement is that students work in teams. As Phoenix's online catalog explains,

    The university organizes each class into problem-solving teams of the type employed successfully in business and industry. Thus, in addition to the development of intellectual and technical knowledge, the student is able to grow emotionally so that the potential for practical application of knowledge and skill is optimized.[26]

    An estimated 90 percent of Phoenix faculty (both online and classroom) teach part-time. At its Northern California brick-and-mortar campus, Phoenix employs 20 full-time faculty and 550 part-timers. These part-time "facilitators," as they are called, must possess a graduate degree from a regionally accredited institution and must work full-time in a field related to the courses they teach.

     

    Links to these and many other online programs can be found at the following sites:

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

    Quotations on the Dark Side from Kriger's article can be found at 
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
     


     

    Internet Companies Directory (A Partial Listing)
    COMPANY DESCRIPTION URL

    e-Retail (consumer products and services)

    1-800 Contacts Contact lenses http://www.1800contacts.com/
    Alloy Online Goods for teens http://www.alloy.com/
    Amazon.com Books, music, electronics http://www.amazon.com
    Autobytel.com New, used car guide http://www.autobytel.com/
    Barnesandnoble.com Books, music http://www.barnesandnoble.com/
    Drugstore.com Medical products http://www.drugstore.com/
    eBay Auctions http://www.ebay.com/
    Egghead.com Computer products http://www.egghead.com/
    Expedia Travel planning http://www.expedia.com/
    Hotel Reservations Network Discounted hotel rooms http://www.180096hotel.com/
    Priceline.com Travel reservations http://www.priceline.com/
    Stamps.com Postage http://www.stamps.com/
    Ticketmaster Guides, tickets http://www.ticketmaster.com/
    Travelocity.com Travel reservations http://www.travelocity.com/
    e-Finance (banks, brokerages and credit companies)
    Ameritrade Securities broker http://www.ameritrade.com/
    Charles Schwab Securities broker http://www.schwab.com/
    CSFBdirect Securities broker http://www.csfbdirect.com/
    E-Trade Securities broker http://www.etrade.com
    IndyMac Bancorp Mortgage lender http://www.indymacbank.com/
    Intuit Personal finance info http://www.intuit.com/
    NetBank Consumer banking http://www.gefn-compubank.com/
    NextCard Consumer credit http://www.nextcard.com
    TD Warehouse Securities broker http://www.tdwaterhouse.com/
    Wit SoundView Securities broker http://www.witsoundview.com/
    e-New Media (advertising/subscription-supported media)
    AOL Time Warner Consumer content http://www.aoltimewarner.com/
    Ask Jeeves Search engine http://www.ask.com/
    Cnet Networks Technology content http://www.cnet.com/
    HomeStore.com Real estate content http://www.homestore.com/
    HotJobs.com Career content http://www.hotjobs.com/
    InfoSpace Wireless content http://infospace.com/
    MarketWatch.com Financial content http://cbs.marketwatch.com/
    McAfee.com Computer protection http://mcafee.com/
    MP3.com Music content http://www.mp3.com/
    Multex.com Financial content http://www.multexusa.com/
    NBC Internet Consumer content http://www.nbci.com/
    SportsLine.com Sports content http://sportsline.com/
    Terra Lycos Consumer content http://www.terralycos.com/
    TheStreet.com Financial content http://www.thestreet.com/
    Apollo Group U of Phoenix Online Education content http://www.ipopros.com/histdeal_pla.asp?deal=2285
    Yahoo Web guide http://www.yahoo.com/
    e-Access providers (connections to the Internet)
    Aether Systems Wireless Internet access http://www.aethersystems.com/
    Excite At Home Internet access http://www.excite.com/
    EarthLink Internet access http://www.earthlink.net/
    Juno Online Services Internet access http://www.juno.com
    Metricom Wireless Internet access http://www.metricom.com/
    IMPORTANT NOTICE:
    Please be advised that Metricom has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
    NetZero Internet access http://www.netzero.net/
    Prodigy Communications Internet access http://www.prodigy.com/
    RCN Internet access http://www.rcn.com/
    Research in Motion Wireless Internet access http://www.rim.net/
    WorldGate Communications Internet access http://www.wgate.com

    Dr Jensen,
    In your internet access directory you have listed e-Access providers - none of these providers offer managed services...i.e. a place to safely house your servers and storage with both physical and internet security provided in addition to system administration services and storage and backup services. If you ever add these to your listing please consider including us, S4R ( www.s4r.com ) - we provide these services at the best prices around and give the best service!

    Thank you.

    Jennie Enholm | S4R (760)804-8004 x113

    e-Learning providers (corporate) For more details go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 
    Caliber Training and executive dev. http://www.caliber.com/ 
    Pensare Executive development with plans for degree programs in partnership with prestige universities http://www.pensare.com/ 
    UNext Executive development and for-credit programs through UNext's Cardean University and in partnership with prestige universities http://www.unext.com/ 
    Smart Force Executive development http://www.smartforce.com/ 
    Quisic Content development, executive development, and for-credit courses http://www.quisic.com/ 
    (Formerly called University Access)
    Headlight (From CyberU) Recreational learners and an online small business training center http://www.cyberu.com/training/headlight/index.asp 
    OnlineLearning.net Training and executive development and for-credit courses http://www.onlinelearning.net/ 
    University of Maryland University College Training and executive development and for-credit courses http://www.umuc.edu/ 
    Fathom (headed by Columbia University in conjunction with many prestigious partners)  A huge knowledge portal that offers over 600 courses http://www.fathom.com/index.jhtml 
    New York University Online Training and executive development and for-credit courses http://i5.nyu.edu/~jmm282/nyupage.html 
    University of Phoenix Training and executive development and for-credit courses (The largest accredited private university in the world.) http://www.phoenix.edu/index_open.html 
    The Kaplan Colleges Training and executive development and for-credit courses (including the online Concord School of Law) http://www.kaplancollege.com/ 
    Sylvan Learning Systems Training and executive development and for-credit courses (and testing centers) http://tutoring.sylvanlearning.com/
    Intellnex from Ernst & Young (the first Big 5 accounting firm university) Training and executive development http://www.intellinex.com/flash/index.htm 
    (Note that most prestige universities have already or are forming private corporations for online delivery of training, executive development, and for-credit courses)
    For links to Internet Libraries, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Librarian'sIndex
    Many other corporate providers are discussed in a book that can be downloaded free:
    The Business of Borderless Education, by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000).  Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

    Bob Jensen's documents on e-Learning are available free at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen's other bookmarks are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 


    Links to Bob Jensen's Workshop Documents on Education and Learning

    The Shocking Future of Education 

    First File

    Second File

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
    (Includes helpers for finding online training and education courses, certificate programs, and degree Programs)
    Detail File

    Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade

    First File

    Second File

    The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education

     Detail File

    Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research Detail File
    History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies Detail File
    Knowledge Portals and Vortals Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Advice to New Faculty (and Resources) Detail File
    Threads of Online Program Costs and Faculty Compensation Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Helper Videos and Tutorials Detail File
    Additional Links and Threads Threads

     



    You can download (for free) nearly six hours of MP3 audio and the PowerPoint presentation slides of one of the best education technology workshops that I ever organized.  This was the pre-convention workshop that I organized for the American Accounting Association, August 12, 2000 in Philadelphia.  The speakers, topics, and download instructions are given at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm 

    Workshop Title
    Innovative Learning Programs for Accounting and Business:  the Ivy League Goes Online, the Sloan Foundation Experiments in Asynchronous Learning, and Experiments in Self-Learning at Major Universities Using the BAM Pedagogy

     

    Sylvan Online Tutoring --- http://tutoring.sylvanlearning.com/


    A Web Training Course From the U.K.
    Becoming WebWise http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/learn/index.shtml 

    Welcome to BBC Becoming WebWise!
    This new online course is the easy way to get to grips with the Internet. It lets you learn at your own pace and can lead to a nationally recognised qualification. Enrol at your local college for one of the accredited qualifications.
    • The eight key sections, or trips, will take you through the Internet basics in a simple and easy to follow format. Remember, you can return to any of the sections as often as you like. It will probably take you about ten hours to complete the course.
    • Becoming WebWise will help you find out about getting connected, e-mailing, searching, bookmarking, making your own address book and the very basics of building your own web page. You will also learn about technological developments like Digital TV and WAP phones, your legal rights online, the history of the net, and the other ways in which you might get online.
    • As you progress through the course, you will be able to see your scores by visiting your scorecard. This will tell you which trip and landmarks you have visited and also your scores in our tasks and quizzes. It is important to log out at the end of your visit so that your scores and progress will be saved.
    • Remember: in order to obtain the accredited qualification you must enrol at a local college. Use our national coursefinder section to find one.
    • Use the Register or Log In link to get a scorecard. If you would like to enter Becoming WebWise without registering or logging in then use this link: Enter Becoming WebWise

    From The Scout Report on January 18, 2002

    A+ Country Reports http://www.countryreports.org/ 

    A fantastic resource for students, teachers, tourists, and anyone else interested in the globe, A+ Country Reports offers a wealth of information on all of the countries of the world. Like the CIA's World Factbook (last mentioned in the September 28, 2001 _Scout Report_ ), A+ Country Reports presents up-to-date information on population, geography, economy, history, and politics. Aside from that, however, the site presents a lively array of extras that don't figure in the CIA's matter of fact dossiers, things such as audio clips of national anthems and links to current weather reports. As the site itself boasts, through a list of quotes from current reviews, A+ Country Reports is particularly appealing to teachers and younger students, and it's obvious why it's appealing, given its attention to the kinds of details kids demand -- bright graphics, large fonts, and Flash-automated features among them. For those interested in sharing what they have learned or already know, there is also a discussion area and links to sites for further study.


    FindTutorials http://www.findtutorials.com/

    FindTutorials offers hundreds of tutorials and professional online IT and Softskills training courses that are available for a variety of disciplines and skill levels. In addition, it offers an online e-mail system, an IT job database with thousands of daily updated positions, and a host of additional resources on internet training skills. With simple to use navigational tools and a "sophisticated in-house developed site search", finding information to meet your requirements merely takes the click of a button.


     

    Western Governors University Meeting Access Goals

    The Western Governors University released its annual report, which said the private, non-profit university, founded by 19 western governors, is achieving its goals to expand access to higher education, especially for working adults. WGU President Bob Mendenhall said, "the constraints on time due to work and family commitments are access issues ... so the flexibility provided by WGU's online, competency-based model is very appealing to a broad spectrum of students." WGU currently has about 2,500 students enrolled, up from 500 students one year ago. The average WGU student is 40 years old, and over 90 percent work full-time.

    For more information, visit:  http://www.wgu.edu 

    Forwarded by Aaron Konstam on February 25, 2003

    WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY, a virtual institution, was granted regional accreditation on Tuesday by a group of four accrediting agencies. Officials at the university believe this will legitimize distance education and competency-based education in the eyes of other institutions. --> SEE http://chronicle.com/free/2003/02/2003022601t.htm 

    The WGU home page is at http://www.wgu.edu 

    WGU has had a long and hard struggle getting accreditation because it is so non-traditional.  The most important thing to note is that WGU is competency based and non-traditional even though major colleges and universities are providing the learning materials --- http://www.wgu.edu/wgu/academics/understanding.html 

    Unlike traditional universities that are typically credit-based, WGU is a competency-based institution. Competencies are nothing more than skills or knowledge identified by professionals in a particular field as being essential for mastery of that field.

    The benefit of this competency-based system is that it makes it possible for you -- if you are already knowledgeable about a particular subject -- to make progress toward completing a WGU degree even if you lack college experience. WGU recognizes that you may have gained skills and knowledge on the job, through years of life experience, or by taking a course on a particular subject. This competency-based system does not use credits in awarding degrees. Instead, students demonstrate their knowledge or skills through assessments.

    However, if you have completed college coursework at another institution, you may have your transcripts evaluated and may be able to have some associate-level domains cleared. Please use the links on this page to learn more about WGU's competency-based education for postsecondary degrees.

    Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
    Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

    From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

    Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

    WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

    The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

    2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     

     


    From the Syllabus News on December 24, 2001

    Commerce Bancorp, Inc., which calls itself "America's Most Convenient Bank," said training courses provided through its Commerce University have received expanded credit recommendations from the American Council on Education (ACE). The bank, whose employees can receive college credit through the program, has received credit recommendations for two customer service training programs. Employees may apply the credit recommendations to college degree programs in which they are participating. Commerce University offers nearly 1,700 courses to employees each year via seven schools related to its areas of operation, including its School of Retail Banking, School of Lending, and School of Insurance.

    For more information, visit: http://commerceonline.com 


    "Training System Delivers Accredited Courses." T.H.E. Journal, September 2001, Page 26 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3620.cfm 

    The Dynamic Online Training System (DOTS) developed by Australian-based WebRaven has made its way into the U.S. market. The system delivers online, self-paced accredited courses to students, providing them with a cost-effective method and the opportunity to complete their high school certificates via the Internet. DOTS is a fully manageable enrollment, student management, course administration and tuition delivery system for educational institutions. It is an innovative software solution that manages all members of an institution, from content managers, content creators, instructors and students. The system also effectively manages the delivery of training to all members of your institution, and even has the facilities to be e-commerce enabled. In addition, DOTS offers complete flexibility to build your own online courseware using multimedia components such as videos, sound clips, images, PDF files and animated GIFs. Advantages of incorporating DOTS into any institution include the cost savings, easy delivery method via the Internet and less reliability on physical resources. WebRaven, Brisbane, Australia, www.webraven.com .

     


    From Syllabus News on January 15, 2002

    SMU, BU Join To Offer Project Management Training

    TrainingTrack, Boston University's training network, said it would join forces with Southern Methodist University's Advanced Computer Education Centers to offer project management training in the Houston, Texas area. The TrainingTrack network, which is composed of regional training companies and schools that distribute and market Boston University's IT and management training programs, will provide area professionals with daytime and evening project management training beginning this month. Tom Bonesteel, director of SMU's training centers, said affiliating with BU's program will give the SMU subsidiary a turnkey project management offering that's flexible enough for area professionals.

    For more information, visit: http://www.engr.smu.edu/soe_acec.html .


    Online Enrollment Nearly Triples for Commercial College

    Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a for-profit, post-secondary education company, said registrations for its online courses for the quarter ending in December, 2001, rose 171 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Course registrations for the fall term increased to 3,456, setting a company record. The company also said it added 14 new online courses in accounting and criminal justice for the January term in response to rising demand. In addition, two new campuses started offering online courses during the January term, bringing the total number of locations to 19. Currently, the company offers 80 courses online. Corinthian's chairman David Moore said the growth "reflects the increasing popularity of this flexible learning alternative as well as the quality of our curricula and dedication of our faculty."

    The Corinthian College homepage is at http://www.cci.edu/ 


    Blackboard to Acquire Prometheus from GW University

    Blackboard Inc. said it would take over the Prometheus course management system from its developer, George Washington University. The agreement provides Prometheus, which had grown into a free-standing software development business at GWU, expanded resources to service partner universities and staff. The partners noted that about 30 percent of Prometheus' 65 university licensees run one of the three systems in Blackboard's e- Education suite -- Blackboard 5: Learning System; Blackboard 5: Community Portal System; and Blackboard: Transaction System. Blackboard was founded in 1997 at Cornell University and has become the largest e- education enterprise software company in the market.

    Bob Jensen's threads on Blackboard are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/blackboard.htm 
    Prometheus is the software engine used by many of the largest distance education providers such as Fathom.
    See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm 


    March 8, 2002 Message from the Risk Waters Group [RiskWaters@lb.bcentral.com

    ONLINE TRADING TRAINING NOW AVAILABLE (Investments, Finance, Derivatives) … 
    ‘Introduction to Trading Room Technology’ from Waters Training. A low-cost, Web-based training solution for financial professionals. Go at your own pace, travel nowhere, and learn about the core trading processes and key technology issues from your own desktop. For more information, go to http://www.riskwaters.com/   to find out more. Lastly, if you have any colleagues, training managers or business associates who would be interested in this new product, please forward them this message. 
    Thank you
    .


    From Syllabus News on January 29, 2002

    e-Learning Firm Readies Section 508 Compliance

    e-Learning software developer SmartForce said 5,000 hours of its e-learning content conforms with the accessibility standards under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 508 requires government agencies to ensure its employees and other people with disabilities have equal access to IT services. The company has worked with Octavia Corp. since last June to make its content and "learning paths" accessible using screen readers and other assistive technologies. The partnership will yield other accessibility approaches, including accessibility reviews, consulting, training, and legacy content conversion and remediation, the companies said.

    the SmartForce homepage is at http://www.smartforce.com/ 


    Firm Adapts University Content for Corporations

    E-learning company Cenquest signed deals with IBM and Microsoft to develop online university-based education programs for their employees. In each case, Cenquest is working with an established university to augment a degree program's curriculum with company-specific content. IBM staff can earn a master's degree in technology commercialization from the University of Texas at Austin; Microsoft employees are participating in accredited technology management courses from Oregon Health & Science University. Cenquest said the programs will allow corporations to gain unprecedented control over their investment dollars currently spent in tuition-reimbursed education programs.

    For more information, visit: http://www.ic2.org/msdegree 

     

     



     

    An Internationalization Experiment With 800 Online Courses at East Carolina Univ.

     

    Linking Students With Counterparts in Other Nations
    Especially note the 800+ online courses at East Carolina University

    Tune in Live at Noon on May 7
    "Innovators in Internationalization," Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i35/livechat.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Many colleges want their students to have an international-education experience, but they struggle to get undergraduates overseas. East Carolina University found a way to use inexpensive and relatively unsophisticated technology to link its students with classrooms around the world. The university's Global Understanding program uses a low-bandwidth video link and e-mail chat software to connect East Carolina students with counterparts at 23 institutions in 17 countries on five continents. Want to know more? Join Rosina Chia and Elmer Poe, who started the program, for the latest in a series of talks on how colleges have tackled some of the basic challenges of internationalizing their campuses.

    The Guests:

    Rosina Chia is assistant vice chancellor for global academic initiatives at East Carolina University, where she is responsible for the internationalization of curricula on the campus. A professor of psychology and a native of China, Ms. Chia focuses her research on the areas of cross-cultural attitudinal comparison and locus of control.

    Elmer Poe is associate vice chancellor for academic outreach at East Carolina. In this role he has helped the university become a leader in distance learning, with 800 courses completely online and more than 7,000 students who do not attend classes on the campus.

    Jensen Comment on a Bit of Education Technology History Where an Accounting Professor Led the Way
    I'm reminded of one of the early pioneers, Sharon Lightner, in internationalization of a course on world accounting standards. She managed to do this early on when technology was not in its infancy, and she managed to achieve face-to-face video on the cheap with almost no budget.

    Present in for each class was Sharon in the U.S., an international standard setter from each of six nations (including a FASB staff member who stayed up late for each class), and a professor from each of the six nations who was physically present in a classroom. Note that in those days IASC international standards were pretty much a dream and not a reality. International standards across borders were literally fluff at that point, and the internal standards that mattered were the unique standards of each nation.

    I should acknowledge that Sharon was a former doctoral student of Gerhardt Mueller when he was at the University of Washington. Gerhardt was originally from Germany and a world leader in internationalization of accounting. He was on the FASB when Sharon sought help in making the contacts in all the participating nations. Gerhardt’s cooperation was crucial to the success of Sharon’s endeavor. 

    At San Diego State University (SDU), the course was given as ACCT 596 Experiential International Accounting course with focus on international accounting standards and standard setting. The course is simultaneously (synchronously) given on six campuses in Switzerland, Japan, Spain (two campuses), and Hong Kong. Each school provides five students. Hong Kong was added in the second year of providing this course online. A professor from each of the campuses is assigned to jointly teach the course (in English).

    The course met once each week at the same time. This means that SDU students assembled in a computer lab at 11:00 p.m. at the same time students from other parts of the world assembled in their computer labs. Other starting times were at 8:00 a.m. in Switzerland and Spain, 12:00 p.m. in Japan, and 4:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. In addition, student teams must assemble at times when all team members can participate online. Grading is based primarily upon class participation and team project performance. The course professor from each campus also is online for each class. In addition, one or more staff members from the standard setting body of each nation is online for some of the classes.

    You can read about the history of her efforts and accomplishments of doing this with interactive audio and video at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255light.htm

     



    Life Experience CLEP

    From Syllabus News on September 26, 2003

    Online Service Launched for Crediting Professional Experience

    A training services firm has launched an online method for preparing business professionals to take and pass College Level Examination Program (CLEP) method for assessing academic credit for students wishing to "place out" of college courses. The InstantCert Academy said the service could potentially lower the requirements and costs for working people seeking advanced degrees and certifications. The service is being offered on a monthly subscription basis for $19.95. One caveat is that not all universities accept CLEP results as a measure for their own credit equivalents.

    For more information visit: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=2921 

    InstantCert Academy specializes in helping adults from all walks of life achieve college-level proficiency. With our help, hundreds of students have saved time and money through course waivers, slashed tuition, and early employment.

    Beware of any college that gives credit for "life experience." Every older adult has life experience. Often colleges that resort to this marketing gimmick are not providing quality degrees.

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill 


    Cross-Border Education Alternatives

    Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
    Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
    Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
    Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
    The Master List of Free Online College Courses ---
    http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

    From Mark Kappel on March 4, 2016

    MoneyGeek.com has created a financial aid guide for online colleges. An interactive map offers readers financial aid resources based on state, degree level, school type and more. In addition, readers can explore federal student loans and grants specific to online schools.

    Review the guide here: http://www.moneygeek.com/education/college/resources/financial-aid-for-online-colleges/


    Mega Universities Partnering with Private and Public Sectors for Employee Education and Traning
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Partnerships


    More Lower-Cost Engineering Degrees, From Purdue, Kaplan and edX ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/10/02/support-kaplan-purdue-launches-low-cost-edx-degrees?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=57f4119096-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-57f4119096-197565045&mc_cid=57f4119096&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

    Jensen Comment
    Following the lead of first Stanford and later Georgia Tech there are now newer experiments taking place with engineering masters degree programs. Stanford's ADEPT program (now defunct) was essentially a video-lecture degree program with extremely high admission standards that, by themselves, gave this degree program academic respect.

    Distance Education:  Stanford Center for Professional Development
    Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected programs, especially engineering. The program was highly restrictive in that employers must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements are as follows:

    For details go to
    http://scpd.stanford.edu/home

    The newer engineering masters programs mentioned in the Chronicle's link above are more open to students and probably will not have quite the admission standards of the former ADEPT program. They also use distance education technologies that were not invented in the days of the ADEPT masters program. For one thing they will do more hand holding. In the ADEPT program students were virtually on their own learning from very technical videos.

    Georgia Tech launched the first "massive online open degree" (MOOC) in computer science by partnering with Udacity and AT&T; a complete degree through that program costs students $7,000. It eventually expanded this program with its online masters in analytics in January 2017, as well as providing the option for advanced credits with a MicroMasters in collaboration with edX ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Tech


    Color-Coded Map of the USA:  Winners and Losers in Terms of Distance Education (heavily adult education) ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/Screen Shot 2019-06-10 at 11.20.52 AM.png?cid=wc

    Bob Jensen's links to distance education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Onside Education and Training in "Microcampus" Retail Stores ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20150503-campusspaces-03-microcampus?cid=wc

    Not every college campus features a full-fledged library, a student union, or residence halls. But when a campus has no classrooms, is it really a campus? 

    For some, the answer is yes. 

    As education moves online and colleges seek new ways of interacting with students, alumni, local communities, and other constituencies, institutions as diverse as the University of Phoenix, the University of Washington, and the Georgia Institute of Technology are responding with experimental, storefront-sized “microcampuses.” They’re also looking at unexpected models — such as Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar stores — for ideas to improve students’ experience.

    The spaces, some located on the ground floors of apartment buildings or commercial high-rises, give the institutions public visibility while providing stylish drop-in spaces for students. They can also be focal points for colleges’ educational and outreach activities with local employers and community groups. 

    Microcampuses are typically under 2,500 square feet, with interiors designed for maximum flexibility to accommodate one-on-one tutoring sessions, casual student meetups, employer presentations, and the occasional formal lecture. What they usually don’t have is a set spot designated as a full-time classroom. 

    The University of Washington’s Othello Commons, which opened in southeast Seattle in January, is a prime example. The 2,300-square-foot space is on the ground floor of a new eight-story apartment building and currently plays host to a “Foundations of Databases” course that meets one night a week to help local residents develop basic IT skills.

    Continued in article


    Kaplan University (a former

     


    Video: A Scenario of Higher Education in 2020 (or thereabouts)---
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ

    A report on people who attended for-profit colleges in Florida in the past decade concluded that the education they received was superficial and not worth the amount of debt they accumulated ---
    Click Here

    Skype a Scientist --- www.skypeascientist.com

    Free Book:  Learning to Learn Online ---: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/learningtolearnonline/

    National Center on Accessible Educational Materials --- http://aem.cast.org/

    The Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, is launching a fully online MBA degree — the first in the 10-campus university ---
    https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/uc-davis-graduate-school-management-offer-online-mba/

    Can a Huge Online College Solve California’s Work-Force Problems?
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-a-Huge-Online-College/244054?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=f80ba3e869f84decb4965e602626b579&elq=fe9f9bb29c1f407097558d58d6c15b2f&elqaid=19912&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9243

    Jerry Brown was taking a victory lap.

    The call went out to reporters early on a recent Monday morning: The governor would attend that day’s meeting of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors. A few minutes after 11, tieless and relaxed, Brown slid into a seat on the dais. He was just in time — and not coincidentally — for a discussion of the state’s newest, and wholly online, community college.

    The virtual college, the 115th institution in California’s two-year system, is Brown’s baby, its approval in June the capstone to his sunset year in office. The college is meant to serve a population too often left behind by higher education: under- or unemployed adults who need new skills to land a job, secure a raise, nab a promotion, just to maintain a toehold in a swiftly changing workplace. An online institution, its advocates say, will allow so-called stranded workers — there are 2.5 million Californians without a postsecondary degree or credential between the ages of 25 and 34 alone — to take short-term courses whenever, wherever.

    Reaching those workers will be necessary for the world’s fifth-largest economy to continue to grow and thrive. And if the online college enrolls even a fraction of its target audience, it would become the largest provider of distance education, public or private, in the nation. The scale — and the potential for innovation — has people across the country looking West.

    Given the floor at the Board of Governors meeting, Brown, a Democrat, couldn’t help crowing. "This is a no-brainer, it is obvious, it is inevitable, it is a juggernaut that cannot be stopped," he said. "California is a leader, it will lead in this. And I say, hallelujah."

    For all the governor’s certitude, it may be premature to declare the online college a sure fix to the state’s yawning gaps in educational and economic opportunity. The unknowns are many: Will job seekers or employers find value in an institution that offers only certificates and credentials, as is the plan for new college, not the degrees so frequently required for middle-class work?

    Digital learning promises convenience, but will harried parents and overburdened breadwinners be any more likely to log onto a computer than set foot in a classroom? If they do register for an online course, will they flourish? After all, studies consistently show that students — low-income and first-generation students most especially — do better in face-to-face or hybrid courses.

    Backers of the new college, like Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the community-college system, pledge to consult with employers and unions to make sure the competency-based credentials offered are prized in the workplace. Research has identified interventions that can help online course takers perform well; starting from scratch, such strategies can be baked in. "We will do as much as possible," Oakley says, "to give them the best opportunity for success."

    Continued in article

    "A Future Full of Badges," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/A-Future-Full-of-Badges/131455/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Competency-Based Learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge


    Papa John's has offered to pay the tuition of around 20,000 employees enrolled in Purdue University Global's online undergraduate and graduate-degree programs ---
    https://www.wilx.com/content/news/Papa-Johns-offers-free-college-tuition-for-employees-505991211.html?elqTrackId=3a885d0d515c461796111feb02f56c76&elq=c27b13832aab47b98b52843cdca2b5dc&elqaid=22298&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10978
    Jensen Comment
    This follows a succession of fast-food company announcements of free college benefits to employees, including those of Starbucks, McDonalds, and Taco Bell. Most are online degree programs, but I think McDonalds will also pay local onsite tuition. Walmart is among the earliest major companies to cover tuition for college degrees. Large accounting firms for years have had much smaller and more-focused degree programs for employees that entail more extensive leaves from jobs to enroll in on-line campus courses. Also in this competitive market for top recruits it's increasingly common to offer new employees student-loan repayment assistance.

    Mega-Universities (unexpectedly) on the Rise ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/Trend19-MegaU-Main?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=818d19efc4804478bc59234df45cb112&elq=e45302a1d7524e09bb00395f674bd07c&elqaid=22287&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10969

    Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, Grand Canyon, Western Governors, and a few other universities have found a new way to play the game that many colleges are losing. Could they one day lay claim to a significant share of the nation’s new college students?

    . . .

    At a time when many colleges are struggling with shrinking enrollment and tighter budgets, Southern New Hampshire is thriving on a grand scale, and it’s not alone. Liberty, Grand Canyon, and Western Governors Universities, along with a few other nonprofit institutions, have built huge online enrollments and national brands in recent years by subverting many of traditional higher education’s hallmarks. Western Governors has 88,585 undergraduates, according to U.S. Education Department data, more than the top 14 universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings combined.

    Jensen Comment
    Especially note the graph of enrollment trends at Arizona State, Grand Canyon, Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, and Western Governors.
    The most important key to success, in my viewpoint, is the attraction of top students coupled with tougher admission standards that are key to academic reputations. If admission standards are not tough reputation depends upon academic standards for flunking out low performers. If you graduate low performers you can soon develop a reputation for being a diploma mill ---  which is the fate of most of the for-profit universities that have closed or will soon close.

    Of course the attraction of reputable faculty is important, especially in research (R1) universities, but often the top research faculty are not even teaching undergraduates. What the Mega-Universities have to concentrate is on hiring and nurturing of great teachers who are experts in their disciplines. This will increasingly change accreditation standards and enforcement.

    Arizona State University is somewhat unique in that it seems to want to be both a reputable R1 research university (with distinguished researchers) along with a diversity of missions such as providing Starbucks' funded degrees to any Starbucks employee (including part-time employees) who want to do the academic work for free.

    Note that religion is no key to success in and of itself. Many religious colleges are on the verge of bankruptcy while Liberty University enrollments soar.

    For me the greatest surprise is how competency testing seems to not be the kiss of death that I predicted in this era where students are constantly brown nosing teachers for grades and seeking leniency based upon race and age. Both WGU and Southern New Hampshire are noted for grading based upon competency testing ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     


    Ivy League Degree for the Nontraditional Student ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/07/25/penn-announces-online-masters-degree-coursera-platform?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=dbda386f31-DNU_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-dbda386f31-197565045&mc_cid=dbda386f31&mc_eid=1e78f7c952


    Purdue University purchased Kaplan University formerly owned by the Washington Post.
    Kaplan now has a new name called Purdue Global University
    https://www.purdueglobal.edu/


    NYT:  The for-profit-college industry continues to cheat students while the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress do nothing ---
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/opinion/predatory-colleges-students-devos.html?elqTrackId=5dc95869b80045dc96a6648f05c9c2bd&elq=8199fd0e47494950a55cdf9dbcbbfc9a&elqaid=19193&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8711


    Question
    What's the most important criteria for sustainable online programs?

    Bob Jensen's Answer
    In my mind the most important criteria are academic standard reputations and sustainability if the Federal government stopped paying tuition for military veterans. Sustainable online programs have reputation things and niches that make them survivors. Most flagship universities (think Wisconsin and Illinois) have online programs these days that are cash cows for the onsite programs and would survive even without Federal money for military veterans. Such flagship online programs are filling a variety of needs and are often taught by the same faculty who teach on campus. Probably the most exciting new things these days are the McDonalds new program for funding employee higher education (onsite or online) and the Purdue takeover of Kaplan University's faltering online programs.

    Of course some online programs have non-traditional funding like Western Governors University and programs funded by employers like Walmart, Starbucks, etc.

    The University of Phoenix’s online enrollment plummets while Western Governors and Southern New Hampshire near 100,000 students as they vie to rule the roost.---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/23/nonprofits-poised-unseat-u-phoenix-largest-online-university?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e057cf8bf5-DNU20180111&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e057cf8bf5-197565045&mc_cid=e057cf8bf5&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

    Liberty University --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_University
    Roughly Half the Students are Graduate Students
    15.000 Students On Campus
    Nearly 100,000 Students Online

    3.1 Center for Law and Government
    3.2 Rawlings School of Divinity
    3.3 Technical Studies and Trades
    3.4 Zaki Gordon Cinematic Arts Center
    3.5 College of Osteopathic Medicine
    3.6 School of Business
    3.7 School of Aeronautics
    3.8 School of Engineering
    3.9 School of Music


    Harvard:  The Death of Supply Chain Management ---
    https://hbr.org/2018/06/the-death-of-supply-chain-management?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_weekly&utm_campaign=weeklyhotlist_not_activesubs&referral=00202&deliveryName=DM7738

    Jensen Comment
    Darn --- just when Walmart commenced to pay for college majors in this discipline

    Walmart’s too-good-to-be-true “$1 a day” college tuition plan, explained ---
    https://www.vox.com/2018/6/1/17413326/walmart-college-tuition-worker-pay-unemployment

    If headlines this week like “Walmart’s perk for workers: Go to college for $1 a day” (CNN) or “Walmart to offer employees a college education for $1 a day” (Washington Post) sound too good to be true, that’s because they largely are. The benefit is real, but it is much more restrictive than those headlines suggest. It’s essentially a bulk purchasing discount for a narrow range of online college courses.

    It’s also a telling benefit on a number of levels. The labor market is getting stronger, and employers are needing to think harder about how to invest in recruiting and retaining employees. But the old-fashioned strategy of paying more continues to be something corporate America resists, in part out of habit and in part because offering higher wages is a little more complicated than it looks. Companies like Walmart are, in essence, trying to get creative with their compensation packages in hopes of narrowly targeting the money they expend on the core goal of recruiting and retaining desirable workers.

    The question is whether policymakers will keep unemployment low long enough to break through the wall of resistance to across-the-board pay hikes and force big companies to finally just raise pay.

    Walmart’s actual tuition plan, explained

    The Walmart program is limited to online degree programs offered by three schools — the University of Florida, Brandman University, and Bellevue University — and specifically focused on bachelor’s or associate degrees in either business or supply chain management.

    You won’t, in other words, be able to do part-time shifts at Walmart to “pay your way through college” in the traditional sense.

    But qualifying Walmart employees (including both full-time and part-time workers who’ve been with the company for 90 days) will get discounted tuition, books, and access to a coach who will help them decide on an appropriate program and shepherd them through the application process

    It’s a nice opportunity for Walmart employees to gain a chance at upward mobility off the retail floor, and that’s likely the point. Unlike higher cash wages (which of course can be used for online college tuition as well as rent, gasoline, movie tickets, medical expenses, etc.), the tuition benefit is likely to be disproportionately appealing to people who are on the more ambitious end of the distribution. It’s an effort, in other words, to make Walmart more attractive specifically to the most appealing set of potential workers, a strategy other companies have pursued in recent years.

    Many large employers are trying tuition benefits

    Modest tuition programs have long been a staple of large employer benefits packages largely because of favorable tax treatment. The IRS allows employers to give employees several thousand dollars’ worth of tuition benefits tax-free, which makes establishing a program something of a no-brainer for most companies big enough to be employing a large back-office staff anyway.

    But four years ago, Starbucks blazed the trail of offering a much more ambitious reimbursement program that essentially offered taxable tuition subsidies rather than taxable wage increases.

    The reason: Academic research shows that workers who are interested in tuition subsidies are different from workers who are not. While everyone likes money, Peter Cappelli’s 2002 research indicates that the workers who like tuition subsidies are more productive than those who don’t, and Colleen Manchester’s 2012 research shows that subsidy-using employees have longer time horizons and are less likely to switch jobs.

    In March of this year, a consortium of big US hotels launched a generous tuition discount program, and later that month, McDonald’s substantially enhanced its tuition benefits. Kroger — another top five US employer — rolled out a new tuition program in April, and Chick-fil-A expanded its program in May.

    These initiatives differ in detail, but the broad story is the same. The unemployment rate is now low, so recruiting new staff is getting harder. Companies are looking to enhance their compensation but would like to do so in targeted ways.

    Continued in article

     

     


    NYT;  How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/magazine/how-liberty-university-built-a-billion-dollar-empire-online.html?elqTrackId=c3412b137c0b46c9999c5833ed3dca57&elq=c99a9c459f244693a05fd66569b048c0&elqaid=18667&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8407

    Not to be forgotten in all of this is Arizona State University's 150 online programs, including employer-funded programs (think Starbucks) ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_State_University

    Arizona State University (commonly referred to as ASU or Arizona State) is a public metropolitan research university on five campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area, and four regional learning centers throughout Arizona, as well as 150 online programs. The 2018 university ratings by U.S. News & World Report rank ASU No. 1 among the Most Innovative Schools in America for the third year in a row and has ranked ASU No. 115 in National Universities with overall score of 47/100 with 83% of student applications accepted.

    ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the U.S. It had approximately 72,000 students enrolled in fall 2017, including 59,198 undergraduate and 12,630 graduate students.] ASU's charter, approved by the board of regents in 2014, is based on the "New American University" model created by ASU President Michael M. Crow. It defines ASU as "a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but rather by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves."

    Liberty University, Purdue University, and ASU may well be the models of the future for comprehensive universities.

    Prestigious universities (think Stanford and MIT) have online specialty programs (e.g., in engineering) as well as participation in online MOOC degree and certificate programs via EdX, Coursera, etc. ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course#Notable_providers

     


     

    Open University in the United Kingdom --- http://www.open.ac.uk/

    Open Courses, Tutorials, Videos, and Course Materials from Prestigious Universities in the USA ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Fee-Based Distance Education Alternatives Around the World ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    InformED:  Listing of Sites for Free Courses and Learning Modules (unlike certificates, transferable credits are never free) ---
    http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/free-online-courses-50-sites-to-get-educated-for-free/

    Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence --- https://www.schreyerinstitute.psu.edu/

    National Endowment for the Arts: Podcasts, Webcasts & Webinars --- http://www.nea.gov/podweb/podCMS/podlist.php

    "Maryland’s Distance-Education Giant Will Stay Public and Part of University System," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 18, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Maryland-s/150109/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Excel University (fee-based CPE credits for accountants) --- http://www.excel-university.com/

    AACC: 21st Century Center (community college helpers, including practice examinations) --- http://www.aacc21stcenturycenter.org/
    For example search on the term "accounting"

    Harvard Extension School: Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Open Learning Course --- 
    https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/intensive-introduction-computer-science

    Links to Free Computer and Coding Courses ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet

    A Master List of 1,200 Free Courses From Top Universities: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures  ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/a-master-list-of-1200-free-courses-from-top-universities.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Bob Jensen's threads on free courses from top universities (transcript credits are not free and entail taking competency tests from credit providers) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Udemy --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy

    Udemy.com is an online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults.[2] Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee.[3] Udemy provides tools which enable users to create a course, promote it and earn money from student tuition charges.

    No Udemy courses are currently credentialed for college credit; students take courses largely as a means of improving job-related skills.[3] Some courses generate credit toward technical certification. Udemy has made a special effort to attract corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their company.[4] For example, PayPal has used the service to train its employees to write Node.js code.[5]

    You can enroll in over 55,000 online classes for $10.99 each during Udemy's New Year's sale (sale ends on January 11, 2018) ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/udemy-new-years-sale-2018

    Udemy --- https://www.udemy.com/

    For example, in the "What do you want to learn" box type in accounting.

    Don't confuse Udemy with Coursera that serves on a higher plane in MOOC-for-credit education
    Coursera --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera


    Distance Education:  University of Maryland University College reports record 2017 U.S. enrollments, despite a challenging climate for online providers ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/08/has-umuc-turned-enrollment-woes-around?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3bcc4f9c28-DNU20180108&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3bcc4f9c28-197565045&mc_cid=3bcc4f9c28&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on free MOOC distance education (certificates and transcript credits cost extra) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    Coursera --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

    August 25, 2016 Message from Glen Gray

    Collaborating with Coursera

    Empowering people through learning

    At PwC, our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. We think there's an opportunity to do this by sharing our experience and expertise with anyone who wants to learn. We’re joining forces with Coursera to create a series of courses designed around topics that address big global issues, drawing on the real-world knowledge and experience of PwC experts from around the globe from multiple disciplines. Our first course is focused on data and analytics, one of the biggest areas of opportunity to help solve problems in an increasingly complex world.

    All course materials can be accessed at no charge. (Those who want to take the assessments and get a certification will pay a small charge). As instructors, you may identify portions of the courses which you wish to incorporate into your classes as assignments to help demonstrate concepts you are teaching. We hope you will agree that this will be a valuable resource. To learn more about and access Coursera, click here.

    Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
    Professor Emeritus
    Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
    David Nazarian College of Business & Economics
    California State University, Northridge
    18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372

    http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f

    2017:  Coursera Partners with Leading Universities to Offer Master’s Degrees at a More Affordable Price
    Includes University of Illinois masters degrees in entrepreneurship, MBA, accountancy, and data science programs---
    http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/coursera-partners-with-leading-universities-to-offer-masters-degrees-at-a-more-affordable-price.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    For students looking for a broader education in business, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has launched an entire MBA program through Coursera. Consisting of 18 online courses and three capstone projects, the iMBA program covers the subjects usually found in b-school programs--leadership, strategy, economics, accounting, finance, etc. The complete curriculum should take roughly 24 to 36 months to complete, and costs less than $22,000--about 25%-33% of what an on-campus MBA program typically runs.

    (The iMBA is actually one of three degree programs the University of Illinois has launched on Coursera. The other two include a Masters in Accounting (iMSA) and a Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS).)

    Now, in case you're wondering, the diplomas and transcripts for these programs are granted directly by the universities themselves (e.g., the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and HEC Paris). The paperwork doesn't carry Coursera's name. Nor does it indicate that the student completed an "online program." In short, online students get the same transcript as bricks and mortar students.

    Finally, all of the degree programs mentioned above are "stackable"--meaning students can (at no cost) take an individual course offered by any of these programs. And then they can decide later whether they want to apply to the degree program, and, if so, retroactively apply that course towards the actual degree. Essentially, you can try things out before making a larger commitment.

    If you want to learn more about these programs, or submit an application, check out the following links. We've included the deadlines for submitting applications.

    Online Master's in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from HEC Paris

    Application deadline, December 7

    Master of Business Administration (iMBA) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Application deadline, November 17

    Master of Science in Accountancy (iMSA) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Application deadline, December 4

    Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    (Application deadline, October 1

     


    Online Colleges in the Georgia System ---
    http://www.schools.com/online-colleges/georgia

    The University System of Georgia (USG) is one of the largest in the country, with a total full-time enrollment of more than 320,000 students at 29 campus locations. What's more, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) counts 39 additional public and private non-profit schools where students can earn a campus-based or online bachelor's degree in Georgia.

    Figuring out which traditional and online colleges in Georgia might be right for you can be a daunting task. What are the differences between the main campus of a large university and its satellite locations? Are you looking for a school that makes it easy for students to transfer class credits earned in a community college program? Which schools have the state's top programs for your major? Information like this can be hard to find, especially if you don't have time to hunt up all the facts you need.

    We gathered data on from the NCES and other U.S. Department of Education sources on 50+ schools in Georgia and analyzed it with our 13-point methodology. Schools that stood out in multiple categories earned the right to be called the best campus-based and online colleges in Georgia.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance higher education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    "How a BYU Campus Is Reshaping Online Education — and the Mormon Faith," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2017 --- 
    http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-BYU-Campus-Is-Reshaping/240649?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=2123037a343c428f8209b582597d619e&elq=a246d4fdfd274984b5e2ea434f5675cd&elqaid=14715&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6221

    On a summer Thursday night, more than a dozen students, ages 22 to 71, are settling in to two classrooms here in a small brick building on the outskirts of the University of Maryland’s main campus. They’re here for their weekly in-person class.

    Around the world, at 436 other Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints congregational and educational facilities, nearly 11,000 other online students are doing the same thing.

    The students here — stay-at-home moms pondering their next step and young adults recently returned from missionary service, among others — are in their final month of PathwayConnect, a yearlong, 15-credit program created by Brigham Young University-Idaho. It’s an ambitious endeavor with a simple goal: to prepare them to go, or return, to college.

    PathwayConnect began in 2009 and has quickly developed into one of online education’s striking success stories. It has graduated nearly 24,000 students, more than 14,000 of whom have continued on for an online certificate or degree from BYU-Idaho. (BYU-Idaho’s online degree programs have been growing so fast — enrollment has increased tenfold, to more than 13,000, over the past five years — that the church recently established the online operation as a separate entity called BYU Pathway Worldwide.)

    As with the rest of BYU, a Mormon character is inseparably woven into PathwayConnect. Required religious offerings, like a two-course sequence on the Book of Mormon, mix with secular courses in writing, mathematics, and life skills, in which students learn about goal-setting and "provident living." Students can use the program as an entry point to college, says Clark G. Gilbert, president of BYU Pathway Worldwide, "and a path back to the faith."

    But at a time when colleges of all stripes are expanding online to meet the needs of a diversifying student population, PathwayConnect is a model worth paying attention to. Several features of the program could make it relevant — and, in some form, adaptable — to other institutions, religious or not.

    ‘No Credit Left Behind’

    Most obvious of these is the price. Students in the United states pay $68 per credit — and even less if they’re overseas. If they later enroll in BYU-Idaho online, they can continue to take the rest of their courses at the same price they paid for PathwayConnect. In the United States, that adds up to just over $8,100 for the 120 credits needed for a bachelor’s degree, half the price of traditional BYU-Idaho. That’s a striking bargain in a world where many political figures still openly dream of creating a $10,000 degree.

    Continued in article

     


    Kaplan University (a for-profit university) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan_University

    "Purdue’s Purchase of Kaplan Is a Big Bet — and a Sign of the Times," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2017 ---
     
    http://www.chronicle.com/article/Purdue-s-Purchase-of-Kaplan/239931?cid=db&elqTrackId=b7653e228b3341a6acebce86c52ed21a&elq=c91e61b14a254328a0af37dde807914b&elqaid=13706&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5700

    With a surprise deal to acquire the for-profit Kaplan University, announced on Thursday, Purdue University has leapfrogged into the thick of the competitive online-education market. Purdue plans to oversee the institution as a new piece of its public-university system — a free-standing arm that will cater to working adults and other nontraditional students.

    The purchase, conceived and executed in just five and a half months, puts Purdue in position to become a major force in an online landscape increasingly dominated by nonprofit institutions. Until now, said Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, the university "has basically been a spectator to this growth" in distance education, with just a few online graduate programs. Mr. Daniels, a former Republican governor of Indiana, described the acquisition as adding a "third dimension" to Purdue, along with its research-rich flagship in West Lafayette, Ind., and its regional campuses.

    For Kaplan and its parent company, Graham Holdings, the deal offers a potentially profitable exit strategy for an operation that has seen its bottom line battered for several years by falling enrollments. (Kaplan now has 32,000 students.)

    The contrast between the typical Purdue student and the military veterans, lower-income students, and members of minority groups who make up much of the enrollment at the open-access Kaplan is "stark," said Mr. Daniels. But he said the university has a responsibility to serve such students. Millions of Americans have some or no college credits, and Purdue can’t fulfill its land-grant mission "while ignoring a need so plainly in sight," he noted while unveiling the deal at a Board of Trustees meeting on Thursday.

    The potential financial upsides were also clearly a factor. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Daniels said it was "too soon" to talk about revenue projections. "We have hope and reason for hope" that Purdue’s new acquisition will do well, he said, alluding to the fast pace of online growth at other nonprofit institutions, like Western Governors and Southern New Hampshire Universities. "If the new entity gets an even modest version of that growth path, we’ll do very well financially."

    Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire, said the online-education market was big enough for a number of new entrants, and he expects Purdue will be a formidable competitor. He also noted some potential pitfalls in absorbing a new entity. "Purdue enjoys a far better brand than Kaplan," said Mr. LeBlanc, and the Kaplan legacy might be a dealbreaker for some students.

    Still, he acknowledged that most students searching on the web for an online degree program may not know or care about a university’s origins. If a search turns up Purdue as an option, he said, "you might get pretty excited pretty quick."

    Merging university cultures also could be challenging. Value systems, reward structures, and budgeting priorities are not easily changed on a dime just because ownership changes, Mr. LeBlanc said. (Kaplan’s current president, Betty Vandenbosch, who worked previously at Case Western Reserve University, will remain as president when Purdue receives the necessary approvals and takes control.)

    Still, Mr. LeBlanc sees the Purdue deal as a sign of the times: "not-for-profit higher ed coming to re-own the space that they ceded" to for-profit colleges.

    An Intricate Deal

    The new institution has no name as yet, but it will no doubt carry the Purdue name in some form for its brand value. It will receive no state funds, relying solely on tuition and donations for its operations.

    Continued in article


    "Distance Ed’s Second Act," by Phil Hill, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2016 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Distance-Ed-s-Second-Act/236571?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=db09c79a6b904181b6f4f6c62c2f7186&elq=a09c5c90756240e6bff2f53f58cf0f04&elqaid=9185&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3192 

    The Babson Survey Research Group, which has tracked online college enrollment for the past 12 years, reports growth from 9 percent of U.S. students taking at least one course online in the fall of 2002 to more than 28 percent in the fall of 2014. The overall growth has slowed recently, but the drastic decrease in for-profit enrollment masks two very interesting numbers:

    Sixty-seven percent of students taking online courses do so at public institutions.

    The number of students at public and private nonprofit colleges who took at least one online course rose by 26 percent in just two years (2012-2014).

    Online education is no longer the province of a small subset of colleges and professors. We are well above the 16-to-20-percent level in Everett Rogers’s technology-adoption curve that indicates a shift into the mainstream. As I described in a previous article, the characteristics of people trying out a new approach (primarily professors in this discussion) change significantly after the technology moves beyond the innovators and early adopters. You start getting people who are more cautious and even skeptical about the outcomes and who need more holistic support to make the jump. We are seeing signs that more and more professors accept that online education is inevitable, even in traditional institutions, and is appropriate for a growing number of nontraditional students and a growing number of disciplines

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on free distance education alternatives (some of the best courses in the world from prestigious universities) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based education alternatives (some of the best online degree programs from top universities) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    MOOC --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    The 50 Most Popular MOOCs of All time ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/learning-how-to-learn-enroll-in-the-latest-edition-of-the-most-popular-mooc.html

    "What You Need to Know About MOOC's," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/

    . . .

    Who are the major players?

    Several start-up companies are working with universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:

    edX

    A nonprofit effort run jointly by MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.

    Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone can use it to run MOOC’s.

    Coursera

    A for-profit company founded by two computer-science professors from Stanford.

    The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue. More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U. of Virginia, have joined.

    Udacity

    Another for-profit company founded by a Stanford computer-science professor.

    The company, which works with individual professors rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars. Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its courses on computer science and related fields.

    Udemy

    A for-profit platform that lets anyone set up a course.

    The company encourages its instructors to charge a small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many of the courses.

    Bob Jensen's threads about MOOCs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     

     


    Starbucks Free Online Courses to Employees Becomes More Like Walmart's Employee Benefits for College Credits

    Starbucks and Arizona State University announced on Monday that they will expand the full benefits of their tuition-discounting partnership to include Starbucks employees who have not yet accrued 60 college credits.
    http://chronicle.com/article/StarbucksArizona-State-U/229127/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Bob Jensen's threads for online training and education degree programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    "How ‘Elite’ Universities Are Using Online Education," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 10, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/How-Elite-Universities/229233/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be?

    Recently, conversations about "elite" online education has revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to academic credit at the institutions offering them (or anywhere else).

    So how exactly does online education figure into the future of elite higher education? Judging by what we’ve seen so far, the answer can be divided into three parts.

    1. Free online courses for everyone.
     

    MOOCs are the McMansions of online higher education — capacious, impressive-looking, and easy to supply to the masses once professors have drawn up the blueprints.

    Families who want to work with the architects directly are not opting for a sequence of free online courses instead of an exclusive residential program that ends with a degree. Even if the MOOCs lose money, wealthier universities can afford to take a hit — especially if it means increasing their visibility in valuable overseas markets.

    Despite their flagging hype, MOOCs remain very popular. Top institutions will probably continue to build them.


     

    2. Paid online courses for professional graduate programs.

    Yale University recently unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring physician’s assistants, offered through its medical school. The program will also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of the academic coursework will be delivered online. It is the second program Yale has created along these lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree in nursing, which the university announced in 2011.

    Degrees in fields like health care and teaching are in high demand, and many lesser-known players have grabbed big chunks of that market online by assuring prospective students that they can go back to school without upending their lives. Yale is not alone in its effort to claim its slice of the pie; graduate schools at the Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and others have also started offering online versions of their professional master’s programs.

    Online does not fundamentally threaten the appeal of professional programs, where the "student experience" is not as sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll are working adults who already went through dorm life and student organizations and late-night philosophical chats with future members of their wedding parties. They are now mainly interested in learning a trade.

    3. Online components in face-to-face undergraduate courses.
     

    In November 2012, a consortium of 10 prestigious colleges announced that they would collaborate with 2U, an online "enabler" company, to build fully online courses that undergraduates could take for credit. The stigma on virtual learning had faded enough that administrators at those colleges — Duke University, Emory University, Washington University in St. Louis, and others — were willing to give it a shot.

    A year and a half later, the consortium was kaput. The faculty at Duke nixed the partnership with 2U. Other colleges went ahead with the experiment, but quickly came to a verdict: Thanks, but no thanks.

    That does not mean online education has no role to play in undergraduate courses. This spring, Bowdoin College is offering a partially online course in financial accounting, taught remotely by a professor at Dartmouth College’s business school. (The Maine college is supplementing those online sessions with weekly meetings on campus, led by a member its own faculty.) Selective outsourcing could become a trend at top colleges that want to add (or license) specialized courses without hiring new professors.

    Continued in article

    "Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-announces-blended-online-masters-degree/56003?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    There may be a difference between the most prestigious highly endowed universities and other universities to the extent that distance education courses are used as cash cows. For example, at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee students pay more for an online section of a course than they do for an onsite section of that same course possibly taught by the same instructor. If the online course is taught by a low-paid adjunct instructor the online course may even cost less to deliver.

    Thus online courses that are priced higher become cash cows as well as serving a wider set of prospective students. Pricing of goods and services generally takes demand functions and price elasticity into account. Often there is more demand from part-time students for online courses, and universities may fill online sections with higher prices (hence low elasticity).

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education and training ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    Bob Jensen threads on free MOOCs from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    "Enrollment Woes Continue for U. of Phoenix," Inside Higher Ed, March 26, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/26/enrollment-woes-continue-u-phoenix

    Jensen Comment
    An enormous problem for all online programs from for-profit university is the rise in the popularity and quality of online degree programs from major state-supported universities. Search for over 1,200 online programs at
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
    This is my recommended search engine for online degree programs.
    Note the links to US News rankings of these online programs at the above site.

    Don't trust those online search programs sponsored by for-profit universities because they exclude the affordable and higher quality online programs from major non-profit universities. Almost daily I get requests to link to one of these misleading search programs. I think people get paid if they can get Webmasters like me to link to these search programs (generally it is the same misleading search program under a different name).

    Bob Jensen's threads for online education and training programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    Largest versus Best Online Degree Programs (there are surprises in both rankings)

    Federal data show the colleges and universities with the most students enrolled online in 2018---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/12/17/colleges-and-universities-most-online-students-2018?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=7a6385859f-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-7a6385859f-197565045&mc_cid=7a6385859f&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

    Jensen Comment
    The mega universities stand out at the top. Reasons why these universities are so huge vary. For the University of Southern New Hampshire its largely marketing success. For Liberty University there's a religious connection to students. Western Governors University and Arizona State have taxpayer funding subsidies. Online universities vary with respect to also having onsite campuses.

    For me there were some surprises regarding the sizes of the online degree programs at the  University of Iowa, University of South Florida, San Diego State University, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Texas at Arlington, and others. I was not aware they had so many online students.

    Western Governors University commenced and still is a model of competency-based testing where instructors have little or no subjective impact on grading. Other leading online universities have some but not all subjectivity in grading ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

    For me the test of quality is having admission standards. The questionable online universities are the for-profit universities that have virtually no admission standards and questionable academic standards.
    USNews provides quality rankings of online programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#Comparisons
    Especially note
    https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    U.S. News College Compass Details of 1,800 Colleges and Universities ($29.95 Annual Database Subscription Fee) ---
    http://www.usnews.com/usnews/store/college_compass.htm
    Jensen Comment
    Much of this data is available for free at each Website, but it's harder to find and match with a student's profile that is this U.S. News consolidated database. The database appears to be of limited use for comparing academic disciplines, although U.S. News has other sites (most of them free) for such purposes. For example if you want comparisons (rankings) on selected disciplines go to http://www.usnews.com/educatio

    US News: 2020 Best Online Bachelor's Programs ---
    https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education 

    #1 Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University--Worldwide Daytona Beach, FL
    #2 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ
    #3 Ohio State University--Columbus (tie) Columbus, OH
    #3 Oregon State University (tie) Corvallis, OR
    #5 Pennsylvania State University--World Campus (tie) University Park, PA
    #5 University of Florida (tie) Gainesville, FL
    #5 University of Illinois--Chicago (tie) Chicago, IL
    #8 Colorado State University--Global Campus (tie) Greenwood Village, CO
    #8 University at Buffalo--SUNY (tie) Buffalo, NY
    #8 University of North Carolina--Wilmington (tie) Wilmington, NC
    #8 University of Oklahoma (tie) Norman, OK

    Popular Degree Profiles Accounting, Business Administration and Management, Computer Science, Health Care Administration and Management, Marketing, 

    Best 2020 Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
     https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings 

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education (including a somewhat neglected ranking of program quality) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm


    U.S. News College Compass Details of 1,800 Colleges and Universities ($29.95 Annual Database Subscription Fee) ---
    http://www.usnews.com/usnews/store/college_compass.htm
    Jensen Comment
    Much of this data is available for free at each Website, but it's harder to find and match with a student's profile that is this U.S. News consolidated database. The database appears to be of limited use for comparing academic discipline, although U.S. News has other sites (most of them free) for such purposes. For example if you want comparisons (rankings) on selected disciplines go to http://www.usnews.com/education


    Question
    Why is Arizona State University forming a for-profit spinoff?

    Answer
    For the same reason Lyft and Uber are planning to raise billions in IPOs. The purpose is to raise capital that, in turn, can be used to by the assets, technology, and workforce necessary to successfully serve the public.

    Question
    Why Arizona State University?

    Answer
    Reputation for academic standards and quality of graduates.

    Arizona State Will Create a For-Profit Spinoff to Court Students in the Work Force ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arizona-State-Will-Create-a/245929?&cid=db

    Arizona State University is creating a for-profit venture to promote its online programs to big employers. The venture will be majority-owned by the TPG Rise Fund, a $2.1-billion private-equity fund that until recently was headed by one of the financiers arrested last week by the Department of Justice in its wide-ranging admissions-bribery dragnet.

    Although the financier, Bill McGlashan, is no longer head of the fund — he said he resigned last week; TPG said he was fired “for cause” — he may still stand to profit from the new ASU venture, if it takes off.

    McGlashan, a self-styled voice of ethical investing in Silicon Valley, was accused of paying $50,000 to a fixer to help gain admission to the University of Southern California for his son by falsifying his test scores, and an additional $250,000 to create the false impression that he was a potential recruit for the football team, complete with a faked picture showing him as a kicker.

    Arizona State’s new venture, which the university calls a “learning-services company,” will focus on developing partnerships with employers to attract more students to the ASU’s online programs, in the vein of its partnerships with Starbucks and Uber. The university is also looking for other research universities to join the venture.

    ASU has not formally announced the creation of the as-yet-unnamed company. But after a Chronicle reporter learned of the deal, the university’s president, Michael M. Crow, described elements of it in an interview on Tuesday. The university had been planning an elaborate rollout of the venture in early April in San Diego at the ASU+GSV Summit, a glitzy gathering of thousands of investors, education-company officials, policy makers, and education leaders.

    In creating the venture, ASU seeks an even bigger slice of the market for students whose tuition is paid in whole or in part by their employers, and better connections to that pool of students.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    While Purdue reeled in the for-profit Kaplan University (and turned it into a non-profit Purdue Global) ASU is casting out some of its non-profit programs into for-profit programs (presumably to raise capital for expanded ventures).

    The most important things in all of these dealings are the logos (Purdue University and Arizona State University) that stand for quality control and academic standards. If these outreach programs do not maintain the same academic standards as the on-campus programs the entire universities will become tainted like the University of Phoenix and other for-profit universities are tainted by such things as low or zero admission standards and low or zero grading standards.

    The ultimate test is academic quality control. Most prestigious universities (think Harvard and MIT) now have extensive distance education programs. Their names signify academic standards that the for-profit programs until now mostly lack. Amidst all this are the recent thrusts of non-profit universities like the University of Massachusetts seeking to join the Mega Universities like Liberty University and the University of Southern New Hampshire having 100,000+ students enrolled in both respected graduate as well as undergraduate programs.

    UMass System Aims to Join the Mega-University Club ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/UMass-System-Aims-to-Join-the/245825?cid=db&elqTrackId=3f32894a5a664ed788887261c8f04c24&elq=79e5bf77abf94b569aa996ee93cc5b1f&elqaid=22428&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=11058
    Will it also serve corporate America with special programs like Arizona State (Starbucks) and Purdue Global (Popa Johns)?

    Mega-Universities (unexpectedly) on the Rise ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/Trend19-MegaU-Main?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=818d19efc4804478bc59234df45cb112&elq=e45302a1d7524e09bb00395f674bd07c&elqaid=22287&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10969

    Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, Grand Canyon, Western Governors, and a few other universities have found a new way to play the game that many colleges are losing. Could they one day lay claim to a significant share of the nation’s new college students?

    . . .

    At a time when many colleges are struggling with shrinking enrollment and tighter budgets, Southern New Hampshire is thriving on a grand scale, and it’s not alone. Liberty, Grand Canyon, and Western Governors Universities, along with a few other nonprofit institutions, have built huge online enrollments and national brands in recent years by subverting many of traditional higher education’s hallmarks. Western Governors has 88,585 undergraduates, according to U.S. Education Department data, more than the top 14 universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings combined.

    Jensen Comment
    Especially note the graph in the above article of enrollment trends at Arizona State, Grand Canyon, Purdue Global, Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, and Western Governors.
    The most important key to success, in my viewpoint, is the attraction of top students coupled with tougher admission standards that are key to academic reputations. If admission standards are not tough reputation depends upon academic standards for flunking out low performers. If you graduate low performers you can soon develop a reputation for being a diploma mill ---  which is the fate of most of the for-profit universities that have closed or will soon close.

    Of course the attraction of reputable faculty is important, especially in research (R1) universities, but often the top research faculty are not even teaching undergraduates. What the Mega-Universities have to concentrate is on hiring and nurturing of great teachers who are experts in their disciplines. This will increasingly change accreditation standards and enforcement.

    Arizona State University is somewhat unique in that it seems to want to be both a reputable R1 research university (with distinguished researchers) along with a diversity of missions such as providing Starbucks' funded degrees to any Starbucks employee (including part-time employees) who want to do the academic work for free. Now ASU wants to become a Mega Univesity with a for-profit venture into adult education ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arizona-State-Will-Create-a/245929?&cid=db

    Note that the religious appeal of Mega Liberty University is no key to success in and of itself. Many religious colleges are on the verge of bankruptcy while Liberty University enrollments soar. Success for Liberty University entails building and maintaining a reputation for academic quality control.

    For me the greatest surprise is how competency testing seems to not be the kiss of death that I predicted in this era where students are constantly brown nosing teachers for grades and seeking leniency based upon race and age. Both WGU and Southern New Hampshire are noted for grading based upon competency testing ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

    Some Universities maintain academic reputations with admissions standards (think Harvard) when in fact there is enormous grade inflation for students who are admitted (again think Harvard where the median grade point average at graduation is an A-). Universities without Harvard-like admission standards must build and maintain their reputations of academic toughness (think Western Governors University and Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire). The same applies to Purdue Global and the new for-profit venture of ASU who cannot afford to let their guards down on academic standards.

     

    Although most students for a time will go to these mega universities for traditional undergraduate and graduate degrees, the future of mega universities is not in degree programs. The Future will be in
    Badges of Competency-Based Learning Performance ---

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#Badges

    Video: A Scenario of Higher Education in 2020 (or perhaps a decade longer)---
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ

     

     


    How Business Higher Education and Training are Changing

    Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
    The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards is a
    "microcredential."

    Competency-Based Learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

    Free Book:  Learning to Learn Online ---: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/learningtolearnonline/

    "Coming to a Business School Near You: Disruption (Part 2)," by Margaret Andrews, Inside Higher Ed, April 13, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/stratedgy/coming-business-school-near-you-disruption-part-2

    . . .

    New Entrants With New Offerings

    A wide array of players are entering the executive education and corporate training market and here are some recent developments:

    • McKinsey, one of the top strategy consultancies in the world, recently launched McKinsey Academy. This new platform uses McKinsey consultants to teach and give feedback, social learning and group-based projects, and adaptive learning and game mechanics to help companies develop their internal talent. Courses include Business Strategy, Mastering Challenging Conversations, and McKinsey’s Approach to Problem Solving, among others. 
    • Udemy for Business offers companies a way to “train your employees better, faster, and more efficiently than ever before” by offering courses in programming, web design, digital marketing and business skills, among others. Client companies include many of the multinationals that business school executive education units covet. 
    • LinkedIn recently acquired Lynda.com, an online learning company known for content focusing on creative skills – and now moving into business topics – as part of LinkedIn's strategy to become a professional development network.
    • Skillshare is “a learning community for creators” and offers a series of online courses to students who pay $10/month for unlimited access to courses taught by practitioners. Skillshare, launched late last year, now has over 750,000 students and courses range from Email Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Photography to Visual Storytelling and Getting Started in Hand Lettering.  Companies can purchase an enterprise license and many of Silicon Valley’s rising stars are clients. 
    • Coursera offers Wharton’s Business Foundation series of four courses (Marketing, Financial Accounting, Operations Management, and Corporate Finance).  Through Coursera’s Signature Track, students can earn a specialization certificate for $595 and completing all four courses plus a capstone project. 

    University and Business Schools are Innovating, too

    That’s not to say that universities and business schools are not innovating, too.  For example:

    • Georgia Tech announced an online Master of Science in Computer Science, offered in collaboration with Udacity and AT&T. The program is delivered entirely through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and costs under $7,000. Could a business degree be next?
    • IMD is getting closer to business through a new partnership with Cisco valued at $10 million US, to “develop thought leadership and address business challenges in digital transformation.” The idea behind the partnership is for IMD “to become the world leading destination for research, innovation and leadership to drive digital transformation to all aspects of enterprises, in every industry.” 
    • Harvard Business School launched HBX, a suite of three business fundamental courses – business analytics, economics for managers, and financial accounting.  They also offer individual courses (the first one launched was disruptive strategy, with Clay Christensen).  Coming soon is HBX Live!, which allows participants worldwide to interact with faculty and each other in real-time.

    Low-Cost MBA Alternatives

    From Kigali, Rwanda, one woman is piecing together the equivalent of an MBA by taking a series of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from different providers. For less than $1000 US she’s taken courses from some of the top business schools in the world and her No-Pay MBA website offers information to help others do the same.

    Students can now take a variety of courses from various providers in a “cafeteria style” like the example above.  While this buffet of courses doesn’t (yet) add up to a degree, at some point some organization is going to figure out how to assign/award credit for these disparate classes – and accredit the program of study.  Then students will be able to bundle together their own degrees and certificates, choosing the best courses from the best schools and building their own All-Star MBA  (or some other degree or certification) program.

    In a recent Financial Times article, Rich Lyons, dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, reiterated his belief that 50% of business schools could be out of business within the next ten years, stating:

    There are over 10,000 business schools in the world so when you start thinking about that group from 1,000 to 10,000, I think curated MOOC content and better ways of credentialing students is going to be a heck of a threat to a lot of those players.”

    Jensen Comment
    I think there's increasing accountability required in both the education and training markets. In particular, for-profit-universities of questionable quality are hurting badly or shutting down entirely. Innovative programs more closely tied to respected traditional universities (think Coursera) or top private sector companies like McKinsey and Cisco  are rising up.

    We are in a transition period where degrees and diplomas still matter, but badges and certificates of competency are on the rise ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#Badges

    Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
    The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards is a
    "microcredential."

    Competency-Based Learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

    "If B.A.’s Can’t Lead Graduates to Jobs, Can Badges Do the Trick?" by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/If-BA-s-Can-t-Lead/228073/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Employers say they are sick of encountering new college graduates who lack job skills. And colleges are sick of hearing that their young alumni aren’t employable.

    Could a new experiment to design employer-approved "badges" leave everyone a little less frustrated?

    Employers and a diverse set of more than a half-dozen universities in the Washington area are about to find out, through a project that they hope will become a national model for workplace badges.

    The effort builds on the burgeoning national movement for badges and other forms of "micro­credentials." It also pricks at much broader questions about the purpose and value of a college degree in an era when nearly nine out of 10 students say their top reason for going to college is to get a good job.

    The "21st Century Skills Badging Challenge" kicks off with a meeting on Thursday. For the next nine months, teams from the universities, along with employers and outside experts, will try to pinpoint the elements that underlie skills like leadership, effective storytelling, and the entrepreneurial mind-set. They’ll then try to find ways to assess students’ proficiency in those elements and identify outside organizations to validate those skills with badges that carry weight with employers.

    The badges are meant to incorporate the traits most sought by employers, often referred to as "the four C’s": critical thinking, communication, creativity, and collaboration.

    "We want this to become currency on the job market," says Kathleen deLaski, founder of the Education Design Lab, a nonprofit consulting organization that is coordinating the project.

    No organizations have yet been selected or agreed to provide validations. But design-challenge participants say there’s a clear vision: Perhaps an organization like TED issues a badge in storytelling. Or a company like Pixar, or IDEO, the design and consulting firm, offers a badge in creativity.

    If those badges gain national acceptance, Ms. deLaski says, they could bring more employment opportunities to students at non-elite colleges, which rarely attract the same attention from recruiters as the Ivies, other selective private colleges, or public flagships. "I’m most excited about it as an access tool," she says.

    ‘Celebrating’ and ‘Translating’

    The very idea of badges may suggest that the college degree itself isn’t so valuable—at least not to employers.

    Badge backers prefer a different perspective. They say there’s room for both badges and degrees. And if anything, the changing job market demands both.

    Through their diplomas and transcripts, "students try to signal, and they have the means to signal, their academic accomplishments," says Angel Cabrera, president of George Mason University, which is involved in the project. "They just don’t have the same alternative for the other skills that employers say they want."

    Nor is the badging effort a step toward vocationalizing the college degree, participants say. As Ms. deLaski puts it: "It’s celebrating what you learn in the academic setting and translating it for the work force."

    Yet as she and others acknowledge, badges by themselves won’t necessarily satisfy employers who now think graduates don’t cut it.

    That’s clear from how employer organizations that may work on the project regard badges. "We’re presuming that there is an additional skill set that needs to be taught," says Michael Caplin, president of the Tysons Partnership, a Northern Virginia economic-development organization. "It’s not just a packaging issue."

    In other words, while a move toward badges could require colleges to rethink what they teach, it would certainly cause them to re-examine how they teach it. At least some university partners in the badging venture say they’re on board with that.

    "Some of what we should be doing is reimagining some disciplinary content," says Randall Bass, vice provost for education at Georgetown University, another participant in the project.

    Mr. Bass, who also oversees the "Designing the Future(s) of the University" project at Georgetown, says many smart curricular changes that are worth pursuing, no matter what, could also lend themselves to the goals of the badging effort. (At the master’s-degree level, for example, Georgetown has already begun offering a one-credit courses in grant writing.)

    "We should make academic work more like work," with team-based approaches, peer learning, and iterative exercises, he says. "People would be ready for the work force as well as getting an engagement with intellectual ideas."

    Employers’ gripes about recent college graduates are often hard to pin down. "It depends on who’s doing the whining," Mr. Bass quips. (The critique he does eventually summarize—that employers feel "they’re not getting students who are used to working"—is a common one.)

    Where Graduates Fall Short

    So one of the first challenges for the badging exercise is to better understand exactly what employers want and whether colleges are able to provide it—or whether they’re already doing so.

    After all, notes Mr. Bass, many believe that colleges should produce job-ready graduates simply by teaching students to be agile thinkers who can adapt if their existing careers disappear. "That’s why I think ‘employers complain, dot dot dot,’ needs to be parsed," he says.

    Mr. Caplin says his organization plans to poll its members to better understand where they see college graduates as falling short.

    Continued in article

    MOOCs --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOCs

    Coursera --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

    Coursera /kɔərsˈɛrə/ is a for-profit educational technology company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs). Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other subjects. Coursera has an official mobile app for iOS and Android. As of October 2014, Coursera has 10 million users in 839 courses from 114 institutions.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    Note that by definition MOOCs are free courses generally served up by prestigious or other highly respected universities that usually serve up videos of live courses on campus to the world in general.  MOOC leaders in this regard have been MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Penn, and other prestigious universities with tens of billions of dollars invested in endowments that give these wealthy universities financial flexibility in developing new ways to serve the public.

    When students seek some type of transcript "credits" for MOOCs the "credits" are usually not free since these entail some types of competency hurdles such as examinations or, at a minimum, proof of participation. The "credits" are not usually granted by the universities like Stanford providing the MOOCs. Instead credits, certificates, badges or whatever are provided by private sector companies like Coursera, Udacity, etc.

    Sometimes Coursera contracts with a college wanting to give its students credits for taking another university's MOOC such as the now infamous instance when more than half of San Jose State University students in a particular MOOC course did not pass a Coursera-administered final examination.
    "What Are MOOCs Good For? Online courses may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they would, but they can prove valuable in surprising ways," by Justin Pope, MIT's Technology Review, December 15, 2014 ---
    http://www.technologyreview.com/review/533406/what-are-moocs-good-for/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141215

    The following describes how a company, Coursera, long involved with the history of MOOCs, is moving toward non-traditional "credits" or "microcredentials" in a business model that it now envisions for itself as a for-profit company. Also note that MOOCs are still free for participants not seeking any type of microcredential.

    And the business model described below probably won't apply to thousands of MOOCs in art, literature, history, etc. It may apply to subsets of business and technology MOOCs, but that alone does not mean the MOOCs are no longer free for students who are not seeking microcredentials. They involve payments for the "microcredentials" awarded for demonstrated competencies. However these will be defined in the future --- not necessarily traditional college transcript credits. A better term might be "badges of competency."  But these will probably be called microcredentials.

    Whether or not these newer types of microcredentials are successful depends a great deal on the job market.
    If employers begin to rely upon them, in addition to an applicant's traditional college transcript, then Coursera's new business model may take off. This makes it essential that Coursera carefully control the academic standards for their newer types of "credits" or "badges."

     

    "Specializations, Specialized," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, February 12, 2015 ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/12/coursera-adds-corporate-partners-massive-open-online-course-sequences

    Massive open online course providers such as Coursera have long pointed to the benefits of the data collected by the platforms, saying it will help colleges and universities understand how students learn online. Now Coursera’s data is telling the company that learners are particularly interested in business administration and technology courses to boost their career prospects -- and that they want to take MOOCs at their own pace.

    As a result, Coursera will this year offer more course sequences, more on-demand content and more partnerships with the private sector.

    Asked if Coursera is closer to identifying a business model, CEO Rick Levin said, “I think we have one. I think this is it.”

    Since its founding in 2012, Coursera has raised millions of dollars in venture capital while searching for a business model. Many questioned if the company's original premise -- open access to the world's top professors -- could lead to profits, but with the introduction of a verified certificate option, Coursera began to make money in 2013. By that October, the company had earned its first million.

    In the latest evolutionary step for its MOOCs, Coursera on Wednesday announced a series of capstone projects developed by its university partners in cooperation with companies such as Instagram, Google and Shazam. The projects will serve as the final challenge for learners enrolled in certain Specializations -- sequences of related courses in topics such as cybersecurity, data mining and entrepreneurship that Coursera introduced last year. (The company initially considered working with Academic Partnerships before both companies created their version of Specializations.)

    The announcement is another investment by Coursera in the belief that adult learners, years removed from formal education, are increasingly seeking microcredentials -- bits of knowledge to update or refresh old skills. Based on the results from the past year, Levin said, interest in such credentials is "palpable." He described bundling courses together into Specializations and charging for a certificate as “the most successful of our product introductions." Compared to when the sequences were offered as individual courses, he said, enrollment has “more than doubled” and the share of learners who pay for the certificate has increased “by a factor of two to four.”

    “I think people see the value of the credential as even more significant if you take a coherent sequence,” Levin said. “The other measure of effectiveness is manifest in what you’re seeing here: company interest in these longer sequences.”

    Specializations generally cost a few hundred dollars to complete, with each individual course in the sequence costing $29 to $49, but Coursera is still searching for the optimal course length. This week, for example, learners in the Fundamentals of Computing Specialization were surprised to find its three courses had been split into six courses, raising the cost of the entire sequence from $196 to $343. Levin called it a glitch, saying learners will pay the price they initially agreed to.

    The partnerships are producing some interesting pairings. In the Specialization created by faculty members at the University of California at San Diego, learners will “design new social experiences” in their capstone project, and the best proposals will receive feedback from Michel "Mike" Krieger, cofounder of Instagram. In the Entrepreneurship Specialization out of the University of Maryland at College Park, select learners will receive an opportunity to interview with the accelerator program 500 Startups.

    As those examples suggest, the benefits of the companies’ involvement mostly apply to top performers, and some are more hypothetical than others. For example, in a capstone project created by Maryland and Vanderbilt University faculty, learners will develop mobile cloud computing applications for a chance to win tablets provided by Google. “The best apps may be considered to be featured in the Google Play Store,” according to a Coursera press release.

    Anne M. Trumbore, director of online learning initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said the capstone projects are an “experiment.” The business school, which will offer a Specialization sequence in business foundations, has partnered with the online marketplace Snapdeal and the music identification app Shazam, two companies either founded or run by Wharton alumni.

    “There’s not a sense of certainty about what the students are going to produce or how the companies are going to use it,” Trumbore said. “Snapdeal and Shazam will look at the top projects graded highest by peers and trained staff. What the companies do after that is really up to them. We have no idea. We’re casting this pebble into the pond.”

    Regardless of the companies' plans, Trumbore said, the business school will waive the application fee for the top 15 learners in the Specialization and provide scholarship money to those that matriculate by going through that pipeline.

    “The data’s great, but the larger incentive for Wharton is to discover who’s out there,” Trumbore said.

    Levin suggested the partnering companies may also be able to use the Specializations as a recruitment tool. “From a company point of view, they like the idea of being involved with educators in their fields,” he said. “More specifically, I think some of the companies are actually hoping that by acknowledging high-performing students in a couple of these capstone projects they can spot potential talent in different areas of the world.”

    While Coursera rolled out its first Specializations last year, Levin said, it also rewrote the code powering the platform to be able to offer more self-paced, on-demand courses. Its MOOCs had until last fall followed a cohort model, which Levin said could be “frustrating” to learners when they came across an interesting MOOC but were unable to enroll. After Coursera piloted an on-demand delivery method last fall, the total number of such courses has now reached 47. Later this year, there will be “several hundred,” he said.

    “Having the courses self-paced means learners have a much higher likelihood of finishing,” Levin said. “The idea is to advantage learners by giving them more flexibility.”

    Some MOOC instructors would rather have rigidity than flexibility, however. Levin said some faculty members have expressed skepticism about offering on-demand courses, preferring the tighter schedule of a cohort-based model.

    Whether it comes to paid Specializations versus free individual courses or on-demand versus cohort-based course delivery, Levin said, Coursera can support both. “Will we develop more Specializations? Yes. Will we depreciate single courses? No,” he said. “We don’t want to discourage the wider adoption of MOOCs.”

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 


    Arizona State's Freshman Year MOOCs Open to All With Final Examinations for Inexpensive Credits

    "Arizona State and edX Will Offer an Online Freshman Year, Open to All," by Charles Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/arizona-state-and-edx-will-offer-an-online-freshman-year-open-to-all/97685?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Arizona State University is joining with the MOOC provider edX in a project that it says “reimagines the freshman year” and opens a new low-cost, low-risk path to a college degree for students anywhere in the world.

    The project, called the Global Freshman Academy, will offer a set of eight courses designed to fulfill the general-education requirements of a freshman year at Arizona State at a fraction of the cost students typically pay, and students can begin taking courses without going through the traditional application process, the university said in a news release on Wednesday. Because the classes are offered as massive open online courses, or MOOCs, there is no limit on how many students can enroll.

    . . .

    The courses to be offered through the Global Freshman Academy are being designed and will be taught by leading scholars at Arizona State. “These courses are developed to their rigorous standards,” Adrian Sannier, chief academic officer for EdPlus at ASU, said in the release. “Course faculty are committed to ensuring their students understand college-level material so that they can be prepared to successfully complete college.”

    Students who pass a final examination in a course will have the option of paying a fee of no more than $200 per credit hour to get college credit for it.

    Mr. Agarwal and Mr. Crow are scheduled to formally announce the project at a conference in Washington on Thursday.

     

    Jensen Comments and Questions
    The real test is how well these credits are accepted by other universities for transfer credit. It probably will not be an issue for graduate school admission since there are three more years of more traditional onsite or online credits. But it could be a huge issue for example when a student takes the first year of ASU MOOC credits and then tries to have these credits accepted by other universities (such as TCU) that still resist accepting any online courses for transfer credit.

    Question
    What are the main differences between MOOC online credits and traditional online credits such as those documented at the following site?
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    For example, at many universities these days there are multiple sections of a course where some sections are onsite and some are online. Often they are taught by the same instructor. The online sections are usually as small or even smaller than the onsite sections because online instructors often have more student interactions such as in instant messaging not available to onsite students ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging

    Answer
    These are the following obvious differences between MOOC online credits and traditional online credits.

    • The huge difference between the ASU MOOC year of courses and the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School MOOC year of courses is that the Wharton School MOOC courses are not available for credit (and therefore are free). The ASU MOOC courses are available for credits that will not be totally free, although they will be available at greatly discounted prices.

       
    • MOOC courses are open to everybody in the world and have no admission standards.

       
    • These are not intended to be equivalent to  advanced placement (AP) credits where students eventually  fill in course requirements with other more advanced courses. The ASU MOOC courses have no requirements to earn substitute credits. Universities do vary with respect to substitution requirements for AP credit, and many do not require taking added replacement courses --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement 
      I suspect that at some universities the ASU MOOCs will be similar to AP credits except that the competency-examination process is different.

       
    • MOOC courses generally have no limits to class size.

       
    • MOOC courses do not have prerequisites such as a MOOC calculus course or linear algebra that has no prerequisites.

       
    • MOOC courses are generally very large such that student interactions online with instructors and/or other students are virtually non-existent.

       
    • MOOC courses generally do not have graded writing assignments such as term papers.

       
    • MOOC courses do not have graded homework.

       
    • MOOC courses do not have graded team projects, whereas team projects are common in smaller traditional online courses.

       
    • MOOC courses generally do not have class attendance requirements or class participation requirements even though they generally do have classes. The first MOOC course ever offered was an artificial intelligence course at Stanford University where students enrolled in the course on campus has the option of not attending class. Some faculty feel like some course courses should have required course attendance and course participation.

       

    The bottom line is that it appears that the ASU freshman year MOOC course credits will be little more than competency-based credits. This will be controversial since many faculty in higher education feel like credits in general education core  courses should  entail class participation, including first-year core courses. For example, at Trinity University there is a first-year seminar that all new students take in very small classes that require a lot of class participation in discussions of assigned readings and the writing of term papers. I think some sections of this seminar don't even have examinations. I did not have examinations when I taught a section of this seminar for two years.

    In traditional large lectures courses on campus students typically are broken out into accompanying recitation sections intended for class participation and interactions with a recitation instructor.

    Jensen Note
    I never anticipated competency-based credits in the first-year of college. I think these will be wildly popular in advance-level training courses such as a CPA examination review course in the final (fifth) year of an accounting program. Using competency-based courses for first-year general education courses is more controversial.

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based credits ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge


    "Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-announces-blended-online-masters-degree/56003?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Yale University is creating a master’s program that will hold many courses online, continuing the Ivy League institution’s foray into “blended” learning.

    The online program, to be offered by the Yale School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology. They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they live.

    It is the second professional school at Yale to try the “blended” model for a graduate program, following the Yale School of Nursing, which opened a partially online doctoral degree in 2011.

    Yale has taken an active but measured interest in online education in the past decade. In 2007 it became one of the first elite institutions to post lecture videos online at no charge. In 2011 it began offering online summer courses to small groups of undergraduates for credit. In 2013 it joined with Coursera and started building MOOCs.

    But a degree program that includes fully online courses is a step toward a different vision of how Yale and other highly selective traditional universities are likely to incorporate online education. Free online courses might make headlines, but tuition-based professional degrees in high-demand fields such as health care are where online courses, and the companies that help build them, are gaining a foothold.

    Other top-tier universities have created online versions of their professional-degree programs, which is something Yale noticed when taking stock of its online presence in 2012. The Johns Hopkins University, for example, offers an online master’s program in public health that delivers about 80 percent of its coursework on the web.

    2U, the online “enabler” company that is helping Yale develop the new program, previously built nursing programs at Georgetown University and Simmons College, as well as programs in public health and health administration at George Washington University.

    Institutions typically sign contracts with companies like 2U when they want to create new online programs as fast as possible without spending a lot of cash upfront. That is an especially attractive option for universities that are trying to grab a larger chunk of the market for high-demand professional degrees in fields such as health, nursing, data science, and business. It is there that 2U and others have found their sweet spot. The companies provide the technology platform and marketing expertise, and take a large share of the tuition revenues.

    Yale would hire new instructors to teach courses in the program, which is still awaiting accreditation approval. The tuition and faculty-to-student ratio would be roughly equivalent to the residential program.

    James Van Rhee, director of the program, said he did not know if the online version would be more profitable, but he did expect it would expand the medical school’s reach — especially in rural areas. The institution hopes to increase enrollments from 40, the size of the current program, to around 300.

    “I don’t know if it will be cost-efficient for us,” said Robert J. Alpern, dean of the medical school, but “hopefully it will be cost-efficient for the students, because they’ll be able to do it from home.”

    Distance Education:  Stanford Center for Professional Development
    Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive in that students must work for employers Must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements are as follows:

    For details go to
    http://scpd.stanford.edu/home

    Most other top universities in the USA now have selected online certificate and degree programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of interest and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online doctoral programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for employment in the Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such doctoral degrees when seeking employment in the Academy.

    "Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online) Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 6, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online 

    Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took its relationship with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of the Internet.

    “I don’t know of anything else like this,” says Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online course].”

    Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May 2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford, and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.

    “We really want to create the high-engagement, community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she says.

    The classes will be offered on a platform supplied by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program: About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.

    “This is by far the most serious and most significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.

    People go to business school for more than just lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer skills and build a network of peers.”

    The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including Harvard Business Schools $1,500 nine-week online program and the Wharton School’s entirely free first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera last fall.

    The program may seem less pricey, though, to the company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus program costs executives $62,500.

    To Novoed, which also provides technology to Wharton, the Haas School of Business, and the Darden School of Business, the Internet is an obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive education programs.

    Saberi says companies are interested in elite training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We expect that programs like this are going to grow.”

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    Question
    Why is Arizona State University forming a for-profit spinoff?

    Answer
    For the same reason Lyft and Uber are planning to raise billions in IPOs. The purpose is to raise capital that, in turn, can be used to by the assets, technology, and workforce necessary to successfully serve the public.

    Question
    Why Arizona State University?

    Answer
    Reputation for academic standards and quality of graduates.

    Arizona State Will Create a For-Profit Spinoff to Court Students in the Work Force ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arizona-State-Will-Create-a/245929?&cid=db

    Arizona State University is creating a for-profit venture to promote its online programs to big employers. The venture will be majority-owned by the TPG Rise Fund, a $2.1-billion private-equity fund that until recently was headed by one of the financiers arrested last week by the Department of Justice in its wide-ranging admissions-bribery dragnet.

    Although the financier, Bill McGlashan, is no longer head of the fund — he said he resigned last week; TPG said he was fired “for cause” — he may still stand to profit from the new ASU venture, if it takes off.

    McGlashan, a self-styled voice of ethical investing in Silicon Valley, was accused of paying $50,000 to a fixer to help gain admission to the University of Southern California for his son by falsifying his test scores, and an additional $250,000 to create the false impression that he was a potential recruit for the football team, complete with a faked picture showing him as a kicker.

    Arizona State’s new venture, which the university calls a “learning-services company,” will focus on developing partnerships with employers to attract more students to the ASU’s online programs, in the vein of its partnerships with Starbucks and Uber. The university is also looking for other research universities to join the venture.

    ASU has not formally announced the creation of the as-yet-unnamed company. But after a Chronicle reporter learned of the deal, the university’s president, Michael M. Crow, described elements of it in an interview on Tuesday. The university had been planning an elaborate rollout of the venture in early April in San Diego at the ASU+GSV Summit, a glitzy gathering of thousands of investors, education-company officials, policy makers, and education leaders.

    In creating the venture, ASU seeks an even bigger slice of the market for students whose tuition is paid in whole or in part by their employers, and better connections to that pool of students.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    While Purdue reeled in the for-profit Kaplan University (and turned it into a non-profit Purdue Global) ASU is casting out some of its non-profit programs into for-profit programs (presumably to raise capital for expanded ventures).

    The most important things in all of these dealings are the logos (Purdue University and Arizona State University) that stand for quality control and academic standards. If these outreach programs do not maintain the same academic standards as the on-campus programs the entire universities will become tainted like the University of Phoenix and other for-profit universities are tainted by such things as low or zero admission standards and low or zero grading standards.

    The ultimate test is academic quality control. Most prestigious universities (think Harvard and MIT) now have extensive distance education programs. Their names signify academic standards that the for-profit programs until now mostly lack. Amidst all this are the recent thrusts of non-profit universities like the University of Massachusetts seeking to join the Mega Universities like Liberty University and the University of Southern New Hampshire having 100,000+ students enrolled in both respected graduate as well as undergraduate programs.

    UMass System Aims to Join the Mega-University Club ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/UMass-System-Aims-to-Join-the/245825?cid=db&elqTrackId=3f32894a5a664ed788887261c8f04c24&elq=79e5bf77abf94b569aa996ee93cc5b1f&elqaid=22428&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=11058
    Will it also serve corporate America with special programs like Arizona State (Starbucks) and Purdue Global (Popa Johns)?

    Mega-Universities (unexpectedly) on the Rise ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/Trend19-MegaU-Main?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=818d19efc4804478bc59234df45cb112&elq=e45302a1d7524e09bb00395f674bd07c&elqaid=22287&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10969

    Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, Grand Canyon, Western Governors, and a few other universities have found a new way to play the game that many colleges are losing. Could they one day lay claim to a significant share of the nation’s new college students?

    . . .

    At a time when many colleges are struggling with shrinking enrollment and tighter budgets, Southern New Hampshire is thriving on a grand scale, and it’s not alone. Liberty, Grand Canyon, and Western Governors Universities, along with a few other nonprofit institutions, have built huge online enrollments and national brands in recent years by subverting many of traditional higher education’s hallmarks. Western Governors has 88,585 undergraduates, according to U.S. Education Department data, more than the top 14 universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings combined.

    Jensen Comment
    Especially note the graph in the above article of enrollment trends at Arizona State, Grand Canyon, Purdue Global, Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, and Western Governors.
    The most important key to success, in my viewpoint, is the attraction of top students coupled with tougher admission standards that are key to academic reputations. If admission standards are not tough reputation depends upon academic standards for flunking out low performers. If you graduate low performers you can soon develop a reputation for being a diploma mill ---  which is the fate of most of the for-profit universities that have closed or will soon close.

    Of course the attraction of reputable faculty is important, especially in research (R1) universities, but often the top research faculty are not even teaching undergraduates. What the Mega-Universities have to concentrate is on hiring and nurturing of great teachers who are experts in their disciplines. This will increasingly change accreditation standards and enforcement.

    Arizona State University is somewhat unique in that it seems to want to be both a reputable R1 research university (with distinguished researchers) along with a diversity of missions such as providing Starbucks' funded degrees to any Starbucks employee (including part-time employees) who want to do the academic work for free. Now ASU wants to become a Mega Univesity with a for-profit venture into adult education ---
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arizona-State-Will-Create-a/245929?&cid=db

    Note that the religious appeal of Mega Liberty University is no key to success in and of itself. Many religious colleges are on the verge of bankruptcy while Liberty University enrollments soar. Success for Liberty University entails building and maintaining a reputation for academic quality control.

    For me the greatest surprise is how competency testing seems to not be the kiss of death that I predicted in this era where students are constantly brown nosing teachers for grades and seeking leniency based upon race and age. Both WGU and Southern New Hampshire are noted for grading based upon competency testing ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

    Some Universities maintain academic reputations with admissions standards (think Harvard) when in fact there is enormous grade inflation for students who are admitted (again think Harvard where the median grade point average at graduation is an A-). Universities without Harvard-like admission standards must build and maintain their reputations of academic toughness (think Western Governors University and Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire). The same applies to Purdue Global and the new for-profit venture of ASU who cannot afford to let their guards down on academic standards.

     

    Although most students for a time will go to these mega universities for traditional undergraduate and graduate degrees, the future of mega universities is not in degree programs. The Future will be in
    Badges of Competency-Based Learning Performance ---

    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#Badges

    Video: A Scenario of Higher Education in 2020 (or perhaps a decade longer)---
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ

     

     


    Department of Education in March 2014:  17,374 online higher education distance education and training programs altogether

    Jensen Comment
    Note that the hundreds of free MOOC courses from prestigious universities are not the same as fee-based distance education degree and certificate programs that are more like on-campus programs in terms in student-instructor interactions, graded assignments, and examinations. Some campuses like the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee even treat online programs as cash cows where the tuition is higher for online programs than identical on-campus programs.

    The (Department of Education Report in March 2014) report says that American colleges now offer 17,374 online programs altogether, 29 percent of which are master’s-degree programs, with bachelor’s and certificate programs making up 23 percent each. Business and management programs are the most popular, at 29 percent of the total, followed by health and medicine programs (16 percent), education programs (14 percent), and information technology and computers (10 percent) ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-there-may-be-fewer-online-programs-than-you-think/51163?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Guide to Online Community Colleges --- http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/online-colleges/community-colleges/
    Jensen Comment
    Online community college courses are good for things like training certificates and associate degrees. However, for students wanting four-year and graduate online courses, there are usually better alternatives such as the ones listed below.

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.


    Question
    What accredited law schools offer online tax LL.M. degrees?

    Answer (these degrees typically take three years to complete for full-time students unless students already have law degrees)
    http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/09/nine-law-schools.html

    Selected Online Masters of Accounting and Masters of Taxation Programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#MastersOfAccounting
    Time between enrollment and graduation depends a great deal on meeting prerequisite requirements in accountancy, and business core (including economics and ethics). I'm biased in recommending such degrees from only AACSB-accredited business programs, although not necessarily AACSB-accredited accounting programs. Some of the most prestigious AACSB-accredited universities do not have the added accountancy specialized accreditation.


    Distance Education:  Stanford Center for Professional Development
    Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive in that employers must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements are as follows:

    For details go to
    http://scpd.stanford.edu/home

    Most other top universities in the USA now have selected online certificate and degree programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of interest and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online doctoral programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for employment in the Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such doctoral degrees when seeking employment in the Academy.

    Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     


    "Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online) Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 6, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online 

    Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took its relationship with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of the Internet.

    “I don’t know of anything else like this,” says Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online course].”

    Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May 2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford, and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.

    “We really want to create the high-engagement, community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she says.

    The classes will be offered on a platform supplied by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program: About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.

    “This is by far the most serious and most significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.

    People go to business school for more than just lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer skills and build a network of peers.”

    The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including Harvard Business Schools $1,500 nine-week online program and the Wharton School’s entirely free first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera last fall.

    The program may seem less pricey, though, to the company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus program costs executives $62,500.

    To Novoed, which also provides technology to Wharton, the Haas School of Business, and the Darden School of Business, the Internet is an obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive education programs.

    Saberi says companies are interested in elite training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We expect that programs like this are going to grow.”

     

    "Disruption Ahead: What MOOCs Will Mean for MBA Programs," Knowledge@wharton Blog, July 16, 2014 ---
    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/moocs-mba-programs-opportunities-threats/

    In a new research paper, Christian Terwiesch, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and Karl Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at the school, examine the impact that massive open online courses (MOOCs) will have on business schools and MBA programs. In their study — titled, “Will Video Kill the Classroom Star? The Threat and Opportunity of MOOCs for Full-time MBA Programs” — they identify three possible scenarios that business schools face not just as a result of MOOCs, but also because of the technology embedded in them. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Terwiesch and Ulrich discuss their findings.

    An edited transcript of the interview appears below.

    Knowledge@Wharton: Christian, perhaps you could start us off by describing the main findings or takeaways from your research?

    Terwiesch: Let me preface what we’re going to discuss about business schools by saying that Karl and I have been in the business school world for many, many years. We love this institution, and we really want to make sure that we find a sustainable path forward for business schools.

    Continued in article

    "What Georgia Tech’s Online Degree in Computer Science Means for Low-Cost Programs," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/What-Georgia-Tech-s-Online/149857/?cid=wc

    Among all recent inventions that have to do with MOOCs, the Georgia Institute of Technology’s online master’s program in computer science may have the best chance of changing how much students pay for a traditional degree.

    The program, which started last winter, pairs MOOC-like course videos and assessments with a support system of course assistants who work directly with students. The goal is to create a low-cost master’s degree that is nonetheless "just as rigorous" as the on-campus equivalent—producing graduates who are "just as good," to quote one of the new program’s cheerleaders, President Obama. The price: less than $7,000 for the three-year program, a small fraction of the cost of the traditional program.

    It’s too early yet for a graduating class. But researchers at Georgia Tech and Harvard University have studied the students who have enrolled in the program, in an effort to figure out "where the demand is coming from and what it’s substituting for educationally," says Joshua S. Goodman, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard.

    By understanding what kinds of students are drawn to the new program, Mr. Goodman and his fellow researchers think they can begin to understand what competitors it might threaten.

    Here is what they found out about those students:

    How They Are Different

    The enrollees are numerous. The online program this year got as many applications as Georgia Tech’s traditional program did during two recent semesters. But while the traditional program accepted only about 15 percent of its applicants, the online program accepted 50 percent, enrolling about 1,800 in its first year. That might not qualify as large in light of the 50,000-students-per-course figures often quoted in reference to MOOCs, but it does make the online program three times as large as the largest traditional master’s programs in computer science, according to the researchers.

    They’re older (and they already have jobs). The people enrolling in the online program are 35 years old, on average, and are far more likely to report that they are working rather than studying full time. (The average age of the students in Georgia Tech’s traditional program is 24, with only half indicating that they are employed.) That should not surprise anyone who has even a passing familiarity with online education. Online programs have pitched themselves to adults who are tethered to work and family, and who want to earn degrees without rearranging their lives around a course schedule.

    They’re from the United States. Online education is supposed to make geographic borders matter less. But this online master’s program has drawn 80 percent of its students from within the country. By contrast, in the traditional program, 75 percent of the students are foreign, mostly from India and China.

    Most of them did not study computer science in college. In the traditional graduate program, 62 percent of students have completed an undergraduate major in computer science. That is true of only 40 percent of the online students. The percentage of undergraduate engineering majors, 27 percent, remained constant.

    How They Are Similar

    They’re good at school. Unlike San Jose State University’s MOOC-related pilot program, which tried and failed to help underperforming students, Georgia Tech’s online program appeals to students with a proven academic track record, specifically those who earned bachelor’s degrees with a grade-point average of 3.0 or higher. (The university told The Chronicle last year that its first group of applicants averaged a 3.58 GPA—about the same as the students in the traditional program.) They seem to be doing well so far: Courses held last spring and summer saw pass rates of about 88 percent, according to the university.

    They’re mostly men. The online program had a lower rate of female applicants than the traditional program did, but there were precious few in either pool: 14 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Among American applicants, the rates were similar: 13 percent and 16 percent.

    Over all, the first enrollees in Georgia Tech’s MOOC-like master’s program fit the profile of students who are applying to online graduate programs at institutions across the country.

    Continued in article


    "The 25 Best Universities In The World For Computer Science," by Melia Robinson, Business Insider, October 30, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/best-universities-for-computer-science-2014-10 

    Ranking Criteria ---
    http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/qs-world-university-rankings-methodology

    Jensen Comment
    The ranking is heavily influenced by the overall prestige ranking of the university apart from computer science.

    I would be inclined to put more emphasis on the quality of the students. For example, it may well be that a Russian university that graduates the hackers that upset world businesses and national intelligence agencies is really a better computer science university in terms of having some of the most gifted students in the world\. However, Russian Universities in general do not have stellar academic standards and tolerate a lot of cheating on the part of students and faculty.

    The problem is that in the case of computer science and some other disciplines like art and music, "student quality" is very difficult to measure. The elusive component is creativity.

    At a conference years ago an associate dean from MIT mentioned that MIT graduates on average will do wonderfully if the university does not get in their way.

    Bob Jensen's threads on college ranking controversies ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

     


    Find your online degree with the SUNY Learning Network --- http://sln.suny.edu/

    Online SUNY Graduate Programs

    Online Master Degree Programs

    MBA | MS | MA | MLS | M.Ed. * denotes SLN Affiliated campus

    Online Master of Business Degree Programs

    Online Master of Science Degree Programs

    Online Master of Arts Degree Programs

    Online Master of Library Science

    Online Master of Education

    Online Doctoral Degree Programs

    DNP * DENOTES SLN AFFILIATED CAMPUS

    Online Doctor of Nursing Practice

    The SUNY Learning Network program is administered by the Office of the Provost.

     

    "Open SUNY Unites Online Ed Offerings Across 64 Institutions," by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, January 21, 2014 ---
    http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/01/21/open-suny-unites-online-ed-offerings-across-64-institutions.aspx?=CT21

    The State University of New York (SUNY) has formally introduced a new online program that allows students to access courses, degrees, professors and academic resources from any of SUNY's 64 campuses. Open SUNY, as it's called, is a mix-and-match service that offers access to 400 "online-enabled" degrees, 12,000 course sections and eight full degrees. The system's expectation is that people from inside and outside the state will attend courses, including international students.

    Students can use the program to start a degree, finish a degree or just take a single course. The Open SUNY Navigator allows a potential student to specify what type of program he or she wants in categories such as entirely online or hybrid, synchronous or asynchronous, experiential, accelerated and so on — and the navigation tool provides potential online offerings to fit the criteria.

    "Open SUNY will provide our students with the nation's leading online learning experience, drawing on the power of SUNY to expand access, improve completion, and prepare more students for success," said Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. "In addition to these new, fully-online degree programs, Open SUNY will take every online course we offer at every SUNY campus...and make them easy to find and accessible for every SUNY student and prospective learners around the globe."

    Along with providing a central application through which to locate course offerings, SUNY is offering Open SUNY+, which adds additional layers of support for online students and instructors. Specific additions include a 24/7 help desk for technical support, a "concierge" service to act as a single source for getting all program questions answered, and extended hour tutoring services. Faculty will have access to training programs and online forums where they can broaden their knowledge about developing effective online courses or share best practices.

    Eight Open SUNY+ degree programs debuting this month were chosen based on a number of factors, including student interest, accreditation, and their capacity to meet current and future workforce demand throughout New York State.

    Among the institutions involved are:

    "We are proud of our collaboration and success in serving a qualified student population that may not otherwise be able to pursue a degree in electrical engineering," said Stony Brook President Samuel Stanley Jr. "We are joining forces with our colleagues at Binghamton University and the University at Buffalo to make a difference. We look forward to implementation of Open SUNY. This is truly an exciting time to be involved in higher education in New York State."


    The top flagship state universities in the USA are under increasing pressures from their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees. The question is whether the most prestigious private universities like Stanford and Harvard will join in the competition.

    The Top MBA Programs in the World according to the Financial Times ---
    http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-ranking-2014

    The Top MBA Programs in the USA according to US News
    http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools

    "Half of U.S. Business Schools Might Be Gone by 2020," by Patrick Clark, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 14, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-programs-could-erase-half-of-u-dot-s-dot-business-schools-by-2020

    Richard Lyons, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has a dire forecast for business education: “Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years—or five,” he says.

    The threat, says Lyons, is that more top MBA programs will start to offer degrees online. That will imperil the industry’s business model. For most business schools, students pursuing part-time and executive MBAs generate crucial revenue. Those programs, geared toward working professionals, will soon have to compete with elite online alternatives for the same population.

    . . .

    Online MBA programs aren’t siphoning choice students from campuses yet, says Ash Soni, executive associate dean at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. Kelley ranks 15th on Bloomberg Businessweek’s list of full-time programs and was an early player in online MBAs. The school draws students from across the country, but it is more likely to compete with online MBA programs offered by the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Arizona State’s Carey School of Business. Says Soni: “If you’re a dean from a regional school and you’re asking, ‘Are these online guys tapping into my space?’ The answer is: maybe in the future, but not yet.”

    Michael Desiderio, the executive director of the Executive MBA Council, says change is coming, but his group isn’t panicking. “We’re not saying it’s a threat or this is the end of the EMBA space,” he says. “It’s stimulating a discussion: How do we adapt to continue to serve a population that has changing needs?”

    Online education is sure to shift the ways schools compete for students. For-profit MBA programs such as DeVry’s Keller School of Management have been the early losers as more traditional universities go online, says Robert Lytle, a partner in the education practice at consultancy Parthenon Group. That trend could extend to lower-ranked schools as the big-name brands follow.

    When Lytle talks to directors at schools who are debating the merits of online learning, he tells them to stop dallying and start building programs. “Once you get out of the top tier of schools, you’re either already online, on your way there, or dead in the water,” he says. It isn’t clear which online models will be most successful, but many schools are feeling pressure to get on board. When Villanova School of Business announced a new online MBA program earlier this year, Dean Patrick Maggitti said there has never been a more uncertain time in higher education. “I think it’s smart strategy to be looking at options in this market.”

     

    Jensen Comment --- Where I Disagree
    Firstly, this is not so much a threat to undergraduate business schools, because most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs do not even offer undergraduate business degrees. It's not likely that Harvard and Stanford and the London Business School will commence to offer undergraduate business degrees online.

    Secondly, this is not so much a threat to masters of accounting programs, because most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs do not even offer masters of accounting degrees and do not have enough accounting courses to meet the minimal requirements to take the CPA examination in most states. . It's not likely that Harvard and Stanford and the London Business School will commence to offer masters of accounting degrees online.

    Thirdly, this is not so much of a threat even at the MBA level to universities who admit graduate students with lower admissions credentials. The US News Top MBA programs currently pick off the cream of the crop in terms of GMAT and gpa credentials. The top flagship state universities like the the Haas School at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois pick off the top students who cannot afford prestigious private universities. By the time all these universities skim the cream of the crop the second-tier public and private universities struggle with more marginal students applying for MBA programs.

    It would be both dangerous and sad if the very top MBA programs introduced lower admissions standards for online programs vis-a-vis on-campus programs. In order to maintain the highest standards the most prestigious universities will have to cater to the highest quality foreign students and herein lies a huge problem. Some nations like China are notorious for fraud and cheating on admissions credentials like the GMAT. In Russia such credentials are for sale to the highest bidders.

    The name of the game in business education is placement of graduates. Prestigious university MBA programs are at the top of the heap in terms of placement largely because of their successful alumni and strong alumni networks that actively seek MBA graduates from their alma maters. This will not work as well for online programs, especially since many of the online graduates of prestigious university online programs will live outside the USA.

    However, top flagship state universities are under increasing pressures from their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees. This is already happening as is reflected in the following rankings of online programs by US News:

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

     

    I don't anticipate that the highest-prestige MBA programs will have online degree programs anytime soon. They may have more and more free MOOCs, but that is an entirely different ballgame if no credit is given for the MOOCs. The highly prestigious Wharton is now offering its first-year MBA courses as free MOOCs ---
    http://www.topmba.com/blog/wharton-steps-experimentation-moocs-mba-news
    Also see http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-13/wharton-puts-first-year-mba-courses-online-for-free

    Who are these students taking free first-year MOOC courses from Wharton?
    Some are college professors who adding what they learn in MOOCs to the courses they themselves teach. Most MOOCs, by the way, are advanced courses on highly specialized topics like the literature of both famous and obscure writers. Others are basic courses that contribute to career advancement.
     

    • For example, the business school at Penn, Wharton, now offers its core MBA courses as free MOOCs. Some students who intently take these courses are seeking to get into Wharton and other prestigious MBA programs.
       
    • Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT scores to get into prestigious MBA programs and to do better in those programs once admitted so that they too can tap those six-figure starting salaries of graduates from prestigious MBA Programs.
       
    • Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT scores to obtain better financial aid packages for further graduate study.
       
    • Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to perform better on the job and thereby get better performance evaluations and raises.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     


    "During an ‘Uncertain Time’ for Higher Ed, Villanova Takes Its MBAs Online," by Patrick Clark, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 30, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-30/villanova-school-of-business-announces-online-mba-program


    "Texas Rolls Out an ‘Affordable Baccalaureate’ Degree," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/texas-rolls-out-an-affordable-baccalaureate-degree/50119?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Two years after Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called on the state’s colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees that would cost students no more than $10,000 each, two institutions rolled out a joint bachelor-of-applied-science program last month that they say can be completed in three years for not much more than the governor’s target amount.

    The initiative, called the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Program, is being offered jointly by South Texas College and Texas A&M University at Commerce, and was assembled under the auspices of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The effort is supported by the College for All Texans Foundation and by a two-year, $1-million grant from the education-technology organization Educause and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    Students can earn the first 90 credit hours required for the degree through online modules, the coordinating board said, with the last 30 credit hours “offered in both a face-to-face and online format.” The degree emphasizes organizational leadership, the board said, adding that the program “will culminate with a digital-capstone experience where students will apply their knowledge and skills to real-world business problems.”

    Students who begin with no college credits should be able to complete the program in three years for $13,000 to $15,000, the board said, while those who have already earned some college credits will pay less.

    The coordinating board said that the new offering was “a faculty-driven initiative, developed by community-college and university faculty,” but “we also listened to what national and regional employers are saying they really want: graduates with critical-thinking skills who are quantitatively literate, can evaluate knowledge sources, understand diversity, and benefit from a strong liberal-arts and sciences background.”

    Shirley A. Reed, South Texas College’s president, said in a statement that the new degree “is a transition from colleges measuring student competencies based on time in a seat to now allowing students to demonstrate competencies they have acquired in previous employment, life experiences, or personal talents.”

    “It is an opportunity for students to earn an affordable bachelor’s degree with the cost as low as $750 per term,” she said, “and allows students to complete as many competencies and courses as possible in that term.”

    "A Second State, Oregon, Considers Making Community College Free," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/a-second-state-oregon-considers-making-community-college-free?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    A day after Tennessee’s governor, Bill Haslam, proposed making two years of community college free for graduating high-school seniors in that state, a similar proposal has advanced in the Oregon legislature. The education committee of the State Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that would require the state’s higher-education coordinating board to study the idea and report back to the legislature this year. That could set up a potential up or down vote on the proposal in the 2015 legislative session, The Oregonian reported.

    Gov. John Kitzhaber supports the bill, but with some caveats. He suggested creating incentives–such as good grades–for students to qualify, and other safeguards to ensure the money is spent wisely.

    Jensen Comment
    One drawback of linking free college to grades is the pressure it will place upon increasing grade inflation that is already on a trend for median grades to be above 3.0.

    Another problem of low-cost degree programs is that they increase pressure for use of low-cost and part-time adjuncts that can lead to higher variance in the  quality of courses.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online education and training alternatives (nearly all of which are not free) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     


    Jensen Caution
    Don't treat distance education courses and MOOC courses as synonyms. President Obama is suggesting priority for distance education courses and online degree programs that are neither free nor "massive" in size. Smaller distance education courses can have intense communications between students and an instructor plus intense communications between students in a course (including team projects). Grading in these distance education courses is very similar to onsite course grading.

    MOOCs present an entire new dimension to student communications and grading. I don't think President Obama was thinking in terms of MOOCs in his latest proposal. However, MOOCs are on the horizon, especially for very specialized courses that colleges cannot afford to teach on campus. Credit in such courses may be given on the basis of competency testing.

     

    "Obama Proposals for Colleges Highlight Online Courses," by Megan O'Neil, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 22, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/obama-proposals-for-colleges-highlight-online-courses/45595?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Developing online classes and other nontraditional teaching approaches could earn colleges money under new federal financing priorities proposed on Thursday by President Obama.

    More colleges should be encouraged “to embrace innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st-century economy and maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank,” the president said in a speech at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York.

    The financial rewards for such innovation would be part of a larger retooling of financing priorities, Mr. Obama said. Under his proposal, the Department of Education would have two years to create a college-rating system to help students and their parents determine the value of an institution. Criteria would include graduation rates, graduates’ competitiveness in the work force, and their debt load upon graduation, among others.

    As one example of innovation in online learning that meets students’ needs, Mr. Obama cited an online master’s program in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The program will make its debut in January and cost a fraction of a traditional on-campus degree.

    Continued in article

    A Ranking of Online MBA  Programs from AACSB-accredited universities (there are no such online accounting doctoral programs) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#MBA

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    "Obama Vows Action on College Costs, but Will It Work?" by Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2013 --- |
    http://chronicle.com/article/Obama-Vows-Action-on-College/141203/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

    In a speech at Knox College last month, President Obama said he would "shake up higher education" with an "aggressive strategy" aimed at making college more affordable.

    On Thursday, the president embarks on a two-state, three-campus tour where he'll lay out what he has in mind. In a letter sent to his supporters this week, he promises "real reforms that would bring lasting change."

    "Just tinkering around the edges won't be enough," he says in the letter. "To create a better bargain for the middle class, we have to fundamentally rethink about how higher education is paid for in this country."

    The plan, he continues, "won't be popular with everyone—including some who've made higher education their business—but it's past time that more of our colleges work better for the students they exist to serve."

    But it's hard to see how the president will tackle two of the root causes of tuition growth: labor costs and state budget cuts. Despite productivity gains, and a move toward self-guided, "competency-based" learning, higher-education remains an industry that's highly dependent on skilled labor. At the same time, many states have slashed their spending on higher-education, forcing public colleges to raise tuition to cover costs.

    Taking Colleges to Task

    Over the past year-and-a-half, Mr. Obama has become a frequent critic of colleges, taking them to task over rising tuition and warning that the government won't continue to pour money into an "undisciplined system." He has threatened to withhold some federal aid from colleges that fail to hold down tuition growth, and has proposed grants for states and colleges that adopt cost-saving measures.

    So far, those ideas have fallen flat, largely because of federal budget constraints. The president has had better luck increasing aid to students and making debt more manageable, through expanded income-based repayment options and lower interest rates on student loans.

    His administration has also made information about college costs and student debt more transparent, through the use of an online College Scorecard and a standardized financial-aid award letter, or "shopping sheet."

    This week's college tour is the latest in a string of campaign-style events the White House is using to promote its economic policies in the run-up to debates in Congress over the federal budget and the debt ceiling. It includes stops on Thursday and Friday at two State University of New York campuses—the University at Buffalo and Binghamton University—and at Lackawanna College, in Scranton, Pa.

    Details of the president's proposals aren't yet available, but some observers expect Mr. Obama to recycle a plan that would tie some money from the campus-based aid programs to efforts to rein in tuition growth, and to repeat his call for a "Race to the Top"-style grant program for colleges and states that take steps to control costs.

    He might also propose an expansion of his signature Pay-as-You-Earn student-loan repayment plan, or declare use of the financial-aid shopping sheet mandatory for all colleges.

    To address state budget cuts, he might propose requiring states to sustain their spending on higher education to receive certain federal funds. But past maintenance-of-effort provisions haven't proven particularly effective, and some members of Congress oppose their expansion. Tackling labor costs would be even trickier.

    "When it comes down to it, there's not all that much the president can do, besides using the bully pulpit" to exhort states and colleges to do more, said Daniel T. Madzelan, a longtime Education Department official who retired last year. "It just comes down to the price of labor."

    From Benefactor to Critic

    During his first years in office, President Obama focused on expanding student aid, pushing for increases in the maximum Pell Grant and the creation of a more generous tuition tax credit. Those changes helped make college more affordable for current students, but they didn't do anything to slow tuition growth, and skeptics say they may have even fueled it.

    In 2010, the administration turned its attention to for-profit colleges, proposing to cut off federal student aid to institutions where borrowers struggle to repay their debt. The resulting "gainful employment" regulation was overturned by the courts, and the Education Department is opening negotiations to rewrite the rule this fall.

    But it was not until 2012, in his State of the Union address, that the president began to apply pressure to all of higher education, putting colleges "on notice" that his administration would not continue to subsidize "skyrocketing tuition."

    "If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down," he said.

    Three days later, in a speech at the University of Michigan, he issued a "blueprint for keeping college affordable," repeating proposals to shift more money from the campus-based student-aid programs to colleges that "do their fair share to keep tuition affordable," and create new incentive programs for colleges and states. The plan also included a call for the College Scorecard that would provide families with "essential information" for choosing a college, including data on institutions' costs, graduation rates, and the potential earnings of graduates.

    He returned to those themes in his 2013 State of the Union address, calling on colleges to "do their part to keep costs down," and urging Congress to consider "affordability and value" when awarding federal aid. In a policy plan that accompanied the speech, he suggested incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system or establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation "based on performance and results."

    Sidestepping Congress

    Getting Congress to agree to any of those ideas will be difficult, given budget realities and competing priorities—not to mention the partisan gridlock currently gripping Washington. Recognizing this, Mr. Obama has vowed to use the powers of his office to get things done.

    Continued in article

    It's troubling enough to study one university's financial reports. It's a nightmare to compare universities.
    "So You Want to Examine Your University's Financial Reports?"  by Charles Schwartz, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Examine-Your/130672/

    Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of Professors ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CostAccounting

    "Treating Higher Ed's 'Cost Disease' With Supersize Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Treating-Higher-Eds-Cost/130934/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    "A Policy Wonk Brings Data on College Costs to the Table," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/A-College-Cost-Policy-Wonk/130662/

    "U. of Texas Regents Publish Data on Faculty 'Productivity'," Inside Higher Ed, May 6, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/06/qt#259013

    The University of Texas System released data Thursday designed to help the system's regents gauge the productivity of faculty members, The Texas Tribune reported -- one part of an accountability push that has concerned many professors and troubled some lawmakers. The massive spreadsheet -- which system officials insisted was raw and unverified, and should be treated as a draft -- contained numerous data points about all individual professors, including their total compensation, tenure status, total course enrollments, and information about research awards. A similar effort this spring at Texas A&M University -- also undertaken in response to pressure from Gov. Rick Perry -- created a stir there.

    "Release of Faculty-Productivity Data Roils U. of Texas," by Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Release-of/127439/

    Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of Professors (including discussions of the Texas A&M cost allocation study) --- See below


    "Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Spinoff Team Up on Remedial Math," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Carnegie-Foundation-and/141839/?cid=wc

    A Stanford University spinoff and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching plan to announce a partnership on Tuesday to expand the distribution of online remedial-mathematics courses that so far have tripled students' success rates in half the time.

    NovoEd, an online-learning start-up company that encourages students to work in small groups and to learn from one another, teamed up with the foundation to tackle what is widely considered a nationwide crisis in remedial math.

    More than 60 percent of students entering community college require at least one remedial-math course before they can progress to credit-bearing courses. Fewer than a third of those students complete it, according to the foundation.

    Over the past two years, the Carnegie Foundation has been trying to improve those numbers through a remedial-math program involving more than 40 community colleges and universities in at least 10 states.

    Statway and Quantway, which together make up Carnegie's Pathways Program, have allowed students to complete in one year remedial-math sequences that used to take two years.

    A Carnegie spokeswoman said that 17 percent of remedial-math students in the colleges that make up the Statway network historically have achieved math credit within three years, but 49 percent of those in the Statway program did so within a single year. Results were similar with the Quantway program.

    The program's director and a senior managing partner at Carnegie, Bernadine Chuck Fong, said in an e-mail on Monday that NovoEd's focus on "student-centered, collaborative learning and pedagogy" meshed with the foundation's collaborative strategies.

    A Focus on Collaborative Learning

    Amin Saberi, co-founder and chief executive officer of NovoEd, agreed. "By combining forces, we can scale up the curriculum and address this national challenge head-on," he said, also in an interview on Monday. He is on leave from Stanford, where he is an associate professor of management science and engineering.

    NovoEd started in January 2013 as an in-house program at Stanford called Venture Lab. Its massive open online courses have reached about 500,000 people in more than 150 countries, Mr. Saberi said.

    NovoEd differs from Coursera and Udacity, two MOOC spinoffs that were also started by Stanford professors, in its focus on collaborative learning, Mr. Saberi said.

    In NovoEd courses, students are typically assigned to groups of four to seven, based on their experiences and locations, to work on problems and projects together. They're also encouraged to discuss roadblocks they've faced in their own learning and how they've overcome the obstacles.

    In the courses, students rate one another as team members, which gives them incentives to be active participants.

    Mr. Saberi said the approach the partnership will take, which includes studying in contexts that are relevant to students, is particularly effective with first-generation and underprepared students who often struggle in online courses. Remedial-math students might, for instance, study how a 20-percent interest rate on a credit card adds up over time.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

    Also don't forget the wonderful free remedial and advanced math videos at the Khan Academy ---
    https://www.khanacademy.org/


    2U Distance Education Course Provider --- http://www.study2u.com/
    2U (The Anti-MOOC Provider) ---  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology

    "3 Universities (Baylor, Southern Methodist, and Temple Universities) Will Grant Credit for 2U’s Online Courses," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/3-universities-will-grant-credit-for-2us-online-courses/45143?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Jensen Comment
    That was July 30, 2013. It's unclear what role the new 2U will play in terms of providing transfer credit accepted by Baylor, SUM, Temple, and other universities after May 2014.

    "2U Ends Semester Online," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, April 3, 2014 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/03/online-education-provider-2u-disband-semester-online-consortium 

    The online education provider 2U will this summer eliminate its online course pool initiative in favor of developing fully online undergraduate degree programs, ending a high-profile effort to offer scalable, credit-granting online courses at residential colleges.

    The consortium, known as Semester Online, was initially marketed as a platform for top-tier universities to offer online courses to paying students at participating universities. During the 2012 media storm surrounding massive open online courses, it emerged with a distinctive message, promising small course sizes and live, interactive videoconferencing sessions.

    But before the launch of last fall’s pilot, Duke and Vanderbilt Universities and the University of Rochester had backed out, and Wake Forest University remained on the fence. At the colleges that dropped out and at Wake Forest, the decisions came after intense faculty debate; Duke, for example, rejected joining the consortium in a 16-14 vote by the Arts & Sciences Council. Although Wake Forest eventually joined the consortium, which this spring expanded with new courses and international partners, the universities and 2U reached a mutual decision to end the initiative.

    “Semester Online was always an experiment,” Chance Patterson, 2U’s senior vice president of communications, said in an email. “The pilot program experienced significant challenges related to the complexities of a consortium structure.”

    In addition to losing some of its founding members, Semester Online’s fall pilot also struggled with low enrollment. Some participating universities were unable to sign up students until mid-June -- several months after fall registration -- meaning some courses were left with single-digit enrollments.

    Patterson described Semester Online as an “informative” experience that has “helped 2U develop its instructional model for the undergraduate population.” And along with Wednesday’s announcement that it would disband the consortium, 2U also unveiled its first undergraduate degree program, an RN to BSN program developed in partnership with Simmons College.

    In an email, Claire E. Sterk, provost of Emory University, described her institution's participation in Semester Online as a learning experience, and thanked the faculty "for being open to academic innovation."

    "From my perspective, it was a great experiment led by our dean of arts and sciences and the faculty," Sterk wrote. "We also learned important lessons about the ways in which universities teach and are able to compare traditional versus more innovative modes of teaching."

    Ed Macias, provost emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, said via email that he was "proud to have been part of this experiment in online education," and that courses had been "top quality."

    2U, fresh off a successful initial public offering last week, is better-known for developing fully online master’s degree programs for institutions such as Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina, among others. 

    Those programs have generally been well-received among graduate school faculty. Writing about his experiences with the University of North Carolina's online M.B.A. program, Scott Cohen, a professor with more than three decades of teaching in graduate-level business courses, described the online experience as "more intimate than 90 percent of the seminars I’ve taught in or taken."


    Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/03/online-education-provider-2u-disband-semester-online-consortium#ixzz2xpZqS1kg
    Inside Higher Ed

     

    Jensen Comment
    Some universities claim that they do not accept distance education transfer credit. However, in some instances it's impossible on a transcript to know whether a student took one or more courses from a highly regarded university online or onsite. Universities like the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University have multiple sections of courses where some sections can be taken on campus and other sections can be taken online. The transcripts may not differentiate between those sections when students from those universities are seeking to transfer to other universities.

    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education courses and degree programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Pricey Online Courses and Degrees --- See Below
    These do not help global low income students other than by allowing students  to learn at home and accumulate transcript credits toward degrees. Sometimes the credits are accepted only by the college or university providing distance education courses. Some universities like the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee that offer both onsite and online sections of the same course will charge higher fees for the online sections. Distance education for come colleges and universities are cash cows.

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Free Online Courses, Videos, Tutorials, and Course Materials ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
    These help low income students by providing totally free courses and learning materials, often from the best professors in the world at prestigious universities. However, if students want transcript credit there will be fees to take competency-based examinations. And those credits are not always accepted by other colleges and universities. The free alternatives are mainly for students who just want to learn.


    Competency-Based Learning --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    "Capella Gets Federal Approval for Competency-Based Degrees," Inside Higher Ed,  August 13, 2013 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/08/13/capella-gets-federal-approval-competency-based-degrees

    The University of Northern Arizona Offers a Dual Transcript Option, One of Which is Competency-Based
    "Competency-Based Transcripts," by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, August 9, 2013 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/09/northern-arizona-universitys-new-competency-based-degrees-and-transcripts

    Jensen Comment
    This program at Northern Arizona differs from the competency-based programs at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Akron, Capella University, and Southern New Hampshire University in that students at Northern Arizona must sign up for online courses at Northern Arizona before becoming eligible for the competency-based transcript. It differs from Western Governors University in that there are two transcripts rather than just a competency-based transcript for online courses.

    Capella may have a more difficult time getting employers and graduate schools to accept Capella's competency-based  transcript credit in general relative to the University of Wisconsin, the University of Akron, and Southern New Hampshire University. Time will tell. Much depends upon other criteria such as SAT scores, GRE scores, GMAT scores, LSAT scores, MCAT scores, and professional licensing examination scores.

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based assessment ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     


    "Professors Are About to Get an Online Education:  Georgia Tech's new Internet master's degree in computer science is the future." by Andy Kessler, The Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2013 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578504761168566272.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

    Anyone who cares about America's shortage of computer-science experts should cheer the recent news out of Georgia Tech. The Atlanta university is making major waves in business and higher education with its May 14 announcement that the college will offer the first online master's degree in computer science—and that the degree can be had for a quarter of the cost of a typical on-campus degree. Many other universities are experimenting with open online courses, or MOOCs, but Georgia Tech's move raises the bar significantly by offering full credit in a graduate program.

    It comes just in time. A shortfall of computer-science graduates is a constant refrain in Silicon Valley, and by 2020 some one million high-tech job openings will remain unfilled, according to the Commerce Department.

    That's why Georgia Tech's online degree, powered by Udacity, is such a game-changer. For the same $7,000 a year that New York City spends per student on school buses, you can now get a master's from one of the most well-respected programs in the country. Moore's Law says these fees should drop to $1,000 by 2020—a boon for students and for the economy.

    Sadly, MOOCs are not without controversy. Consider what happened at San Jose State after the university last fall ran a test course in electrical engineering paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Students who worked with online content passed at a higher rate than classroom-only students, 91% to 60%. The course was so successful that the school's president decided to expand online courses, including humanities, which will also be rolled out to other California State universities.

    You'd think professors would welcome these positive changes for students. Some teachers across the country are, however cautiously, embracing the MOOC model. But plenty of professors smell a threat to their livelihood. In an April 29 open letter to the university, San Jose State philosophy professors wrote: "Let's not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education."

    In April, an Amherst faculty committee decided against online courses, since they apparently run afoul of the school's mission of "learning through close colloquy." As it happens, Amherst professors rank seventh in salary of top liberal arts colleges, pulling in $137,700. And at Duke, where my son is a student, a faculty council at the school's arts and sciences college voted 16 to 14 against granting graduation credits for taking a Duke MOOC. By the way, Duke professors' average salary is $180,200.

    I have nothing against teachers—or even high salaries, if the teachers are worth it. But half of recent college graduates don't have jobs or don't use their degree in the jobs they find. Since 1990, the cost of college has increased at four times the rate of inflation. Student loans are clocking in at $1 trillion.

    Something's got to give. Education is going to change, the question is how and when. Think about it: Today's job market—whether you're designing new drugs, fracking for oil, writing mobile apps or marketing Pop Chips—requires graduates who can think strategically in real time, have strong cognitive skills, see patterns, work in groups and know their way around highly visual virtual environments. This is the same generation that grew up playing online games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, but who are almost never asked to use their online skills in any classroom.

    MOOCs will inevitably come to K-12 education too. Everyone knows great public school teachers. But we also all know the tenured type who has been mailing it in for years. Parents spend sleepless nights trying to rearrange schedules to get out of Mr. Bleh's fourth-period math class. Online education is about taking the "best in class" teachers and scaling them to thousands or millions of students rather than 25-30 at a time.

    The union-dominated teaching corps can be expected to be just as hostile as college professors to moving K-12 to MOOCs. But a certain financial incentive will exist nonetheless. I noted this in a talk recently at an education conference where the audience was filled with people who create education software and services.

    I began by pointing out that in 2011 only 7.9% of 11th graders in Chicago public schools tested "college ready." That's failure, and it's worse when you realize how much money is wasted on these abysmal results. Chicago's 23,290 teachers—who make an average salary of $74,839, triple U.S. per capita income and 50% more than median U.S. household income—cost Chicago taxpayers $1.75 billion out of the city's $5.11 billion budget.

    Why not forget the teachers and issue all 404,151 students an iPad or Android tablet? At a cost of $161 million, that's less than 10% of the expense of paying teachers' salaries. Add online software, tutors and a $2,000 graduation bonus, and you still don't come close to the cost of teachers. You can't possibly do worse than a 7.9% college readiness level.

    Continued in article

    Masters of Accounting and Taxation Online Degree Programs
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#MastersOfAccounting

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    Question
    What is the difference between traditional competency-based course credits and "decoupled" competency-based course credits?

    Answer
    In traditional competency-based systems an instructor either does not assign course grades or does so based solely on examinations that cannot be linked to particular students in a way where knowing a student can affect the final grade. Course grades are generally not influenced by class discussions (onsite or in online chat rooms), homework, term papers, course projects, team performance, etc. In many instances the instructors do not even prepare the examinations that determine competency-based grades.

    Western Governors University --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
    WGU was one of the universities in modern times (since 1997) to offer fully accredited online courses using a competency-based grading system. However, students must participate in WGU courses and do class assignments for courses before they can take the competency-based examinations.

    Southern New Hampshire University (a private onsite university that is not funded by the State of New Hampshire) ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_New_Hampshire_University

    In "decoupled" course credit systems, a university that usually offers competency-based courses where class attendance or online course participation is not required. Students can learn the material from any sources, including free online learning modules, before signing up to take the competency-based examinations. Sometimes more than one "progress" competency-based examination may be required. But no particular course is required before taking any competency-based examination.

    Decoupled systems become a lot like the Uniform CPA Examination where there are multiple parts of the examination that may be passed in stages or passed in one computer-based sitting.

    Southern New Hampshire University (a private onsite university that is not funded by the State of New Hampshire) ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_New_Hampshire_University

    SNHU claims to be the first university to decouple courses from competency-based examinations. However, I'm not certain that his claim is true since the University of Wisconsin System may have been the first to offer some decoupled competency-based degree programs..The University of Akron now has some similar alternatives.

    Wisconsin System's Competency-Based Degrees as of November 28, 2012 ---
    http://www.wisconsin.edu/news/2012/r121128.htm 

    "College Degree, No Class Time Required University of Wisconsin to Offer a Bachelor's to Students Who Take Online Competency Tests About What They Know," by Caroline Porter, The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2013 --- "
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323301104578255992379228564.html

    It is expected that students seeking decoupled competency-based credits will sign up for learning modules from various free learning systems.
    Listing of Sites for Free Courses and Learning Modules (unlike certificates, transferrable credits are never free) ---
    http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/free-online-courses-50-sites-to-get-educated-for-free/

    Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
    Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

    From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

    Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

    WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

    The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

    2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     

    "Competency-Based Education Advances With U.S. Approval of Program," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2013 --- Click Here
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/u-s-education-department-gives-a-boost-to-competency-based-education/43439?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Last month the U.S. Education Department sent a message to colleges: Financial aid may be awarded based on students’ mastery of “competencies” rather than their accumulation of credits. That has major ramifications for institutions hoping to create new education models that don’t revolve around the amount of time that students spend in class.

    Now one of those models has cleared a major hurdle. The Education Department has approved the eligibility of Southern New Hampshire University to receive federal financial aid for students enrolled in a new, self-paced online program called College for America, the private, nonprofit university has announced.

    Southern New Hampshire bills its College for America program as “the first degree program to completely decouple from the credit hour.” Unlike the typical experience in which students advance by completing semester-long, multicredit courses, students in College for America have no courses or traditional professors. These working-adult students make progress toward an associate degree by demonstrating mastery of 120 competencies. Competencies are phrased as “can do” statements, such as “can use logic, reasoning, and analysis to address a business problem” or “can analyze works of art in terms of their historical and cultural contexts.”

    Students show mastery of skills by completing tasks. In one task, for example, students are asked to study potential works of art for a museum exhibit about the changing portrayal of human bodies throughout history. To guide the students, Southern New Hampshire points them to a series of free online resources, such as “Smarthistory” videos presented by Khan Academy. Students must summarize what they’ve found by creating a PowerPoint presentation that could be delivered to a museum director.

    Completed tasks are shipped out for evaluation to a pool of part-time adjunct professors, who quickly assess the work and help students understand what they need to do to improve. Southern New Hampshire also assigns “coaches” to students to help them establish their goals and pace. In addition, the university asks students to pick someone they know as an “accountability partner” who checks in with them and nudges them along.

    Students gain access to the program through their employers. Several companies have set up partnerships with Southern New Hampshire to date, including Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and ConAgra Foods.

    The Education Department is grappling with how to promote innovation while preventing financial-aid abuses. Southern New Hampshire, whose $2,500-a-year program was established last year with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has served as a guinea pig in that process. But other institutions are lining up behind it, hoping to obtain financial aid for programs that don’t hinge on credit hours.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    In many ways this USNH program reduces the costs of student admission and of offering remedial programs to get students up to speed to enroll in USNH courses on campus.

    But there are enormous drawbacks
    In some courses the most important learning comes from student interactions, team projects, and most importantly case discussions. In the Harvard Business School, master case teachers often cannot predict the serendipitous way each class will proceed since the way it proceeds often depends upon comments made in class by students. In some courses the most important learning takes place in research projects. How do you have a competency-based speech course?

    Time and time again, CPA firms have learned that the best employees are not always medal winners on the CPA examination. For example, years and years ago a medal winner on occasion only took correspondence courses. And in some of those instances the medal winner did not perform well on the job in part because the interactive and team skills were lacking that in most instances are part of onsite and online education.

    Note that distance education courses that are well done require student interactions and often team projects. It is not necessary to acquire such skills face-to-face. It is necessary, however, to require such interactions in a great distance education course.

    A USNH College for America accounting graduate may not be allowed to sit for the CPA examination in some states, especially Texas. Texas requires a least 15 credits be taken onsite face-to-face in traditional courses on campus. Actually I cannot find where an accounting degree is even available from the USNH College for America degree programs.


    "Georgia Tech to Offer a MOOC-Like Online Master's Degree, at Low Cost," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 14, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Ga-Tech-to-Offer-a-MOOC-Like/139245/

    "Southern Illinois University to Offer Online Accounting Degree," by Gail Perry, AccountingWeb, May 6, 2013 ---
    http://www.accountingweb.com/article/southern-illinois-university-offer-online-accounting-degree/221747?source=education


    Cross-Cultural Investigations: Technology and Development (Multicultural Online Education and Open Sharing) ---
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/anthropology/21a-801j-cross-cultural-investigations-technology-and-development-fall-2012/

    One way for these so-called distance education search engines to become more legitimate would be to add top not-for-profit distance education programs to their search engine databases.

    New From US News
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Jensen Comment
    I don't know why the largest for-profit universities that generally provide more online degrees than the above universities combined are not included in the final outcomes. For example, the University of Phoenix alone as has over 600,000 students, most of whom are taking some or all online courses.

    New From US News
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

     

    For-profit universities may have shot themselves in the foot by not providing the evaluation data to US News for online degree program evaluation. But there may b e reasons for this. For example, one of the big failings of most for-profit online degree programs is in undergraduate "Admissions Selectivity."

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


    University of Illinois Extension
    http://web.extension.illinois.edu/state


    "U. of South Carolina Crafts an Online Degree That Students Can Afford," by Alina Mogilyanskaya, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-South-Carolina-Crafts-an/134566/

    Mark E. Pittman is in many ways the quintessential student for the University of South Carolina's new Palmetto College. At 47, he is a former Navy man, a husband, a father of three, and the principal breadwinner in his family. More than a decade after leaving behind his studies at South Carolina, he has re-enrolled—and if all goes well, he will soon become the first person in his family to earn a bachelor's degree.

    Mr. Pittman recently began studying in the university's new Back to Carolina program, an online degree-completion option for adults who are 25 or older and previously earned at least 60 academic credits at the university. Back to Carolina is a pilot program for Palmetto College, the first offering in a much broader distance-learning effort set to begin in the fall of 2013.

    With Palmetto, the first program of its kind in the state, the university sees itself as filling a gap in the availability of affordable bachelor's degrees for South Carolinians, as well as contributing to the state's educational-attainment and work-force goals.

    More than that, the university is positioning itself to compete with for-profit institutions.

    Palmetto College will offer online bachelor's-completion programs in a variety of vocational fields, including business, criminal justice, education, and nursing, which students can pursue on their own time. It will enroll students who already hold at least 60 credits from one of the system's largely two-year "regional" colleges, a South Carolina technical college, or an out-of-state institution, and who, for whatever reason, are unable to relocate to a four-year, or "senior," campus to complete a baccalaureate degree.

    The South Carolina system has four regional colleges, and about 500 students per year transfer to one of the four senior campuses to continue toward bachelor's degrees. "How many are not able to relocate, that's a different story," says Michael D. Amiridis, the university's provost. "That's what we will be testing with the Palmetto College."

    "We always think of the dropout as someone who couldn't make it, but by far the predominant reason is that someone had economic challenges or married or needed to take a job. And so we want these people to come back to the university and to complete their bachelor's degrees," says Harris Pastides, president of the university.

    Mr. Pittman, for example, lives in Kershaw, S.C., a town of about 1,800 people. The majority of Kershaw's workers commute out of town to their jobs, and the only site of higher education there is an off-campus center of York Technical College.

    In the late 1990s, Mr. Pittman was majoring in biology at the university, first taking courses at the Lancaster campus, about a half-hour's drive from his home, and then at the main campus, in Columbia, an hour away. After two and a half years, the pressures of studying, along with those of providing for and being able to spend time with his wife and young children, became too much, and Mr. Pittman left the university for the work force.

    For the past four years he has been working at home, in order to cut out the time he spent commuting to his job at Bank of America, in Charlotte, N.C.—63 miles each way—and to spend more time with his family. Now he is also studying at home, evenings and weekends, to earn a B.A. in liberal studies, the degree that Back to Carolina is piloting this year.

    "It's certainly added to my plateful," Mr. Pittman says. "But I'm not complaining. It's a great opportunity, and I'm going to leverage it and take advantage of it as much as I can."

    Competitive Pricing

    One of the "guiding principles" of Palmetto College is that its programs are "positioned to compete with for-profit institutions," says a February progress report compiled by Huron Consulting Group, which worked with the university to develop the Palmetto College concept. By offering competitively priced online degrees backed by the resources of a large public institution and the university's brand, officials hope to attract the demographic that for-profits often claim as their main market.

    While for-profit colleges have been criticized for their low online-degree-completion rates, Mr. Amiridis anticipates that there won't be a "huge discrepancy" between the graduation rates of South Carolina's traditional campuses and those of Palmetto College. Attributing his expectation of student success to the hybrid nature of the program—the first 60 credits of study will be completed at a traditional campus and the last 60 online—he emphasizes that students will already have an academic history before enrolling in online courses.

    That history will not only prepare them to perform academically but also aid in the admissions process. "We are selective, and we're careful in the way that we select people to make sure that they have a reasonable chance of success," Mr. Amiridis says. "I view this as an ethical responsibility, quite frankly."

    Apart from distinguishing itself through this admissions standard, Palmetto College will focus on a more specific population than that of the for-profits, he says.

    "The populations that we're trying to serve, they know us. They know the University of South Carolina. In many cases they aspire to receive a degree from the University of South Carolina," Mr. Amiridis says. "We're not competing with for-profit institutions. We're not trying to take this and go nationally."

    The provost's comments parallel the marketing principle put forward by the Huron report, which states that "techniques should be used to differentiate USC from the for-profit institutions that are heavily marketed."

    The consultants' report is also explicit about Palmetto College's role, concluding that at a price of $367 per credit hour, the college will become "a significant competitor to the for-profit institutions that have recently become major players in the South Carolina higher-education marketplace."

    A study done in conjunction with Huron two years ago showed that at that sample price, Palmetto College courses for students with 60 credits would cost less than 40 percent of a comparable course offered by a for-profit in the state, Mr. Amiridis says. Ultimately, administrators decided that Palmetto tuition would be comparable to that for the system's two- and four-year campuses.

    Despite its focus on former University of South Carolina students, the new college may end up competing with for-profits more directly.

    "One of the things that's going to happen is that at some point in time, Palmetto will exhaust that population," says Bruce N. Chaloux, chief executive of the Sloan Consortium, which promotes online learning in higher education.

    While the consortium recommends that institutions engage in adult degree-completion programs those previously enrolled students who had left without degrees, Mr. Chaloux says that transplants to the state or holders of credits from other universities would also be interested.

    'Catching Fire'

    The creation of Palmetto College is also a move to leverage South Carolina's regional campuses while streamlining the university system. The four regional colleges will be consolidated under the administrative umbrella of Palmetto College, which will be led by a new chancellor. Some of the colleges' operations, like financial aid, human resources, and budget and finance will be centralized, and additional advisers will be hired to serve Palmetto students.

    No staffing cuts have been announced, although Mr. Amiridis says the move may lead to "an optimization of the staffing needs."

    Ann C. Carmichael, dean of the regional campus at Salkehatchie, says the centralization of resources and personnel will empower the university's regional colleges by allowing for "collective decision making" and leading to "more efficient use of scarce dollars."

    Palmetto College is an expansion of Palmetto Programs, an option that has allowed students at regional colleges to complete baccalaureate degrees in liberal arts or organizational leadership "synchronously," or by attending live broadcasts of lectures held on other campuses.

    "It's almost like a natural evolution of what's been happening," says Sandra J. Kelly, chair of the university's Faculty Senate. Faculty in both the senior and regional colleges have been converting courses into a synchronous online format for Palmetto Programs; those who are interested are now crafting "asynchronous classes," or ones that students can take on their own time, for Palmetto College.

    Continued in article


    At the University of Wisconsin
    "Online Degree Program Lets Students Test Out of What They Already Know," by Angela Chen, June 20, 2012 --- Click Here
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-degree-program-lets-students-test-out-of-what-they-already-know/37097?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    The University of Wisconsin plans to start a “flexible degree” program online focused on allowing undergraduates to test out of material they have mastered.

    The new program, geared toward working adults with some college education, operates under a “competency based” model, said Raymond Cross, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges and University of Wisconsin-Extension. This model is similar to the Advanced Placement program, in which high-school students take AP tests to pass out of college-level courses.

    In the university’s new program, college courses will be broken down into units. For example, a higher-level mathematics class could include units such as linear algebra and trigonometry. Students can then test out of certain units (instead of full courses) and spend time learning only material that is new to them. Eventually, the units will build into courses, and then a degree. The flexible-degree program and traditional-degree program will have identical course requirements, and since each flexible degree will be associated with a specific campus, the student will receive a diploma from the originating campus and not from the system.

    “We’re trying to find ways to reduce the cost of education,” Mr. Cross said. “Implicit in the model is the idea that you can take lectures online from free sources—like Khan Academy and MITx—and prepare yourself for the competency test. Then take the remaining courses online at UW.”

    The biggest challenge, he says, is determining how to best test competency. Some units will require tests, while others may require written papers or laboratory work. The difficulty of measuring “competency’” for any unit will affect the program’s pricing structure, which has not yet been determined.

    The idea of competency-based credentials is common in technical and health fields, Mr. Cross said, but it is rare at traditional universities. The program is part of a push to encourage Wisconsin’s 700,000 college dropouts to go back to a university.

    “With higher ed now, people often have a piece or two missing in their education, so we are responding to the changes in our culture and helping them pull all these pieces together,” Mr. Cross said. “Students already interface with a lot of different institutions and different classes and professors, and this will help that process. I don’t think this diminishes traditional higher ed at all. I think it’ll enhance it.”

    The first courses in the flexible-degree program will be available starting in fall 2013. The university is still developing exact degree specifications, Mr. Cross said. Likely degrees include business management and information technology.

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment (including distance education assessment issues and competency-based testing) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm


    A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/a_master_list_of_500_free_courses_from_great_universities.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

    Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


    Socrates Mouses Around in the 21st Century
    A Fully Online Philosophy Degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

    "Virtual Philosophy," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2012 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/17/unc-greensboro-may-offer-its-first-fully-online-degree-philosophy

    Some assume that online education is not a suitable medium for courses that rely on the Socratic Method. But the philosophy professors at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro are skeptical.

    The Greensboro philosophy department, which already offers online versions of eight of its courses, has adapted two additional ones, including a “capstone” seminar, for the Web. Pending the approval of the university system’s general administration, the new courses would make it possible to earn an undergraduate philosophy degree from Greensboro without setting foot on its campus.

    That would make philosophy the first department at Greensboro’s undergraduate college to offer a fully online degree.

    That might strike some observers as odd, given philosophy’s reputation as a discipline that relies on classroom exchanges and whose pedagogical model has hardly changed since ancient Greece. But philosophy and technology are more closely linked than some might assume, says Gary Rosenkrantz, the chair of the department.

    “It’s not as ironic as it seems if you reflect on the fact that computers -- both hardware and software -- derive from logicians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Rosenkrantz. Threads of inquiry that use the “if-then” protocol of formal logic are the “foundation of both the computer chip and basic computer software functions,” he says.

    In fact, the structured reasoning of philosophy makes it perhaps more amenable to adaptation than some other humanities disciplines. To help teach the online versions, Wade Maki, a lecturer at Greensboro, developed a computer program based on the choose-your-own-adventure books of his youth. Called “Virtual Philosopher,” the program poses ethical dilemmas and presents multiple-choice questions. Once a student answers, the program -- which features text as well as video of Maki -- interrogates her answer before offering her the opportunity to either change or reaffirm it.

    By asking leading questions and restricting student answers, Virtual Philosopher seeks to give students some autonomy without letting them wander off-topic, says Maki. For a preformatted program, the similarity to a typical classroom exchange is remarkable, he says.

    “It’s this classic tennis back and forth, intellectually,” says Maki, who has co-authored a paper on using Virtual Philosopher to replicate the Socratic Method online. “And if you’ve been teaching for a while … it becomes quite natural to find that they can be easily structured to give a student a good replica of what happens in the classroom.”

    The online philosophy courses at Greensboro do not rely entirely on Maki’s Virtual Philosopher. The instructors also hold live video chats via Blackboard, where students can inquire about various ideas without having to color inside the lines, says Rosenkrantz.

    But with the proposed fully online philosophy track comes a new challenge: holding an upper-level seminar online. Whereas the lower- and mid-level courses had only to match the level of interaction that students could reasonably expect from a traditional class of 40 or 50 students, Rosenkrantz will now have to try to replicate a much smaller, discussion-intensive course when it puts one of the department’s capstone courses, “Philosophy 494: Substance and Attribute,” on to the Web. “That needs to have a significant element of synchronous interaction between a professor and students,” he says.

    Rosenkrantz, who is slated to teach the course if the online major gets approved, says he is planning to use Google+ Hangouts to hold live discussions. Instructors have for years resisted holding seminar discussions online because multiperson video chat platforms were viewed as unreliable. But, like some other institutions that are moving discussion-intensive pieces of their curriculums to the Web, the Greensboro oracles are seeing technological capabilities gaining on ambition in online education. “Certainly the technology is there to attempt it now,” says Rosenkrantz.

    Continued in article

     
    Leo Strauss: 15 Political Philosophy Courses Online --- Click Here
     http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/CUClWOU5aXE/leo_strauss.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

     

    From Amherst College
    Ask a Philosopher (a live philosopher will answer your questions) ---
    http://www.askphilosophers.org/

    Sample Question on April 19, 2012
    Is it ethical to kill someone in self-defense? My instinct was yes at first, but upon further reflection, in a situation where it's "you or them", I can't seem to think of a reason to kill someone in self-defense, other than the fact that you simply want to live. After all, you're still taking a human life. (Also if you could explain why it is or isn't ethical would help me out a lot thanks!)

    View the replies of several "philosophers" (who apparently never were faced with a life or death decision in real life)
    I think one of the answers is either tongue-in-cheek or just plain dumb!

    Gateway to Philosophy --- http://www.bu.edu/paideia/index.html

    Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas http://www.philosophynow.org/

    Video course covers Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville.
    Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Yale Course"--- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/introduction_to_political_philosophy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Also see the BBC's "Big Thinker" Lecture Series --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/bertrand_russell_bbc_lecture_series_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Teach Philosopy 101  --- http://www.teachphilosophy101.org/
    This site presents strategies and resources for faculty members and graduate assistants who are teaching Introduction to Philosophy courses; it also includes material of interest to college faculty generally. The mission of TΦ101 is to provide free, user-friendly resources to the academic community. All of the materials are provided on an open source license. You may also print as many copies as you wish (please print in landscape). TΦ101 carries no advertising. I am deeply indebted to Villanova University for all of the support that has made this project possible.
    John Immerwahr, Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University

    Methodologies of Comparative Philosophy: The Pragmatist and Process Traditions by Robert W. Smid (State University of New York Press; 2009, 288 pages; $80). Evaluates the methodologies of William Ernest Hocking, F.S.C. Northrop, Robert Cummings Neville, and David L. Hall in collaboration with Roger T. Ames.

    Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas http://www.philosophynow.org/

    Video course covers Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville.
    Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Yale Course"--- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/introduction_to_political_philosophy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Also see the BBC's "Big Thinker" Lecture Series --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/bertrand_russell_bbc_lecture_series_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues With Plato in Contemporary Thought by Max Statkiewicz (Penn State University Press; 2009. 216 pages; $60). Describes a "rhapsodic mode" in Plato's dialogues that is echoed by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Irigaray, Derrida, and Nancy.

    Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography by David Mikics (Yale University Press; 2009, 273 pages; $30). Topics include the French thinker's vision of philosophy as a realm that resists psychology.
     

    Ask Philosophers --- http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/

     

  • This site puts the talents and knowledge of philosophers at the service of the general public. Send in a question that you think might be related to philosophy and we will do our best to respond to it. To date, there have been 1375 questions posted and 1834 responses.

    Philosophy Talk (Audio) --- http://www.philosophytalk.org/

    Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas http://www.philosophynow.org/

    The Secret Lives Of Philosophers
    "Are Philosophers Really Lovers Of Wisdom?" Simoleon Sense, February 2, 2009 ---
    http://www.simoleonsense.com/are-philosophers-really-lovers-of-wisdom/

    I’ve always been interested in becoming an academic philosopher. My interest is so profound that I even majored as one during undergrad, only to quickly switch to Psychology & Neuroscience. Here’s an article brought to my attention by a friend and philosopher.
     Click Here To Read About The Secret Lives Of Philosphers

    Article Introduction (Via Philosopher’s Net)
     

    Although academics will hardly raise an eyebrow about this “open secret”, it comes as a surprise to many others to learn that many philosophers, in fact an increasing number by my lights, are little devoted to the love of wisdom. In only a merely “academic” way do they aspire to intellectual virtue. Even less often do they exhibit qualities of moral excellence. On the contrary, many philosophers, or what pass as philosophers, are, sadly, better described as petty social climbers, meretricious snobs, and acquisitive consumerists.

    I blush a bit now to confess that part of what drove me into philosophy in the first place was the naive conviction that among those who call themselves lovers of wisdom I would find something different in kind from the repugnant and shallow brutalism of the worlds of finance, business, and the law to which I had suffered some exposure in Ronald Reagan’s America.

    Article Excerpts (Via Philsopher’s Net)

    “Instead, I’ve found that the secret lives of philosophers are more often than not pre-occupied with status and acquisition.”

    “Like debutantes at the ball, philosophers now often spend much of their time dropping names, gossiping, promoting their connections, hawking their publications, passing out business cards and polishing their self-promotional web sites.”

    “Attitudes toward material consumption are not, I’m afraid much better. Philosophers seem to pepper their conversations more and more with remarks about the perks or bonuses they receive – how much money they have available for travel, what sort of computer allowances, how big their research grants are.”

    “All of this suggests a philosophical culture that imitates the business world not only in its emphasis on product (publication) but also in its adopting the criteria and trappings of professional success characteristic of commercial life.

    Conclusions (Via Philosopher’s Net)

    “One implication of this little secret is that professional philosophers have become less and less egalitarian in their view of education.”

    “Finding philosophers devoted principally to the love of wisdom and to sharing it broadly has become, as Spinoza said of all excellent things, as difficult as it is rare.”


  • Competency-Based College Credit --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ECA

    "Online Education Is Everywhere. What’s the Next Big Thing?" by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-is-everywhere-whats-the-next-big-thing/32898?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Western Governors University (a nonprofit, competency- based online university) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
    Also see http://www.wgu.edu/home2

    New Charter University (a for-profit, self-paced, competency-based online university) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Charter_University

    "No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 29, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/No-Financial-Aid-No-Problem/131329/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    It's a higher-education puzzle: Students are flocking to Western Governors University, driving growth of 30 to 40 percent each year. You might expect that competitors would be clamoring to copy the nonprofit online institution's model, which focuses on whether students can show "competencies" rather than on counting how much time they've spent in class.

    So why haven't they?

    Two reasons, says the education entrepreneur Gene Wade. One, financial-aid regulatory problems that arise with self-paced models that aren't based on seat time. And two, opposition to how Western Governors changes the role of professor, chopping it into "course mentors" who help students master material, and graders who evaluate homework but do no teaching.

    Mr. Wade hopes to clear those obstacles with a start-up company, UniversityNow, that borrows ideas from Western Governors while offering fresh twists on the model. One is cost. The for-profit's new venture—New Charter University, led by Sal Monaco, a former Western Governors provost—sidesteps the loan system by setting tuition so cheap that most students shouldn't need to borrow. The price: $796 per semester, or $199 a month, for as many classes as they can finish.

    "This is not buying a house," says Mr. Wade, co-founder and chief executive of UniversityNow. "This is like, do I want to get cable?"

    Another novelty: New Charter offers a try-it-before-you-buy-it platform that mimics the "freemium" model of many consumer Web services. Anyone can create an account and start working through its self-paced online courses free of charge. Their progress gets recorded. If they decide to pay up and enroll, they get access to an adviser (who helps navigate the university) and course specialists (who can discuss the material). They also get to take proctored online tests for course credit.

    The project is the latest in a series of experiments that use technology to rethink the economics of higher education, from the $99-a-month introductory courses of StraighterLine to the huge free courses provided through Stanford and MIT.

    For years, some analysts have argued that ready access to Pell Grants and federal loans actually props up colleges prices, notes Michael B. Horn, executive director for education at Innosight Institute, a think tank focused on innovation. That's because institutions have little incentive to charge anything beneath the floor set by available financial aid.

    "Gene and his team are basically saying, the heck with that—we're going to go around it. We think people can afford it if we offer it at this low a price," Mr. Horn says. "That could be revolutionary."

    Yet the project faces tall hurdles: Will employers value these degrees? Will students sign on? And, with a university that lacks regional accreditation right now­—New Charter is nationally accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council, and is considering seeking regional accreditation—will students be able to transfer its credits?

    Mr. Wade banks on appealing to working adults who crave easier access to education. When asked who he views as the competition, his reply is "the line out the door at community college." In California, where Mr. Wade is based, nearly 140,000 first-time students at two-year institutions couldn't get into any courses at all during the previous academic year, according to a recent Los Angeles Times editorial about the impact of state budget cuts.

    Mr. Wade himself benefited from a first-class education, despite being raised without much money in a housing project in a tough section of Boston. Growing up there, during an era when the city underwent forced busing to integrate its schools, felt like watching a "train wreck" but walking away unscathed. He attended high school at the prestigious Boston Latin School. With assistance from Project REACH, a program to help Boston minorities succeed in higher education, he went to Morehouse College. From there his path included a J.D. from Harvard Law, an M.B.A. from Wharton, and a career as an education entrepreneur.

    The 42-year-old founded two earlier companies: LearnNow, a charter-school-management outfit that was sold to Edison Schools, and Platform Learning, a tutoring firm that served low-income students. So far, he's raised about $8 million from investors for UniversityNow, whose New Charter subsidiary is a rebranded, redesigned, and relocated version of an online institution once called Andrew Jackson University. Breaking a Traditional Mold

    To build the software, Mr. Wade looked beyond the traditional world of educational technology, recruiting developers from companies like Google. Signing up for the university feels more like creating an account with a Web platform like Facebook than the laborious process of starting a traditional program—in fact, New Charter lets you join with your Facebook ID. Students, whether paying or not, start each class by taking an assessment to establish whether they're ready for the course and what material within it they need to work on. Based on that, the system creates a pathway to guide them through the content. They skip stuff that they already know.

    That was part of the appeal for Ruben Fragoso, who signed up for New Charter's M.B.A. program three weeks ago after stumbling on the university while Googling for information about online degrees. Mr. Fragoso, 53, lives in Albuquerque and works full time as a logistics coordinator for a solar power company. The Mexican-born father of two earned a bachelor's degree 12 years ago from Excelsior College. With New Charter, he mostly teaches himself, hunkering down in his home office after dinner to read and take quizzes. By week three, he hadn't interacted with any other students, and his instructor contact had been limited to a welcome e-mail. That was fine by him.

    He likes that he can adjust his schedule to whatever fits—one course at a time if a subject is tough, or maybe three if he prefers. His company's education benefits—up to $5,000 a year—cover the whole thing. With years of business experience, he appreciates the option of heading quickly to a final test on a subject that is familiar to him.

    Continued in article

    Competency-Based Learning (where teachers don't selectively assign grades) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    Western Governors University (with an entire history of competency-based learning) ---- http://www.wgu.edu/
    Especially note the Business Administration (including Accounting) degree programs

    From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on November 3, 2016

    Over the past 20 years, Western Governors University has grown into a formidable competency-based online education provider. It’s on just its second president, Scott D. Pulsipher, a former Silicon Valley executive, who stopped by our offices yesterday.

    WGU has graduated more than 70,000 students, from all 50 states. But a key part of the institution’s growth strategy is local, using its affiliations with participating states (not that all the partnerships start smoothly, mind you). There are six of them, and more growth is on the way; Mr. Pulsipher says WGU is in serious discussions to expand into as many as five more states — he declines to name them — at a pace of one or two per year.

    The university's main focus remains students, he says. One example is an effort to minimize student loans. Through better advising, students are borrowing, on average, about 20 percent less than they did three years ago, amounting to savings of about $3,200. “Humans make better decisions,” Mr. Pulsipher says, “when they have more information.” —Dan Berrett

    2016 Bibliography on Competency-Based Education and Assessment ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/26/rise-competency-based-education?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0f02e8085b-DNU20160126&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0f02e8085b-197565045

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

     

    New From US News
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Jensen Comment
    I don't know why the largest for-profit universities that generally provide more online degrees than the above universities combined are not included in the final outcomes. For example, the University of Phoenix alone as has over 600,000 students, most of whom are taking some or all online courses.

    My guess is that most for-profit universities are not forthcoming with the data requested by US News analysts. Note that the US News condition that the set of online programs to be considered be regionally accredited does not exclude many for-profit universities. For example, enter in such for-profit names as "University of Phoenix" or "Capella University" in the "College Search" box at
    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-phoenix-20988
    These universities are included in the set of eligible regionally accredited online degree programs to be evaluated. They just did not do well in the above "Honor Roll" of outcomes for online degree programs.

    For-profit universities may have shot themselves in the foot by not providing the evaluation data to US News for online degree program evaluation. But there may b e reasons for this. For example, one of the big failings of most for-profit online degree programs is in undergraduate "Admissions Selectivity."  

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation

    For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    "Purdue Kicks Off Global Online-Education Project," by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-kicks-off-global-online-education-project/36339

    Purdue University today joined the group of universities that have recently announced plans to experiment with online courses aimed at a global audience.

    The new effort, called PurdueHUB-U, will serve up modular online courses with video lectures, interactive visualizations, and tools for students to interact with their peers and the professor. The project’s leaders hope it will improve face-to-face classes and bring in revenue by attracting students around the world.

    PurdueHUB-U grew out of a course taught this year on Purdue’s nanoHUB, a collaborative platform for nanotechnology research. The course, on the fundamentals of nanoelectronics, was broken into two parts that lasted a few weeks each. It attracted 900 students from 27 countries, most of whom paid $30 for the class and a certificate of completion. Students also had the option to turn their certificates into continuing-education credits for an additional $195.

    Timothy D. Sands, Purdue’s provost, called that pricing model a “low outer paywall” that was much cheaper than traditional credit-hour charges, but not quite free. He added that the project will first focus on developing online course materials to transform the university’s face-to-face classes. Mr. Sands said the course modules could also be offered to Purdue alumni, allowing them to continue their education after they graduate.

    Continued in article

    Educating the Masses:  From MITx to EDX
    Harvard and MIT Create EDX to Offer Free Online Courses Worldwide --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/05/harvard_and_mit_create_edx_to_offer_free_online_courses_worldwide.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    The MOOC Model Revisited
    "Massive Open Online Courses: How: 'The Social” Alters the Relationship Between Learners and Facilitators'," by Bonnie Stewart, Inside Higher Ed, April 30, 2012 --- Click Here
     http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/massive-open-online-courses-how-%E2%80%9C-social%E2%80%9D-alters-relationship-between

    Bob Jensen's threads on MITx and other free courses, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

     


    "Professor Hopes to Support Free Course With Kickstarter, the ‘Crowd Funding’ Site," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 29, 2012 --- Click Here
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-hopes-to-support-free-course-with-kickstarter-the-crowd-funding-site/35864?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Free online courses for the masses are all the rage—and many are being run by start-ups hoping to profit by selling related materials and services. Jim Groom thinks that’s too commercial, so he’s raising money for the online course he co-teaches at the University of Mary Washington using Kickstarter, the popular “crowd funding” service.

    In a campaign released today, the professor makes his plea in an irreverent video that mixes in clips from a 90s true-crime show, and video interviews with students and professors shot from unusual angles. He explains that last year he ran the course, which is on digital storytelling and is called DS106, using his own equipment. But the class has grown so large that he needs a new server to keep it going, and he estimates that will cost him $2,900.

    He’s asking for contributions ranging from $1 to $3,000, and those who give will get what he describes as “DS106 schwag”—a T-shirt, a bumper sticker, or a desk calendar with a different creative assignment for each day. Some of the rewards reflect the quirky nature of the course itself: For $100 you can have one of the course assignments named after you.

    The campaign will run for a couple of weeks. If he hasn’t met his goal of $4,200 (a price that figures in the server cost and the price of the schwag), then the project gets nothing and all of those who pledged keep their money. If the target is met, the deal is on. If the goal is exceeded, he says he will use the extra money to add other enhancements to the course.

    In an interview this week, Mr. Groom stressed that the course is “not about him,” and he criticized the way some massive online courses rely on what amounts to a celebrity professor to attract students. He used the word “community” frequently to describe the group of professors and students involved in the course.

    The idea for the campaign came from Tim Owens, another instructional technologist at Mary Washington. “I’ve wanted to do a Kickstarter for so long, but I’ve never been able to think of what could we do,” he said. When he heard Mr. Groom wondering where they could come up with $2,900, he suggested the crowd-funding site.

    Mr. Groom argues that crowd funding could be a model for other free online-education projects. Even some of the largest, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare effort, have mostly relied on grants for support and have struggled to find a long-term way to stay afloat.

    “It’s like a PBS model” of pledge drives, Mr. Groom said.

    The Chronicle asked the folks at Kickstarter whether other educational efforts have used the site to raise money. A representative from the company pointed us to these five campaigns, all of which succeeded:

    SmartHistory: Raised $11,513 for a Web site created by two art historians.

    Punk Mathematics: Raised 28,701 for a book of mathematical stories.

    Open Educational Resources for Typography: Raised $13,088 to develop teaching materials for courses on typography.

    Trade School: Raised $9,133 to run a program that turns storefronts into temporary trade schools.

    Brooklyn Brainery: Raised $9,629 to set up a collaborative school whose courses would cost $25 for four weeks.

    Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on the growth of distance education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation

     


    "Udacity Update:  A firsthand look at what it’s been like to take “Computer Science 101″ through the Internet higher-ed start-up," by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/03/21/udacity-update/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    It’s been a couple of weeks since my first post about the Udacity CS101 course, so here’s an update. Before that, let me mention this nice article in Wired about Udacity and its origins. That article sheds a little light on the questions I had earlier about Udacity’s business model.

    So, Units 3 and 4 are now done with the CS101 course. The focus of Unit 3 was mostly on the concept of the list in Python, along with FOR loops and an emphasis on computer memory. Unit 4 was a bit of a left turn into a discussion of computer networks, with an emphasis on the basics of the Internet and the concepts of latency and bandwidth. So, just from this description, you can see one of the things I particularly like about CS101: It’s not just about Python. This is a class that is actually about computer science in general with Python as a tool for understanding it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I find it easy to stick with CS101 when I’ve always ended up dropping previous attempts to learn Python. Context is a really good motivator. (The current Unit 5 is continuing this holistic trend by delving into algorithm analysis, which happens to be the same thing I’m teaching in my Discrete Structures class now.)

    Unit 3 was rough. There were over 40 videos to watch, and two of the homework assignments that had to do with refining the fledgling web crawler program we are writing were just completely over my head. I also realized that I fall into the same trap as my students do: I procrastinate rather than budget my time. What I should have done was sit down for the first two evenings after the unit was released and plow through 20 videos at a time, then spend the remaining 5 days working on 1-2 homework problems a night. What I did was wait until 3 days before the homework was due to start on the videos. The good news is that I got 100% on all the homework I submitted. The bad news is that I only attempts 3/4 of the problems. So it was rough primarily because it reminds me that I’m just like any other student in terms of my tendency not to use time wisely. I’m hoping that can be converted into something positive.

    Unit 4 was better. It was shorter, for one thing, and the material was new and interesting for me. “Learn more about computer networks” has been on my Someday/Maybe list for I don’t know how long, and I have finally actually learned more about them. The discussion of data structures was useful too, because I’m learning Python partially to write some software to help study columnar transposition ciphers, and the question of what’s the right data structure in Python to represent permutations of finite sets has come up with me before. As I mentioned before, having a specific project in mind when you learn something is a powerful way to stay engaged when learning it.

    I’m slowly starting not to suck as a programmer, I think. I’m still a newbie, and my Discrete Structures students would probably crack up laughing at my attempts at coding. But when we had to write a program in Unit 3 to check the validity of a Sudoku problem — a “three gold star” problem, meaning extra-high difficulty level — and I managed to put together a procedure that works and does so in a nice, clean, organized way, I began to feel that this whole Udacity idea is actually working.

    Continued in article


    Graduates Who Are Happy to Land Minimum Wage Careers
    "Little-Known (usually unaccredited) Colleges Exploit Visa Loopholes to Make Millions Off Foreign Students," by Tom Bartlett, Karin Fischer, and Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Little-Known-Colleges-Make/126822/

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges working in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


    From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    "Online Search Ads Hijack Prospective Students, Former Employee Says," by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-search-ads-hijack-prospective-students-former-employee-says/33047?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Last year, James Soloway called hundreds of prospective students per day on behalf of a company that placed advertisements on Google and Bing. The ads promised to help students contact the admissions offices of public colleges if they filled out an online form and included their phone number.

    He told the students who responded that they would hear from their preferred public college, even though they almost never did. In the meantime, he said, they should consider attending a for-profit college—such as Kaplan University, Grand Canyon University, or the University of Phoenix.

    Most of the prospective students were confused. Some hung up. But sometimes, the pitch worked, he says. Some people, especially high-school students, believed he was an educational counselor and gave weight to his recommendations, he says.

    The entire process was designed to redirect students who wanted information on a public college to a for-profit college, Mr. Soloway says. “The expectation was that we were not to allow a call to end with a student until we had created three private-school leads.”

    The account offers new details about the practices of lead-generation companies that place misleading search ads to lure prospective students. (Click here to download Mr. Soloway’s full description of the call center’s activities.) In July, The Chronicle found dozens of ads on Google and Bing that falsely implied relationships with public colleges in order to get students to give away information that can be sold to for-profits.

    Mr. Soloway made calls on behalf of one of those lead-generation companies, Vantage Media, from March to December 2010. The company contracted with a call center run by Mr. Soloway’s employer, Inspyre Solutions.

    Representatives of Vantage, Kaplan, and Westwood College did not respond to requests for comment. Vantage officials have previously said that they provide a free service to both colleges and students, and that the company does not mislead anybody.

    Mr. Soloway said he is speaking publicly about his former work because he feels bad that he helped to deceive students. He estimates that Vantage’s online marketing efforts brought in at least 2,000 prospects per week to the Winnipeg, Manitoba, call center where he worked.

    After learning that students never heard back from the public colleges they were trying to reach—and realizing that he might soon be fired for poor performance—he quit his job and filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in February about Vantage’s practices.

    “I feel bad that I was part of something that took advantage of people, a lot of them kids still in high school,” he says.

    Mr. Soloway said he was given a single day of training before starting to work on behalf of Vantage, which made it difficult to advise students on their educational options. For instance, he says he started without knowing the differences between various nursing degrees.

    Continued in article

    "Colleges Fight Google Ads That Reroute Prospective Students," by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 31, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Fight-Google-Ads-That/128414/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

     

    Misleading Promotional Sites for For-Profit Universities

    For-profit universities provide some free Website services in an effort to lure people into signing up for for-profit programs without ever mentioning that in most instances the students would be better off in more prestigious non-profit universities such as state-supported universities with great online programs and extension services.


    I'm bombarded with messages like the following one from ---
    http://www.paralegal.net/


    Then go to the orange box at http://www.paralegal.net/more/
    If you feed in the data that you're interested in a bachelor's degree in business with an accounting concentration, the only choices given are for-profit universities. No mention is made of better programs at the Universities of Wisconsin, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.


    I've stopped linking to the many for-profit university sites like this.
    My threads on distance education alternatives are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    The for-profit universities are getting much more subtle in their online marketing programs. When you go to the site mentioned in the email message below, it looks like a great site with the homepage listing of major universities by state.

    However, when you do a database search the bias of the site begins to show through. For example consider the Wisconsin zip code 53039 to search for an online undergraduate degree in accounting, all that appears is a listing of for-profit universities. What about the much cheaper and much more respectable online undergraduate accounting degree from the University of Wisconsin system of state universities?

    Next consider the Maryland zip code 20742 to search for an online undergraduate degree in accounting, all that appears is a listing of for-profit universities. What about the much cheaper and much more respectable online undergraduate accounting degree from the University of Maryland  system of state universities?


    As a matter of fact you get the same subset of for-profit universities whether you search for Wisconsin or Maryland.

    It begins to look like this subset of for-profit universities is paying for this site and giving very biased outcomes in searches for online degrees.

    Next I ran a test searching for on-campus undergraduate accounting degrees for both Wisconsin and Maryland. No listing is given for the cheaper and more prestigious accounting degrees from the state-supported universities in those states. Instead a listing of for-profit alternatives is presented.

    Thus, these university search engines appear at first blush to be legitimate. However, when you dig deeper you discover that the recommendations are only for costly and less prestigious for-profit universities. I've no objection to them marketing their degree programs. However, if they pretend to be full service in the best interests of students, they should be including less costly and more prestigious alternatives from state-supported universities. They should also be listing alternatives from private non-profit universities in their search engines.

    Message received by Bob Jensen on November 1, 2011

     
    Hi Bob,

    I run an economics degree site called
    http://www.economicsdegree.net.
    Having been a college professor 11 years, I decided to make a website to
    help future economics students pick the right school for them. I spent
    some time earlier today looking through the resource links listed on your
    site, and I thought you would like to know I found a broken link on this
    page:

    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

    This is the broken link I came across:
    http://www.accountingobserver.com/blog/

    When you get a chance to fix this broken link, if you find an open
    spot for a link to my site,
    http://www.economicsdegree.net, I would
    certainly appreciate it.  I believe my site is one of the largest actively
    maintained resources that lists every accredited school offering an economics
    degree.

    Thank you :)
    XXXXX

     

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit universities operating in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    Question
    Is a free MIT online certificate worth more than most any comparable course grade from a North American college or university?

    "Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education?" by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 20, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/20/will-mitx-disrupt-higher-education/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    MIT has been doing online access to education a lot longer than most people, largely due to their invaluable OpenCourseWare project. (Here’s an interview MIT did with me last year on how OCW strongly influenced my inverted-classroom MATLAB course.) Now they are poised to go to the next level by launching an online system called MITx in Spring 2012 that provides credentialing as well as content:

    Mr. Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would start this spring — perhaps with just one course — but would expand to include many more courses, as OpenCourseWare has done. [...]

    The M.I.T.x classes, he said, will have online discussions and forums where students can ask questions and, often, have them answered by others in the class.

    While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential.

    “I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”

    The official FAQ reveals a couple of additional points. First, the content of MITx courses will be free — which seems to imply that MITx course content will be different than OCW course content, and not just a certification layer on top of existing resources — and you’ll only pay money for the certificate. Second, there will be no admissions process. If you want a course, you just take it and then pay for the credentialing if you feel like you’re up to it.

    I think this last point about having no admissions process may be the most significant piece of MITx. It seems to represent a complete shift from the traditional way of providing access to higher education. As far as I can tell, there will not even be a system of checking prerequisites for MITx courses. If that’s so, then if you feel you can step into, say, an Algorithms class and keep up with the material and demonstrate your mastery, then nobody at MIT will care if you haven’t had the right courses in basic programming, data structures, discrete math, or whatever. MIT is basically saying, we won’t be picky about who we let take these courses — if you can afford it and live up to our standards, we’re happy to credential you.

    Of course there are a lot of questions about MITx that are yet to be answered. What is the “modest fee” they plan to charge, and is it really affordable? How exactly will the credentialing process work? (It’s interesting that the certification will be handled by a non-profit organization to be formed within MIT. Is this a kind of outsourcing of grading?) How will one “demonstrate mastery” and what will MITx define as “mastery” in courses that are not strictly skills-based? Will there eventually be a full enough slate of courses offered to make the whole system compelling for learners? And perhaps most importantly, what will employers, graduate schools, and even undergraduate institutions make of applicants who come in with some of these MITx certifications? Without external buy-in, MITx will likely be just another continuing education program like hundreds of others.

    We’ll hear a lot more about this in the future, but for now this seems to have the potential to be genuinely disruptive in higher education. What do you think?

    "MIT Expands 'Open' Courses, Adds Completion Certificates," Inside Higher Ed, December 19, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2011/12/19/mit-expands-open-courses-adds-completion-certificates

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which pioneered the idea of making course materials free online -- today announced a major expansion of the idea, with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to students who have no connection to MIT.

    MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning.

    The first course through MITx is expected this spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute MIT credit. The university also plans to continue MIT OpenCourseWare, the program through which it makes course materials available online.

    An FAQ from MIT offers more details on the new program.

    While MIT has been widely praised for OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open" educational movement has shifted to programs like the Khan Academy (through which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and an initiative at Stanford University that makes courses available -- courses for which some German universities are providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in OpenCourseWare.

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on open source video and course materials from prestigious universities ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology in general ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS  ---
    https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=76319&PK=N1S1009

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

     


    Distance Education.org or DistanceEducation.Org is a Great Helper Site
    Ben Pheiffer in San Antonio forwarded this link to a terrific listing (with pricing estimates) of online training and education degree programs and courses from respectable universities --- http://www.distance-education.org/Courses/
    Both graduate and undergraduate degree programs are listed as well as training courses (some free).

    Free online tutorials in various disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm/#Tutorials

    Education & Learning: Asia Society --- http://www.asiasociety.org/education-learning

    Latino Distance Education
    American RadioWorks: Rising by Degrees [iTunes] http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/latino_college/index.html

    The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/


    "The Growth of For-Profits," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 18, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/carnegie_releases_revised_classifications_of_colleges_and_universities

    Jensen Comment
    The Devil is in the details. Especially note the tables in this article.

    The article does not really deliver on one of the things I worry a lot about --- the growth in cheap shot graduate degrees awarded by for-profit universities, especially at the doctoral level. These universities are very secretive about their admission standards such as GRE and GMAT expectations. Credit for life experience is an instant turn off for me, because all God's children had life experiences.

    These universities are generally quite secretive about their faculty who deliver those degrees. It's difficult to evaluate the research credentials of those faculty. Secondly, most of these doctoral degrees can be earned with fewer years of full-time study and interactions with teaching and research faculty. For example, the average onsite accounting doctoral program takes over five years, most of which is spent on campus interacting with faculty and other doctoral students. Capella offers an accounting doctoral program that can be completed in less than three years and has a curriculum more like a masters program. There is a doctoral thesis at Capella but who signs off on each accounting doctoral thesis? Do graduates of this program publish later on in our accounting research journals? Are these graduates making names for themselves in tenure track positions at major universities?

    I'm a long time advocate of distance education, but I'm suspicious of for-profit university academic standards. If a major research university having AACSB accreditation commences a distance education that the research faculty at that institution deems equivalent to the onsite degree program, them I'm all for expanding degree opportunities for business higher education. But I'm a snob when others adopt such programs, especially at the masters and doctoral levels.

    For Profit Universities in the Gray Zone of Fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


    Prestigious U.K. MBA Program Offers Courses on Facebook
    "British Business School Offers M.B.A. Courses on Facebook." by Travis Kaya, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 30, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/british-university-offers-m-b-a-courses-on-facebook/28463?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Facebook has changed the way students, faculty members, and administrators communicate outside the classroom. Now, with the introduction of the London School of Business & Finance’s Global MBA Facebook app, Facebook is becoming the classroom.

    The Global MBA app—introduced in October—lets users sample typical business-school courses like corporate finance and organizational behavior through the social-networking site. The free course material includes interactive message boards, a note-taking tool, and video lectures and discussions with insiders from industry giants like Accenture Management Consulting and Deloitte. This may be a good way to market a school, notes an observer from a business-school accrediting organization, but it may not be the best way to deliver courses.

    Unlike most online business courses, the Global MBA program will not require students to pay an enrollment fee up front. Instead, students can access basic course material free of charge and pay the school only when they are ready to prepare for their exams. School administrators hope that letting students “test drive” the online courses before actually shelling out the tuition money will boost graduation rates.

    While the school offers a large collection of study material on Facebook—including 80 hours of Web video—students seeking formal accreditation must qualify for entrance into the M.B.A. program. Once enrolled in the paid course, students are given access to additional content on the business school’s InterActive course management system, and are required to sit for examinations—like they would if they were enrolled in more traditional distance-learning or brick-and-mortar programs. The Facebook MBA program is accredited by the University of Wales and costs a total of £14,500—about $22,000.

    Steve Parscale, director of accreditation for the Kansas-based Accreditation Council for Business Schools & Programs, said sample classes offered through social-networking sites could provide great advertising opportunities for online colleges. “The younger generation is all on social media,” Mr. Parscale said. “If you can get them on Facebook to test-drive a class, then you can get them to actually enroll.”

    Continued in article


    Elite Research University Online Degrees?
    "Somebody is going to figure out how to deliver online education for credit and for degrees in the quality sector—i.e., in the elite sector," said Christopher Edley Jr., dean at Berkeley's law school and the plan's most prominent advocate. "I think it ought to be us—not MIT, not Columbia, not Caltech, certainly not Stanford."
    Jensen Comment
    Actually Stanford introduced one of the highest quality Master of Engineering online programs in history, the ADEPT Program --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
    Search for the word ADEPT at the above site. The ADEPT video approach, however is only suited to highly talented and highly motivated students. I doubt that the ADEPT program is suited for online students in general.

     

    "U. of California (Berkeley) Considers Online Classes, or Even Degrees:  Proposal for virtual courses challenges beliefs about what an elite university is—and isn't," by Josh Keller and Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/In-Crisis-U-of-California/65445/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Online education is booming, but not at elite universities—at least not when it comes to courses for credit.

    Leaders at the University of California want to break that mold. This fall they hope to put $5-million to $6-million into a pilot project that could clear the way for the system to offer online undergraduate degrees and push distance learning further into the mainstream.

    The vision is UC's most ambitious—and controversial—effort to reshape itself after cuts in public financial support have left the esteemed system in crisis.

    Supporters of the plan believe online degrees will make money, expand the number of California students who can enroll, and re-establish the system's reputation as an innovator.

    "Somebody is going to figure out how to deliver online education for credit and for degrees in the quality sector—i.e., in the elite sector," said Christopher Edley Jr., dean at Berkeley's law school and the plan's most prominent advocate. "I think it ought to be us—not MIT, not Columbia, not Caltech, certainly not Stanford."

    But UC's ambitions face a series of obstacles. The system has been slow to adopt online instruction despite its deep connections to Silicon Valley. Professors hold unusually tight control over the curriculum, and many consider online education a poor substitute for direct classroom contact. As a result, courses could take years to gain approval.

    The University of California's decision to begin its effort with a pilot research project has also raised eyebrows. The goal is to determine whether online courses can be delivered at selective-research-university standards.

    Yet plenty of universities have offered online options for years, and more than 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall-2008 term, notes A. Frank Mayadas, a senior adviser at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who is considered one of the fathers of online learning.

    "It's like doing experiments to see if the car is really better than the horse in 1925, when everyone else is out there driving cars," he said.

    If the project stumbles, it could dilute UC's brand and worsen already testy relations between professors and the system's president, Mark G. Yudof.

    As the system studies whether it can offer quality classes online, the bigger question might be this: Is California's flagship university system innovative enough to pull online off?

    Going Big The proposal comes at a key moment for the University of California system, which is in the midst of a wrenching internal discussion about how best to adapt to reduced state support over the long term. Measures to weather its immediate financial crisis, such as reduced enrollment, furloughs for staff and faculty members, and sharply rising tuition, are seen as either temporary or unsustainable.

    Administrators hope the online plan will ultimately expand revenue and access for students at the same time. But the plan starts with a relatively modest experiment that aims to create online versions of roughly 25 high-demand lower-level "gateway courses." A preliminary list includes such staples as Calculus 1 and Freshman Composition.

    UC hopes to put out a request for proposals in the fall, says Daniel Greenstein, vice provost for academic planning, programs, and coordination. Professors will compete for grants to build the classes, deliver them to students, and participate in evaluating them. Courses might be taught as soon as 2011. So, for a current undergraduate, that could mean the option to choose between online and face-to-face versions of, say, Psychology 1.

    The university plans to spend about $250,000 on each course. It hopes to raise the money from external sources like foundations or major donors. Nobody will be required to participate—"that's death," Mr. Greenstein said—and faculty committees at each campus will need to approve each course.

    Building a collection of online classes could help alleviate bottlenecks and speed up students' paths to graduation. But supporters hope to use the pilot program to persuade faculty members to back a far-reaching expansion of online instruction that would offer associate degrees entirely online, and, ultimately, a bachelor's degree.

    Mr. Edley believes demand for degrees would be "basically unlimited." In a wide-ranging speech at Berkeley last month, Mr. Edley, who is also a top adviser to Mr. Yudof, described how thousands of new students would bring new money to the system and support the hiring of faculty members. In the long term, he said, online degrees could accomplish something bigger: the democratization of access to elite education.

    "In a way it's kind of radical—it's kind of destabilizing the mechanisms by which we produce the elite in our society," he told a packed room of staff and faculty members. "If suddenly you're letting a lot of people get access to elite credentials, it's going to be interesting."

    'Pie in the Sky' But even as Mr. Edley spoke, several audience members whispered their disapproval. His eagerness to reshape the university is seen by many faculty members as either naïve or dangerous.

    Mr. Edley acknowledges that he gets under people's skin: "I'm not good at doing the faculty politics thing. ... So much of what I'm trying to do they get in the way of."

    Suzanne Guerlac, a professor of French at Berkeley, found Mr. Edley's talk "infuriating." Offering full online degrees would undermine the quality of undergraduate instruction, she said, by reducing the opportunity for students to learn directly from research faculty members.

    "It's access to what?" asked Ms. Guerlac. "It's not access to UC, and that's got to be made clear."

    Kristie A. Boering, an associate professor of chemistry who chairs Berkeley's course-approval committee, said she supported the pilot project. But she rejected arguments from Mr. Edley and others that faculty members are moving too slowly. Claims that online courses could reap profits or match the quality of existing lecture courses must be carefully weighed, she said.

    "Anybody who has at least a college degree is going to say, Let's look at the facts. Let's be a little skeptical here," she said. "Because that's a little pie-in-the-sky."

    Existing research into the strength of online programs cannot simply be applied to UC, she added, objecting to an oft-cited 2009 U.S. Education Department analysis that reported that "on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."

    "I'm sorry: I've read that report. It's statistically fuzzy, and there's only something like four courses from a research university," she said. "I don't think that's relevant for us."

    But there's also strong enthusiasm among some professors in the system, including those who have taught its existing online classes. One potential benefit is that having online classes could enable the system to use its resources more effectively, freeing up time for faculty research, said Keith R. Williams, a senior lecturer in exercise biology at the Davis campus and chair of the UC Academic Senate's committee on educational policy, who stressed that he was speaking as a faculty member, not on behalf of the Senate. "We're supportive, from the faculty perspective, of looking into this in a more detailed way," he said.

    A National Context While the University of California plans and looks, other public universities have already acted. At the University of Central Florida, for example, more than half of the 53,500 students already take at least one online course each year. Pennsylvania State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Massachusetts all enroll large numbers of online students.

    UC itself enrolls tens of thousands of students online each year, but its campuses have mostly limited those courses to graduate and extension programs that fully enrolled undergraduates do not typically take for credit. "Pretty pathetic," is how Mr. Mayadas described California's online efforts. "The UC system has been a zilch."

    But the system's proposed focus on for-credit courses for undergraduates actually stands out when compared with other leading institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. Both have attracted attention for making their course materials available free online, but neither institution offers credit to people who study those materials.

    Mr. Mayadas praised UC's online move as a positive step that will "put some heat on the other top universities to re-evaluate what they have or have not done."

    Over all, the "quality sector" in higher education has failed "to take its responsibility seriously to expand itself to meet the national need," Mr. Greenstein said, dismissing elites' online offerings as "eye candy."

    Jensen Comments
    The above article suggests that online programs make more money than onsite programs. This is not universally true, but it can be true. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee charges more for online courses than equivalent onsite courses because online courses have become a cash cow for UWM. The reasons, however, are sometimes dubious. Online courses are often taught with relatively cheap adjunct specialists whereas onsite courses might be taught with more expensive full-time faculty.

    Also the above article ignores the fact that prestigious universities like the University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, and University of Maryland have already been offering accredited and highly respected undergraduate and masters degrees in online programs for years. They purportedly impose the same academic standards on online programs vis-a-vis onsite programs. Adjunct instructors  with proper supervision need not necessarily be easy graders. In fact they may be more responsive to grading instructions than full-time faculty quavering in fear of teaching evaluations in their bid for tenure and promotions.

    Who's Succeeding in Online Education?
    The most respected online programs at this point in time seem to be embedded in large university systems that have huge onsite extension programs as well as online alternatives.  Two noteworthy systems in this regard are the enormous University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas extension programs.  Under the initial  leadership of Jack Wilson, UMass Online thrives with hundreds of online courses.  I think Open University in the U.K. is the largest public university in the world. Open University has online as well as onsite programs. The University of Phoenix continues to be the largest private university in the world in terms of student enrollments. I still do not put it and Open University in the same class as the University of Wisconsin, however, because I'm dubious of any university that relies mostly on part-time faculty.

    From the University of Wisconsin
    Distance Education Clearinghouse ---  http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html

    I wonder if the day will come when we see contrasting advertisements:
    "A UC Berkeley Accounting PhD online in 5-6 Years Full Time"
    "A Capella Accounting PhD online in 2 Years Full Time and no comprehensive examinations"

    Capella University is one of the better for-profit online universities in the world. ---
    http://www.capella.edu/

    A Bridge Too Far
    I discovered that Capella University is now offering an online Accounting PhD Program
    --- 
    http://www.capella.edu/schools_programs/business_technology/phd/accounting.aspx

    Although I have been recommending that accountancy doctoral programs break out of the accountics mold, I don't think that the Capella's curriculum meets my expectation ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

    On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
    For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    Even in lean times, the $400 billion business of higher education is booming. Nowhere is this more true than in one of the fastest-growing -- and most controversial -- sectors of the industry: for-profit colleges and universities that cater to non-traditional students, often confer degrees over the Internet, and, along the way, successfully capture billions of federal financial aid dollars.

    In College, Inc., correspondent Martin Smith investigates the promise and explosive growth of the for-profit higher education industry. Through interviews with school executives, government officials, admissions counselors, former students and industry observers, this film explores the tension between the industry --which says it's helping an underserved student population obtain a quality education and marketable job skills -- and critics who charge the for-profits with churning out worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt.

    At the center of it all stands a vulnerable population of potential students, often working adults eager for a university degree to move up the career ladder. FRONTLINE talks to a former staffer at a California-based for-profit university who says she was under pressure to sign up growing numbers of new students. "I didn't realize just how many students we were expected to recruit," says the former enrollment counselor. "They used to tell us, you know, 'Dig deep. Get to their pain. Get to what's bothering them. So, that way, you can convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.'"

    Graduates of another for-profit school -- a college nursing program in California -- tell FRONTLINE that they received their diplomas without ever setting foot in a hospital. Graduates at other for-profit schools report being unable to find a job, or make their student loan payments, because their degree was perceived to be of little worth by prospective employers. One woman who enrolled in a for-profit doctorate program in Dallas later learned that the school never acquired the proper accreditation she would need to get the job she trained for. She is now sinking in over $200,000 in student debt.

    The biggest player in the for-profit sector is the University of Phoenix -- now the largest college in the US with total enrollment approaching half a million students. Its revenues of almost $4 billion last year, up 25 percent from 2008, have made it a darling of Wall Street. Former top executive of the University of Phoenix Mark DeFusco told FRONTLINE how the company's business-approach to higher education has paid off: "If you think about any business in America, what business would give up two months of business -- just essentially close down?" he asks. "[At the University of Phoenix], people go to school all year round. We start classes every five weeks. We built campuses by a freeway because we figured that's where the people were."

    "The education system that was created hundreds of years ago needs to change," says Michael Clifford, a major education entrepreneur who speaks with FRONTLINE. Clifford, a former musician who never attended college, purchases struggling traditional colleges and turns them into for-profit companies. "The big opportunity," he says, "is the inefficiencies of some of the state systems, and the ability to transform schools and academic programs to better meet the needs of the people that need jobs."

    "From a business perspective, it's a great story," says Jeffrey Silber, a senior analyst at BMO Capital Markets, the investment banking arm of the Bank of Montreal. "You're serving a market that's been traditionally underserved. ... And it's a very profitable business -- it generates a lot of free cash flow."

    And the cash cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government. Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools, leading to serious questions about one of the key pillars of the profit degree college movement: that their degrees help students boost their earning power. This is a subject of increasing concern to the Obama administration, which, last month, remade the federal student loan program, and is now proposing changes that may make it harder for the for-profit colleges to qualify.

    "One of the ideas the Department of Education has put out there is that in order for a college to be eligible to receive money from student loans, it actually has to show that the education it's providing has enough value in the job market so that students can pay their loans back," says Kevin Carey of the Washington think tank Education Sector. "Now, the for-profit colleges, I think this makes them very nervous," Carey says. "They're worried because they know that many of their members are charging a lot of money; that many of their members have students who are defaulting en masse after they graduate. They're afraid that this rule will cut them out of the program. But in many ways, that's the point."

    FRONTLINE also finds that the regulators that oversee university accreditation are looking closer at the for-profits and, in some cases, threatening to withdraw the required accreditation that keeps them eligible for federal student loans. "We've elevated the scrutiny tremendously," says Dr. Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits many post-secondary institutions. "It is really inappropriate for accreditation to be purchased the way a taxi license can be purchased. ...When we see any problematic institution being acquired and being changed we put it on a short leash."

    Also note the comments that follow the above text.

    But first I highly recommend that you watch the video at --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    May 5, 2010 reply from Paul Bjorklund [paulbjorklund@AOL.COM]

    Interesting program. I saw the first half of it and was not surprised by anything, other than the volume of students. For example, enrollment at University of Phoenix is 500,000. Compare that to Arizona State's four campuses with maybe 60,000 to 70,000. The huge computer rooms dedicated to online learning were fascinating too. We've come a long way from the Oxford don sitting in his wood paneled office, quoting Aristotle, and dispensing wisdom to students one at a time. The evolution: From the pursuit of truth to technical training to cash on the barrelhead. One question about the traditional university though -- When they eliminate the cash flow from big time football, will they then be able to criticize the dash for cash by the educational entrepreneurs?

    Paul Bjorklund, CPA
    Bjorklund Consulting, Ltd.
    Flagstaff, Arizona


    Prison University Project --- http://www.prisonuniversityproject.org


    "Enrollments Plunge at Many For-Profit Colleges," by Rachel Wiseman, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Enrollments-Plunge-at-Many/128711/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    . . .

    Bucking the Trend

    While some of the biggest for-profit colleges saw declines, a few showed enrollment increases. Total enrollment in the American Public University System, which charges $250 per undergraduate credit—less than many of its proprietary peers do—grew 28 percent in the quarter ending June 30. The system is operated by American Public Education Inc.

    With a similarly low price point, Bridgepoint Education saw a slight uptick in new-student enrollment. But whether enrollment will continue to climb is open to question, given the company's revelation in May that New York's attorney general is investigating its business practices.

    How for-profit enrollments will trend in the future is "difficult to call," said Robert L. Craig, a managing director of the investment bank Stifel Nicolaus. He says external factors such as the economy and federal student aid will affect how well those institutions fare. He expects the for-profit sector will continue to grow in the long term, as emphasis is placed on expanding higher education to a greater portion of Americans and as traditional options for acquiring a degree reach capacity in some states.

    But some analysts are concerned that if institutions do not lower their prices, they risk losing applicants and profits. "A lot of these institutions have a cost system that is going to be untenable for the consumer," said Mr. Safalow, as more traditional universities enter into online education and the number of available applicants plateaus. "This is an industry that is closer to saturation than I think most people realize."

     

    Jensen Comment
    The big exception is American Public Education (University) Inc. that was bolstered when Wal-Mart elected to heavily subsidize employees who elect to further their educations from APE.

    Does this pass the Academy’s smell test?
    "Wal-Mart Employees Get New College Program—Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Wal-Mart-Employees-Get-New/24504/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    The American Public University System has been described as a higher-education version of Wal-Mart: a publicly traded corporation that mass-markets moderately priced degrees in many fields.

    Now it's more than an analogy. Under a deal announced today, the for-profit online university will offer Wal-Mart workers discounted tuition and credit for job experience.

    Such alliances are nothing new; see these materials from Strayer and Capella for other examples. But Wal-Mart is the country's largest retailer. And the company is pledging to spend $50-million over three years to help employees cover the cost of tuition and books beyond the discounted rate, according to the Associated Press.

    "What's most significant about this is that, given that APU is very small, this is a deal that has the potential to drive enrollments that are above what investors are already expecting from them," Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, told Wired Campus. "Which is why the stock is up."

    Wal-Mart workers will be able to receive credit—without having to pay for it—for job training in subjects like ethics and retail inventory management, according to the AP.

    Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S. Roughly half of them have a high-school diploma but no college degree, according to The New York Times. A department-level manager would end up paying about $7,900 for an associate degree, factoring in the work credits and tuition discount, the newspaper reported.

    “If 10 to 15 percent of employees take advantage of this, that’s like graduating three Ohio State Universities,” Sara Martinez Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart’s external advisory council, told the Times.

     

    "News Analysis: Is 'Wal-Mart U.' a Good Bargain for Students?" by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Wal-Mart-U-a-Good/65933/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    There might have been a Wal-Mart University.

    As the world's largest retailer weighed its options for making a big splash in education, executives told one potential academic partner that Wal-Mart Stores was considering buying a university or starting its own.

    "Wal-Mart U." never happened. Instead, the retailer chose a third option: a landmark alliance that will make a little-known for-profit institution, American Public University, the favored online-education provider to Wal-Mart's 1.4 million workers in the United States.

    A closer look at the deal announced this month shows how American Public slashed its prices and adapted its curriculum to snare a corporate client that could transform its business. It also raises one basic question: Is this a good bargain for students?

    Adult-learning leaders praise Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, for investing in education. But some of those same experts wonder how low-paid workers will be able to afford the cost of a degree from the private Web-based university the company selected as a partner, and why Wal-Mart chose American Public when community-college options might be cheaper. They also question how easily workers will be able to transfer APU credits to other colleges, given that the university plans to count significant amounts of Wal-Mart job training and experience as academic credit toward its degrees.

    For example, cashiers with one year's experience could get six credits for an American Public class called "Customer Relations," provided they received an "on target" or "above target" on their last performance evaluation, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. A department manager's training and experience could be worth 24 credit hours toward courses like retail ethics, organizational fundamentals, or human-resource fundamentals, she said.

    Altogether, employees could earn up to 45 percent of the credit for an associate or bachelor's degree at APU "based on what they have learned in their career at Wal-Mart," according to the retailer's Web site.

    Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, points out that this arrangement could saddle Wal-Mart employees with a "nontransferable coupon," as one blogger has described it.

    "I now see where the 'trick' is—if a person gets credit for Wal-Mart courses and Wal-Mart work, they aren't likely to be able to transfer those to much of anyplace else," Ms. Poley wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Transferability could be important, given the high turnover rate in the retail industry.

    Inside the Deal Wal-Mart screened 81 colleges before signing its deal with American Public University. One that talked extensively with the retailer was University of Maryland University College, a 94,000-student state institution that is a national leader in online education. According to University College's president, Susan C. Aldridge, it was during early discussions that Wal-Mart executives told her the company was considering whether it should buy a college or create its own college.

    When asked to confirm that, Ms. Galberth said only that Wal-Mart "brainstormed every possible option for providing our associates with a convenient and affordable way to attend college while working at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club," which is also owned by Wal-Mart Stores. "We chose to partner with APU to reach this goal. We have no plans to purchase a brick-and-mortar university or enter the online education business," she said.

    The Wal-Mart deal was something of a coming-out party for American Public University. The institution is part of a 70,000-student system that also includes American Military University and that largely enrolls active-duty military personnel. As American Public turned its attention to luring the retail behemoth, it was apparently able to be more flexible than other colleges and willing to "go the extra mile" to accommodate Wal-Mart, said Jeffrey M. Silber, a stock analyst and managing director of BMO Capital Markets. That flexibility included customizing programs. APU has a management degree with courses in retail, and its deans worked with Wal-Mart to add more courses to build a retail concentration, said Wallace E. Boston, the system's president and chief executive.

    It also enticed Wal-Mart with a stable technology platform; tuition prices that don't vary across state lines, as they do for public colleges; and online degrees in fields that would be attractive to workers, like transportation logistics.

    Unlike American Public, Maryland's University College would not put a deep discount on the table.

    Credit for Wal-Mart work was also an issue, Ms. Aldridge said.

    "We feel very strongly that any university academic credit that's given for training needs to be training or experience at the university level," Ms. Aldridge said. "And we have some very set standards in that regard. And I'm not certain that we would have been able to offer a significant amount of university credit for some of the on-the-job training that was provided there."

    Awarding credit for college-level learning gained outside the classroom is a long-standing practice, one embraced by about 60 percent of higher-education institutions, according to the most recent survey by the Council for Adult And Experiential Learning. A student might translate any number of experiences into credit: job training, military service, hobbies, volunteer service, travel, civic activities.

    Pamela J. Tate, president and chief executive of the council, said what's important isn't the percentage of credits students get from prior learning—a number that can vary widely. What's important, she said, is that students can demonstrate knowledge. Workers might know how they keep the books at a company, she explained. But that doesn't automatically mean they've learned the material of a college accounting course.

    Karan Powell, senior vice president and academic dean at American Public University system, said credit evaluation at her institution "is a serious, rigorous, and conservative process." But will the credits transfer? "Every college or university establishes its own transfer-credit policies as they apply to experiential learning as well as credit from other institutions," she said in an e-mail. "Therefore, it would depend on the school to which a Wal-Mart employee wanted to transfer."

    Affordable on $12 an Hour? Then there's the question of whether low-wage workers will be able to afford the degrees. One of the key features of this deal is the discount that Wal-Mart negotiated with American Public.

    "Wal-Mart is bringing the same procurement policies to education that it brings to toothpaste," said John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, a distance-learning institution based in New York.

    American Public University's tuition was already cheap by for-profit standards and competitive with other nonprofit college options. It agreed to go even cheaper for Wal-Mart, offering grants equal to 15 percent of tuition for the company's workers. Those employees will pay about $11,700 for an associate degree and $24,000 for a bachelor's degree.

    But several experts pointed out that public colleges might provide a more affordable option.

    The Western Association of Food Chains, for example, has a partnership with 135 community colleges in the western United States to offer an associate degree in retail management completely online, Ms. Tate said. Many of the colleges also grant credit for prior learning. Though the tuition varies by state, the average tuition cost to earn the degree is about $4,500, she said. By contrast, she said, the American Public degree is "really expensive" for a front-line worker who might make $12 an hour.

    "What I couldn't figure out is how they would be able to afford it unless Wal-Mart was going to pay a substantial part of the tuition," she said. "If not, then what you've got is this program that looks really good, but the actual cost to the person is a whole lot more than if they were going to go to community college and get their prior learning credits assessed there."

    How the retailer might subsidize its employees' education is an open question. In announcing the program, Wal-Mart pledged to spend up to $50-million over the next three years "to provide tuition assistance and other tools to help associates prepare for college-level work and complete their degrees."

    Alicia Ledlie, the senior director at Wal-Mart who has been shepherding this effort, told The Chronicle in an e-mail that the company is "right now working through the design of those programs and how they will benefit associates," with more details to be released later this summer.

    One thing is clear: The deal has a big financial impact on American Public. Wal-Mart estimates that about 700,000 of its 1.4 million American employees lack a college degree.

    Sara Martinez Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart's external advisory council, suggests 10 or 15 percent of Wal-Mart associates could sign up.

    "That's 140,000 college degrees," she told The Chronicle. "Imagine three Ohio State Universities' worth of graduates, which is huge in American higher education."

     

    Jensen Comment
    This Wal-Mart Fringe Benefit Should Be Carefully Investigated by Employees
    It does not sit well with me!

    • If Wal-Mart would pay the same amount of benefit for online state university degrees (e.g., the University of Wisconsin has over 100,000 online students) as the for-profit American Public University that charges higher tuition even at a Wal-Mart discount, why would a student choose the less prestigious and relatively unknown American Public University? Possibly American Public wins out because it's easier to get A & B grades with less academic ability and less work.
      "Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College:  A 50-year rise in grade-point averages is being fueled by private institutions, a recent study finds," by Catherine Rampell. The New York Times, April 19, 2010 ---
      http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109339/want-a-higher-gpa-go-to-a-private-college?mod=edu-collegeprep
       

       
    • I certainly hope that the Wal-Mart contributions toward tuition can be extended to state-supported colleges and universities having more respected credits. For example, online degrees from the University of Wisconsin or the University of Maryland are are likely much more respected for job mobility and for acceptance into graduate schools.

       

       
    • Giving credit for "job experience" is an absolute turn off for me. Most adults have some form of "job experience." This is just not equivalent to course credit experience in college where students face examinations and academic projects. Weaker colleges generally use credit for "job experience" ploy as a come on to attract applicants. But the credits awarded for job experience are not likely to be transferrable to traditional colleges and universities.

       
    • The "discounted tuition" in this for-profit online program is likely to be higher than the in-state tuition from state-supported colleges and universities.

       
    • I'm dubious about the standards for admission in for-profit colleges as well as the rigor of the courses. Watch the Frontline video served up by PBS.

      On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College, Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
      For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
      http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

       
    • The American Public University System is accredited by the North Central Association accrediting agency that is now under investigation for weakened standards for college credits.
       

    "Inspector General Keeps the Pressure on a Regional Accreditor," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Inspector-General-Keeps-the/65691/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education has reaffirmed a recommendation that the department should consider sanctions for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations. In a report this week, the Office of Inspector General issued its final recommendations stemming from a 2009 examination of the commission's standards for measuring credit hours and program length, and affirmed its earlier critique that the commission had been too lax in its standards for determining the amount of credit a student receives for course work.

    The Higher Learning Commission accredits more than 1,000 institutions in 19 states. The Office of Inspector General completed similar reports for two other regional accreditors late last year but did not suggest any sanctions for those organizations.

    Possible sanctions against an accreditor include limiting, suspending, or terminating its recognition by the secretary of education as a reliable authority for determining the quality of education at the institutions it accredits. Colleges need accreditation from a federally recognized agency in order to be eligible to participate in the federal student-aid programs.

    In its examination of the Higher Learning Commission, the office looked at the commission's reaccreditation of six member institutions: Baker College, DePaul University, Kaplan University, Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the University of Phoenix. The office chose those institutions—two public, two private, and two proprietary institutions—as those that received the highest amounts of federal funds under Title IV, the section of the Higher Education Act that governs the federal student-aid programs.

    It also reviewed the accreditation status of American InterContinental University and the Art Institute of Colorado, two institutions that had sought initial accreditation from the commission during the period the office studied.

    The review found that the Higher Learning Commission "does not have an established definition of a credit hour or minimum requirements for program length and the assignment of credit hours," the report says. "The lack of a credit-hour definition and minimum requirements could result in inflated credit hours, the improper designation of full-time student status, and the over-awarding of Title IV funds," the office concluded in its letter to the commission's president, Sylvia Manning.

    More important, the office reported that the commission had allowed American InterContinental University to become accredited in 2009 despite having an "egregious" credit policy.

    In a letter responding to the commission, Ms. Manning wrote that the inspector general had ignored the limitations the accreditor had placed on American InterContinental to ensure that the institution improved its standards, an effort that had achieved the intended results, she said. "These restrictions were intended to force change at the institution and force it quickly."

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The most successful for-profit universities advertise heavily about credibility due to being "regionally accredited." In some cases this accreditation was initially bought rather than achieved such as by buying up a small, albeit still accredited, bankrupt not-for-profit private college that's washed up on the beach. This begs the question about how some for-profit universities maintain the spirit of accreditation acquired in this manner.

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education alternatives (some for-profit universities have onsite as well as online programs) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


    Some years back the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy (TSBPA) declared war on distance education by requiring a minimum of five semester courses (15 credits) of accounting onsite instead of online ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TexasBigBrother.htm

    Large universities in Texas such as the University of Texas and Texas A&M have extensive online degree programs in such areas in science and engineering, but not in accountancy where very large and highly-rated onsite accounting degree programs have shown virtually no interest in reaching out to students who are unable to attend classes on campus. In fact, I've suspected for a long time that these major universities have pressured the TSBPA to discourage distance education.

    Western Governors University --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University

    WGU is a competency-based online university where course instructors do not assign grades. Instead the grading is competency based much like professional certification examinations such as the CPA Examination and medical board examinations ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ComputerBasedAssessment

    "WGU Lassoes Texas," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, August 4, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/04/governor_perry_partners_with_western_governors_university

    Western Governors University continued to live up to its name on Wednesday, as Texas Governor Rick Perry announced a partnership with the fast-growing online institution — and was promptly showered with praise from nearly everyone.

    Western Governors, a regionally accredited, nonprofit university founded in 1997 by 18 politicians who held that office at that time, represents an alternative model of higher education that has garnered both praise and skepticism.

    Aimed at working adults (the average student is 36), Western Governors confers bachelors and master’s degrees based on a student’s ability to demonstrate skills. There are no classrooms and no professors. Students learn online and mostly on their own, with light guidance from their advisers. They take proctored tests at local testing centers whenever they feel they are ready. Students pay tuition — between $2,890 and $4,250, depending on the program — every six months until they graduate, which 40 percent of them do within four years. (First-time, full-time students are considerably less successful, graduating at a 22 percent rate.)

    The partnership with Texas will create a state-branded version of Western Governors called WGU-Texas. Texas is the third state to create a local version of Western Governors, which is based in Salt Lake City, Utah; Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels created WGU-Indiana last summer, and the Washington State legislature voted WGU-Washington into existence earlier this year.

    Like Indiana and Washington, Texas will not allocate any money out of its state budget to Western Governors, which supports itself based on tuition. However, a Western Governors spokeswoman says the university is currently working with Texas officials to allow Texas residents to spend in-state financial aid grants on the Utah-based institution.

    Amid deep cuts to public higher education budgets, Governor Perry earlier this year challenged state institutions to come up with some way to offer a four-year degree program for the total price of $10,000. Alas, WGU-Texas is not the answer to that challenge, said Catherine Frazier, a Perry spokeswoman. The average Western Governors graduate earns a degree in 30 months, or five pay periods; including fees, that means $14,735 for the least expensive degrees (information technology and business), and $21,890 for the most expensive (nursing pre-licensure).

    “But, certainly, having this affordable option does prove that a degree can be offered by an institution at an affordable price,” Frazier said.

    In its effort to expand into various states, Western Governors has faced criticism from some educators, particularly in Washington state. “[B]rain research demonstrates that real learning requires students to struggle with difficult material under the consistent guidance of good teachers,” wrote Johann Neem, an associate professor of history at Western Washington University, in an April op-ed for The Seattle Times. “WGU denies students these opportunities. In fact, its advertisements pander to prospective students by offering them credit for what they already know rather than promising to teach them something new.”

    But advocates say the Western Governors model has its place in the constellation of state higher education systems. For adult students who possess the knowledge and skills to bypass a chunk of the curriculum — either because they have some prior college or because they have picked it up in their working lives — the competency-based model is a good way to avoid the tedium and expense of sitting through redundant classes, the Center for Adult and Experiential Learning has said.

    “The idea is that these adult learners will bring certain skills and knowledge to the table and that they [will] be able to use them to accelerate progress toward an academic degree and advance in the workforce,” said Dominic Chavez, a spokesman for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, in an e-mail. “While students will typically be able to gain course credit for having specific knowledge in certain areas, students reach a point at which they acquire new knowledge and skills beyond their existing levels,” Chavez said. “These are the skills that take them to the next level and that offer increased workforce opportunities.”

    The WGU-Texas announcement met with glowing praise elsewhere. The partnership “will help address our state's key workforce needs while offering affordable career and continuing education opportunities to Texans over 30," said State Senator Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat who chairs the state senate’s higher education committee, in a statement.

    “This low-cost alternative will expand access to more Texans, engaging our diverse student population and upholding our statewide commitment to help more students reach their academic and lifelong goals,” wrote the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, a group of former administrative heavyweights from the Texas higher ed system who have challenged much of Governor Perry's higher education agenda.

    Rey Garcia, president of the Texas Association of Community Colleges, said his organization was planning a statewide articulation agreement with WGU-Texas that would make it easy for students to finish their bachelor’s degrees at Western Governors after two years at community college. “The traditional universities don’t make it terribly easy for students with an applied science degree [at a community college] to transfer into a baccalaureate,” Garcia said in an interview. “WGU is a lot more flexible in that regard.”

    Garcia added that he is not worried students will skip the community colleges altogether and opt for all four years at WGU-Texas because “they’re considerably more expensive than we are.”

    But Mary Aldridge Dean, executive director of the Texas Faculty Association, said prospective students — especially younger ones — should consider more than just the price tag when considering enrolling at WGU-Texas.

    Continued in article

    Question
    Why can't the highest scoring CPA Exam taker in the nation probably can't become a licensed CPA in Texas?

    Answer
    Because in Texas, unlike the other 49 states, nobody can become a CPA without having taken at least five accounting courses onsite. Distance education graduates need not apply for a CPA certificate if they have distance education degrees and/or did not take about half of the required accounting, auditing, and tax courses onsite instead of online.

    In effect this means that Texas does not allow full distance education accounting degrees such that even flagship universities like Texas and Texas A&M like flagship universities in Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Maryland have distance education accounting degrees.

    March 31, 2011 message from Barbara Scofield

    In the state of Texas educators are struggling with ever more onerous rules for candidacy. The AICPA, however, seems to be ignoring issues that loom large for the TSBPA. One of their newly featured "new CPAs" at the link below is an award winner from Colorado (not a 150 hour state) who took her accounting courses online (Texas requires 15 credit hours face to face of upper division accounting courses) from DeVry.

    http://www.thiswaytocpa.com/exam-licensure/exam-diary/leslie-rezgui/

    Could this person work as a CPA in Texas?

    Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
    Chair of Graduate Business Studies
    Professor of Accounting
    The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
    4901 E. University Dr. Odessa, TX 79762
    432-552-2183 (Office)

    November 5,. 2010 reply from Bruce Lubich <BLubich@umuc.edu>
    Note that Bruce is the Director of an online accounting distance education program in the University of Maryland System

    Hi Bob,  

    When TX first went to the 15 credit requirement, we had a couple of  University of Maryland University College students apply for the exam there,  and be rejected. Our transcript doesn't show which courses were taken  online. Apparently it's on the TX paperwork. Lying on that is not  something to be encouraged for future CPAs. So, unless a student has no  desire to sit for the CPA exam or they just need to fill in a few holes to  qualify, the TX market has dried up for all online programs.

    Evidently, the  TX board takes this requirement very seriously, so my guess is that your  Deloitte hire would be denied the ability to sit. Seems to me Deloitte  would need to send the student to a different office until they pass the  exam.   As for reciprocity, I haven't heard of any problems. That doesn't mean  they're not out there, but I haven't heard of them.   Bottom line is TX has protected their investment in their brick & mortar  schools.   At one time LA and New Mexico had similar, though weaker rules like this.  I believe both have woken up and done away with those rules.  

    Bruce Lubich 
    University of Maryland University College

    November 6, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi Bruce,

    Thanks for this.
    What you are saying is that the Texas Board may be cooperating with Texas Universities to reserve all entry-level accounting jobs in Texas for only graduates of Texas universities. Graduates from your program in the University of Maryland system can, thereby, not compete for jobs in Texas CPA firms. .

    Out-of-state graduates need not apply. Seems like a great idea for the other 49 states so that graduates of a given state have a monopoly on jobs within the state. Of course the national and international CPA firms might object to complications this creates in hiring. And students who want to leave a state might object to not having jobs available anywhere other than the state where they graduated.

    Why didn't the European Union think of this as a clever way of restricting labor flows between borders?

    Bob Jensen

    My threads (rough draft notes) on this antiquated and absurd ruling by the TSBPA (read that Big Brother) can be found at
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TexasBigBrother.htm

     


    Historically Black Colleges and Universities --- http://www.college-scholarships.com/historically_black_colleges_universities.htm
    Online Degree Alternatives (does not include some of the newer black college alternatives and strangely excludes some of the bigger alternatives such as the University of Wisconsin System, the University of Maryland System, and ) --- http://www.college-scholarships.com/ssac.htm

    "Black Colleges Are Slowly Adding Online Degrees," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/black-colleges-slowly-adding-online-degrees/28385?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

     

    Jensen Comment
    Currently 19 out of 105 historically black colleges and universities have selected online degree programs.

    In my search of a sampling of the historically black college and university distance education degree alternatives, I could not find any accounting degree programs available online.

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance training and education alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


    The Alternative Model:  Partnerships Between Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Education Distance Education Ventures
    The model is not new but it may become much more common as for-profit stand-alones become more stressed by regulations and drying up markets

    "Outsourcing Plus," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 12, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/12/azstate

    With budgets tight and the commercial market flush with companies willing to take on various tasks that come with running a university, it has become relatively common for institutions to outsource parts of their operations to outside companies.

    It is less common for a public university to entrust an outsider with such a wide swath of duties that it calls that private company an equal partner in online education. But Arizona State University announced on Monday that it is doing just that with Pearson, the education and media company.

    Under the agreement, the Arizona State faculty will teach online courses through Pearson’s learning management platform, LearningStudio, using the tools embedded in that platform to collect and analyze data in hopes of improving student performance and retention. Pearson will also help with enrollment management and “prospect generation," while providing more "customer-friendly" support services for students, the university says.

    Arizona State, meanwhile, says it will retain control over all things academic, including instruction and curriculum development.

    Universities often strike deals with private companies to manage parts of their online operations, particularly when they are trying to quickly grow their online enrollments, which is Arizona State’s stated goal in this case (now serving 3,000 online students, it hopes to grow to somewhere between 17,000 and 30,000 within five years). Companies such as Embanet, 2Tor, SunGard Higher Education, Bisk Education, Colloquy, and Compass Knowledge Group have, to varying degrees, taken over online program management at other name-brand universities in exchange for a cut of the tuition revenue.

    Jensen Comment
    There is obviously a spectrum of partnerships that will probably emerge. At one end the courses are totally managed by a not-for-profit university that only uses the for-profit partner's media delivery services. Then there might be a move up where selected for-profit's courses are selectively brought into the curriculum. Then there might be entire specialized programs that are brought into the curriculum such as executive programs (non-degree) or undergraduate pharmacy or even accounting degree programs.

    The next move up the ladder would be for-profit graduate degree programs where assessment is controlled by the not-for-profit partner. For example, Western Governor's University now has over 10,000 students in competency-based programs. One might imagine partnering of WGU with a for-profit distance education MBA program where the competency assessments and degrees are administered by WGU.

    Lastly, one might envision doctoral programs, although these might come last because they are typically money losers if they have respectability in the market such as AACSB respectability. For example, Capella now has an online accounting doctoral program that I view as a fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#CommercialPrograms
    One might envision a partnering with some respected state university, such as ASU, that greatly alters the curriculum and the assessment process and the dissertation advising to bring Cpaella's accounting doctoral program more in line with ASU's onsite accounting doctoral program. This off course is probably way, way down the road.

    "Where For-Profit and Nonprofit Meet," by David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed, October 13, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/13/princeton

    Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accounting doctoral programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


    The whole world is invited to learn from BYU's 600 online courses (except for high school athletes)
    "Black Mark for BYU," by Doug Lederman , Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2010 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/09/byu

    Brigham Young University's Independent Study program appears to be wildly successful. At any given time, students are taking more than 100,000 high school courses and 22,000 college classes, for a variety of reasons: to get courses out of the way in the summer, finish high school or college early, or improve their performance in classes in which they struggled. Based on those numbers and the fees the program charges for its nearly 600 online courses, the program generates millions of dollars in revenue a year. (BYU officials won't say.)

    A tiny fraction of its enrollments -- about 500 a year -- are high school athletes seeking to use the BYU program's courses to meet the National Collegiate Athletic Association's freshman eligibility standards. Yet for the second time in several years, dealings with the high-stakes world of big-time college athletics appear to pose a potentially serious threat to the 90-year-old program's status. Last month, the NCAA decided to "de-certify" the BYU program (and one other, the American School) as a legitimate provider of "nontraditional" courses. The decision came in response to a change in NCAA rules this spring requiring "nontraditional" courses to include regular interaction between students and professors, and to set specific timeframes in which the courses must be completed.

    Brigham Young officials expressed dismay about the NCAA's decision, which they said had caught them by surprise. "We do want to look at what we can do to be in compliance with what the NCAA has put in place," said Carri Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the university.

    She noted that BYU Independent Study had made a set of changes in its programs and policies the last time it drew NCAA scrutiny -- when athletes at several colleges were found to have earned credit from their institutions for courses at BYU in which they did little or no work (or cheated to complete). Among other changes, Jenkins noted, BYU Independent Study altered its policies surrounding when and how tests are administered, and stopped letting athletes enrolled in NCAA member colleges enroll in its classes.

    But the courses remain a commonly-trod path for high school athletes seeking to meet the NCAA's academic eligibility standards for freshman athletes, which require students to surpass a minimum grade-point average in 16 core high school courses to compete in their first year in college. BYU and the American School, which is based in Illinois, are among the most common programs from which high school athletes seek eligibility through nontraditional courses, which the association defines as "[t]hose taught via the Internet, distance learning, independent study, individualized instruction, correspondence, and courses taught by similar means, including software-based credit recovery courses."

    Use of the courses has burgeoned, and in March the association's Division I members approved a rule aimed at toughening oversight of them, said Chuck Wynne, an NCAA spokesman. "Members were obviously concerned that prospective student-athletes were taking these courses and not being prepared for the rigors of college academics," he said. The changes require that instructors and students have "ongoing access to one another and regular interaction with one another for purposes of teaching, evaluating and providing assistance to the student throughout the duration of the course"; that the "student's work ... is available for review and validation"; and that "[a] defined time for completion of the course is identified by the high school or secondary school program."

    In the wake of the rules changes, NCAA officials began reviewing providers of nontraditional courses, and the association has "approved a bunch" as meeting the new standards, Wynne said. So far, only BYU Independent Study and the American School were found to fall short. (American School responded to the NCAA's findings, which it is appealing, here.)

    Wynne declined to specify exactly how and why BYU was deemed to fall short of the NCAA standards. But he said that most of the scrutiny of the nontraditional programs focused on the lack of regular, sustained interaction between students and instructors -- ideally interaction initiated by the instructor, designed to ensure at least some oversight of the students' work -- and on some programs' failure to set a minimum timeframe for the completion of course work.

    One NCAA review -- "not necessarily at BYU," Wynne said -- found that one high school athlete had completed "a semester of algebra in six minutes."

    "We understand that these are good quality educational tools when implemented and done right," Wynne said, noting that the NCAA is not philosophically opposed to online learning. "It's mostly about the administration of these programs. You can have the best curriculum in the world, but if someone does algebra in six minutes, you know there's something wrong."

    Jenkins of BYU insisted that the six-minute-algebra incident had most definitely not taken place in one of the university's online offerings. She said that the university plans to do whatever it needs to to reassure the NCAA that its courses are of high quality, and that the independent study program had not heard from past, current or prospective students who might be concerned about a stigma from the NCAA's action.

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

     

     


    "High-Profile Trader's Harsh Critique of For-Profit Colleges," Inside Higher Ed, May 27, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/27/qt#228602

    Steven Eisman, the Wall Street trader who was mythologized in Michael Lewis's The Big Short as that rare person who saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming and made a killing as a result, thinks he has seen the next big explosive and exploitative financial industry -- for-profit higher education -- and he's making sure as many people as possible know it. In a speech Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, an exclusive gathering at which financial analysts who rarely share their insights publicly are encouraged to dish their "best investment ideas," Eisman started off with a broadside against Wall Street's college companies.

    "Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry," said Eisman, of FrontPoint Financial Services Fund. "I was wrong. The For-Profit Education Industry has proven equal to the task." Eisman's speech lays out his analysis of the sector's enormous profitability and its questionable quality, then argues that the colleges' business model is about to be radically transformed by the Obama administration's plan to hold the institutions accountable for the student-debt-to-income ratio of their graduates. "Under gainful employment, most of the companies still have high operating margins relative to other industries," Eisman said. "They are just less profitable and significantly overvalued. Downside risk could be as high as 50 percent. And let me add that I hope that gainful employment is just the beginning. Hopefully, the DOE will be looking into ways of improving accreditation and of ways to tighten rules on defaults." Stocks of the companies appeared to fall briefly in the last hour of trading Wednesday, after news of Eisman's speech made the rounds.

    "Subprime goes to college:  The new mortgage crisis — how students at for-profit universities could default on $275 billion in taxpayer-backed student loans," by Steven Eusnan, The New York Post,  June 6, 2010 ---
    http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP

    Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.

    The for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate, driven by easy access to government sponsored debt in the form of Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the government. Thus, the government, the students and the taxpayer bear all the risk, and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards. This is similar to the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime originators bore far less risk than the investors in their mortgage paper.



    Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP#ixzz0q6iq9jsm
     
    Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.

    The for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate, driven by easy access to government sponsored debt in the form of Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the government. Thus, the government, the students and the taxpayer bear all the risk, and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards. This is similar to the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime originators bore far less risk than the investors in their mortgage paper.



    Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP#ixzz0q6iq9jsm
     

    Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.

    The for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate, driven by easy access to government sponsored debt in the form of Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the government. Thus, the government, the students and the taxpayer bear all the risk, and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards. This is similar to the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime originators bore far less risk than the investors in their mortgage paper.

    A student prepares for an online quiz at home for the Universtity of Phoenix. In the past 10 years, the for-profit education industry has grown 5-10 times the historical rate of traditional post secondary education. As of 2009, the industry had almost 10% of enrolled students but claimed nearly 25% of the $89 billion of federal Title IV student loans and grant disbursements. At the current pace of growth, for-profit schools will draw 40% of all Title IV aid in 10 years.

    How has this been allowed to happen?

    The simple answer is that they’ve hired every lobbyist in Washington, DC. There has been a revolving door between the people who work for this industry and the halls of government. One example is Sally Stroup. In 2001-2002, she was the head lobbyist for the Apollo Group — the company behind the University of Phoenix and the largest for-profit educator. But from 2002-2006 she became assistant secretary of post-secondary education for the Department of Education under President Bush. In other words, she was directly in charge of regulating the industry she had previously lobbied for.

    From 1987 through 2000, the amount of total Title IV dollars received by students of for-profit schools fluctuated between $2 billion and $4 billion per annum. But when the Bush administration took over, the DOE gutted many of the rules that governed the conduct of this industry. Once the floodgates were opened, the industry embarked on 10 years of unrestricted massive growth. Federal dollars flowing to the industry exploded to over $21 billion, a 450% increase.

    At many major-for profit institutions, federal Title IV loan and grant dollars now comprise close to 90% of total revenues. And this growth has resulted in spectacular profits and executive salaries. For example, ITT Educational Services, or ESI, has a roughly 40% operating margin vs. the 7%-12% margins of other companies that receive major government contracts. ESI is more profitable on a margin basis than even Apple.

    This growth is purely a function of government largesse, as Title IV has accounted for more than 100% of revenue growth.

    Here is one of the more upsetting statistics. In fiscal 2009, Apollo increased total revenues by $833 million. Of that amount, $1.1 billion came from Title IV federally funded student loans and grants. More than 100% of the revenue growth came from the federal government. But of this incremental $1.1 billion in federal loan and grant dollars, the company only spent an incremental $99 million on faculty compensation and instructional costs — that’s 9 cents on every dollar received from the government going toward actual education. The rest went to marketing and paying executives.

    Leaving politics aside for a moment, the other major reason why the industry has taken an ever increasing share of government dollars is that it has turned the typical education model on its head. And here is where the subprime analogy becomes very clear.

    There is a traditional relationship between matching means and cost in education. Typically, families of lesser financial means seek lower cost colleges in order to maximize the available Title IV loans and grants — thereby getting the most out of every dollar and minimizing debt burdens.

    The for-profit model seeks to recruit those with the greatest financial need and put them in high cost institutions. This formula maximizes the amount of Title IV loans and grants that these students receive.

    With billboards lining the poorest neighborhoods in America and recruiters trolling casinos and homeless shelters (and I mean that literally), the for-profits have become increasingly adept at pitching the dream of a better life and higher earnings to the most vulnerable of society.

    If the industry in fact educated its students and got them good jobs that enabled them to receive higher incomes and to pay off their student loans, everything I’ve just said would be irrelevant.

    So the key question to ask is — what do these students get for their education? In many cases, NOT much, not much at all.

    At one Corinthian Colleges-owned Everest College campus in California, students paid $16,000 for an eight-month course in medical assisting. Upon nearing completion, the students learned that not only would their credits not transfer to any community or four-year college, but also that their degree is not recognized by the American Association for Medical Assistants. Hospitals refuse to even interview graduates.

    And look at drop-out rates. Companies don’t fully disclose graduation rates, but using both DOE data and company-provided information, I calculate drop out rates of most schools are 50%-plus per year.

    Default rates on student loans are already starting to skyrocket. It’s just like subprime — which grew at any cost and kept weakening its underwriting standards to grow.

    The bottom line is that as long as the government continues to flood the for-profit education industry with loan dollars and the risk for these loans is borne solely by the students and the government, then the industry has every incentive to grow at all costs, compensate employees based on enrollment, influence key regulatory bodies and manipulate reported statistics — all to maintain access to the government’s money.

    Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP#ixzz0q6hwLIst

    June 6, 2010 reply from dgsearfoss@comcast.net

    Hi Bob,

    Equally as bad, if not worse, are the companies that provide on-line courses to the military. They price their tuition at exactly the amount that will be covered by the military, set horribly low levels of expectation as reflected by the “testing” and “grading”, and virtually none of the “credits” are transferrable to an accredited higher education institution.

    It is a scandal that should be dealt with harshly by Congress.

    Jerry

    "Higher education's bubble is about to burst," by: University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Washington Examiner, June 6, 2010 ---
    http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher-education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html

    It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar.

    The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

    Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

    Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily.

    College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. ... Normal supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."

    Consumers would balk, except for two things.

    First -- as with the housing bubble -- cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They're willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often, their parents) don't fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.

    Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs that this is beginning to happen already.

    A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt -- debt that her degree in Religious and Women's Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about $700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer's assistant earning an hourly wage.

    And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house, Munna can't simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be expunged in a bankruptcy. She's stuck in a financial trap.

    Some might say that she deserves it -- who borrows $100,000 to finance a degree in women's and religious studies that won't make you any money? She should have wised up, and others should learn from her mistake, instead of learning too late, as she did: "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back."

    But bubbles burst when people catch on, and there's some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than run up debt. Things haven't collapsed yet, but they're looking shakier -- kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.

    So what happens if the bubble collapses? Will it be a tragedy, with millions of Americans losing their path to higher-paying jobs?

    Maybe not. College is often described as a path to prosperity, but is it? A college education can help people make more money in three different ways.

    First, it may actually make them more economically productive by teaching them skills valued in the workplace: Computer programming, nursing or engineering, say. (Religious and women's studies, not so much.)

    Second, it may provide a credential that employers want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it's a weeding tool that doesn't produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might. A four-year college degree, even if its holder acquired no actual skills, at least indicates some ability to show up on time and perform as instructed.

    And, third, a college degree -- at least an elite one -- may hook its holder up with a useful social network that can provide jobs and opportunities in the future. (This is more true if it's a degree from Yale than if it's one from Eastern Kentucky, but it's true everywhere to some degree).

    While an individual might rationally pursue all three of these, only the first one -- actual added skills -- produces a net benefit for society. The other two are just distributional -- about who gets the goodies, not about making more of them.

    Yet today's college education system seems to be in the business of selling parts two and three to a much greater degree than part one, along with selling the even-harder-to-quantify "college experience," which as often as not boils down to four (or more) years of partying.

    Post-bubble, perhaps students -- and employers, not to mention parents and lenders -- will focus instead on education that fosters economic value. And that is likely to press colleges to focus more on providing useful majors. (That doesn't necessarily rule out traditional liberal-arts majors, so long as they are rigorous and require a real general education, rather than trendy and easy subjects, but the key word here is "rigorous.")

    My question is whether traditional academic institutions will be able to keep up with the times, or whether -- as Anya Kamenetz suggests in her new book, "DIY U" -- the real pioneering will be in online education and the work of "edupunks" who are more interested in finding new ways of teaching and learning than in protecting existing interests.

    I'm betting on the latter. Industries seldom reform themselves, and real competition usually comes from the outside. Keep your eyes open -- and, if you're planning on applying to college, watch out for those student loans.

    Examiner contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds hosts "InstaVision" on PJTV.com and blogs at Instapundit.com.
    He is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee.

    Bob Jensen's threads on how for-profit universities operate in the gray zone of fraud ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

    On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
    For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

    Bob Jensen's threads on many of the for-profit universities are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Although there is a gray zone, for-profit colleges should not be confused with diploma mills ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill

    "'College, Inc.'," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/College-Inc/23850/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    PBS broadcast a documentary on for-profit higher education last week, titled College, Inc. It begins with the slightly ridiculous figure of Michael Clifford, a former cocaine abuser turned born-again Christian who never went to college, yet makes a living padding around the lawn of his oceanside home wearing sandals and loose-fitting print shirts, buying up distressed non-profit colleges and turning them into for-profit money machines.

    Improbably, Clifford emerges from the documentary looking OK. When asked what he brings to the deals he brokers, he cites nothing educational. Instead, it's the "Three M's: Money, Management, and Marketing." And hey, there's nothing wrong with that. A college may have deep traditions and dedicated faculty, but if it's bankrupt, anonymous, and incompetently run, it won't do students much good. "Nonprofit" colleges that pay their leaders executive salaries and run multi-billion dollar sports franchises have long since ceded the moral high ground when it comes to chasing the bottom line.

    The problem with for-profit higher education, as the documentary ably shows, is that people like Clifford are applying private sector principles to an industry with a number of distinct characteristics. Four stand out. First, it's heavily subsidized. Corporate giants like the University of Phoenix are now pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars per year from the taxpayers, through federal grants and student loans. Second, it's awkwardly regulated. Regional accreditors may protest that their imprimatur isn't like a taxicab medallion to be bought and sold on the open market. But as the documentary makes clear, that's precisely the way it works now. (Clifford puts the value at $10-million.)

    Third, it's hard for consumers to know what they're getting at the point of purchase. College is an experiential good; reputations and brochures can only tell you so much. Fourth—and I don't think this is given proper weight when people think about the dynamics of the higher-education market—college is generally something you only buy a couple of times, early in your adult life.

    All of which creates the potential—arguably, the inevitability—for sad situations like the three nursing students in the documentary who were comprehensively ripped off by a for-profit school that sent them to a daycare center for their "pediatric rotation" and left them with no job prospects and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The government subsidies create huge incentives for for-profit colleges to enroll anyone they can find. The awkward regulation offers little in the way of effective oversight. The opaque nature of the higher-education experience makes it hard for consumers to sniff out fraudsters up-front. And the fact that people don't continually purchase higher education throughout their lives limits the downside for bad actors. A restaurant or automobile manufacturer that continually screws its customers will eventually go out of business. For colleges, there's always another batch of high-school graduates to enroll.

    The Obama administration has made waves in recent months by proposing to tackle some of these problems by implementing "gainful employment" rules that would essentially require for-profits to show that students will be able to make enough money with their degrees to pay back their loans. It's a good idea, but it also raises an interesting question: Why apply this policy only to for-profits? Corporate higher education may be the fastest growing segment of the market, but it still educates a small minority of students and will for a long time to come. There are plenty of traditional colleges out there that are mainly in the business of preparing students for jobs, and that charge a lot of money for degrees of questionable value. What would happen if the gainful employment standard were applied to a mediocre private university that happily allows undergraduates to take out six-figure loans in exchange for a plain-vanilla business B.A.?

    The gainful employment standard highlights some of my biggest concerns about the Obama administration's approach to higher-education policy. To its lasting credit, the administration has taken on powerful moneyed interests and succeeded. Taking down the FFEL program was a historic victory for low-income students and reining in the abuses of for-profit higher education is a needed and important step.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The biggest question remains concerning the value of "education" at the micro level (the student) and the macro level (society). It would seem that students in training programs should have prospects of paying back the cost of the training if "industry" is not willing to fully subsidize that particular type of training.

    Education is another question entirely, and we're still trying to resolve issues of how education should be financed. I'm not in favor of "gainful employment rules" for state universities, although I think such rules should be imposed on for-profit colleges and universities.

    What is currently happening is that training and education programs are in most cases promising more than they can deliver in terms of gainful employment. Naive students think a certificate or degree is "the" ticket to career success, and many of them borrow tens of thousands of dollars to a point where they are in debtor's prisons with their meager laboring wages garnished (take a debtor's wages on legal orders) to pay for their business, science, and humanities degrees that did not pay off in terms of career opportunities.

    But that does not mean that their education did not pay off in terms of life's fuller meaning. The question is who should pay for "life's fuller meaning?" Among our 50 states, California had the best plan for universal education. But fiscal mismanagement, especially very generous unfunded state-worker unfunded pension plans, has now brought California to the brink of bankruptcy. Increasing taxes in California is difficult because it already has the highest state taxes in the nation.

    Student borrowing to pay for pricey certificates and degrees is not a good answer in my opinion, but if students borrow I think the best alternative is to choose a lower-priced accredited state university. It will be a long, long time before the United States will be able to fund "universal education" because of existing unfunded entitlements for Social Security and other pension obligations, Medicare, Medicaid, military retirements, etc.

    I think it's time for our best state universities to reach out with more distance education and training that prevent many of the rip-offs taking place in the for-profit training and education sector. The training and education may not be free, but state universities have the best chance of keeping costs down and quality up.

    "Wal-Mart Employees Get New College Program—Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Wal-Mart-Employees-Get-New/24504/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    The American Public University System has been described as a higher-education version of Wal-Mart: a publicly traded corporation that mass-markets moderately priced degrees in many fields.

    Now it's more than an analogy. Under a deal announced today, the for-profit online university will offer Wal-Mart workers discounted tuition and credit for job experience.

    Such alliances are nothing new; see these materials from Strayer and Capella for other examples. But Wal-Mart is the country's largest retailer. And the company is pledging to spend $50-million over three years to help employees cover the cost of tuition and books beyond the discounted rate, according to the Associated Press.

    "What's most significant about this is that, given that APU is very small, this is a deal that has the potential to drive enrollments that are above what investors are already expecting from them," Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, told Wired Campus. "Which is why the stock is up."

    Wal-Mart workers will be able to receive credit—without having to pay for it—for job training in subjects like ethics and retail inventory management, according to the AP.

    Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S. Roughly half of them have a high-school diploma but no college degree, according to The New York Times. A department-level manager would end up paying about $7,900 for an associate degree, factoring in the work credits and tuition discount, the newspaper reported.

    “If 10 to 15 percent of employees take advantage of this, that’s like graduating three Ohio State Universities,” Sara Martinez Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart’s external advisory council, told the Times.

    Jensen Comment
    This Wal-Mart Fringe Benefit Should Be Carefully Investigated by Employees
    It does not sit well with me!

    • I certainly hope that the Wal-Mart contributions toward tuition can be extended to state-supported colleges and universities having more respected credits. For example, online degrees from the University of Wisconsin or the University of Maryland are are likely much more respected for job mobility and for acceptance into graduate schools.

       
    • Giving credit for "job experience" is an absolute turn off for me. Most adults have some form of "job experience." This is just not equivalent to course credit experience in college where students face examinations and academic projects. Weaker colleges generally use credit for "job experience" ploy as a come on to attract applicants. But the credits awarded for job experience are not likely to be transferrable to traditional colleges and universities.

       
    • The "discounted tuition" in this for-profit online program is likely to be higher than the in-state tuition from state-supported colleges and universities.

       
    • I'm dubious about the standards for admission in for-profit colleges as well as the rigor of the courses. Watch the Frontline video served up by PBS.

      On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
      For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
      http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea


       
    • The American Public University System is accredited by the North Central Association accrediting agency that is now under investigation for weakened standards for college credits.
       

      "Inspector General Keeps the Pressure on a Regional Accreditor," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2010 ---
      http://chronicle.com/article/Inspector-General-Keeps-the/65691/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

      The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education has reaffirmed a recommendation that the department should consider sanctions for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations. In a report this week, the Office of Inspector General issued its final recommendations stemming from a 2009 examination of the commission's standards for measuring credit hours and program length, and affirmed its earlier critique that the commission had been too lax in its standards for determining the amount of credit a student receives for course work.

      The Higher Learning Commission accredits more than 1,000 institutions in 19 states. The Office of Inspector General completed similar reports for two other regional accreditors late last year but did not suggest any sanctions for those organizations.

      Possible sanctions against an accreditor include limiting, suspending, or terminating its recognition by the secretary of education as a reliable authority for determining the quality of education at the institutions it accredits. Colleges need accreditation from a federally recognized agency in order to be eligible to participate in the federal student-aid programs.

      In its examination of the Higher Learning Commission, the office looked at the commission's reaccreditation of six member institutions: Baker College, DePaul University, Kaplan University, Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the University of Phoenix. The office chose those institutions—two public, two private, and two proprietary institutions—as those that received the highest amounts of federal funds under Title IV, the section of the Higher Education Act that governs the federal student-aid programs.

      It also reviewed the accreditation status of American InterContinental University and the Art Institute of Colorado, two institutions that had sought initial accreditation from the commission during the period the office studied.

      The review found that the Higher Learning Commission "does not have an established definition of a credit hour or minimum requirements for program length and the assignment of credit hours," the report says. "The lack of a credit-hour definition and minimum requirements could result in inflated credit hours, the improper designation of full-time student status, and the over-awarding of Title IV funds," the office concluded in its letter to the commission's president, Sylvia Manning.

      More important, the office reported that the commission had allowed American InterContinental University to become accredited in 2009 despite having an "egregious" credit policy.

      In a letter responding to the commission, Ms. Manning wrote that the inspector general had ignored the limitations the accreditor had placed on American InterContinental to ensure that the institution improved its standards, an effort that had achieved the intended results, she said. "These restrictions were intended to force change at the institution and force it quickly."

      Continued in article

      Jensen Comment
      The most successful for-profit universities advertise heavily about credibility due to being "regionally accredited." In some cases this accreditation was initially bought rather than achieved such as by buying up a small, albeit still accredited, bankrupt not-for-profit private college that's washed up on the beach. This begs the question about how some for-profit universities maintain the spirit of accreditation acquired in this manner.

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

     


    Question
    How can you find an accredited only college or set of online courses within an accredited college?

    Answer
    One approach is to go to "Accredited-Online-Colleges,com" ---
    http://www.accredited-online-colleges.com/Online-Degrees/index.asp

    Online Degrees Accounting & Finance | Business | Business Administration & Management | Communication & Journalism | Education | Engineering | Family & Consumer Sciences | Human Resources | Information Technology & Computers | Legal Professions | Liberal Arts & General Studies | Medical & Health Care | Multimedia & Design | Psychology | Public Administration & Social Services | Sales & Marketing | Security & Protective Services | Visual & Performing Arts |

    Jensen Comment
    My recommendation here is "Buyer Beware." This site has a truly mixed bag of colleges to a point where I would take the phrase "Accredited Colleges" with a giant grain of salt. Having said this, I also find that this AOC site can be helpful in finding online alternatives.

    Beware of any college that gives credit for "life experience." Every older adult has life experience. Often colleges that resort to this marketing gimmick are not providing quality degrees.

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill 


     


    New York State Gives Trump University a Failing Grade
    Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/New-York-State-Gives-Trump-U/23190/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Five years after Donald Trump opened an online university -- called Trump University, of course -- New York State's Education Department is taking a dim view of the tycoon's venture into higher education, The Daily News reported today. The university, which promises to teach would-be plutocrats how to make themselves rich if they will only make Mr. Trump a bit richer first, is not a university at all, say state officials. In a letter obtained by the News, one official demanded that Mr. Trump drop "University" from the unaccredited, non-degree-granting institution's name. "Use of the word 'university' by your corporation is misleading and violates New York Education Law and the Rules of the Board of Regents," the letter says. Michael Sexton, president of Trump U., told the News that, if necessary, "we will change our name to Trump Education."

    Interestingly, the word “accounting” does not appear in the course catalog --- not even the traditional first course in accounting ---
    http://www.trumpuniversity.com/learn/index.cfm

    The “courses” appear to be mostly sales pitch seminars like con men/women put on in hotel conference rooms.

    Bob Jensen's threads on more legitimate distance education training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


    "LecturesOnline and BritannicaU," by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, February 28, 2010 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/lecturesonline_and_britannicau 

    In 1999, while teaching at West Virginia University, I created a site called LecturesOnline.org. You can find the original home page for LecturesOnline at the Internet Archive site. LecturesOnline.org was created out of my desire to easily locate materials for teaching, and to share the materials that I was creating for my classes with other faculty.

    The home page contains the following text:

    "LecturesOnline.org is the one-stop site to preview, examine, and download academically focussed digital work-product, such as PowerPoint lectures, demonstrations, figures, charts, graphs, and HTML pages. [The site]… tries to fill a gap in the academic world; the absence of a web site that allows academics to easily find, distribute, disseminate and trade educational materials that they produce for teaching."

    In 1999, while still teaching at WVU, I started consulting for the Britannica - and in 2000 I sold LecturesOnline to the company. That same year I left my job at WVU to join Britannica's new San Francisco based educational start-up. The original idea was to leverage Britannica's expertise, resources, and brand to expand the reach and content of LecturesOnline. A site called "BritannicaU" would develop out of LecturesOnline, one that would fold in Britannica's multimedia and text content with user-submitted teaching materials and perhaps content from other sources. The site would be organized around disciplines, the way a college/university is organized, allowing faculty looking for lecture material to easily locate high quality content.

    This vision never came to fruition. Looking back, I still think that BritannicaU (or an expanded LecturesOnline) was a pretty good idea. A site such as BritannicaU would have (and perhaps still would) fill a need for quality discipline (or course) specific teaching materials. Faculty still produce tons of PowerPoint lectures for their own courses, and these lectures are never shared (as they are locked up in learning management systems or on individual hard drives). At least a certain percentage of faculty members would be willing to share their teaching materials, particularly if they got attribution and their material was not re-purposed for commercial use (this was before Creative Commons). Sharing would be encouraged if an easy exchange method for borrowing was part of the deal. For Britannica, mixing their existing content with user submitted materials would have increased the relevancy and visibility of their brand. I've long thought that Encyclopædia Britannica content is useful for teaching, and a site like BritannicaU would have demonstrated this idea.

    Why did BritannicaU never get off the ground? The idea died before we were able to produce any workable site, it never even made it to the stage of being released (although a good deal of money was spent on outsourced Web design, consulting and prototyping).

    Some reasons for the failure of BritannicaU:

    1) Business Model: BritannicaU, sort of an expanded LecturesOnline with Britannica content and a more advanced platform, may have been a good idea but it would have never been a huge revenue generator. The whole point of the original site was a nonprofit exchange. Why would faculty upload their teaching materials if someone else was making money off them? This tension existed from the day I sold LecturesOnline to Britannica. How would BritannicaU monetize? Advertising seemed like the only possibility, but again this would violate the original spirit and rationale of the site. Britannica could have made the site a dot-org, foregone advertising and decided to live with the site as channel to market their content as relevant to higher ed faculty, but that would have cannibalized its paid (subscription) properties. A "LecturesOnline" brought to you by Britannica probably would have been the best bet, but Britannica was never interested in moving too far beyond their core content (or other expensively produced original content), or supporting a property that did not make money.

    2) Leadership and Experience: The Britannica Educational Division, initially based in a couple of live/work lofts South of Market (SOMA) and finally at the Presidio before closing in 2001, recruited some very smart people. Most of these folks never worked on BritannicaU, as the inherent lack of a business model quickly doomed the higher ed. site, with the focus quickly moving to a product called BritannicaSchool for the K-12 market. As for me, I had really no idea what I was doing and did not have the skills or influence to make BritannicaU a reality. Someone should write the story of Britannica's foray in the San Francisco start-up world to launch an education division, putting this effort into the larger context of Britannica's historical transformation from print to digital. My role at Britannica was too marginal, too peripheral and too short-term to write this story, but I hope someone takes it up. (Note: I'd like to connect with the old San Francisco Britannica.com Education people).

    3) Technology: Back in 2000 during the dot-com bubble some crucial technologies and business models were not in place. User generated content and the read/write Web were not really mainstreams concepts. Building any kind of website, much less one that would incorporate the technologies necessary to allow anyone to upload, tag, search, and discover teaching materials, was an incredibly expensive proposition. Today a site like this could be built on Drupal, with storage come from Amazon S3, for very little money. Bandwidth and storage are now cheap, 10 years ago these were expensive and scarce commodities.

    Today, if you go to LecturesOnline.org you will find some Web squatter. Britannica was never really interested in the idea of user generated and shared content, and after buying the site from me they never did anything with it. The dot-com bubble collapsed, Britannica's management and business model changed (and changed again), and I left the company in late 2001. I'll be forever grateful for the opportunity that Britannica gave me to participate in a start-up culture and transition my career from a traditional faculty track to educational technology. While I never moved full-time to San Francisco (tele-commuting from West Virginia, where my wife was in medical school), I cherish the time I spent with all the amazing people who at one time worked at Britannica.com Education and who still work for the company in Chicago.

    If I could have a "do-over", I think that it would have been smarter to have not sold LecturesOnline.org to Britannica, and to have maintained the site as an independent nonprofit. Perhaps I could have figured out a way to have a company "sponsor" the site, some way to bring the expertise and resources necessary to scale the idea. Certainly my lack of programming skills, lack of money, the fact I had a full-time teaching gig, and the state of the technology when I began LecturesOnline would have made this difficult. I still think that Britannica's Encyclopædia content is much more useful for teaching than most faculty realize, and there should be a way to get this material into the hands of people putting together lectures. Mostly, I'm happy that I had the opportunity to start something new, try to grow it, and to fail. No doubt that failure is the best teacher, and I hope to have many more failures in the course of my career.

    Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
     

    Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
     

    Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
     

    Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


    The Zero-Tuition Online University of the People (now working on gaining accreditation) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_People

     

    "Tuition-Free University Gains a Following:  A year since its formation, the online University of the People has attracted several hundred students, a team of top academic advisers, and growing support worldwide," by Alison Damast, Business Week, January 21, 2010 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jan2010/bs20100121_194827.htm?link_position=link1

    One of the higher education world's boldest experiments began in September when 180 students from nearly 50 countries around the world logged on to their computers for their first day of school at the University of the People. At first glance, the school has many of the trappings of a modern university: a provost, department heads, even an admissions committee. Yet there are glaring differences—namely, a the lack of a campus or physical classroom and just a handful of paid staff—that set it apart from its bricks-and-mortar counterparts.

    Those are shortcomings the students, most of them from developing countries and without the means to pay for college, are willing to overlook, says Shai Reshef, an Israeli entrepreneur and founder of the school, the world's first global tuition-free online university.

    "Education has become so expensive that not that many people can afford it, and in some parts of the world it just doesn't exist or there isn't a big enough supply," says Reshef, who has more than two decades' experience with Internet-based educational ventures and is chairman of Cramster.com, an online study community. "This is exactly why the Internet was invented. I thought: What can be done better with the Internet than helping people get an online education for free?"

    Backed by the U.N. It was just about a year ago that Reshef made headlines in the distance learning community with his announcement that he intended to start an online college program using open-source software that would be free to students all over the world, one of just a handful of tuition-free universities. The nonprofit venture, which he named University of the People, attracted attention not only because of its tuition-free mission but also because it had the backing of the U.N., a leadership team made up of academics from top educational institutions like Columbia University and New York University, and an innovative approach to distance education, with an emphasis on peer-to-peer learning.

    Today, the online university is fully operational, with 300 students, a growing array of course offerings, and even a recently announced research partnership with Yale University. The school is tapping into a growing market: Nonprofit institutions account for 68% of the more the more than 2 million students enrolled in online education, according to the latest estimates from Eduventures, a higher education consulting firm.

    There are still many trials ahead for the fledgling university, which is struggling to make inroads in the competitive online global education market. To stay afloat, the school will need to raise several million dollars in startup costs this year and introduce new admission and application testing fees, which could pose difficulties for students from developing countries. But perhaps its greatest challenge—and the one its success will hinge on—will be gaining accreditation, a step toward the school's goal of conferring bachelor's degrees to students. This would also allow the school to carve out a niche as a major player in a space that has so far been primarily dominated by schools like the for-profit Apollo Group's (APOL) University of Phoenix and Washington Post Co.'s (WPO) Kaplan University, both of which have broad online degree offerings, says Roger C. Schonfeld, the manager of research at ITHAKA S+R, a higher education strategy and research organization.

    Business and Computer Science "What the University of the People is offering to do is make education time- and space-neutral. They have a lot of ingredients there to be successful, and they certainly have quite a few superstars on their advisory board," Schonfeld says. Among them: a former dean at INSEAD and the current U.S. Ambassador to Bangladesh. "I think that their success from a business perspective may turn on their ability to become accredited," Schonfeld notes. "With accreditation, they have a good chance of an innovative model that might see some success."

    For now, the school's academic offerings are limited. Students can pursue an associate's-degree or bachelor's-degree track in business or a bachelor's track in computer science. Those subject areas were chosen because they are professions that "are in high demand and areas where students will most likely be able to find a job," Reshef says. (A notice on the school's Web site reads: "These programs may in the future lead towards undergraduate degrees. However, no degrees will be granted until the university obtains proper authorization from relevant authorities.")

    Obtaining accreditation is a top priority for the school, says Reshef, noting that the school is incorporated in Pasadena, Calif., making it easier for the school to work with American accreditation agencies. "We intend to apply for accreditation as soon as we can," Reshef says, though he declined to specify which accreditation body the school planned to work with.

    The school's unaccredited status does not appear to be a stumbling block for students like Deema Sultan, 27, who lives in Syria and was among the first cohort of students to matriculate at the University of the People this fall. She came across the school through a news story run on a Syrian Web site last summer and immediately became intrigued. "I thought, "Oh, this is a great idea, but I doubt it is true,"" says Sultan.

    Her doubts were assuaged when she found the school's Web site and saw that she met the eligibility requirements. Now in her second semester, she is pursuing a business administration track. When not in school, she helps run her family's textile business. She hopes her education will help the business grow and help her become a more astute entrepreneur.

    "This is a great opportunity for me because, even though I'm working, I could not afford to study in Syria or the U.S.," says Sultan, who takes classes from a computer in her parent's home or at Internet cafés, when the family's connection is down. "I'm very impressed by it so far and the level of education they are offering. I've been telling my friends all about it."

    The University of the People has not launched an official marketing campaign, but word appears to be spreading quickly. In its first two semesters, the school received 3,000 applications from all over the world, the school says. Students enrolled in the current class range in age from 18 to 63; the vast majority have opted for the business program. To gain admission, students have to submit a high school diploma, have Internet access, be proficient in English, and be able to pass two mandatory courses in English and computer skills. The school has so far attracted students from 70 countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Zambia, and expects to enroll several hundred more students when its third semester begins in February, Reshef says.

    Peer-to-Peer Learning Admitted students are placed in a class of 15 to 20 of their peers and given access to free online materials and social networking tools. There are five semesters throughout the school year, each lasting 10 weeks. The school is using Moodle, an open sourceware e-learning software platform, to deliver lectures, reading material, homework assignments, and tests to students, who work together in groups.

    Every class is overseen by an instructor, but the school's educational model is based on peer-to-peer learning, meaning that students are expected to learn by interacting with their peers, posting and responding to questions on lessons and reading in their online classrooms. If students can't find the answer to a question through their classmates, they can reach out for help to an online volunteer community of university professors, graduate students, retired academics, and computer specialists.

    The model appears to be working, the school says. A survey of students conducted in November by the school indicated that 90% of the class was satisfied with the classroom experience and would definitely or likely recommend the school to peers and family.

    Continued in article

     

    University of the People --- http://www.uopeople.org/

    Course Catalogs --- http://www.uopeople.org/ACADEMICS/CourseCatalog/tabid/197/Default.aspx

     


    Onsite and Online College Directory by State in the U.S. --- http://www.college-scholarships.com/index.html#collegestate
    Always investigate the credibility of any college you're interested in before assuming all college degrees are accepted for employment and further study.

    Also see http://www.onlinelearning101.com  

    Scholarship sources --- http://www.college-scholarships.com/free_scholarship_searches.htm
    Always look for gimmicks such as a scholarship to a questionable online college or university.

    Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mill frauds and the gray zones --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill


    An Online Learning Experiment Overwhelms the University of Southern California
    "An Experiment Takes Off," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 7, 2009 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/07/uscmat# 

    When Karen Symms Gallagher ran into fellow education deans last year, many of them were "politely skeptical," the University of Southern California dean says (politely), about her institution's experiment to take its master's program in teaching online.

    Many of them seemed to appreciate Gallagher's argument that the traditional model of teacher education programs had largely failed to produce the many more top-notch teachers that California (and so many other states) desperately needed. But could a high-quality MAT program be delivered online? And through a partnership with a for-profit entity (2Tor), no less? Really?

    Early results about the program known as MAT@USC have greatly pleased Gallagher and USC. One hundred forty-four students enrolled in the Rossier School of Education program's first full cohort in May, 50 percent more than anticipated and significantly larger than the 100 students who started at that time in the traditional master's in teaching program on the university's Los Angeles campus.

    And this month, a new group of 302 students started in the second of three planned "starts" per year, meaning that USC has already quadrupled the number of would-be teachers it is educating this year and, depending on how many students enroll in January, is on track to increase it a few times more than that.

    It will be a while -- years, probably, until outcomes on teacher certification exams are in and the program's graduates have been successful (or not) in the classroom -- before questions about the program's quality and performance are fully answered (though officials there point out that the technology platform, like much online learning software, provides steady insight into how successfully students are staying on track). But USC officials say that short of quantitative measures such as those, they believe the online program is attracting equally qualified students and is providing an education that is fully equivalent to Rossier's on-ground master's program -- goals that the institution viewed as essential so as not to "dilute the brand" of USC's well-regarded program.

    "So far, we've beaten the odds," says Gallagher. "We're growing in scale while continuing to ensure that we have a really good program."

    "Scale" is a big buzzword in higher education right now, as report after report and new undertaking after new undertaking -- including the Obama administration's American Graduation Initiative -- underscore the perceived need for more Americans with postsecondary credentials. Many institutions -- especially community colleges and for-profit colleges -- are taking it to heart, expanding their capacity and enrolling more students. The push is less evident at other types of colleges and universities, and almost a foreign concept at highly selective institutions.

    That's what is atypical, if not downright exceptional, about the experiment at USC, which Inside Higher Ed explored in concept last fall. At that time, some experts on distance learning and teacher education -- not unlike some of Gallagher's dean peers -- wondered whether students would be willing to pay the tuition of an expensive private university for an online program, among other things.

    Officials at the university and 2Tor -- the company formed by the Princeton Review founder John Katzman, which has provided the technology and administrative infrastructure for the USC program -- were confident that they would be able to tap into the market of Ivy League and other selective college graduates who flock to programs like Teach for America in ever-growing numbers each year but are also interested in getting a formal teaching credential right away.

    While those students certainly have other options -- major public universities such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Virginia, and private institutions like Columbia University's Teachers College and Vanderbilt University, among others -- all of them require students to take up residence in way that doesn't work for everyone.

    Haley Hiatt, a 2005 graduate of Brigham Young University, actually does reside in Los Angeles -- but she's also a relatively new mother who "didn't want to have to put [her nearly 2-year-old daughter] in day care all the time," she says. So after first contemplating master's programs in history at institutions like Vanderbilt and George Washington University, and then weighing a series of graduate programs at institutions in and around Los Angeles, Hiatt entered the first cohort of the MAT@USC program. She now joins her fellow students in "face to face" meetings (on the Internet, using video chat technology) twice a week, but otherwise does most of her other course work on her own time. "I find it takes more discipline than I needed when I was in the classroom" every day at BYU, she says.

    Of the initial cohort of 144 students, about 5 percent got their bachelor's degrees from Ivy League institutions, and about 10 percent came from the crosstown rival University of California at Los Angeles, says Gallagher. About 10 percent hail from historically black colleges and universities -- the proportion of students in the online program who are black (about 11 percent) is about double the proportion in the on-ground program, though the campus program has slightly higher minority numbers overall. Students in the online program are somewhat older (average age 28 vs. 25 for the face-to-face program) and the average college grade point average is identical for both iterations of the program: 3.0, USC officials say.

    Other numbers please Gallagher even more. A greater proportion of students in the online program are in science-related fields than is true in the campus-based program, a heartening sign given the pressure on American teacher education programs to ratchet up the number of science teachers they produce.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The key to this kind of explosion in online enrollments is mostly triggered by reputation of the university in general.

    Many universities are finding online programs so popular that they are now treating them like cash cows where students pay more for online tuition than for onsite tuition. One university that openly admits this is the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UMW).

    Bob Jensen's threads on why so many students prefer online education to onsite education (even apart from cost savings) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation
    Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineVersusOnsite

    Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers


    Brigham Young University (BYU) launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with
    six Creative Commons licensed courses

    Before reading this module you may want to read about the Creative Commons ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/

    From Canada's Creative Commons --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15108

    Jane Park, June 10th, 2009

    It appears that David Wiley’s move to Brigham Young University has already resulted in progress towards opening the university’s content. Long-time pioneer and academic of open education, Wiley reports that BYU’s Independent Study has launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with six Creative Commons licensed courses under CC BY NC-SA.

    “The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed).”

    The most interesting thing about this pilot is that it “is part of a dissertation study to measure the impact of OCW courses on paying enrollments.” So far, “the results are very positive - 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses… if this pattern remains stable, then BYU IS OCW will be financially self-sustainable with the ability to add and update a number of new courses to the collection each year, indefinitely, should they so choose.” Echoing Wiley, that is an exciting prospect. We look forward to seeing these results develop, in addition to other inquiries into the sustainability of general OER initiatives in the future…

    BYU Independent Study --- http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/courses/ocw/
    Also see http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/aboutus/index.cfm

     

    University Courses   High School Courses

    You may view, use, and reuse all materials in the Open CourseWare courses. Please note that Open CourseWare courses do not provide the opportunity to submit assessments for credit, interact with faculty, or receive credit or a certificate upon completion. BYU Independent Study provides these courses as a community service under a Creative Commons license. The course materials are freely available for you to use, download, modify and share as long as you do not sell the products you derive from them. If you alter, transform, or build upon the courses, you may distribute your work only using licensing terms the same as or similar to the Creative Commons Atribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

    University Courses  (includes art, accounting, chemistry, etc.)
    High School Courses
    Middle School Courses
    Personal Enrichment Courses
    Free Courses (includes such things as dating and romance)

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing (learning materials, videos, lectures, and entire courses) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    Creative Commons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/
    Creative Commons Directory of Resources --- http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators 


    The New University of Illinois Online Global Campus

    Online-education venture at the U. of Illinois tries to distinguish itself from other distance-learning programs

    "The Global Campus Meets a World of Competition," by Dan Turner, The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, April 3, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i30/30a01001.htm

    The University of Illinois Global Campus, a multimillion-dollar distance-learning project, is up and running. For its March-April 2009 term, it has enrolled 366 students.

    Getting to this point, though, has looked a little like the dot-com start-up bubble of the late 1990s. Hundreds of Internet-related companies were launched with overly ambitious goals, only to later face cutbacks and other struggles to stay alive. Most crashed anyway. Some observers now say the Global Campus must try to avoid the same fate of churning through a large initial investment while attracting too few customers.

    The project, planned about four years ago, was designed to complement existing online programs offered by individual Illinois-system campuses at Urbana-Champaign, Springfield, and Chicago. Those programs primarily serve current students as an addition to their on-campus course work. The Global Campus, in contrast, seeks to reach the adult learner off campus, who is often seeking a more focused, career-related certification or degree, such as completing a B.S. in nursing.

    Online education has proved popular with institutions, students, and employers across the United States, with opportunities and enrollment growing. According to the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit organization focused on online learning, the fall 2007 term saw 3.9 million students enroll in at least one online course, many at for-profit institutions like DeVry University and the University of Phoenix.

    That growing popularity, says David J. Gray, chief executive of UMassOnline, the online-learning arm of the University of Massachusetts system, is part of the Global Campus's problem. The Illinois program, he says, is "fighting uphill in a market that's a lot more uphill."

    The slope didn't seem as steep in the fall of 2005, when Chester S. Gardner, then the university's vice president for academic affairs, led a committee to investigate ideas for the future of online education at Illinois. That resulted in a proposal and business plan presented to the Board of Trustees the next year. The system's "existing online programs were not structured for adult learners," says Mr. Gardner, who is now leading the Global Campus.

    The program was formally established in March 2007. The university initially financed it with $1.5-million of general revenue. The program started teaching its first 12 students in 2008.

    Now, Mr. Gardner says, the Global Campus has a budget of approximately $9.4-million for the 2008-9 fiscal year. Approximately $1-million of that comes from the state, he says, and the remaining money comes from various grants, tuition, and loans from the Board of Trustees.

    The trustees' investment has produced heavy involvement, Mr. Gardner says. "They're acting like venture capitalists," he notes, adding that "they're certainly doing their job of holding my feet to the fire."

    This year the 366 Global Campus students are enrolled in five different degree and four different certificate programs; Mr. Gardner expects the number of students to rise to around 500 by May.

    Those numbers put the program on a much slower track than earlier, sunnier estimates of 9,000 students enrolled by 2012. Mr. Gardner says the 9,000 figure came from his 2007 budget request to the trustees and was not precise. "We had no direct experience upon which to base our projections," he says.

    Now, Mr. Gardner says, he has more realistic figures. Once 1,650 students are enrolled, the monthly income from tuition will equal monthly expenses, on average. His current projections show the Global Campus reaching that point of stability by the 2011 fiscal year.

    Continued in article

     Distance Education is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance in the 21st Century ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance education ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


    I don't usually post advertisements to my Web page unless I think they fit into the context of recent discussion
    A unique online program—and the nation’s only advanced degree program in governmental accounting—the Masters in Governmental Accounting at Rutgers Business School prepares graduates to take advantage of career opportunities in one of today’s fastest growing specialized fields— governmental accounting, auditing, and finance. The 10-course program is designed for prospective CPAs, practicing CPAs, MBAs, MPAs, and accounting students who want to specialize and advance their careers in government financial management. Through its online offerings, students can earn the Masters in Governmental Accounting degree without ever setting foot in a classroom, allowing them to continue in their careers as they build their knowledge and expertise.
    A September 2, 2008 email message from AccountingWEB.com [emailbulletin@mail.accountingweb.com]


    MIT's Great Leap Into Open Knowledge Sharing in Multiple Languages

    March 12, 2007 message from abuali twaijry [aat1420@YAHOO.COM]

    Anybody knows about any training course(s) on accounting technology or internet accounting (or similar subject) provided during the summer of 2007.  Please advise.
    Atwaijry

    March 13, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

    MIT now has most of its entire curriculum of course materials in all disciplines available free to the world as open courseware. This includes the Sloan School of Business Courses --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
    Especially note the FAQs --- http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/OCWHelp/help.htm

    By the end of the year all MIT's course materials will be available, which is probably the most extensive freely open knowledge initiative (OKI) in the entire world.

    MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) has formally partnered with three organizations that are translating MIT OCW course materials into Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese --- http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/Translations.htm

    Question
    What is the most popular download course at MIT?
    Answer: According to ABC News last week it's the Introduction to Electrical Engineering Course.

    Other major universities now have huge portions of their curriculum materials available --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

    If you want to try something quite different, you might consider some online business and accounting courses from the University of Toyota --- http://www2.itt-tech.edu/st/onlineprograms/  (These are not free).

    Other online training and education programs are listed at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen


    eLearning Africa --- http://www.elearning-africa.com/


    Minnesota State Colleges Plan to Offer One-Fourth of Credits Online by 2015 ---
    http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3476&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


    A Distance Learning Course on Introductory Accounting from the Harvard Business School --- Click Here
    This course dates back to 2005 and I'm not certain how often it is updated.
    It appears that students cannot get credit from Harvard for taking this course, although other colleges could give credit for taking the course.
    It features narrated animations. Fees for this course can be found by phoning

    A Preview is available at
    http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/viewFileNavBean.jhtml?_requestid=21163

    Financial Accounting: An Introductory Online Course
    Publication Date: Nov 4, 2005
    Availability: Available
    Author(s):  David F. Hawkins, Paul M. Healy, Michael Sartor
        Type: Online Courses
    Product Number: 105708
    Language: English
    Source: HBS
    Length: Information Not Available
     

    To preview (Authorized Faculty) or purchase this online course, call (800) 545-7685 (outside the U.S. and Canada, 617-783-7600).
    A Teaching Note is available for Authorized Faculty. Online course product #105708


    Question
    Where can students substitute their college instructors for an online ($399) McGraw-Hill tutor for possible college credit?

    An accounting tutor (not for advanced courses)  is listed at http://straighterline.com/courses/descriptions/#accounting1

    Other course tutors, including college algebra and English composition, are listed at http://straighterline.com/

    "Who Needs a Professor When There's a Tutor Available?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3095&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    An unusual new commercial service offers low-cost online courses and connects students to accredited colleges who will accept the courses for credit. The only thing missing: professors.

    The service, called StraighterLine, is run by SmartThinking, a company that operates an online tutoring service used by about 300 colleges and universities. The online courses offered by StraighterLine are self-guided, and if students run into trouble they can summon a tutor from SmartThiking and talk with them via instant messaging. Students turn in their assignments or papers to tutors for grading as well.

    “We’re using our tutoring service as the instructional component,” says Burck Smith, CEO of SmartThinking. “Students move through the course, and when they have a problem they click a button and they’re talking with a tutor.”

    The courses cost $399 each, which includes 10 hours of time with a tutor. If students need more one-on-one help, they can pay extra for more tutoring.

    The courses themselves were developed by McGraw-Hill, and StraighterLine uses Blackboard’s course-management service. So this virtual college is essentially cobbled together from various off-the-shelf learning services.

    So far three colleges have agreed to grant credit for the StraighterLine courses — Fort Hays State University, Jones International University, and Potomac College.

    The colleges see the partnership as a way to attract new students. “One of the things we hope to do is convert those students to Jones students,” says D. Terry Rawls, a vice chancellor at Jones International. “My expectation is that in reality students will take one maybe two courses with StraighterLine and then the students will take the rest of their courses with us.”

    Richard Garrett, a senior analyst for Eduventures, sees the service as part of a broader trend of colleges granting credit for unconventional college experience, provided that the students can pass a test or otherwise demonstrate competency. And that raises the question, he says, “what is the core business of the academy versus what can be outsourced?

     

    Jensen Comment
    It may well be that colleges and universities may soon have to accept transfer credit for these tutors from such places as Fort Hays State University --- http://www.fhsu.edu/

    In addition to its onsite programs in Hays, Kansas, Fort Hays State University has its own online degree programs at http://www.fhsu.edu/virtualcollege/

    Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online video courses and course materials from leading universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    Free online tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

    Free textbooks and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


    Good Luck Jack (and Suzi):  You're Going to Need All the Luck You Can Get

    "Jack Welch Launches Online MBA:  The legendary former GE CEO says he knows a thing or two about management, and for $20,000 you can, too," by Geoff Gloeckler, Business Week, June 22, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2009/bs20090622_962094.htm?link_position=link1

    A corporate icon is diving into the MBA world, and he's bringing his well-documented management and leadership principles with him. Jack Welch, former CEO at General Electric (GE) (and Business Week columnist), has announced plans to start an MBA program based on the business principles he made famous teaching managers and executives in GE's Crotonville classroom.

    The Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI) will officially launch this week, with the first classes starting in the fall. The MBA will be offered almost entirely online. Compared to the $100,000-plus price tag for most brick-and-mortar MBA programs, the $600 per credit hour tuition means students can get an MBA for just over $20,000. "We think it will make the MBA more accessible to those who are hungry to play," Welch says. "And they can keep their job while doing it."

    To make the Jack Welch Management Institute a reality, a group led by educational entrepreneur Michael Clifford purchased financially troubled Myers University in Cleveland in 2008, Welch says. Welch got involved with Clifford and his group of investors and made the agreement to launch the Welch Management Institute.

    Popularized Six Sigma For Welch, the new educational endeavor is the latest chapter in a long and storied career. As GE's longtime chief, he developed a management philosophy based on relentless efficiency, productivity, and talent development. He popularized Six Sigma, wasn't shy about firing his worst-performing managers, and advocated exiting any business where GE wasn't the No. 1 or No. 2 player. Under Welch, GE became a factory for producing managerial talent, spawning CEOs that included James McNerney at Boeing (BA), Robert Nardelli at Chrysler, and Jeff Immelt, his successor at GE.

    Welch's decision to jump into online education shows impeccable timing. Business schools in general are experiencing a rise in applications as mid-level managers look to expand their business acumen while waiting out the current job slump. The new program's flexible schedule—paired with the low tuition cost—could be doubly attractive to those looking to move up the corporate ladder as the market begins to rebound.

    Ted Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, agrees. "I think it's a good time for someone to launch a high-profile online degree," Snyder says. "If you make the investment in contentthat allows for a lot of interaction between faculty and students and also among students, you can get good quality at a much more reasonable tuition level."

    Welch's Secret Weapon That being said, there are challenges that an online MBA program like Welch's will have a difficult time overcoming, even if the technology and faculty are there. "The integrity and quality of engagement between faculty and students is the most precious thing we have," Snyder says. "Assuming it's there, it dominates. These things are hard to replicate online."

    But Welch does have one thing that differentiates his MBA from others: himself. "We'll have all of the things the other schools have, only we'll have what Jack Welch believes are things that work in business, in a real-time way," he says. "Every week I will have an online streaming video of business today. For example, if I was teaching this week, I would be putting up the health-care plan. I'd be putting up the financial restructuring plan, talking about it, laying out the literature, what others are saying, and I'd be talking about it. I'll be doing that every week."

    Welch and his wife Suzy are also heavily involved in curriculum design, leaning heavily on the principles he used training managers at GE.

    Continued in Article

    Jensen Comment
    There are enormous obstacles standing in the way of the super-confident Jack Welch on this one. I should mention that I've never been a Jack Welch fan and am especially disturbed that he is the world's leader in platinum retirement perks that, in my opinion, go way beyond his value in the past and future to GE. But I will try to not let my prejudices bias my remarks below.

    In any case it will be interesting to track the progress of the Jack Welch Management Institute. I would applaud if it becomes one of the best online degree programs in the world, because I highly support the development of more and better online training and education programs in the world --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

    The Official Website of the Jack (and Suzi) Welch Management Institute is at http://www.welchway.com/

    The competition is listed at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

    More on the greatest swindles of the world
    General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE. As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for...

    Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
    Jensen Comment
    GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
    Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
    Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

    Question
    How would you advise Jack and Suzi to modify the program for greater assurance as to success?

    Answer
    My advice would be to make this a GE Executive MBA Program. The business model would be to gear it to GE professionals, especially newly hired engineers that are strong on technical ability and weak on managerial skills, financial management, marketing, and accounting.

    The key to success would be to have GE pay the tuition as a fringe benefit to the winning employees selected to get an MBA from Jack and Suzi. This may not be too difficult since there are shrines throughout the world in GE facilities where Jack Welch is worshipped as a God.

    Some of the advantages of this business model are as follows:

    There are successful business models of this nature already in existence, although in most instances the corporation or other organization selected an AACSB-accredited institution to devise a special curriculum for employees seeking degrees in that institution. A few examples are summarized below.

    Bob Jensen's threads on available online training and education programs are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

     


    The Bright Future of Grand Canyon University online
    The Apollo Group is the king of for-profit higher education, parent of the University of Phoenix. By comparison, Grand Canyon University, another for-profit college in Phoenix, is David to Apollo’s Goliath. But that’s obviously not quite how Brian Mueller sees it. Mueller, the president of the Apollo Group and the driving force behind the University of Phoenix’s highly successful online division, is betting that Grand Canyon’s future is brighter — or perhaps more profitable — than Apollo’s. The two companies announced this morning that Mueller is giving up his position at Apollo to help lead Grand Canyon into its recently announced initial public offering, which was initially valued at $230 million. Compared to Apollo, which educates hundreds of thousands of students and is 35 years old, Grand Canyon is comparatively a toddler. Since 2004, when it was purchased by a team of investors, it has been transformed from a struggling nonprofit Christian college with fewer than 1,000 into a thriving institution that has about 20,000 students, most of them online. A full report on these striking developments will be available on our Web site Thursday morning.
    Inside Higher Ed, June 25, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/25/qt


    "Continued Growth for 2 Distance Ed Models," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/19/distance

    Two unique models of providing distance education to mainly nontraditional students are coming into their own, each showing a healthy expansion of enrollments and growth in available course offerings. One, the Online Consortium of Independent Colleges & Universities, has been enlarging since its inception, while the other, Western Governors University, faced years of skepticism from critics who said its ambitious goals would never be met. Now, both are touting their success with fresh numbers and statistics, suggesting that online education needn’t only come from large for-profit companies or local community colleges.

    In 2005, Regis University announced a consortium of colleges that would work together, rather than compete, to share each others’ online courses in a way that would in effect vastly expand the offerings of each of the group’s members. Since then, the 39 founding colleges of the OCICU have expanded to 68, with 1,784 course enrollments over the past year.

    The model is unusual in that it allows colleges that are interested in offering courses online, but don’t necessarily have the resources to cover every conceivable topic, to supplement their catalog with classes that already exist — in the consortium and on the Web, but not on their campuses. So far, seven of the member colleges, including Regis, act as “providers,” essentially allowing other colleges in the group to pick and choose which courses to make available to their own students, with full institutional credit assigned through the student’s college.

    “We’ve just experienced remarkable growth and great feedback from the schools participating,” said Thomas R. Kennedy, executive director of new ventures at Regis. “Especially as member schools ... they don’t have any online schools whatsoever, and overnight they have one. That’s one of the beauties of it.”

    That near-instant capability can serve students in a number of ways. Do they need to fulfill a general elective requirement, like sociology or political science? The providers offer plenty of possibilities for students at colleges that don’t have the resources to fill every gap in the curriculum. What about students interested in a niche topic, like Irish studies? Some of the providers, as well as members that are planning on offering up courses to the rest of the consortium in the future, have such offerings as well.

    Many, but not all, of the member colleges are religiously affiliated, and most fit the profile of small- or medium-sized institutions in the Council of Independent Colleges that may not have the resources to get into the distance education business on their own. Members pay a one-time fee of $3,500 to join the consortium plus an annual fee of $1,000, Kennedy said, to cover administrative costs. Of the approximately $1,350 in tuition for a three-credit course, he added, about $500 would go to the provider school per student — essentially extra cash for a course that was already being held, he pointed out — and $700 would remain at the student’s home college, which would incur no additional cost.

    “All these provider schools are doing is opening up their classes ... to visiting students, in a way,” he said. The key difference, however, is that students receive credit as if they took the courses at their own institutions, rather than as transfer credits.

    Kennedy said he’s been urging member colleges to pocket that extra tuition money “and start investing in your own online program.”

    Some are doing just that. Keuka College, in upstate New York, administers degree completion programs by partnering with hospitals and community colleges across the state. To help students in its various programs who need to take a specific course or two to complete their degrees, the college can now send them to offerings available online through the consortium.

    “We found that by using courses offered through the consortium, we could offer students more forms of access,” said Gary Smith, associate vice president for professional studies and international programs at Keuka, especially for the “general education or general elective pool that’s outside our major program offerings.”

    This year, Keuka will ramp up its own online courses by playing to its strengths: If all goes according to plan, Smith said, the college will add classes in Asian studies to the consortium’s lineup.

    A ‘Competency-Based’ University Takes Off

    Another model that’s meeting or exceeding the expectations of its leaders is breathing a sigh of relief. Western Governors University, founded in 1997 by 19 state governors, started with ambitious plans to grow its enrollment and become a regional economic engine. But the initial plans faltered and the university found itself the object of criticism and even scorn — although that wasn’t necessarily confined to Western Governors.

    “If you go back to the mid-’90s, when the idea for WGU bubbled up from among the conversations from the governors of the Western states, there was at that time no clear sense of whether or not online education would work, period, or would work with any level of success and any decent level of quality,” said Patrick Partridge, the university’s vice president of marketing and enrollment. But, he acknowledged, there was plenty of skepticism in academe as well. “I think that skepticism was both of a financial type and sort of an awareness ... of the kind of political hurdles in the higher-ed world.”

    These days, the picture for both online education in general, and WGU in particular, seems quite a bit brighter. The nonprofit institution, which receives no state support and sustains itself primarily through tuition and private donations, announced this month that it had reached an enrollment of 10,000 students — up from 500 in 2003. That growth can be attributed to a number of factors, including regional accreditation, but the university also emphasizes two features that distinguish it from most of its peers: a “competency-based” approach to assessing students’ work, and its nationally accredited Teachers College.

    From the outset, courses and curriculums are developed with input from senior faculty together with an “outside council” including practitioners from a given field. Course material is then assessed to a level that’s considered “highly competent,” Partridge said, by the developers of the course, effectively creating a standardized set of requirements in lieu of more independent assessments by individual instructors. Upon completion, employers can theoretically be assured that students are proficient in a specific set of skills and knowledge.

    The university doesn’t give letter grades, and it allows students to take as long as they want in their course of study — which could be a mixed blessing, since they pay a flat fee (a bit under $3,000) every six months. All in all, Partridge said, “we are as different from the other online schools as they are from” traditional higher education. It’s a model not suited to everyone, he acknowledged, but especially tailored to students with a certain “impatience” or “determination” to complete in a timely manner.

    Another significant draw for WGU is the Teachers College, which, unlike any other such online program, places graduates at schools in virtually every state. Now, at least half of WGU’s students are enrolled in the teaching program. “[W]e offer a path to initial teacher licensure for individuals all around the country who want to become teachers, often later in life where returning to a traditional school of education ... is just not that convenient,” Partridge said.

    The university projects further growth in the coming years, with a predicted enrollment of up to 15,000 in the foreseeable future. “We really see the future as one in which the people of the United States and the adult audience need to have very good-quality and affordable options to either get a first bachelor’s degree or continue to pursue [a] master’s degree, in particular change careers and pursue dreams that will in the long run strengthen our economy, the citizenry and make our country, our states, etc., stronger,” said Partridge.


    From the Scout Report on February 23, 2006 

    LearningSpace --- http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

    Looking back to the late nineteenth century, one can find traces of the earliest distance education learning programs at the university level at places like the University of Chicago and Columbia University. It would take six decades before an entire university was created specifically as a distance teaching institution, and it would happen on the other side of the Atlantic. This school is Open University in Britain, and they have continued this mission for over four decades. Recently, they created the LearningSpace website which contains dozens of different online courses, categorized into disciplines such as education, modern languages, and history. While visitors don’t have to register to use the materials, they may find it useful.

    Registering will allow visitors to discuss the materials in a forum, write journal entries, and complete different quizzes.


    More historically black colleges — especially in the public sector — are offering distance education.
    A new survey released by the Digital Learning Lab of Howard University reports that 40 of 103 historically black colleges and universities are offering distance courses this year, up from 29 a year ago. While the percentages of colleges offering distance education vary by sector, they tend to be well over half, according to data from the Sloan Consortium. Nonetheless, the Howard survey suggests significant progress for black colleges in entering the distance ed arena.
    Scott Jaschik, "Black Colleges Expand Distance Learning," Inside Higher Ed, March 1, 2007 --- http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/01/hbcu


    Distance Learning Today will be a quarterly supplement to USA Today newspaper
    Dr. John G. Flores, CEO of The United States Distance Learning Association, today announced his organization's sponsorship of "Distance Learning Today," a quarterly supplement in USA TODAY. "Distance learning is transforming the American educational landscape, through on-line technology, video conferencing systems, satellite delivery and other media," Flores said. "We expect this supplement to be an invaluable guide for millions of present and potential distance learners as well as a means for our member institutions and corporate sponsors to reach them." The first supplement will appear in September and is expected to exceed twenty pages. Editorial will include features on the distance learning revolution, financing a distance education, increasing acceptance of distance learning degrees among employers, technology requirements and, importantly, how to evaluate the quality of a distance learning offering. "Today, there are thousands of institutions offering degrees and certifications for distance learners," Flores said. "It's timely to provide the public with a reliable information resource concerning this dynamic educational alternative." Formed in 1987, the United States Distance Learning Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs of the distance learning community by promoting the development and application of distance learning for education and training and by providing advocacy, information, networking and distance learning opportunities.
    PRWeb, June 9, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb396750.htm

    Jensen Comment
    PRWeb is a tremendous (overwhelming?) source of news in a huge set of categories --- http://www.prweb.com/newsbycategory/index.htm


    Distance Education (Online) Cheating

    Woman pleads guilty to charges that she paid someone to take online courses for her son, and to transfer the credits to Georgetown University, where he was a student.---
    https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/california-woman-charged-and-agrees-plead-guilty-college-admissions-case

    BOSTON – A California woman will plead guilty to charges filed today alleging that she paid $9,000 to have an individual take online classes for her son, in order to earn credits to facilitate his graduation from Georgetown University.

    Karen Littlefair, 57, of Newport Beach, Calif., will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. A plea hearing has not yet been scheduled by the Court. According to the terms of the plea agreement, the government will recommend a sentence of four months in prison, one year of supervised release, a fine of $9,500 and restitution.

    According to the charging documents, Littlefair agreed with William “Rick” Singer and others to pay approximately $9,000 to have an employee of Singer’s for-profit college counseling business, The Edge College & Career Network (“The Key”), take online classes in place of Littlefair’s son and submit those fraudulently earned credits to Georgetown to facilitate his graduation. The Key employee allegedly completed four classes for Littlefair’s son at Georgetown and elsewhere, and in exchange, Littlefair paid Singer’s company approximately $9,000. Littlefair’s son graduated from Georgetown, using the credits earned by the Key employee, in May 2018.  

    Singer previously pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government’s investigation.

    Case information, including the status of each defendant, charging documents and plea agreements are available here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme.

    The charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, up to three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

    United States Attorney Andrew E. Lelling; Joseph R. Bonavolonta, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division; and Kristina O’Connell, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigations in Boston, made the announcement today. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Eric S. Rosen, Justin D. O’Connell, Leslie A. Wright and Kristen A. Kearney of Lelling’s Securities and Financial Fraud Unit are prosecuting the cases.

    The details contained in the court documents are allegations and the remaining defendants are presumed not guilty unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    It's not clear what what the punishments will be for those who took the classes for money. This problem is not unique to distance education. When my daughter was at the University of Texas she learned that some students with fake IDs were taking large lecture courses on campus for money. The problem with distance education is that it becomes easier to hire out course taking. For example, there's a case where the wife of a football player took her husband's online courses so he could concentrate more on preparation for a NFL career. It may well be that he was too dumb to take the courses as well.

    Ohio State Accuses 85 Students of Cheating on Online Tests ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ohio-state-u-accuses-85-students-of-cheating-on-online-tests/112000?elqTrackId=592e2bcfef3742f0a01015fb1aa9fc87&elq=657ef66861154a85908c76c54666a981&elqaid=9366&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3288

    Claims of Cheating in Online Courses at Iowa ---
    https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/23/claims-cheating-online-courses-iowa?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3bae57df2e-DNU20160523&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3bae57df2e-197565045

    Respondus and other online tools for monitoring and exam cheating monitoring ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus

    Bob Jensen's threads on online cheating ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#OnlineCheating

     


    This is a program that could affect virtually every college and university.

    "Obama's Great Course Giveaway: Clues to a grand online-education plan emerge from the college and the experts that may have inspired it," by Marc Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2009 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Obamas-Great-Course-Giveaway/47530/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Logan Stark's classmates scramble for courses with professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the San Luis Obispo campus, he didn't need to sweat getting the best.

    It was practically guaranteed.

    That's because much of the class was built by national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It's a hybrid of online and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and software engineers.

    By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they need the most help.

    Mr. Stark's class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material—both the content and the software that delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

    The administration has released only vague statements about the plan. But Chronicle interviews with a senior Education Department official and others whose ideas have informed the emerging policy suggest how colleges might use these courses—and how Carnegie Mellon, repeatedly cited by officials, might offer a model for the effort.

    The government would pay to develop these "open" classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project's free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about $10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

    The result is a "huge population of students," he says, "that aren't being served."

    Experts see huge potential in serving those students with open courses: To help them explore careers. To give them confidence before returning to school. To improve retention once they get there. To lower the cost of a degree. To spur alternative ways of awarding credit. And to guarantee standards "whether you are in a more impoverished, underserved, or remote area of the country," says Curtis J. Bonk, a professor in the department of instructional- systems technology at Indiana University and author of the new book The World is Open.

    The plan coincides with Mr. Obama's goal for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But Marshall S. (Mike) Smith, senior counselor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, feels that won't happen simply by moving middle- and high-school students further through the system. Higher education also needs to rope in older students who never went beyond high school, or who abandoned college before finishing a degree, he says.

    "The opportunity to attract those people would be greatly enhanced by having a bunch of really good courses that they could work on in the evenings," Mr. Smith says, so they could "try out the idea of getting course credit for them—and get hooked."

    Mr. Smith, a veteran of the Clinton- and Carter-era Education Departments, is an open-education evangelist who recently returned to government after serving as education-program director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The California foundation has funneled more than $80-million into making digital resources like textbooks and lecture videos freely available on the Web.

    Mr. Smith has bigger ambitions still. In January he published an article in the journal Science laying out the dream of "a 21st-century library" composed of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students. The courses would be laced with multimedia features and personalized with feedback from computer programs that track student performance. The language coming out of the White House and Education Department today echoes some of the concepts in Mr. Smith's article.

    But his article also stacked up the challenges and mixed incentives that the controversial free-knowledge movement must surmount.

    Working against open access are "financial concerns, authors' fears of exposing mediocre content, the weight of traditional practice, and legitimate reasons for protecting intellectual property," he wrote. "Some publishers and professional academic organizations believe they have a lot to lose" as open educational resources grow more popular.

    In an hourlong interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Smith focused on many of the details facing the administration as it tries to create an open-course clearinghouse and navigates delicate, still-unanswered questions about what role the government would play in financing and disseminating its contents.

    One big question: Who would get the money?

    A possible answer, which is not specified in a House of Representatives bill that includes the online proposal, could be an outside laboratory-and-research organization that would receive a block of government money and parcel it out into competitive grants for course development, and then make sure the courses were updated. A community college could house the project, Mr. Smith says. So could a consortium of community colleges, a university, or a nongovernmental group.

    The courses created would reach students through multiple devices, such as computers, handheld devices, and e-book readers like Kindles. They would be modular, and therefore easily updated. Both nonprofit and for-profit entities could compete for the money to build them.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on free course materials, videos, and entire courses are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


    Jensen Caution
    Don't treat distance education courses and MOOC courses as synonyms. President Obama is suggesting priority for distance education courses and online degree programs that are neither free nor "massive" in size. Smaller distance education courses can have intense communications between students and an instructor plus intense communications between students in a course (including team projects). Grading in these distance education courses is very similar to onsite course grading.

    MOOCs present an entire new dimension to student communications and grading. I don't think President Obama was thinking in terms of MOOCs in his latest proposal. However, MOOCs are on the horizon, especially for very specialized courses that colleges cannot afford to teach on campus. Credit in such courses may be given on the basis of competency testing.

     

    "Obama Proposals for Colleges Highlight Online Courses," by Megan O'Neil, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 22, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/obama-proposals-for-colleges-highlight-online-courses/45595?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Developing online classes and other nontraditional teaching approaches could earn colleges money under new federal financing priorities proposed on Thursday by President Obama.

    More colleges should be encouraged “to embrace innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st-century economy and maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank,” the president said in a speech at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York.

    The financial rewards for such innovation would be part of a larger retooling of financing priorities, Mr. Obama said. Under his proposal, the Department of Education would have two years to create a college-rating system to help students and their parents determine the value of an institution. Criteria would include graduation rates, graduates’ competitiveness in the work force, and their debt load upon graduation, among others.

    As one example of innovation in online learning that meets students’ needs, Mr. Obama cited an online master’s program in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The program will make its debut in January and cost a fraction of a traditional on-campus degree.

    Continued in article

    A Ranking of Online MBA  Programs from AACSB-accredited universities (there are no such online accounting doctoral programs) ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#MBA

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

    "Obama Vows Action on College Costs, but Will It Work?" by Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2013 --- |
    http://chronicle.com/article/Obama-Vows-Action-on-College/141203/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

    In a speech at Knox College last month, President Obama said he would "shake up higher education" with an "aggressive strategy" aimed at making college more affordable.

    On Thursday, the president embarks on a two-state, three-campus tour where he'll lay out what he has in mind. In a letter sent to his supporters this week, he promises "real reforms that would bring lasting change."

    "Just tinkering around the edges won't be enough," he says in the letter. "To create a better bargain for the middle class, we have to fundamentally rethink about how higher education is paid for in this country."

    The plan, he continues, "won't be popular with everyone—including some who've made higher education their business—but it's past time that more of our colleges work better for the students they exist to serve."

    But it's hard to see how the president will tackle two of the root causes of tuition growth: labor costs and state budget cuts. Despite productivity gains, and a move toward self-guided, "competency-based" learning, higher-education remains an industry that's highly dependent on skilled labor. At the same time, many states have slashed their spending on higher-education, forcing public colleges to raise tuition to cover costs.

    Taking Colleges to Task

    Over the past year-and-a-half, Mr. Obama has become a frequent critic of colleges, taking them to task over rising tuition and warning that the government won't continue to pour money into an "undisciplined system." He has threatened to withhold some federal aid from colleges that fail to hold down tuition growth, and has proposed grants for states and colleges that adopt cost-saving measures.

    So far, those ideas have fallen flat, largely because of federal budget constraints. The president has had better luck increasing aid to students and making debt more manageable, through expanded income-based repayment options and lower interest rates on student loans.

    His administration has also made information about college costs and student debt more transparent, through the use of an online College Scorecard and a standardized financial-aid award letter, or "shopping sheet."

    This week's college tour is the latest in a string of campaign-style events the White House is using to promote its economic policies in the run-up to debates in Congress over the federal budget and the debt ceiling. It includes stops on Thursday and Friday at two State University of New York campuses—the University at Buffalo and Binghamton University—and at Lackawanna College, in Scranton, Pa.

    Details of the president's proposals aren't yet available, but some observers expect Mr. Obama to recycle a plan that would tie some money from the campus-based aid programs to efforts to rein in tuition growth, and to repeat his call for a "Race to the Top"-style grant program for colleges and states that take steps to control costs.

    He might also propose an expansion of his signature Pay-as-You-Earn student-loan repayment plan, or declare use of the financial-aid shopping sheet mandatory for all colleges.

    To address state budget cuts, he might propose requiring states to sustain their spending on higher education to receive certain federal funds. But past maintenance-of-effort provisions haven't proven particularly effective, and some members of Congress oppose their expansion. Tackling labor costs would be even trickier.

    "When it comes down to it, there's not all that much the president can do, besides using the bully pulpit" to exhort states and colleges to do more, said Daniel T. Madzelan, a longtime Education Department official who retired last year. "It just comes down to the price of labor."

    From Benefactor to Critic

    During his first years in office, President Obama focused on expanding student aid, pushing for increases in the maximum Pell Grant and the creation of a more generous tuition tax credit. Those changes helped make college more affordable for current students, but they didn't do anything to slow tuition growth, and skeptics say they may have even fueled it.

    In 2010, the administration turned its attention to for-profit colleges, proposing to cut off federal student aid to institutions where borrowers struggle to repay their debt. The resulting "gainful employment" regulation was overturned by the courts, and the Education Department is opening negotiations to rewrite the rule this fall.

    But it was not until 2012, in his State of the Union address, that the president began to apply pressure to all of higher education, putting colleges "on notice" that his administration would not continue to subsidize "skyrocketing tuition."

    "If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down," he said.

    Three days later, in a speech at the University of Michigan, he issued a "blueprint for keeping college affordable," repeating proposals to shift more money from the campus-based student-aid programs to colleges that "do their fair share to keep tuition affordable," and create new incentive programs for colleges and states. The plan also included a call for the College Scorecard that would provide families with "essential information" for choosing a college, including data on institutions' costs, graduation rates, and the potential earnings of graduates.

    He returned to those themes in his 2013 State of the Union address, calling on colleges to "do their part to keep costs down," and urging Congress to consider "affordability and value" when awarding federal aid. In a policy plan that accompanied the speech, he suggested incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system or establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation "based on performance and results."

    Sidestepping Congress

    Getting Congress to agree to any of those ideas will be difficult, given budget realities and competing priorities—not to mention the partisan gridlock currently gripping Washington. Recognizing this, Mr. Obama has vowed to use the powers of his office to get things done.

    Continued in article

    It's troubling enough to study one university's financial reports. It's a nightmare to compare universities.
    "So You Want to Examine Your University's Financial Reports?"  by Charles Schwartz, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Examine-Your/130672/

    Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of Professors ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CostAccounting

    "Treating Higher Ed's 'Cost Disease' With Supersize Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Treating-Higher-Eds-Cost/130934/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    "A Policy Wonk Brings Data on College Costs to the Table," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2012 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/A-College-Cost-Policy-Wonk/130662/

    "U. of Texas Regents Publish Data on Faculty 'Productivity'," Inside Higher Ed, May 6, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/06/qt#259013

    The University of Texas System released data Thursday designed to help the system's regents gauge the productivity of faculty members, The Texas Tribune reported -- one part of an accountability push that has concerned many professors and troubled some lawmakers. The massive spreadsheet -- which system officials insisted was raw and unverified, and should be treated as a draft -- contained numerous data points about all individual professors, including their total compensation, tenure status, total course enrollments, and information about research awards. A similar effort this spring at Texas A&M University -- also undertaken in response to pressure from Gov. Rick Perry -- created a stir there.

    "Release of Faculty-Productivity Data Roils U. of Texas," by Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Release-of/127439/

    Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of Professors (including discussions of the Texas A&M cost allocation study) --- See below

     

     

     


    Update on Online K-12 Schools

    Brigham Young University (BYU) launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with
    six Creative Commons licensed courses

    Before reading this module you may want to read about the Creative Commons ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
    Creative Commons Home Page --- http://creativecommons.org/

    From Canada's Creative Commons --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15108

    Jane Park, June 10th, 2009

    It appears that David Wiley’s move to Brigham Young University has already resulted in progress towards opening the university’s content. Long-time pioneer and academic of open education, Wiley reports that BYU’s Independent Study has launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with six Creative Commons licensed courses under CC BY NC-SA.

    “The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed).”

    The most interesting thing about this pilot is that it “is part of a dissertation study to measure the impact of OCW courses on paying enrollments.” So far, “the results are very positive - 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses… if this pattern remains stable, then BYU IS OCW will be financially self-sustainable with the ability to add and update a number of new courses to the collection each year, indefinitely, should they so choose.” Echoing Wiley, that is an exciting prospect. We look forward to seeing these results develop, in addition to other inquiries into the sustainability of general OER initiatives in the future…

    BYU Independent Study --- http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/courses/ocw/
    Also see http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/aboutus/index.cfm

     

    University Courses   High School Courses

    You may view, use, and reuse all materials in the Open CourseWare courses. Please note that Open CourseWare courses do not provide the opportunity to submit assessments for credit, interact with faculty, or receive credit or a certificate upon completion. BYU Independent Study provides these courses as a community service under a Creative Commons license. The course materials are freely available for you to use, download, modify and share as long as you do not sell the products you derive from them. If you alter, transform, or build upon the courses, you may distribute your work only using licensing terms the same as or similar to the Creative Commons Atribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

    University Courses  (includes art, accounting, chemistry, etc.)
    High School Courses
    Middle School Courses
    Personal Enrichment Courses
    Free Courses (includes such things as dating and romance)

    Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing (learning materials, videos, lectures, and entire courses) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives are at
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

     


    June 22, 2006 module from the newsletter of T.H.E. Journal

    Pennsylvania Unveils Latest Statewide Public Cyber School

    Families across Pennsylvania were given a new option in public education with the announcement of the Agora Cyber Charter School. This public cyber school, which will serve students in grades K-10, is currently accepting enrollments from new students and hiring certified teachers from across the state. The Agora Cyber Charter School is the only public cyber school in Pennsylvania using both the curriculum and school management services by K12 Inc. As a K12 certified school, Agora Cyber Charter School's teachers, students, and parents will have access to not only the complete K12 learning program, but also to K12's team of education, curriculum, and school management experts. Agora Cyber Charter School teachers will have the benefit of receiving K12's specialized teacher training designed to equip them to meet every challenge and become excellent cyber school educators. Additionally, students who enroll in Agora receive a computer system on loan from the school, access to the K12 Online School, lessons, assessments, books, materials, planning and progress tools, Internet reimbursement, access to the school community, and much more.

    Jensen Comment
    Some online alternatives in other states are summarized at http://www.evanscraig.com/resources/general.htm


    Bob Jensen's threads on free math tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

    Learnthat.com: Free web training for computer courses ---
    http://www.learnthat.com/courses/computer/default.asp


    Bob Jensen's threads on free textbooks and other learning materials in various fields, including literature, economics, history, statistics, and  accounting --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    Bob Jensen's writing helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries


    Stanford University's Online High School for Gifted Students
    Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth will launch a three-year, fully accredited, diploma-granting high school for gifted students, thanks to a $3.3 million gift from the Malone Family Foundation. The program will begin accepting student applications this spring and is scheduled to begin classes in the fall.
    "Stanford to offer first online high school for gifted students," Stanford Report, April 14, 2006 ---
    http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/april19/ohs-041906.html

    Stanford's Online High School for Gifted Students
    Stanford University is opening an online high school for gifted students this fall, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. The high school will eventually enroll 300 students and Stanford officials hope to provide an educational alternative and to have a lead on recruiting some of the brightest students for college.
    Inside Higher Ed, August 15, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/15/qt
    Jensen Comment
    Stanford also manages an onsite high school in East Palo Alto.
    I had the following Tidbit in April 2006:


    A Remedial High School Alternative

    PLATO Learning Inc. ( http://www.plato.com ) has announced the release of PLATO Courses, which are semester-long online courses that provide schools and districts a way to deliver rigorous credit-recovery solutions, alternatives for students not succeeding in the traditional environment, credit-granting distance learning programs, and home school curricula. The PLATO Courses cover math, science, and social studies, and are aligned to national standards in each subject area. Each course provides a comprehensive course curriculum, including exemptive assessments, instructional content, cumulative final exams, and state standards coverage reports. To promote the successful use of PLATO Courses, PLATO Education Consultants provide both on-site and electronic professional development sessions. Each PLATO Course also includes teacher support materials in the form of a Teacher's Guide and an Implementation Guide. Pricing varies.


    Education Atlas --- http://www.educationatlas.com/


    A fee-based window to 75,000 providers of over 700,000 scholarships --- http://www.scholarshipexperts.com/ 

    Revised Student Loan Site from the U.S. Department of Education Gets a Lot of Hits (50% increase in the first month of operation) --- http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/ 

    Bob Jensen's College Finder --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#EducationInGeneral 

    Online Distance Education Training and Education Courses and Programs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

    Google Links to Colleges and Universities --- http://www.google.com/options/universities.html 

    Search engine for education sites --- http://www.searchedu.com/  

     


    US News and World Reports offers some pretty good startup advice at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/stepbystep/brief/step1_brief.php

    Sets of rankings are given at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

    A school comparison service is offered at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/tools/brief/coworks_brief.php  


    Free From the University of Utah
    Learn Genetics Online (for teachers and students) --- http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/

    The Genetic Science Learning Center is an outreach education program located in the midst of bioscience research at the University of Utah. Our mission is to help people understand how genetics affects their lives and society.

    To achieve this mission, we present education offerings for various audiences, including:

    • This website, which delivers interactive and print-based resources, free of charge, to Internet users worldwide. The website has two main components:

       
      • Information and activities: These address standards for science education, and are accessible to all users from the homepage.
      • Teacher Resources and Lesson Plans: These are accessible from the top right of any page. They include PDF-based Print-and-Go™ classroom activities and teacher guides for all materials.
    • Professional development programs that update K-12 teachers' expertise in bioscience topics. See our list of upcoming courses and workshops, accessible through the Teacher Resources and Lesson Plans section of this site.
    • Public education programs that highlight topics of current interest and research underway at the University of Utah.

    Our educational resources provide accurate and unbiased information about topics in genetics and bioscience. Designed for non-research audiences, our materials are interactive and jargon-free, target multiple learning styles, and often convey concepts through visual elements. Our newest materials are being developed with our Exploragraphic™ design methodology.

    Some topics in genetics and bioscience research are controversial. The Learning Center does not take sides in politically or ethically charged topics. Rather, our goal is to provide comprehensive information that promotes a lively discussion of these topics, so that individuals can arrive at their own informed decisions.


    Open2 portal to learning
    I think Open University in the U.K. is the largest university in the world. It has extensive onsite and online courses.  BBC News and Open University combined forces to create the Open2 portal to learning and news --- http://www.open2.net/
    There are also various forums.


    Long-standing international studies programs and international student exchange programs that typically involve onsite study on a foreign campus.  Most all colleges and universities have some type of international studies program.

    College education distance education courses for credit, including online programs that cater to international students.  Many examples can be found at the following sites.


    Question
    Will Wikipedia evolve into a successful open sharing Wikiversity?

    Answer
    See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity

    See the proposal at the proposed projects page which was rushed into existence because of calls to delete the wikiversity pages from Wikibooks. The current location of Wikiversity is Wikibooks:Wikiversity.

    This page is a formal project proposal for the Wikiversity project. Please add ideas and thoughts to Talk:Wikiversity. For thoughts/proposals on how to develop Wikiversity, see Moving Wikiversity forward.

     


    There are many distance education courses in the U.K.

    The Guardian has a really interesting education search page for U.K. students.  It first lets you choose from hundreds of distance education course topics.  Then you choose what type of credential/degree your are seeking and what college you want to pick --- http://www.ecctisclearing.co.uk/

    When I searched for "accounting" and "degree" courses on August 27, 2005, I found links to 820 courses in many colleges and universities.


    Canada's Open University
    Athabasca University, in Edmonton, Alberta,
    said Monday (August 15, 2005) that it had become the first Canadian university to become accredited by a regional agency in the United States. The distance education institution, which bills itself as “Canada’s Open University,” said it had been granted accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
    Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/16/qt


    Welcome to virtual classrooms in India (forwarded by Jagdish Gangolli)
    Education in colleges and schools across India's villages and urban areas will not be the same from July 28 onwards after the launch of a revolutionary education service by President A P J Abdul Kalam on Thursday. Install a one-and-a-half feet long, small dish antennae in your home, school, neighbourhood community hall, college or university and you can attend world-class classroom lectures, whether you are a primary student or a college graduate. Such lectures delivered at any remote learning centre or the Indian Institutes of Technology are disseminated to your home. Nearly a year after the Indian Space Research Organisation launched the world's first dedicated education satellite, Edusat, virtual classrooms have become a reality in the country. President Kalam opened the country's first phase of Edusat's operations on Thursday by connecting 15 teacher training centres and 50 government schools through satellite in Kerala.
    "A revolution in India education," redoff.com, July 28, 2005 --- http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/jul/28gi.htm


    Teachers Without Borders  --- http://www.teacherswithoutborders.org/


    From Syllabus News on April 27, 2004

    Online University Consortium Flaks Traditional Degree Programs

    A consortium of traditional universities has produced a report that – not surprisingly – indicates traditional universities are the preferred choice for online education and degree programs over for-profit providers. The Online University Consortium, whose members include Penn State, the University of Oregon, Ohio University, and the University of Southern California, said a survey it conducted showed companies prefer candidates with degrees from traditional universities two-to-one over for-profit providers. OIC also pointed to market research by Eduventures, a for-profit educational research firm, that concluded that, “as the market matures, brand strength will increasingly favor non-profit institutions.”

    According to the report, traditional universities command significant brand equity, and will threaten market share of for-profit businesses, because students identify them as a familiar provider from which they will choose an online program for traditional reasons. “For-profit providers enjoyed an initial surge in popularity partly because of convenience," notes Greg Eisenbarth, the Consortium's Executive Director. "However, the market has shifted dramatically with the country's most respected universities now offering quality online degree programs for greater choice and flexibility."

    The studies can be found at: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=6743 

    Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


    June 28, 2005
    Peru State College, in Nebraska, is
    now offering six of its bachelor’s degree programs and one master’s degree online --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/28/new


    "University of Illinois at Springfield Wants to 'Mirror' All Classroom Programs Online," by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 2004, Page A32.

    Officials of the University of Illinois at Springfield say they are working toward creating an online "mirror campus" that will offer all 39 of the degree programs that are available in the university's classrooms. The plan is one of the most ambitious online projects undertaken by a mainstream institution.

    The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave the university a $1.21-million grant last month to pay for converting courses into online formats and for hiring more faculty members to teach them. The university is also spending at least $400,000 on the current phase of the project.

    By fall the Springfield campus will have eight degree programs online, made up of about 175 online courses. The grant money will pay for eight more online degrees, to be available in three years. Officials hope to have all 39 degrees available online in about 10 years.

    EXPANDING ACCESS

    The Springfield campus is not, however, becoming a virtual institution. All on-campus courses and degrees will remain available. The mirror campus is meant to give students the option of taking any course either by going to a classroom or by lounging on a futon with a laptop.

    "The key word here is access," says Burks Oakley II, the university's associate vice president for academic affairs. "One of the key things about this grant is keeping online in the mainstream."

    While there are many virtual institutions in the United States, there appear to be no mainstream institutions that have tried to put all of their degree programs online. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has promised to put teaching materials from all its courses online but not the courses themselves, meaning that outsiders may see the materials but not take the courses for credit.

    The University of Illinois at Springfield is a midsize institution, with about 4,500 students. It has 20 undergraduate degree programs, 18 master's programs, and a doctoral program. Comparatively few freshmen and sophomores attend the institution, as most students enroll for upper-division and graduate courses.


    Education Fraud and Gray Zone Warnings About Questionable Online Program --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#DiplomaMill


    Important Distance Education Site
    The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.aln.org/
    The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.


    From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on March 9, 2007

    Toyota University Opens Admissions to Outsiders
    by Mike Spector and Gina Chon
    Mar 05, 2007
    Page: B1
    Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
     

    TOPICS: Accounting, International Accounting, Inventory Systems, Just-In-Time Inventory Management, Kaizen costing, Managerial Accounting, Operational Control Systems, Productivity, Quality Costs

    SUMMARY: Toyota Motor Corp. operates a training center in Gardena, CA, that it began in 1998 to "train the company's own employees in it distinctive business philosophy and 'lean-thinking' approach to producing cars....The school occupies the Toyota Plaza building...' and is run by Mike Morrison, who is referred to as "the dean," and Will Decker, "assistant dean." Toyota is not offering training sessions to outsiders now because of demand for its services by the companies' own workers, but has done so in the past. The article describes Toyota's lean-thinking management and production philosophies and describes several cases of outsiders using its services. One story covered in the article describes how the LA Police Department participated in the training seminar to improve the process for booking inmates. A result of the LAPD participation also was the benefit received when staff police realized their suggestions were taken to heart by management.

    QUESTIONS: 
    1.) Why has Toyota established its "Toyota University"? Would you call it a university or a training center? What is the difference between these two?

    2.) Why has Toyota offered its management and process training to outsiders? Why is it not doing so now? What are the strategic advantages and disadvantages to offering corporate training to outsiders?

    3.) What production innovations has Toyota developed that form the central philosophy for the training discussed in the article? List the terms for the innovations and define them.

    4.) What hands on learning strategy is used to emphasize the problems with defects that can arise in traditional production planning systems? Why do you think this technique might be more effective than, say, having an instructor merely list the pros and cons of particular production systems?

    5.) Why is it possible for good production process techniques in one industry to benefit very different industries, even government services such as the police force? How does listening and learning about very different circumstances from one's own industry, produce part of this benefit?

    6.) What evidence in the article speaks to the benefits of management listening to staff suggestions?

     


    Northeastern University's Online MBA Program --- http://www.onlinemba.neu.edu/bwem/


    Bob Jensen's reply (November 16, 2007) to a CPA from Pennsylvania who inquired about online MBA programs

    Many online MBA programs are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#Education
    Obviously, some are more prestigious/reputable than others.

    Your alma mater (Penn State) has very reputable business and accounting studies, including a fully-online MBA program --- http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/iMBA.shtml?cid=0406_GOOJS437_0606
    This program is designed for applicants with business experience, but it appears you should qualify on this criterion since you are a CPA and are professionally employed in the real world.

    Penn State’s online MBA program consists of 20 courses plus a two-week residency requirement. Given the scheduling constraints, it will probably take two years of part-time (but intensive) study. The online curriculum is at http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/iMBA_curriculum.shtml 

    Online masters of accounting and taxation programs are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#MastersOfAccounting
    However, I can’t see the cost benefit of these programs given that you are already a CPA. An exception might be made if you had a problem with reciprocity when relocating into a 150-credit licensing state.

    You might also consider getting a doctorial degree in accounting or finance. However, I don’t think there are any respectable doctoral programs in these areas that do not require 2-3 years of full-time residency. However, these programs are generally free plus they provide added living allowances. Most require the equivalency of four-years of full-time study, part of which might be online and part of which includes the thesis year that probably does not require residency. There are other factors to consider --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms 

    The good news is that there is a dire shortage of accounting and finance doctoral students. Most graduates currently expect to earn over $150,000 starting salaries (including summers).

    Bob Jensen

     


    "CPEs Can Lead to MBA," AccountingWeb, August 19, 2005 ---
    http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101218

    The Ohio Society of Certified Public Accountants (OSCPA) has partnered with Franklin University in Columbus, Ohio, to allow CPAs to apply CPE credit toward the Franklin MBA. The Applied Leadership Focus allows CPAs to apply qualifying CPEs towards as many as eight credit hours in the Franklin MBA Program. CPAs applying CPEs toward their MBA can obtain their degree in as little as 14 months, reducing the usual 17-month duration by up to three months. Four credit hours are the equivalent of 120 CPEs.

    “CPAs are committed to lifelong learning and fulfill a stringent continuing education commitment requiring 120 hours every three years,” explains J. Clarke Price, CAE, President and CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs in announcing the partnership. “Through this unique partnership with Franklin University, Ohio Society members can apply their CPE credits toward an MBA. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to create value-added benefits fo rour members.”

    CEO Leaderboard reports that the Franklin MBA is the largest MBA Program in central Ohio. The Franklin MBA is unique in the choices and flexibility it offers. Students can select from two academic formats: the new Life Cycle format and the traditional Discipline-Based format. Further tailoring is available through seven Focus Areas, including the accounting-focused Financial Leadership Focus. Students can also choose to complete their MBA online or on-site. Finally, Franklin’s rolling admission and flexible start dates all students to begin the MBA Program at multiple pints during the year.

    Continued in article

     

     


    Banks and Credit Derivatives
    From Jim Mahar's blog on August 17, 2005

    Minton, Stulz, and Williamson have an


    Health Care (Healtcare) Education Online

    YourLearning.com --- http://www.yourlearning.com/churchillreport.html 

    The report may be beneficial for individuals who are involved in online learning developments in healthcare education in the USA and other countries. The institutions visited during the fellowship may find it useful to read own and others case studies, to compare and reflect on the developments and implications on teaching and learning in healthcare. The report may be useful for other institutions in the USA, to add to the picture of diversity in online learning developments within USA. .


    American InterContinental University (AIU) Online--- http://www.aiuniv.edu/ 

    "Al Gore Keynotes AIU Online Graduation Ceremony," Lycos, March 5, 2004 --- http://snipurl.com/LycosGore 

    Millions of future students will owe a debt of gratitude to those who today are blazing a new trail in online education, said former United States Vice President Al Gore during the online commencement ceremony of American InterContinental University (AIU) Online, one of the nation's fastest-growing universities.

    "Even those of us who have promoted and believe in this new technology stand in awe of what you have done," Mr. Gore told the AIU Online graduates and their families and friends during the Web-based event held Saturday, February 28. "You are the ones who have supplied the hard work, the stamina, the dedication, the endurance and the will to succeed that we recognize today."

    In addition to Mr. Gore's remarks, a highlight of the online graduation ceremony was the reading of the names of recipients of bachelor's degrees and master's degrees in the curricular programs of Information Technology, Business Administration, Visual Communication and Education. Also announced were the names of students who had earned Honors designations.

    Mr. Gore said that with the information revolution replacing the industrial revolution, education is far more important today than at any other point in human history. "America's gross domestic product has tripled in value over the last half-century while the gross tonnage of everything we make and sell actually has declined slightly. That's because materials like steel and wood and rubber and plastic are being replaced by ingenuity, knowledge and the ability to use information in more creative ways.

    "The degree you receive today certifies that you have obtained the knowledge and skills to deal with information more effectively than those who lack this credential and who have not gone through the experience that you have just successfully navigated," Mr. Gore said. "But the value of your online education extends beyond opening up new career opportunities for you. It also will enrich life for you and your families."

    American InterContinental University is a wholly owned subsidiary of Career Education Corporation (NASDAQ: CECO). CEC operates 78 campuses in the U.S., Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates and had approximately 83,200 students as of January 31, 2004. AIU Online is the Web-based virtual campus of American InterContinental University, an international university with onsite campuses located in Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles, CA; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Houston, TX; London, England; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. American InterContinental University has been educating students for more than 30 years and is regionally accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.


    Wal-Mart University Tuition Discounts

    From Syllabus News on January 13, 2004

    Wal-Mart Signs Capella U. as ‘Preferred’ Online Ed Provider

    Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has signed a deal for Capella University to become the online education provider for its new My Education Connection program. Under the offering, Walmart customers can receive tuition discounts for online degree programs from Capella, which has 9,000 students and offers degrees and certificates to working adults in business, technology, education, human services, and psychology.

    You can read the following at http://www.capella.edu/GATEWAY.ASPX 

    Capella University Overview In Brief Capella University is an accredited online university that offers courses, certificates and degree programs, including MBA, doctorate, graduate and undergraduate degrees in business, technology, education, human services and psychology. Founded in 1993, Capella is the world's fastest-growing e-learning institution.

    A pioneer in online learning, Capella University is a results-oriented educational institution geared specifically to the goals and lifestyles of adult learners. Capella redefines the higher education experience for non-traditional learners, thereby offering an accessible and flexible education program that allows technology to remove the barriers of time and place.

    Accreditation Capella University is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), the same body that accredits Big Ten universities. The NCA has recognized Capella for "its pioneering role in translating an adult learning model into action." Capella is the first and only online academic institution to participate in the NCA of Colleges and Schools Academic Quality Improvement Project.

    Enrollment Capella University's student body currently comprises students from all 50 states and more than 40 countries. The majority of Capella's learners are working adults who often are balancing family, work and educational achievement. 

    More than 600 corporations provide tuition reimbursement to employees enrolled at Capella University. Check the Capella Learner Organizations list for your employer's name.

    Additionally, some Organizations have signed Corporate Alliance Partnership Agreements with Capella University. Employees of our Corporate Partners receive several additional benefits such as tuition discounts, streamlined enrollment process and cohort learning opportunities. Our programs are designed to have an immediate impact on the individual learner and the organization, positioning both for greater success.

    Capella is also a leading provider of courses in all branches of the U.S. Military --- http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/military_index.aspx 

    Corporate partnerships and alliances are listed at http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/corp/index.aspx 


    Some Winners and Losers to Date in Online MBA Programs

    "Universities Exporting M.B.A. Programs via the Internet," by Otto Pohl, The New York Times, March 26, 2003 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/nyregion/26MBA.html 

    LONDON — If Jeremy Hallett had his way, he would be sitting on a leafy university campus in the United States with plenty of time to contemplate the theories of business.

    Instead, he spends hectic lunch hours and long evenings in his office cubicle here, earning his M.B.A.

    "It's not a perfect world," he says with a shrug.

    Driven by the mantra of globalization and enabled by Internet-based technologies, M.B.A. programs in the United States are expanding rapidly into new markets overseas. The schools are looking for full-time, on-campus students seeking an international M.B.A. degree as well as part-timers like Mr. Hallett, who want to learn from afar while they continue working.

    Some of the universities are virtual, offering American degrees via the Internet. Mr. Hallett, a London-based senior vice president at Thomson Financial, is earning his M.B.A. from Cardean University, a newly created entity that exists only in cyberspace and markets a course package created by other institutions, including Stanford, Columbia and the University of Chicago.

    For Mr. Hallett, it was the availability of these prestigious schools on his computer screen that persuaded him to enroll. "These schools are recognized around the world," he said. "This degree will be truly international."

    The M.B.A. is an American creation. More than 100,000 students are enrolled in M.B.A. programs in the United States, and now tens of thousands more are enrolled overseas. Even the threat of global recession has not diminished its popularity, as unemployed workers sharpen their job skills.

    The biggest growth opportunity today for American online universities is inside the United States, but the schools are also looking to carry the prestige of American education overseas.

    "We're serving a global market," said Andrew Rosenfield, the founder and chairman of Cardean University. A third of Cardean's students are outside the United States, and he expects the proportion to grow significantly over time.

    "The United States certainly has no monopoly on running successful businesses," he says, adding that business students have to get their training somewhere.

    Traditional campus-based programs are looking to train them as well. Columbia formed a partnership with the London Business School, and the Stern School of Business at New York University recently inaugurated the Trium M.B.A. degree with the London School of Economics and H.E.C. Paris. Thunderbird, an M.B.A. program in Arizona that bills itself as the oldest international M.B.A. program in the world, established its own satellite campus in France last fall.

    These programs are designed to appeal to executives who want globally recognized names on their résumés.

    Lawrence Naested, an American Express executive in London, is enrolled in the Trium program, studying in places like Hong Kong, Paris, Brazil, and New York. "This is far and away superior to a traditional M.B.A. program," he says. "Mixing with different backgrounds and nationalities far outweighs spending a year in a book."

    Even schools that are very careful about diluting their brand names are looking for new growth opportunities. The Harvard Business School is keeping its campus-based education sacrosanct while offering noncredit Harvard-branded education to managers who can tap into a database for answers to specific questions. Instead of teaching what may be needed one day, they offer continuous assistance to managers confronted with real-life situations.

    "We're moving from just-in-case education to just-in-time education," says Jonathon D. Levy, vice-president of online learning solutions at Harvard Business School Publishing, a subsidiary of the Harvard Business School.

    This wealth of new business models centered on education has caught the eye of investors. "Very solid returns, solid profits, and good cash flow," says Richard Close, a vice president of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, summing up why he feels for-profit post-secondary education is a great investment opportunity. "Online, you can leverage that success even more."

    Most of the online universities are hoping to emulate the success of the University of Phoenix, whose growth is one of the most remarkable stories in for-profit academia. The university, with 140,000 students, has become the largest university in the country in terms of enrollment. About 60,000 of those students attend classes online and 4,000 are overseas. The stock of Apollo Group, which owns the university, has kept pace, rising 500 percent since January 2000.

    There have also been plenty of failures. Many online programs founded during the Internet boom did little but hemorrhage money. Pensare, an online M.B.A. company using Duke courses, has been scrapped. Quisic, an online program developed with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, was closed.last year, and SUNY Buffalo had an online M.B.A. program that lasted only 18 months.

    Administrators of campus-based programs believe the failure of many online programs highlights the importance of extensive classroom time and personal interaction. And while few of those involved with online degrees dispute the superiority of full-time, face-to-face learning, they point to the much larger market of those who would like an education but cannot quit their jobs or travel to a campus.

    Unlike elite campus-based programs, which offer exclusivity along with the degree, the online programs accept anyone with a good credit history and a reasonable likelihood of finishing the program. The online programs are expensive — Cardean's M.B.A. costs $24,000 — but that is still much less than a program like Trium, which costs $92,000.

    The success of the American M.B.A. overseas already has some foreign schools marketing themselves as alternatives. "We reflect an Anglo-American way of doing business," says Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, the director of the British Open University Business School master's program.

    Continued in the article.


    Online MBA program from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University at Tempe --- http://wpcarey.asu.edu/mba/ 


    From Syllabus News on October 14, 2003

    Online University Consortium Releases Learner Assessment Tool

    A network of universities founded to help companies and employees secure a quality online education, announced a Web-based assessment tool for prospective students considering online degree programs. The Online Learner Assessment, unveiled by the Online University Consortium, helps students determine their aptitude for online education in order to choose the best source for their individual learning style. The tool helps Online UC to match learners with qualified degree programs.

    "The tool helps learners avoid costly mistakes by making the best education choice for their individual needs," said Greg Eisenbarth, Online UC's executive director. "This allows targeted development and enhances ROI for corporations funding employee training."

    Read more: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=3157 

    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

     


    Education Index --- http://www.educationindex.com/

    Welcome to the Education Index®, an annotated guide to the best education-related sites on the Web. They're sorted by subject and lifestage, so you can find what you're looking for quickly and easily. There's also a place to find out more about us, and about all that the Education Index has to offer.

    The Web WeaselSM is here to guide you through the site; you'll find "The Weas" (as we affectionately know it) mixing it up in the chemistry lab, providing health care, and running for office.

    This section is a topic-by-topic breakdown of the best sites on the World Wide Web. We're continually reviewing new sites and adding resources, and appreciate your comments and suggestions.

    Agriculture Finance Military Technologies
    Anthropology General Reference Music
    Archaeology General Science Parks & Recreation
    Architecture/Design Geography Performing Arts
    Art Geology Personal Services
    Astronomy Health & Medicine Philosophy
    Biology/Life Sciences History Physical Education
    Botany Home Economics Physics
    Business Interdisciplinary Studies Political Science
    Chemistry Language Protective Services
    Communications Law Psychology
    Computer Science Liberal Arts & Sciences Public Administration
    Conservation Library Science Sociology
    Construction Trades Literature Statistics
    Economics Manufacturing Technology
    Education Marketing Theology
    Engineering Mathematics Transportation
    Environmental Science Mechanics Women's Studies
    Ethnic/Cultural Studies

    Note the NYU Virtual College online training and education courses --- http://www.scps.nyu.edu/landing/index.jsp?wfId=142 

    NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS) where you'll find a wealth of programs to meet your career needs.

    As the leader in adult education, SCPS offers:
    • World-class education at a prestigious research university

    • Specialized instruction by a faculty of renowned leaders

    • An opportunity to study in New York City, home to some of the fastest-growing global industries

    • Courses and degree programs that accommodate your busy schedule, including our online offerings from
      The Virtual College 

    College for Financial Planning --- http://www.fp.edu/ 
    There are now three distance learning masters degree programs.

    The College for Financial Planning, the oldest and most widely respected provider of financial planning education in the United States, offers an accredited online master’s degree program as well as several industry education and certification programs. In 1972, we created the country's first financial planning education program—the CFP® Certification Professional Education Program—still our most popular, with over 55,000 graduates. In addition, the College also offers continuing education and professional development courses for financial services professionals.


    Portal to Asian Internet Resources --- http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:3200/PAIR/index.html 

    A Title VI-funded project, the Portal to Asian Internet Resources (PAIR) offers scholars, students and the interested public more than six thousand professionally selected, cataloged and annotated online resources.

    Committed to directing users to Asian area content in the humanities and social sciences, the PAIR Project is supported by an impressive complement of area studies scholars, bibliographers and subject selectors based at the libraries of the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota and the Ohio State University.

    With a primary mission of providing direct access to online Asian information in native languages and scripts, the PAIR Project team also hopes to broaden access by offering users a suite of instructional resources on the use of Asian character sets and search engines.


    From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002

    Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program

    Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a "fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees. The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and access interactive multimedia course content.

    For more information, visit: http://www.babson.edu/mba/fasttrac


    From Syllabus News on March 4, 2003

    Online School Awards Dual Canadian-U.S. eMBAs

    Canada’s Lansbridge University, one of the first completely online commercial universities, is launching an executive Master of Business Administration program that will award graduates dual eMBA degrees from Landsbridge and the Nashville, Tenn.-based American Graduate School of Management (AGSM). The eMBA program is designed for managers with at least five years of full-time work experience, including at least two years at a management level. The degree program requires about 18 to 20 hours of study per week, and typically takes two-and-a-half years to complete. AGSM was co-founded in 2000 by Lamar Alexander, a U.S. Senator, former U.S. secretary of education, and former president of the University of Tennessee.

     


    Legal Education at a Distance

    The online only Concord School of Lawwhich has managed to grow without ABA recognition — announced a merger with Kaplan University. In terms of corporate ownership, this isn’t much of a change — both Concord and Kaplan are divisions of Kaplan Inc., a major player in for-profit higher education. But because Kaplan University is regionally accredited (which Concord is not), the merger will make Concord students eligible for federal student loans and to defer repaying their past student loans when enrolled. These are seen as advances for Concord — whose officials say that they believe law school’s efforts will eventually change attitudes about distance legal education.
    Scott Jaschik, "Legal Education at a Distance," Inside Higher Ed, October 31, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/31/concord


    From SyllabusNews on August 20, 2002

    Online Only Law School Graduates First Class

    With the graduation of its inaugural class, the first wholly Internet law school said it has already hit several milestones for growth. In less than four years, the Concord University School of Law has grown from 33 students to more than 1,000 today enrolled in the school's Juris Doctor, Executive Juris Doctor, and Master of Health Law programs. The school's faculty has also grown, from six at the school's launch in 1998 to more than 60 currently. Concord said more than 42 percent of its current students already have one or more advanced degrees, including 67 MDs, 33 Ph.D.s and 23 CPAs. Moreover, its students recorded a 50 percent pass rate on California's rigorous First Year Law Student's Exam, compared to the statewide first-time takers' rate of 30 percent.

    For more information, visit: http://www.concordlawschool.com

    A pioneering -- and maligned -- Internet-only law school debuts its first graduating class. Despite the school's lack of bar association accreditation, its grads look forward to practicing law.

    "Law Grads Online, Bar None," by Julia Scheeres, Wired News, November 21, 2002 --- http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56512,00.html 

    Despite the traditionalists who pooh-poohed its very existence, the country's pioneering Internet law school will debut its first class of Juris Doctorates on Thursday at a graduation ceremony in Los Angeles, where the virtual institution has a physical office.

    The event marks the third time the students and faculty of Concord Law School have met face-to-face in four years. Ten of the 14 graduates are expected to attend the ceremony, which will feature media mogul Barry Diller as the keynote speaker and will be webcast on Concord's website.

    Both the American Bar Association and the California Bar Association have refused to accredit the school, charging that law students can't get a proper education online. This lack of recognition means that Concord students can only ply their trade in the handful of states that don't require attorneys to graduate from ABA-accredited schools.

    But that impediment didn't phase Roberto Lee, a 62-year-old general surgeon from Wytheville, Virginia, who studied law at night after long days stooped over operating tables, often subsisting on three hours of sleep.

    Like many Concord students, Lee plans to use his legal knowledge to complement an existing career, counseling patients on handling tight-fisted insurance companies.

    "This is a dream come true," said Lee, who will attend the graduation with his wife and four kids, two of whom are lawyers themselves. "Hopefully this will allow me to help my patients get the care they need."

    Concord students convened in California to take the First Year Students' Law Exam (aka the "baby bar") and to attend a career forum. In February, they'll meet a final time to take the state's grueling three-day General Bar Exam. (California is unusual in that the state doesn't require law students to attend an accredited school to take the exam.)

    Continued at - http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56512,00.html 

    Legal Education at a Distance

    The online only Concord School of Lawwhich has managed to grow without ABA recognition — announced a merger with Kaplan University. In terms of corporate ownership, this isn’t much of a change — both Concord and Kaplan are divisions of Kaplan Inc., a major player in for-profit higher education. But because Kaplan University is regionally accredited (which Concord is not), the merger will make Concord students eligible for federal student loans and to defer repaying their past student loans when enrolled. These are seen as advances for Concord — whose officials say that they believe law school’s efforts will eventually change attitudes about distance legal education.
    Scott Jaschik, "Legal Education at a Distance," Inside Higher Ed, October 31, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/31/concord

    See also

     


    UMassOnlne, the virtual university for the University of Massachusetts  --- http://www.umassonline.net/ 

     

    With UMassOnline, time and distance are no longer barriers to the courses, degree programs, certificates, and professional and corporate education opportunities that you need, both to earn a living and to live.

    Register Now for Summer Online Courses!
    Taking courses this summer? Take them online! UMassOnline gives you a choice of 170 online summer courses from UMass Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell!

    Is an online program right for you?
    If you are considering online education, here are some of the questions you’ll want to ask!

    Confessions of an Online Professor
    Dr. David Patterson, Professor of Music at UMass Boston for nearly 30 years, writes about teaching his first online class.

    UMass is Featured in US News & World Report
    Programs offered by the UMass campuses through UMassOnline are featured in US News & World Report's October 15, 2001, ''Best of the Online Grad Programs'' issue

    Summer 2002
    In addition to the course views shown below, you can also now customize how you would like to view the course listings.

    View Courses by Campus

    View Courses by Subject Area

     From the June 21, 2002 edition of Syllabus News

    UMass Online Enrollments, Revenue, Soar

    UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts' web-based learning division, said online program enrollments reached 7,824 in fiscal year 2002, a 58 percent increase over the preceding year. Combined revenues for online programs increased 82 percent to $6.2 million. The school attributes the growth to overall student satisfaction, the regular addition of new online programs serving community needs, and the growing acceptance of using the Internet for personal services. "The online program has been an enormous benefit for me as it has allowed me to increase my course load, and ... to learn at a more relaxed pace," said Valerie Cox, an online student at UMass Lowell. "Students who opt to continue their education online are benefiting from highly-regarded academic programs without having to sacrifice a full-time job or more time with their families," added UMassOnline chief executive officer Jack Wilson.

    For more information, visit: http://www.umassonline.net 


    Jack Wilson is one of the early pioneers in education technologies and learning.  He is now CEO and founder of UMass Online (see above).  You can read the following at 

    Dr. Wilson, also known as an entrepreneur, was the Founder (along with Degerhan Usluel and Mark Bernstein), first President, and only Chairman of LearnLinc Corporation (now Mentergy), a supplier of software systems for corporate training to Fortune 1000 Corporations.  In early 2000. LearnLinc merged with Gilat Communications, (GICOF) which also acquired Allen Communication from the Times Mirror group.  The Gilat-Allen-LearnLinc combination forms a powerful "one stop shopping" resource for E*Learning that is now the Mentergy unit of Gilat Communications.  (The LearnLinc Story).

    Dr Wilson was the J. Erik Jonsson '22 Distinguished Professor of Physics, Engineering Science, Information Technology, and Management and the Co-director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer.  After coming to Rensselaer in 1990, he served as the 

    • Dean of Undergraduate Education, 

    • Dean of Professional and Continuing Education, 

    • Interim Provost, 

    • Interim Dean of Faculty, and as the 

    • Founding Director of the Anderson Center for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.  

    In these roles, Wilson led a campus wide process of interactive learning and restructuring of the educational program, known for the design of the Studio Classrooms, the growth of the Distributed Learning Program, the creation of the Faculty of Information Technology, and the initiation of the student mobile computing (universal networked laptop) initiative

    The Studio Classrooms at Rensselaer replaced large sized core courses taught by traditional lecture pedagogy with student pairs responsible largely for teaching themselves using computer-aided and interactive course materials --- http://www.rpi.edu/dept/NewsComm/WNCTW/ad7.html 

    Welcome To Interactive Learning
    Roll up your sleeves and take a seat in the Rensselaer studio classroom. Classes of about 60 students are engaged at wired workstations - utilizing cutting edge tools like Web-based technologies, full-motion video, computer simulation, and other laboratory resources. An instructor and teaching assistant move from workstation to workstation observing and coaching. Notes are taken with a simple mouse click, as students download files and class materials onto their required laptops. It's an innovative blend of discussion and skill-building, high-tech inquiry and problem-solving - preparing scholars to succeed in the new business world. It's all part of Interactive Learning at Rensselaer.

    More Studios Than Hollywood
    Interactive Learning is more than just a concept at Rensselaer; it's a working reality. The approach has been infused throughout all of our undergraduate disciplines in more than 25 studio classrooms with more being built all the time. In the LITEC studio classroom, students build remote-controlled cars in a project-based, team environment. In the Circuits Studio, students develop and test their own circuits. The Collaborative Classroom, funded by the National Science Foundation, serves as a testbed for using computer technology to collaborate on design projects. At Rensselaer, knowledge and application are seamlessly intertwined.

    Teaching How We Teach
    Rensselaer's revolutionary model for education has been talked about, honored, and emulated. We earned the first Pew Charitable Trust Award for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education and the first Boeing Outstanding Educator Award, among others. Last year, we were named to administer an $8.8 million Pew-funded program to bring educational innovation to other universities in this country: The Center for Academic Transformation. Literally hundreds of institutions have visited Rensselaer to learn how we teach.

    No Stopping Now
    Of course, the very thinking that enabled Rensselaer to initiate Interactive Learning is the same mindset that keeps us pressing forward. Rensselaer's Anderson Center for Innovation in Undergraduate Education was founded 11 years ago with the continuing mission of making Rensselaer a leader in innovative pedagogy. More recently, the Rensselaer Academy of Electronic Media has become the spawning ground for highly creative visualization software that enables students to learn scientific and engineering principles in ways never before possible. We continue to look for new and better methods to evolve education - meeting the present and future needs of our students, professors, and global businesses. Because solving real-world challenges is our mission and our passion.

    Why not change the world?


    Important Article of the Week --- by Jack Wilson

    "More than Digital Content: Long Live Your Course," by Jack M Wilson, Syllabus, May 2002, pp. 12-14 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6331 

    It all used to be so easy. As far as a university administrator was concerned, content came in two forms: written materials and patents. Over the centuries, a very simple way of dealing with these was developed: Faculty were left the ownership of the text materials, and the university got custody of the patents. The university benefited from publication of the texts because the fame of the professor accrued to the institution, which was always recognized on the article or textbook. The faculty benefited from the patent because it could be included in the promotion and tenure process, and they would also share in the profits through a pre-negotiated percentage of the royalties.
    Then the world changed. As the bumper sticker says: "IT happened." Information Technology, that is. Being digital. What was clear became obscure. What was known became perplexing. Content now became digital, and it could be copied, altered, stolen, distributed, and sold at rates never before imagined. When greed and paranoia are added to sudden change, it is a recipe for trouble, and that is exactly what we have.
    Trouble in the Kingdom
    Perhaps greed struck first. The media decreed that "Content is King," and corporations moved to lock up as much content as they could and then worked to develop the digital distribution systems to capitalize on that content. Universities, seeing dollars in digital content, began to promulgate policies to assert their intellectual property rights. Faculty were not much wiser. They began to think that their content was so valuable that they were going to be able to make big money by digitizing and selling it. Very few did. Content providers, the companies formerly known as "publishers," moved to take advantage of their ownership of the content.

    Every publisher had a strategy
    to capitalize on its content in the digital world. For example: Harcourt Higher Education was launched as a college in 2000 and confidently predicted "50,000 to 100,000 enrollments within five years." Unfortunately, by late 2001, the Harcourt effort was gone after enrolling a total of 32 students.
    I am not suggesting that faculty and universities do not have the right to be compensated for their intellectual property. I believe they do. I am suggesting that a foolishly inflated sense of the value of their property (read: greed) leads to foolish and counterproductive policies and actions.
    So much for the greed. What about the paranoia? While serving as provost and dean at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I had to adjudicate many disputes between faculty and the university legal counsel over the ownership of digital materials. At one point, the counsel asserted that "anything on the university servers becomes the property of the university." That got the faculty excited. It also created havoc in our education programs as faculty threatened to remove materials from our Web sites. With a lot of work and reference to tradition and legal precedent, we were able to craft a policy that was acceptable but far from perfect.
    As part of several national projects, I have had the opportunity to work with faculty and administrators from all over the country. Many faculty seriously fear that their work will be digitized, their lectures put in digital video, and then there will be no more need for them. I was once on a panel where another panelist suggested that we were moving toward a day when Paul Samuelson would teach all the introductory economics courses and Jack Wilson would teach all the introductory physics courses. I stood up and said, "I object!" This is a serious misconception that seems to equate the role of the professor with the presentation of content. I have often said that any faculty member that could be replaced by a videotape, CD, or Web site should be replaced—as soon as possible. I don’t expect many to be replaced. Teaching is not presenting. Watching is not learning.

    What’s Wrong with This Question?
    It has become popular, in the past few years, to ask the question: "Who owns courses?" I think that is a question that comes from confusion between courses and course materials. I also think it is a profoundly dangerous question. Merely asking the question presumes that someone actually "owns" courses. That contravenes centuries of traditions of freedom of speech and academic freedom. In some sense, academic disciplinary communities take ownership of courses though defining a general community understanding of a course’s content. Usually this definition is arrived at informally and over a period of time. It is always under discussion and revision.
    At times, a community makes a more formal effort to define a course. This definition of ownership is acceptable because it is community-generated, permissive, non-restrictive, and non-coercive. For this reason, the syllabi of particular courses (in mathematics, history, economics, art, and so forth) look pretty much the same wherever they are taught. Not identical, but very similar. One can own course materials, but one cannot own courses, syllabi, pedagogies, or ideas. Those are in the collective custody of various communities who are charged with their stewardship, but without the prerogatives of ownership. We do not want to allow the necessary dialogue over ownership of "materials" to in any way alter this essential freedom.

    The Least Valuable
    What have we learned over the past few years? Teaching is not about content. That does not mean that content is not important. I have taught physics (and other subjects) for 33 years. The content is very important. It is just that it is a commodity in most cases. The introductory courses that I have taught use pretty much the same content as those taught by nearly every other professor in the world. In fact, the content found in the introductory physics courses of the 1980s was substantially the same as that found in the courses of the 1940s.

    When MIT announced that it was providing free access to the materials from all of its courses, I was immediately called by several reporters all asking variations of the question: "If MIT is giving away their courses for free, why would anyone pay for courses from UMassOnline?" I would ask the reporter if MIT was giving away access to their classes, their academic credit, their faculty, their students, their campus, their library, or any other aspect of their educational environment. The answer was always no. MIT is planning to give away free access to some or maybe even most of their content. That is all. Of the entire value chain of higher education, content is the least valuable part.

    It All Adds Up
    Another way to look at this is to point out that more than 170 students paid more than $3,000 each to be in my "live-on-line" graduate class last academic year at RPI. All of the content of that class was available for free on the Web or available for roughly $50 in a text. If so, why were students so eager to pay the $3,000 tuition that I had to raise the course enrollment limit four times? These students were certainly interested in the content, but they were far more interested in the holistic educational experience, which included "live-on-line," or live interaction with a faculty member, stimulating interactions with other bright and experienced students, team-generated case studies, academic credit from a well-respected university, and the experience of being part of an academic community.
    Looking at it from another angle: UNext, through its Cardean University offspring, planned to acquire content from five leading universities in the United States and Europe and then use that to offer degrees from Cardean. They spent amounts up to $700,000 per course to massage that content into very well-produced online courses. Unfortunately, the expected market has yet to materialize. Students want access to Chicago, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford degrees; to faculty, fellow students, and classes; and not to their content.

    Harcourt officials stumbled over the content issue in a different way. As a leading content provider, they assumed that they had a leg up on the competition with their extensive library of content. To their credit, they quickly realized the need for the rest of the value chain and set about building it from scratch. Still, it is hard to build the kind of reputation in a few months that took universities more than a century to acquire.
    Publishers make a business by aggregating this content value over a large number of providers. It may be true that the content is worth only $50 out of a course that costs $3,000 per student to deliver, but this 1.7 percent adds up when spread over hundreds of thousands of students in thousands of universities. Content is worth more to the publisher than it is to the university. For a few faculty members—the authors—the content is worth more to them than it is to the university.

    Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6331  

    The conclusion of the article reads as follows:

    New Definitions from Old Principles
    We know that the laws and customs for the new world of digital content will be hammered out in court cases, union negotiations, and faculty senate deliberations over the coming years. If we want to find a safe way through this it would be helpful to remember a few principles:

    • The value of a university learning experience, online or traditional, is far more than the value of the content.
    • Content-based intellectual property is more valuable to the faculty than it is to the university.
    • Development of digital materials will require some sharing of ownership between faculty and the university with minimal restrictions on reuse by either and proportional compensation to each for their contributions.
    • No one can or should own courses, syllabi, pedagogies, or ideas.

    Defining intellectual property rights and sorting out digital content management issues will undoubtedly be a long and tedious process, but attention to the underlying principles may help us through.


    From Syllabus News on September 19, 2003

    Beijing Students Enroll in Stevens Hybrid Telecom Masters

    WebCampus, the online unit of Hoboken, N.J.-based Stevens Institute of Technology, will deliver a "hybrid" master's degree to 32 graduate students enrolled in a Stevens' degree program in China. The masters in telecommunications management is being offered to Chinese students--partly online and partly in conventional classrooms--at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), one of China's top engineering universities. The first students start classes in November. Instruction will be delivered a third online by Stevens faculty, a third by Chinese instructors in Beijing, and a third by Stevens faculty in intensive courses in China. The Stevens-BIT program, approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education and other government bodies, is the first such "hybrid" degree from a US university in China.

    For more information, visit: http://www.webcampus.stevens.edu 


    Northeastern University's MBA Program --- http://www.onlinemba.neu.edu/bwem/


    Babson College's experiments with "Tailor-Made Degrees"

    "Tailor-Made Degrees: Customized Corporate Education," by Tom Moore, Syllabus, March 2002, pp. 30-33 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6135

    The popular notion of a new graduate entering "the real world" points to the fact that we commonly view academia and the corporate environment as two disparate, almost polarized communities. The perception may be that universities focus on theory while businesses concentrate on practice. And to combine the two—to influence academic curriculum on behalf of corporate needs—has traditionally been frowned upon as a corruption of pure academic purpose.

    This is not to say that higher education has ignored the corporate community. Colleges and universities have long offered corporate training programs and customized courses. However, corporate offerings and traditional degree programs have fallen into two distinct categories, usually considered to be very separate: the graduate degree program, typically thought of as the more rigorous education experience designed exclusively by academics, and the executive education program, a shorter-term, not-for-credit alternative intended to serve the corporation’s needs.

    Now, due in large part to the maturing nature and growing acceptance of distance learning, the wall that once stood between business and academia is beginning to crumble. Over the past few years, we’ve begun to see a blending of executive education and graduate degree programs. The result is a new model for professional education: the corporate-customized graduate degree program.

    The Babson College Experience

    In 2000, Babson College opened the doors of Babson Interactive, a school dedicated to applying e-learning to innovative management education programs. The goal was to create an e-learning/faceto- face hybrid that is both responsive to the needs of businesses and culminates in a degree from an established brick-andmortar university.

    When I was first hired by Babson College, I held the titles of dean of the Babson School of Executive Education and dean of its Graduate School of Business. My responsibilities included overseeing Babson’s MBA programs and executive education courses at the same time. As I stepped into the position of CEO of Babson Interactive, I relinquished my role as dean of the Graduate School but retained my title and responsibilities as dean of Executive Education. It was clear from the start that e-learning offered high potential for an entirely new type of executive education, and that Babson Interactive was the place where we would explore the possibilities.

    Babson had been watching the development of e-learning from the sidelines for quite some time before opening Babson Interactive. At first we were, frankly, not very interested. For the most part, the technologies appeared underdeveloped and unproven. We had great concern that the initial technology was not robust enough to provide the kind of insight and judgment building that we felt a good graduate program should offer.

    In the past few years, however, we’ve seen the technology improve and have observed other institutions implement very successful e-learning programs. I now believe that a blended degree program—one that incorporates both elearning and face-to-face instruction— offers an education experience that can, in fact, be superior to the traditional classroom experience. The key is in the proper balancing of these two learning modes.

    A number of corporations have come to Babson Interactive. In one example, Babson, along with Cenquest, an e-learning company with expertise in creating online courses, developed a oneof- a-kind company-customized MBA degree program for Intel Corp. By combining the foundational and theoretical knowledge included in a Babson graduate degree with the strategic intent of the company, the program provided Intel with a completely new employee education option.

    The customization of the curriculum took several forms. The Intel team offered input into the class electives. They also provided real work projects to be used as examples and incorporated into the coursework. Through e-learning technology, Intel executives, partners, and even customers could be included as guest lecturers.

    ROI and Student Benefits

    Corporations have long viewed companyreimbursed education as a standard employee benefit alongside health care and bonus programs. U.S. businesses spend $58 billion annually on employee education. And in a market where there is always fierce competition for top employees, offering quality education programs is seen as essential to hiring and retaining the best and brightest.

    Unfortunately, the return-on-investment for company-reimbursed degree programs has been less than easy to quantify. Corporations have had little influence over the schools being attended, much less the programs being offered and the curriculum being taught. Aside from reimbursement contingencies based on keeping a certain grade point average, businesses have had limited input into the nature of their employee’s for-credit education experience. The programs are typically funded more upon faith and hope then on real data showing that employees will learn skills that will increase their overall value to the company.

    Perhaps a larger irony to these programs is that while they are seen as a necessary tool for hiring and retaining employees, they often have an opposite effect. It is not unusual for a company to pay for an employee’s graduate education only to have that employee leave once the degree is obtained. In such cases, the reimbursement program often becomes a company-sponsored training ground for its competition.

    Since the programs at Babson Interactive are designed to increase an employee’s value to the company, chances are far better that graduates will continue their careers at the company once their degree is completed. And since employees work and study with other employees from various corporate locations, managers see the learning experience as providing a rare opportunity to build valuable employee relationships across company campuses.

    Lessons Learned

    In the final analysis, there is a real learning curve involved in maximizing both the instructional and business models for this type of program. Still, it is clear that corporate education is heading in a new direction. Companies like Intel are looking to this new corporate education model to provide higher quality assurances and overall increased value. By combining a traditional graduate degree curriculum with content tailored to the needs of a company, customized degree programs offer unprecedented benefits to both the employee and employer and stand to ultimately redefine the relationship between academia and the "real world."


    November 14, 2002 message from robert Port [portb71@hotmail.com

    Very informative website I find surfing for DL info. One question. The link to the University of Maryland's Marketing department is www.rhsmith.umd.edu . But according to them, they do no have online bachelor's or master's degrees.

    Dorrian

    The link you have points to University of Maryland University College which is a different school in the University System of Maryland www.usmd.edu . The degrees from there are different than from UMD even though the two schools are right next to each other (One in College Park [umd] one in Adelphi [umuc]). Also I think UMUC is not AACSB.

    Just thought you should know because the website might create confusion. It would be a great thing if the main campus UMD offered Marketing degrees online...I hope they do. Anyway Great website!


    On March 17, 2002 while returning home from the San Antonio Airport, I learned that our taxi driver was currently taking two distance education computer engineering courses via the Internet from SMU.  He said he really enjoyed this online education opportunity that was helping him walk in his father's footsteps (his father is a computer engineer).  SMU's Master of Science distance education program in engineering and computer science is at http://www.seas.smu.edu/disted/ 


    "Online MBA programs grow in popularity," by Jerry LaMartina, Kansas City Star Online, July 15, 2001 --- http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/moneywise.pat,business/37749b46.714,.html 

    Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q3.htm#KansasCityStar 


    "THE HOTTEST CAMPUS ON THE INTERNET Duke's pricey online B-school program is winning raves from students and rivals," Business Week, October 27, 1997 --- http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549015.htm 

    Update:  The Duke MBA --- Global Executive MBA Program (formerly called GEMBA) --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html 
    As of Fall Semester 2001, there have been over 600 graduates from over 38 nations.  In terms of enthusiasm and alumni giving, this program is a real winner for Duke University.

    The Duke MBA - Global Executive is every bit as academically demanding as Duke's other two MBA programs. Global Executive uses the same faculty base, the same rigorous grading standards, and provides the same Duke degree. However, the content has been adjusted to include more global issues and strategies to serve a participant population that has far more global management experience.

    • Like most other Executive MBA programs, the Global Executive program is a lock-step curriculum, meaning that all students take all courses. The courses are targeted at general managers who have or will soon assume global responsibilities. The program is designed for those who want to enhance their career path within their existing company. 
    • International Residencies: International residencies are an important ingredient in a global MBA program as they add to the value and richness of the classroom component by providing various lenses (social, economic, cultural, etc.) through which to view various economies and systems. Instead of simply studying about an economy, Fuqua provides an experiential component which adds value to the learning experience ... 
    • Global Student body: Unlike traditional Executive MBA programs which usually have a regional draw, the flexibility of Global Executive accommodates a student body from around the globe. Not only are the students diverse geographically, but they are also diverse in the types of global management experiences that they bring to the classroom.

    For the class entering in May 2001, tuition is $95,000. Tuition includes all educational expenses, a state-of-the-art laptop computer, portable printer, academic books and other class materials, and lodging and meals during the five residential sessions. The tuition does not include travel to and from the residential sites.

    You can learn a great deal about the extend of distance education in this program by looking at the academic calendar at http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/global_cal2001.htm 

    Pensare ceased operations in 2001
    Duke University has also signed a partnership agreement with Pensare Corporation for the global delivery of a MBA Program --- http://www.pensare.com/newsroom/991011duke.asp 

    Pensare, Inc., the leading provider of Business Learning Communities for the Internet, today announced a strategic alliance with Duke University's Fuqua School of Business to co-produce and deliver a new accredited Duke MBA program. The alliance also gives Pensare exclusive distribution rights to the jointly developed curriculum for resale among its corporate customers and other business schools seeking to develop their own degree-granting programs. As part of this agreement, Pensare will provide the Internet-based technology platform, produce the courses in an online format, and provide ongoing support for the program.

    Update:  Duke's Online Cross-Continent  MBA --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/cc/cc_home.html 
    In Fall Semester 2001, there were 220 students tied into two distance education centers (in Durham, N.C. and in Frankfurt) for the Cross-Continent MBA program.

    While in Germany in the Summer of 2001, I had dinner with Tom Keller, former Dean of Duke's Fuqua School of Business and Dean of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program.  Tom spent two years in the Frankfort headquarters of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program.  This program is quite different from the online Global Executive MBA Program, although both are asynchronous online programs and used some overlapping course materials.  

    The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program allows high-potential managers to earn an internationally-focused MBA degree from Duke University in less than two years, utilizing a format that minimizes the disruption of careers and family life. It is designed for individuals with three to nine years professional work experience.

    The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program will contain course work with a global emphasis in the subject areas of Management, Marketing, Operations, Economics, Finance, Accounting, Strategy and Decision Sciences.

    Students will complete 11 core courses, four elective courses and one integrative capstone course to earn their MBA degree. Two courses will be completed during each of the eight terms of the program. Depending upon their choice of electives, students may choose to complete the one-week residency requirements for their sixth and seventh terms at either Fuqua School of Business location in North America or Europe.

    The two classes - one on each continent - will be brought even closer together through a transfer requirement built into the program. During the third term, half of the class from Europe will attend the North American residential session and vice versa. In the fourth term, the other half of each class trades locations for one week of residential learning. After the transfer residencies, the students resume their coursework using the same Internet mediated learning methods as before, but with global virtual teams that have now met in a face-to-face setting

    World-Class Resources 
    When you're linked to Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, you're connected to a world of resources residing on a network with robust bandwidth capabilities. Duke MBA students have secure access to the Duke and Fuqua business library databases as well as a network of Duke faculty and outside experts.

    World-Wide Content Delivery 
    The virtual classroom can take on many different forms. Here, a faculty member prepares a macroeconomics lecture for distribution via CD ROM and/or the Internet. Students will download this lecture in a given week of study and follow up with discussion and team projects.

    Bulletin Board Discussion 
    Rich threads of conversation occur during this asynchronous mode of communication. Professors and guest lecturers can moderate the discussion to keep learning focused.

    Real-Time Chat Session 
    Occurs between students and classmates as well as faculty. Here, a student in Europe discusses an assignment with a professor in the United States
    .


     

    The ADEPT Program in the School of Engineering at Stanford University made the world take notice that all prestigious universities were not going to take the high road in favor of onsite education with a haughty air of arrogance that their missions were not to deliver distance education courses.  Other prestigious universities such as Columbia University, Duke University,  and the London School of Economics certainly took notice following the overwhelming success of Stanford's ADEPT Program for delivering a prestigious diplomas online --- http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/ 

    Stanford, through Stanford Online, is the first university to incorporate video with audio, text, and graphics in its distance learning offerings. Stanford Online also allows students to ask questions or otherwise interact with the instructor, teaching assistant, and/or other students asynchronously from their desktop computer. Stanford Online is credited by many sources as a significant contributor to the growth of Silicon Valley, and to the competitive technical advantage of companies that participate in continuing education through distance learning.

    Learn More about Stanford Online


     

    Message sent to Stanford, Yale, and Oxford alumni:

    Renew your academic passion! This spring, Stanford, Yale and the University of Oxford are offering online courses to alumni and friends through the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, a joint venture among the three institutions – http://www.allLearn.org/stanford

    Courses cover a range of contemporary subjects and are produced by distinguished faculty members of the three partner universities. Designed for your busy schedule, you can participate at times that are convenient for you. Spring 2002 offerings include:

    Islam and the West World War II The Stock Market Emotional Intelligence Shakespeare The American Civil War Roman History

    Click here to examine the complete online course catalog and register for classes: http://www.allLearn.org/stanford .

    Spring courses start on April 15. Enrollments are limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, so please act now.

    All Stanford alumni, family and friends are welcome to enroll. Please feel free to share this e-mail with others you know who may be interested in taking online courses offered by the Alliance.

    Sincerely yours,

    Howard Wolf President, 
    Stanford Alumni Association

     


    From the Syllabus News on December 24, 2001

    Commerce Bancorp, Inc., which calls itself "America's Most Convenient Bank," said training courses provided through its Commerce University have received expanded credit recommendations from the American Council on Education (ACE). The bank, whose employees can receive college credit through the program, has received credit recommendations for two customer service training programs. Employees may apply the credit recommendations to college degree programs in which they are participating. Commerce University offers nearly 1,700 courses to employees each year via seven schools related to its areas of operation, including its School of Retail Banking, School of Lending, and School of Insurance.

    For more information, visit: http://commerceonline.com 


    From Syllabus News on July 23, 2002

    Online U. Graduates Largest Ever Online Class

    Minneapolis-based Capella University, a fully online school serving adult learners and employers, said it would confer the largest graduating class in its history at a commencement ceremony on July 27, 2002. About 400 students from around the globe will be honored at the event, more than doubling the size of last year's graduating class. Based on existing growth, Capella projects distance learning will increase by 900 percent in the United States to include 750,000 students fully online by 2005. The school's fifth commencement will draw more than 100 graduates who will travel to Minneapolis to attend the graduation, some from as far away as the United Kingdom, South Korea and Singapore. For students that cannot travel to Minnesota, the ceremony will also be broadcast live on the Capella University Web site.

    For more information, visit: http://www.capellauniversity.edu 

    From Syllabus News on November 13, 2001

    Online U. Offers Continuing Ed Web Services

    Online Capella University has launched a web-based assessment tool for adults considering continuing their education. The "2-Minute Advisor" is an interactive tool designed to provide people individual course and program recommendations based on their interests and specific needs. The Advisor online questionnaire provides recommendations on courses or programs that best match a person's interests and goals; an assessment of their learning style; reference and research material to help with their decision; and information on financial aid. "Everybody has questions about continuing their education, but few people take the time to meet with an advisor, said Steve Shank, chancellor of the school. The advisor gives people "quick access to the information they need to make an informed decision."

    For more information, visit: http://www.capellauniversity.edu 


    Kentucky Virtual U. Adds Online Tutoring

    Kentucky Virtual University opened registration for Spring 2002 with new online services, including free online tutoring, Sunday call center hours and an online writing center. Acting chief executive officer Daniel Rabuzzi said the services "are designed to create a high- touch environment for students plugged into class over the Internet. Live tutors are now just a click away, and in some subjects, are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week." Students can schedule tutoring sessions in subjects ranging from basic math to Calculus II, accounting, chemistry, economics, Spanish and statistics. The tutoring will remain free through mid- May 2002 and is available through an arrangement with the University of Kentucky.

    For more information, visit: http://www.kyvu.org 


    From Syllabus News on December 18, 2001

    AOL Launches 'Online Campus' Service

    America Online Inc. said last week it would launch the AOL Online Campus, enabling its members to register for offline courses, access career resources, pursue a hobby or complete undergraduate and graduate degrees online. Coursework ranging from GED degrees to college-level business administration, technology and nursing studies would be offered by various education and content providers, including the online University of Phoenix, the University of California Berkley Extension, the Western Governors University, the Public Broadcasting Service, and bookseller Barnes & Noble. AOL developed the Online Campus based on extensive member feedback, including a recent member survey showing 63 percent said they had a high interest in taking a course online.


    Updates from Syllabus News on August 26, 2003

    For-Profit Offers AT&T Employees Online College Degree Program

    Capella University, a 10 year-old Minnesota-based for-profit university specializing in education for working adults has struck a deal with A&T to offer the company’s employees and their family members an opportunity to earn college degrees online and in a time frame that suits their work schedules. The first employees to take advantage of AT&T’s tuition assistance plan at Capella started this summer. The school said it focuses on making it easier for students to focus on learning instead of red tape.

    For more information visit http://www.capellauniversity.edu 


    The Chronicle of Education articles on Distance Education --- http://chronicle.com/indepth/distance/players.htm 
    Subscription required to view the full articles.


    Learning through distance education --- http://www.britishcouncil.org/eis/disted.htm 
    The Education Virtual Campus:  Virtual Education

    What is distance education?
    What is open learning? 
    Higher education by distance education 

    • The Open University 
    • University of London External Programme 
    • External courses offered by other higher education institutions 

    Further, vocational and continuing education through open and flexible learning

    • MA and diploma in Distance Education
    • MSc and diploma in Agricultural Development
    • MSc and diploma in Agricultural Economics
    • MSc and diploma in Environmental Management
    • MSc and diploma in Food industry Management and Marketing
    • MSc and diploma in Financial Economics
    • MSc in Financial Management
    • Diploma in Financial Policy
    • Diploma in Economic Principles
    • MSc and diploma in Organizational Behaviour
    • MSc in Occupational Psychology
    • Master of Laws (LLM)
    • MSc in Dental Radiology*
    • MSc in Community Dental Practice*
    • MA in Geography
    • Diploma in English Commercial Law
    • MPhil and PhD available in all faculties to appropriately qualified students who are already graduates of the University of London

    February 2003 Update About Open University

    Open University is centered in the U.K. and is one of the largest, if not the largest, universities in the world --- http://www.open.ac.uk/ 
    It has many onsite and online programs.

    It attempted some years ago to break into the North American market with several partnerships with colleges in the U.S. and Canada.  That venture known as U.S. Open University failed.  However, Open University is now betting on some new partnership with New School University --- http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/news-releases/index.asp#896 

    The Open University (OU) has announced a strategic alliance with New School University, New York, to collaborate on distance and online learning education programmes. The first course Managing Finance and Information is being planned for March this year, based on a module from the Open University Business School’s Professional Certificate in Management.

    The New School University homepage is at http://www.newschool.edu/ 


    Don Carter's July 2001 Update on the new Chartered Accountancy School of Business in Canada
    Don Carter also signed up to be in the audience.  I received the following message from Don Carter in Canada (as a result of this message, Don will have a few minutes in the August 11 program to outline the CASB program and answer questions about it):

    Hi Bob,

    Thank you very much for your prompt response to my phone message. We are very excited about what we have accomplished in our new CA School of Business program. The CA School of Business (CASB) was incorporated last summer as a partnership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon and Northwest Territories. Once we phase in all existing students across western Canada, we will have approximately 2,500 students taking the program. CASB will be responsible for delivering the graduate level professional qualification program to become a Chartered Accountant in western Canada. Students enter the program with a four year undergraduate degree. Perhaps the easiest way to describe what we are doing is that we delivery the equivalent of your fifth year programs in the U.S. but through the profession itself rather than universities.

    Our program is based on the new Canadian CA Competency Map and one of its unique features is that it is fully integrated across the six major competency areas of Organizational Effectiveness, Control and Risk Management, Finance, Performance Measurement, Tax, Information Technology and Assurance. The program will consist of six core modules and two focus modules and follows what we refer to as a "life-cycle of a business" approach. Module 1 begins with a small business start-up as a proprietorship, in Module 2 it incorporates, in Module 3 it acquires other businesses and becomes involved in international operations, in Module 4 we introduce NPOs and Controllership issues and finally in Module 5 we address strategic management issues and take the company public. As mentioned earlier, each module is fully integrated across the six competency areas. The following Excel File may help to see how we have developed the curriculum for the first five modules.

    <<CASB Curriculum Framework.xls>>

    Module six will consist entirely of evaluation including our new national Uniform Evaluation but also including evaluation of a number of the pervasive competencies that cannot be assessed on a written evaluation.

    Finally, Modules 7 and 8 will enable the students to "drill down" in one of the major competency areas of their choice and hopefully serve as a platform for "life-long learning" and perhaps specialization. Our plan is to also make these two modules available to existing CAs to help them "retool" and acquire the broader skill set advocated by the 1996 CICA Vision Report.

    In addition to being competency-based, the program is also "learner-centered" with primary emphasis on facilitated learning rather than teaching. Each model consists of ten weeks of on-line facilitated learning followed by a three-day interactive face-to-face session where the students will be involved in group work, presentations etc. to facilitate development and evaluation of the pervasive competencies set out in the grey column on the Curriculum Framework.

    The entire program, which will take 24 months to complete, (our experience requirement is 36 months) is one giant case simulation. A student entering the CASB program becomes a student of a simulated CA firm named Parkhurst & Loewen (P&L). That firm has a series of clients and those clients involve a series of engagements on which the student will be involved module by module. One of our primary objectives with this new program is to improve the connection between our education program and the student's work experience. Quite literally, what a student learns this week in a module they can apply on the job the next day.

    We are using WebCT as our overall platform for e-mails, bulletin boards and chat-rooms but have designed our content using Flash to provide basic multi-media presentation. We are trying to keep this simple in order to minimize the hardware and software requirements on the student end.

    Each student is assigned to a cohort of 30 students. They communicate with their facilitator by e-mail (24 hour turn-around). The facilitators hold "office hours" with scheduled chat-room sessions.

    The model is one of "continuous learning" and "continuous evaluation". Students complete a number of tasks for each unit (usually a week) and submit them as an e-mail attachment to a reviewer (48 hour turnaround). The review is competency-based and if competency is not achieved on the original submission, the reviewer will identify the deficiencies and provide guidance on how to achieve the required competency. Students must re-submit all tasks until competency is achieved. Our experience to date is that the re-submission rate at the start of the first module is around 50% but tails off as students become more comfortable with the competency-based approach.

    We are trying to dramatically change the culture by taking the emphasis away from "memorization" to pass an exam and onto a "research" focus where the student learns where to find the information needed to address an issue, how to evaluate and analyze that information and how to convert it into a recommendation to a client or an internal management decision. By changing our pedagogy in this fashion we no longer have to "cap the syllabus" to meet reasonable expectations of students. The students will now be exposed to, and hopefully feel comfortable working with, a much broader content domain and the "finished product" will be much stronger than one who memorized GAAP, GAAS and the Tax Act.

    We have built this program in an unbelievably short period of time. We have developed the first three modules to date. We have approximately 700 students taking Modules 1 or 2 this summer and are currently piloting Module 3.

    The entire program is electronic. Students are required to have word-processing and spreadsheet capability. We provide Tax software and Caseware for working paper production as well as the CICA Virtual Professional Library which is a very powerful research tool on CD ROM.

    Since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, I am going to provide CONFIDENTIAL access to our student web site which is password protected and only accessible to students registered in a module.

    Http://XXXXX

    User Name: XXXXX Password: XXXXX

    Let me suggest that you begin with my introduction to the unique features of the program, then go into Weeks 1 and 2 of Module 1, then go into the P&L website (some fun stuff but main item is the resource library).

    I would be happy to answer any questions as I am sure that I have missed many elements of our model in my attempt to describe it above. My direct line is (604) 488-2635 and you have my e-mail: carter@casb.com .

    Regards,

    Don Carter [carter@casb.com

    Message 2 from Don Carter

    Hi Bob.
     Thank you for your prompt reply. I have one request and that is before you reproduce my message in New Bookmarks that you delete the link to the actual module web site which is proprietary. There is a demo version of the first module in our public website, http://www.casb.com  which will provide any reader with an idea of our module format. Other than that I am very pleased to have you post to your New Bookmarks. I also appreciate very much the invitation to dinner and to possibly share with the participants on Saturday. 
    Regards, 
    Don.

     

     


    Oxford University to Open Internet Institute --- http://wired.com/news/school/0,1383,43616,00.html 

    Oxford University will open the world's first "Internet Institute," a multidisciplinary department that will research the Net and its impact on policy and society.

    The Oxford Internet Institute will be within the division of social sciences located at Oxford's Balliol College.

    The institute has already received 10 million pounds (14.4 million dollars) from the Shirley Foundation, in addition to 5 million pounds (7.2 million dollars) from the Higher Education Funding Council for England to fund the initiative.

    The school has not announced when the OII will open, but school officials plan to hire a director for the institute this summer.

    "I congratulate Oxford University on establishing this innovative institute," said David Blunkett, the secretary of state for education, in a statement. "Britain needs a center for top-class research on the difficult issues the Internet poses in cryptography, intellectual property rights, security and so on."

    "In bringing together research across the country, I hope the institute will become a world leader," he added.

    Possible topics for investigation at the OII include global law enforcement, privacy and security, healthcare, defense, the digital divide, community and education.

    Oxford will appoint permanent staff to the institute, as well as offer senior visiting appointments.

    This is not the school's first foray into Internet initiatives.

    The school already offers a number of research programs related to the Internet, including "Virtual Society," which explores the behavior patterns and interactivity between people as a result of new technologies; a program in Comparative Media Law and Policy; and work on Internet-enabled health care at the Institute of Health Sciences.

    Oxford has also formed a distance-learning partnership with Stanford, Princeton and Yale, which will provide online courses to alumni, called the University Alliance for Lifelong Learning.

    Lifelong Learning at Oxford University --- http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ 

    DACE aims to widen access to University provision to the community at large. It achieves this through provision by its own academic staff and by enlisting or co-operating with members of other University departments and other qualified persons outside the University. Teaching services are provided in as wide a range of subjects to as many groups as resources allow. The Department is committed to the maintenance of University quality and traditions of excellence in all educational programmes which it offers, or with which it is associated. Its staff ensure quality through their own research and scholarship and have special experience and/or training in initiating, designing, promoting and teaching courses for adults.

    The Department also acts as a direct link between the University and a wide variety of external agencies, organisations and institutions involved in post-compulsory education and training.


    Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, Yale Invest $12 million in Distance Learning Venture --- http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/00/alliance104.html 

    The Alliance will offer non-credit courses to the alumni, taking advantage of emerging technologies to give the graduates convenient access to their schools' extraordinary resources.

    The four universities recognize the potential appeal of the Alliance's educational opportunities to other audiences seeking ongoing personal enrichment, and they plan in the future to make their offerings available to a wider public.

    The Alliance will provide on-line courses and interactive seminars; multi-media programs; topical Web sites that include links to research information; live and taped coverage of campus speakers, exhibitions, and other events; lectures on tape; and other offerings.

    The member universities and their faculties will control the content of the courses and other educational products offered, ensuring that they meet the highest standards.

    "The Alliance among four of the world's greatest universities has an inspiring mission," Allison said. "It will provide the schools' alumni around the world with ongoing access to the best in higher education, enriching their lives and helping them make the fullest contribution to their communities. I am honored to be leading this exciting and promising venture."

    Today's announcement comes at a time when the accelerating advance of knowledge is increasing the need for people all over the world to have access to life-long learning. The spread of democracy and of market-based economies is expanding the number of people who want and would benefit from access to the finest teaching and information resources.
    September 28, 2000


    Cambridge University partners with MIT in a Bridge of Minds to both foster student exchanges, spin-offs from research, and to possibly become an online university --- http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1999/nov10/cambridge.html 

    The integrated research program will focus on how technology improves productivity, how technology-based enterprises grow out of academia, and how technology enterprises develop into world-class organizations. The new Institute will also link research programs in fields that are likely to have great impact on the evolution of future technology.
    November 10, 1999


    Western Governors University Meeting Access Goals

    The Western Governors University released its annual report, which said the private, non-profit university, founded by 19 western governors, is achieving its goals to expand access to higher education, especially for working adults. WGU President Bob Mendenhall said, "the constraints on time due to work and family commitments are access issues ... so the flexibility provided by WGU's online, competency-based model is very appealing to a broad spectrum of students." WGU currently has about 2,500 students enrolled, up from 500 students one year ago. The average WGU student is 40 years old, and over 90 percent work full-time.

    For more information, visit:  http://www.wgu.edu 


    Since 1996, the University of British Columbia, in partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico, has been delivering online graduate programs --- http://itesm.cstudies.ubc.ca/ 


    Harvard University's Online Distance Education Program --- http://distanceed.dce.harvard.edu/ 

    This year we offer twenty-six distance education courses using Internet streaming video and multimedia technology. When an Extension School course is offered by distance education, it means that registered students can attend lectures when they are given (in a lecture hall at Harvard) or they can view the lectures later via the Internet anywhere in the world. In addition to viewing the lectures, students participate in other aspects of the course in the same fashion as local students. 

    I think Harvard Extension has a long way to go if it is serious about distance education.  To my knowledge, there are only a few courses and no degree programs available.  More importantly, the online courses seem to be mostly video replays without substantive interactive course materials and without the faculty immersion into interactive learning.  

    Harvard University is such a large system, that there are distance education initiatives apart from the above Extension Program.  One such initiative is at the Harvard Law School --- http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/online/ 

    One of the Berkman Center's top priorities is to explore new possibilities for education in a networked environment. As part of this exploration, we offer a program of interactive online lecture and discussion series. For the 2001 program, we have expanded the offerings available for Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit.

    PENSARE AND HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING TO DEVELOP INTRANET-BASED "PERFORMANCE COURSES" --- http://www.pensare.com/newsroom/980921hbsp.asp 
    (Note that an intranet is not the Internet.)

    Pensare Inc. and Harvard Business School Publishing announce a multi-year agreement to co-develop online business courses for the corporate workplace. Under terms of the agreement, Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP) will be responsible for providing content (based in large part on the research of Harvard Business School professors), while Pensare will provide the intranet platform, instructional design and software design. The long-term relationship underscores Pensare's commitment to work with the top business schools and innovative providers of business education. The agreement will produce a full suite of intranet-based performance courses and will enable HBSP to provide a new form of customized educational products and performance solutions to corporate clients.

    The first performance course by Pensare and HBSP is based on the service management research of Harvard Business School Professors James Heskett and Jeffrey Rayport and is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 1999. Additional general management courses will be developed for release later in 1999. The suite of customizable business performance courses will be distributed through Harvard Business School Publishing and Pensare's direct sales forces, as well as a network of Pensare selling partners.

    Pensare and Harvard Business School Publishing are creating customizable multiuser dimensional (MUD) simulations that will enable corporate users to role-play aspects of the performance courses, improving practice and mastery in a risk-free, interactive environment. One value of Pensare solutions is the unique ability to capture a company's "collective wisdom," and share that knowledge widely and easily throughout an organization. Pensare also enables companies to "profile" employees' key areas of expertise and connect them with others as mentors and coaches on a particular subject.

    "Harvard University now spends $US8 million per year to maintain the online delivery of programs in its Business School alone (MacColl 1999)".  As quoted from Page 78 of Cross-Border Business Combinations and Strategic Alliances, by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000).  Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

    More recently, Harvard University entered into a for-profit corporate venture in partnership with Stanford University to deliver executive training and education courses onsite and online.  It is uncertain when this will be operational.  Very few corporate programs are making serious profits to date, but some are or will be making enormous profits, especially corporations affiliated with prestige universities. Examples include the corporate executive distance education companies like Duke Education Corporation and corporations formed by Cornell, Wharton, and Maryland. The Godzilla in the land of monkeys will soon be the new Stanford-Harvard corporation for executive training and education. I'd buy stock in that corporation in a Silicon Valley nanosecond. See "When Harvard Met Stanford," Business Week Online, April 18, 2001 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2001/nf20010418_841.htm 

    Note the sheer size of this operation --- "more than 1.5 million people already use its 15 e- learning modules in three topic areas of leadership, strategy and general management."

    From Syllabus News on October 2, 2001

    Harvard B-School Expands Business Courses Via the Web

    Harvard Business School Publishing said last week it would use the Internet to make available its electronic learning programs in best management and business practices to corporate groups and enterprises. HBSP said more than 1.5 million people already use its 15 e- learning modules in three topic areas of leadership, strategy and general management. HBSP will now offer support for companies that wanted to make the modules available to company groups via the Internet.

    For more information, contact Nancy O'Leary at Harvard Business School Publishing http://noleary@hbsp.harvard.edu 

     


    Not all distance education programs become thriving successes just because they are new, innovative, and from a prestigious university.  There are many failed distance education programs, including some programs from top universities.  At one time, the McGill distance education program for teachers had nearly 50 online courses.

    McGill University Courses for Teachers through distance education --- http://www.education.mcgill.ca/distance/default.html 

    The current Distance Education offerings are being phased out. Students already enrolled in programs will be able to continue until completion within prescribed time limits. No new admissions to programs will take place. If you are already enrolled in a program, we can fax a registration form to wherever you wish. 


    Revenue and Accreditation Hurdles Facing Corporate Universities

    One thing that just does not seem to work is a university commenced by a major publishing house.  McGraw-Hill World University was virtually stillborn at the date of birth as a degree-granting institution.  It evolved into McGraw-Hill Online Learning ( http://www.mhonlinelearning.com/  ) that does offer some interactive training materials, but the original concept of an online university ( having distance education courses for college credit) is dead and buried.  Powerful companies like Microsoft Corporation started up and then abandoned going it alone in establishing new online universities.

    The last venturesome publishing company to start a university and fight to get it accredited is now giving up on the idea of having its own virtual university --- http://www.harcourthighered.com/index.html 
    Harcourt Higher Education University was purchased by a huge publishing conglomerate called Thompson Learning See http://www.thomsonlearning.com/harcourt/ .  Thomson had high hopes, but soon faced the reality that it is probably impossible to compete with established universities in training and education markets.

    The Thomson Corporation has announced that it will not continue to operate Harcourt Higher Education: An Online College as an independent degree-granting institution. Harcourt Higher Education will close on August 27, 2001. The closing is the result of a change of ownership, which occurred on July 13, 2001, when the Thomson Corporation purchased the online college from Harcourt General, Inc.

    From Syllabus e-News on August 7, 2001

    Online College to Close Doors

    Harcourt Higher Education, which launched an online for-profit college in Massachusetts last year, is closing the school's virtual doors Sept. 28. Remaining students will have their credentials reviewed by the U.S. Open University, the American affiliate of the Open University in England.

    We can only speculate as to the complex reasons why publishing companies start up degree-granting virtual universities and subsequently abandon efforts provide credit courses and degrees online.  

    Enormous Revenue Shortfall (Forecast of 20,000 students in the first year;  Reality turned up 20 students)

    "E-COLLEGES FLUNK OUT," By: Elisabeth Goodridge, Information Week, August 6, 2001, Page 10 

    College students appear to prefer classroom instruction over online offerings.

    Print and online media company Thomson Corp. said last week it plans to close its recently acquired, for-profit online university, Harcourt Higher Education.  Harcourt opened with much fanfare a year ago, projecting 20,000 enrollees within five years, but only 20 to 30 students have been attending.

    Facing problems from accreditation to funding, online universities have been struggling mightily--in stark contrast to the success of the overall E-learning market.  A possible solution?  E-learning expert Elliott Masie predicts "more and more creative partnerships between traditional universities and online ones."

    Roosters Guarding the Hen House
    Publishing houses failed to gain accreditations.  I suspect that major reason is that the AACSB and other accrediting bodies have made it virtually impossible for corporations to obtain accreditation for startup learning corporations that are not partnered with established colleges and universities.  In the U.S., a handful of corporations have received regional accreditation (e.g., The University of Phoenix and Jones International Corporation), but these were established and had a history of granting degrees prior to seeking accreditation.  In business higher education, business corporations face a nearly impossible hurdle of achieving business school accreditation ( see http://businessmajors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050499.htm ) since respected accrediting bodies are totally controlled by the present educational institutions (usually established business school deans who behave like roosters guarding the hen house).  Special accrediting bodies for online programs have sprung up, but these have not achieved sufficient prestige vis-à-vis established accrediting bodies.  

    Note the links to accreditation issues at http://www.degree.net/guides/accreditation.html )
    Where GAAP means Generally Accepted Accreditation Principles)

    All About Accreditation: A brief overview of what you really need to know about accreditation, including GAAP (Generally Accepted Accrediting Practices). Yes, there really are fake accrediting agencies, and yes some disreputable schools do lie. This simple set of rules tells how to sort out truth from fiction. (The acronym is, of course, borrowed from the field of accounting. GAAP standards are the highest to which accountants can be held, and we feel that accreditation should be viewed as equally serious.)

    GAAP-Approved Accrediting Agencies: A listing of all recognized accrediting agencies, national, regional, and professional, with links that will allow you to check out schools.

    Agencies Not Recognized Under GAAP: A list of agencies that have been claimed as accreditors by a number of schools, some totally phony, some well-intentioned but not recognized.

    FAQs: Some simple questions and answers about accreditation and, especially, unaccredited schools.

    For more details on accreditation and assessment, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Question:
    Is lack of accreditation the main reason why corporate universities such as McGraw-Hill World University, Harcourt Higher Education University, Microsoft University, and other corporations have failed in their attempts to compete with established universities? 

    Bob Jensen's Answer:
    Although the minimum accreditation (necessary for transferring of credits to other colleges)  is a very important cause of failure  in the first few years of attempting to attract online students, it is not the main cause of failure.  Many (most) of the courses available online were training courses for which college credit transfer is not an issue.

    1. Why did the University of Wisconsin (U of W) swell with over 100,000 registered online students while Harcourt Higher Education University (HHWU) struggled to get 20 registered?

      Let me begin to answer my own question with two questions.  If you want to take an online training or education course from your house in Wisconsin's town of Appleton, would you prefer to pay more much more for the course from HHWU than a low-priced tuition for Wisconsin residents at the U of W.  If you were a resident of Algona, Iowa and the price was the same for the course whether you registered at HHWU or U of W, would you choose U of W?  My guess is that in both cases, students would choose U of W, because the University of Wisconsin has a long-term tradition for quality and is likely to be more easily recognized for quality on the students' transcripts.

      The UW Distance Education homepage is at http://learn.wisconsin.edu/ 

    2. Why can the University of Wisconsin offer a much larger curriculum than corporate universities?

      The University of Wisconsin had a huge infrastructure for distance education long before the age of the Internet.  Televised distance education across the state has been in place for over 30 years.  Extension courses have been given around the entire State of Wisconsin for many decades.  The University of Wisconsin's information technology system is already in place at a cost of millions upon millions of dollars.  There are tremendous economies of scale for the University of Wisconsin to offer a huge online curriculum for training and education vis-à-vis a startup corporate university starting from virtually scratch.

    3. What target market feels more closely attached to the University of Wisconsin than some startup corporate university?

      The answer is obvious.  It's the enormous market comprised of alumni and families of alumni from every college and university in the University of Wisconsin system of state-supported schools.

    4. What if a famous business firm such as Microsoft Corporation or Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) elected to offer a prestigious combination of executive training and education to only upper-level management in major international corporations?  What are the problems in targeting to business executives?

      This target market is already carved out by alumni of elite schools such as Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, London School of Economics, Duke, University of Michigan, University of Texas, and the other universities repeatedly ranked among the top 50 business schools in the nation.  Business executives are more often than not snobs when it comes to universities in the peer set of "their" alma maters.  Logos of top universities are worth billions in the rising executive onsite and online training and education market.  UNext Corporation recognized this, and this is the reason why the its first major step in developing an online executive education program was to partner with five of the leading business schools in the world.


    5. Why does one corporate university, The University of Phoenix, prosper when others fail or limp along with costs exceeding revenues?  

      The University of Phoenix is the world's largest private university.  The reason for its success is largely due to a tradition of quality since 1976.  This does not mean that quality has always been high for every course over decades of operation, but each year this school seems to grow and offer better and better courses.  Since most of its revenues still come from onsite courses, it is not clear that the school would prosper if it became solely an online university.  The school is probably further along on the learning curve than most other schools in terms of adult learners.  It offers a large number of very dedicated and experienced full-time and part-time faculty.  It understands the importance of small classes and close communications between students and other students and instructors.  It seems to fill a niche that traditional colleges and universities have overlooked.

    You can read more about these happenings at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 
    Especially note the prestigious universities going online at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


    Prework Materials for MBA Applicants

    Dear Accounting Professor:

    If you are looking for prework materials for MBAs or are trying to develop on-line accounting courses, you may wish to review Ivy Software's Financial Accounting: A Management Perspective (FAAMP).

    Financial Accounting: A Management Perspective (FAAMP) takes on a users' perspective rather than a preparers' perspective, and teaches the financial accounting cycle using the retained earnings approach, which has proven to be very successful with executives and executives-to-be. The purpose of this product is to supply managers with knowledge of the objectives of accounting and to provide the tools necessary to interpret accounting information.

    FAAMP was designed to teach individuals with no background in accounting or finance some of the basic elements of the subject. It may be used as a pre-work to a course or as part of an existing course. Our largest customers use it as a pre-work to their executive programs ranging in length from one to six weeks, or as pre-work to their MBA programs. It is also used extensively in Executive MBA programs and individual company programs.

    Available on CD-ROM or on-line, the cost of the package is $50.00 net. Ivy also has on-line testing so you may ensure that your students have completed the package on time and to your level of satisfaction. FAAMP may also be combined with other titles in our Business Education Library to create an Essential Skills package customized for your MBA program.

    To review a portion of FAAMP online, go to http://www.ivysoftware.com . From the site, click on Products then Financial Accounting: A Management Perspective and select product demo. The Authorware Web Player plug-in as required to view the demo and can be acquired on the site. If you would like to receive a complimentary desk copy of FAAMP, or any other products, please feel free to contact us via the following information or simply reply to this email.

    e-mail: mailto:ivysales@ivysoftware.com  phone: (800) 342-5489 fax: (804) 779-7767


    Distance Education Clearinghouse --- http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html 
    This is a tremendous resource site that includes links to online courses and programs.


    Hungry Minds --- http://www.hungryminds.com/ 
    Over 17,000 training and education courses (Mostly from top universities)

    Our online campus, hungrymindsuniversity.com, offers up to 17,000 courses from top universities like UC-Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, as well as leading training companies and subject experts.

    Our famous brands including For Dummies, CliffsNotes, and Frommerís are all more than books. When you want to know, or know-how, you can get immediate answers by visiting cliffsnotes.com, dummies.com, and frommers.com. You can even subscribe to free e-newsletters filled with tips delivered direct to your desktop. Our 42 Dummies Daily newsletters make over 14.5 million deliveries per month.

    And for all our books -- including the award-winning series that have made us the best-selling computer books publisher -- check out our online bookstore.

    Hungry Minds is here to feed your appetite for knowledge with a full range of trusted, timely content. Whether it's to find a restaurant on a wireless Palm, to study Shakespeare at 2 a.m. with a downloaded Cliffs Note, to solve a computing problem with Dummies Answer Network, to fulfill an ambition via the UC Berkeley certificate program -- with Hungry Minds it's all possible!

    Enrollment in higher-education distance-learning programs in the state of Illinois has risen 44 percent from spring of 2000, reports the Illinois Virtual Campus (IVC), a joint project of the University of Illinois and the Illinois Board of Higher Education.
    EDUCAUSE, August 2001, Page 6. 

    The IVC homepage is at http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/ 

    Did you know that many colleges and universities in Illinois are offering academic courses and even entire degree programs over the Internet? The IVC is your gateway to this exciting new world in higher education.A D A browser users, click here to skip general menu and go directly to the content text.

    The IVC is a directory of distance courses, certificate, and degree programs offered by Illinois colleges and universities. Connect to thousands of online and other distance learning courses and programs.

    Get started as an online student in the Student Center. Find online resources that can help you be a successful student, or access a map of our 40 Illinois Student Support Centers.

    The IVC recognizes that business and industry have unique needs for their employees, and we know that Illinois colleges and universities can help them meet those needs. Find contact information for becoming an IVC business and industry partner.

    Find resources needed by Illinois colleges and universities to participate as a provider of content.

    Student Support Center staff are active partners with the IVC and need access to administrative resources. This page links to internal IVC documents, reports, and procedures.


    Academy of Art University

    http://www.academyart.edu 

    http://online.academyart.edu/about.html


    From Syllabus e-News, Resources, and Trends August 14, 2001

    Skidmore to Expand Internet Class Offerings

    Skidmore College received a grant of $460,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop three new baccalaureate distance-learning programs through its University Without Walls. The new interdisciplinary programs in American history and culture, human nature and behavior, and communication and the arts, will be designed so they can be completed entirely over the Internet, said Skidmore President Jamienne Studley. The three-year grant will support new staff, provide funds for faculty to develop 30 new Internet courses and pay for assistance with Web site development, technical support, marketing, travel and other costs related to developing the new online programs.

    The Skidmore College homepage is at http://www.skidmore.edu 

    Bob Jensen's documents on distance education are linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 


    One of the largest campuses on the Internet --- The University of Wisconsin  http://learn.wisconsin.edu/  
    Over 100,000 registered online students.

    They Blazed the Trail for Distance Education (History) by James Gooch --- http://www.uwex.edu/disted/gooch.htm 

    In this paper on trends in continuing education the author, who was formerly program information director for outreach services at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, reviews delivery systems that have made distance education possible and practical. The review begins with the introduction of correspondence study classes for off-campus students in 1891 and extends to today's computerized and satellite-delivered systems that make extension classes available to adult students worldwide.

    University of Wisconsin's Distance Education Clearinghouse --- http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html 

    Keeping Current

    dot Today's Distance Education Headlines
    dot Journals, Bibliographies and Other Readings
    dot Conferences
    dot Funding and Legislation
    dot Wisconsin News


    A Few of the Highlights

    dot InfoSource
    dot Distance Education Systemwide Interactive Electronic Newsletter (DESIEN)
    dot Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning
    dot The Governor's Wisconsin Educational Technology Conference (GWETC)
    dot Virtual Initiatives for Technology, Teaching and Learning (VIT2AL)


    Program Resources and Courses

    dot University of Wisconsin Distance Learning Catalog
    dot Certificate Programs
    dot Collaborative Nursing Program
    dot Learning Innovations
    dot Additional Program Information


    Technologies

    dot Interactive Delivery Systems
    dot Networks
    dot Compressed Video
    dot Satellite
    dot Web Development Resources
    dot Wisconsin Association of Distance Education Networks (WADEN)


    New to Distance Education?

    dot Definitions
    dot Glossaries
    dot Introductory materials


    Places and Services

    dot Instructional Communications Systems
    dot The Pyle Center at the University of Wisconsin
    dot University of Wisconsin's HELP-ONLINE
    dot Wisconsin Agencies, Organizations and Institutions
    dot A*DEC Distance Education Consortium
    dot Products, Associations and More Distance Education sites

    The University of Washington Offers Free Online Short Courses --- http://www.outreach.washington.edu/about/releases/20010521freecourse.asp 

    University of Washington Distance Learning Resources (Including Links to Programs) --- http://www.washington.edu/students/distance/ 


    Forbes Best on the Web Directory --- http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/main.jhtml 

    Education

    College Planning --- http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=9 
    With four-year private colleges commanding on average $120,000 in tuition, it's never too early to prepare for financing a college degree. Web sites ...

    Corporate Training --- http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=139 
    Online education is in many ways tailor-made for corporations and they know it. Last year corporations spent $1.1 billion on online training. Merrill ...

    Higher Education --- http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=147 
    Taking college classes over the Internet is easy. Finding the colleges that offer them is not. Duke University and the University of Maryland have ...

    Homeschooling --- http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=141 
    The Internet is an excellent resource for parents interested in homeschooling. Many sites offer virtual classes and on-line tutors. There are links ...

    Private Schools --- http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=140 
    Once staid private schools have gone flashy, using the Web to flaunt their ivy-covered halls, manicured athletic fields and happy preppies.


    Finding a college on the Web --- http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/28/technology/28COLL.html 

    "The College Search Game, Spam Included," The New York Times, September 28, 2001
    Related Articles
    Online Application Forms Add to College Admission Frenzy
    (December 23, 1999)

    Students See Risk in Online College Applications
    (July 6, 2000)

    For students who are starting their college searches, several Web sites offer one-stop shops that include searchable databases of college information, test preparation aids, virtual tours and online applications. Here are some of the leading sites and some of the additional features they contain:

    THE COLLEGE BOARD: www.collegeboard.com Features online registration for the SAT and help with essay preparation. Plans to offer soon a search feature called LikeFinder, which will enable students to find colleges similar to the ones they are reading about, and a feature that will generate side-by-side comparisons of selected colleges.

    COLLEGELINK: www.collegelink.com Offers a month-by-month planner and articles about financial aid.

    COLLEGENET: www.collegenet.com The CollegeBot search engine looks at college-related Web sites.

    PETERSON'S COLLEGEQUEST: www.collegequest.com Includes a personal organizer, practice tests for the SAT and ACT and discussion groups.

    EMBARK: www.embark.com Offers online "lockers" where students can store applications in progress and results of searches.

    XAP: www.xap.com Gives students a head start on the admissions process, starting in eighth grade, by leading them through questions about high school courses and the types of colleges they would like to attend.

    Some Web sites, like the ones below, focus on specific aspects of the college search:

    CPNET AND U-WIRE: www.cpnet.com, www.uwire.com News from college newspapers around the country.

    FAFSA ON THE WEB: www.fafsa.ed.gov An online version of the federal financial aid form.

    FASTWEB: www.fastweb.com A database of scholarships and grants.

    FINAID: www.finaid.org Calculators and resources to help demystify the financial-aid process.

    NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION STATISTICS/IPEDS COLLEGE OPPORTUNITIES ON-LINE: www.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool A database of 9,000 colleges. Students can search for colleges based on a profile of the types of schools they are interested in.

    USNEWS.COM: www.usnews.com/usnews/edu Annual rankings of colleges according to U.S. News & World Report, and a database that can be searched for specific criteria.


    ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Graduate Distance Learning Programs --- http://www.gradschools.com/listings/distance/econ_develop_distance.html 
    This document contains a long listing of university distance education programs.

    Educators say students should be wary of unscrupulous institutions that market themselves on the World-Wide Web as legitimate providers of distance education


    International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) --- http://www.icde.org/  
    (Affiliated with the United Nations and UNESCO)


     

    Walden University introduced an online doctoral program in public policy --- http://www.waldenu.edu/ 
    Walden also has other online graduate programs, including an online MBA program.

    Walden University is designed for working professionals who desire an advanced degree while maintaining career and personal commitments. Walden's flexible, student-centered education allows you to earn a master's or doctorate from the convenience of your home or workplace.


    The International Distance Education Course Finder ---   http://www.dlcoursefinder.com/ 

    The International Distance Learning Course Finder is the world's largest online directory of e-learning courses from 127 countries. This universal distance education resource has information on over 50,000 distance learning courses and programs offered from a multitude of universities, colleges and companies.


    National Institute for Distance Education, Map of Europe --- http://www.icde.org/OpenDoor/Net/europe.htm 


    Worldwide Virtual Library of Distance Education --- http://www.cisnet.com/~cattales/Deducation.html 

    Distance Education Offerings

    Distance Education Journals, Newsletters, and Newsgroups

    Distance Education Organizations


    Asia's Blossoming Universities From the Land of the Rising Sun to Down Under, AsiaWeek's Guide to Asia's Best Universities charts the progress of the region's universities as they adapt to the new education economy --- http://internationaled.about.com/education/internationaled/library/weekly/aa050901a.htm 


    Openhere.com --- http://www.openhere.com/edu/distance-learning/international-resources/ 
     Related OpenHere Categories:
     

     


    LANIC's Distance Education in Latin America --- http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/distance/ 

    Argentina

    Brazil

    Chile

    Colombia

    Costa Rica

    Dominican Republic

    Mexico

    Peru

    Puerto Rico

    Venezuela

    Uruguay

    Online Courses, Seminars, & Training Programs


    International Resources

    Journals & Writings


    From Syllabus e-News on October 9, 2001

    eCollege Tops Colorado List for Fastest Growth

    The fastest growing company in Colorado in the past year was edcuational courseware developer eCollege, according to the consulting firm Deloitte & Touche, which ranked state companies in its annual Colorado Technology Fast 50 listing. Denver-based eCollege, an application service provider that develops online campuses and courseware, had revenue growth of 10,996 percent in the last year. Qwest Communications was number two on the list. Five year-old eCollege has worked on online educational programs for Seton Hall University, the University of Colorado, the DeVry Institutes, the Kentucky Virtual High School, and Microsoft Faculty Center.

    For more information, visit: http://www.ecollege.com 


    CISAER: Courses on the Internet: Survey, Analysis, Evaluation, Recommendation --- http://home.nettskolen.nki.no/~morten/cisaer/ 

    Transnational Institutions

    Australia | Austria
    Belgium | Brazil
    Canada | China | Cyprus
    Denmark
    Finland
    Germany
    Iceland | India | Ireland | Israel | Italy
    Japan
    The Netherlands | New Zealand | Norway
    Portugal
    South Africa | Spain | Sweden
    Turkey
    UK | USA | Uzbekistan


    The University Alliance of "accredited" distance education courses --- 
    http://info.bisk.com/index.asp?Source=51s23
     


     

    Distance-Educator.com --- http://www.distance-educator.com/ 


    About.com International News and Resources --- http://internationaled.about.com/education/internationaled/mbody.htm 
    This is a great news site that contains regional classifications.

    The Distance Learning link is at http://internationaled.about.com/education/internationaled/cs/distancelearning/index.htm 

    Links to distance learning and online courses with a special emphasis on international relations, and international business and management courses.

    Brainpower.com
    Offers a number of different degree programs online including an MBA with a specialization in International Business.

    Capella University
    Offers a number of different degree programs online including an MBA with a specialization in International Business.

    Distance Learning
    A one-stop shop for all the information and resources you'll need to succeed in your distance learning endeavors.

    HungryMinds.com
    Choose from over 17,000 online courses.

    Jones International University
    Offers three fully accredited degree programs - both BA and MA in Business Communication and an MBA program.

    Kaplan College
    They offer a self-study course in International Business Skills.

    LifeLongLearning.com
    An online database of 9,500 distance learning courses.

    OnLine Education
    Offering a variety of MBA and business degrees as well as some health science degrees in association with UK universities.

    NewPromise.com
    Founded by professors from Harvard and MIT, this online directory has a search function available to members only. Free membership.

    Universities and Colleges Offering Distance Learning
    A comprehensive database of universities and colleges that provide quality distance education from Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States.


    degree.net --- http://www.degree.net/ (note the links to accreditation issues at http://www.degree.net/guides/accreditation.html )

    Most of the calls and e-mail messages we get concern accreditation: What is it, how important is it, how can you tell if a school's really accredited, and so forth. While accreditation is a complex and sometimes baffling field, it's really quite simple to get the basics. This on-line guide offers you:

    All About Accreditation: A brief overview of what you really need to know about accreditation, including GAAP (Generally Accepted Accrediting Practices). Yes, there really are fake accrediting agencies, and yes some disreputable schools do lie. This simple set of rules tells how to sort out truth from fiction. (The acronym is, of course, borrowed from the field of accounting. GAAP standards are the highest to which accountants can be held, and we feel that accreditation should be viewed as equally serious.)

    GAAP-Approved Accrediting Agencies: A listing of all recognized accrediting agencies, national, regional, and professional, with links that will allow you to check out schools.

    Agencies Not Recognized Under GAAP: A list of agencies that have been claimed as accreditors by a number of schools, some totally phony, some well-intentioned but not recognized.

    FAQs: Some simple questions and answers about accreditation and, especially, unaccredited schools


    AboutEducation at http://www.about.com/education/ 

    Adult/Continuing Education
    Adult/Continuing Education
    Distance Learning
    Votech Education

     

    College/University
    Business Majors
    College Admissions: U.S.
    College Life
    Graduate School
    International Education
    Job Searching: College Grads

     

     

    Education Partners
    Contentville

     

    Primary/Secondary Education
    Creative Writing for Teens
    Daycare/Preschool
    Elementary Educators
    Family Crafts
    Homeschooling
    Private Schools
    Secondary School Educators
    Special Education
    Teachers: Canada

     

     


    Also Recommended
    AtoZTeacherStuff
    ExamPractice
    Inspiring Teachers
      LessonPlansPage
    LessonPlanz
    Search4Colleges

    WorldwideLearn --- http://www.worldwidelearn.com/ 

    At this site you'll find hundreds of online courses and learning resources in 46 subject areas offered by educational institutions, companies and individuals from all over the world.

    Online Training Long Distance Learning Distance Education eLearning Web-based Training Whatever you call it - learning online is about you and how you can pursue learning and education at your convenience. Its learning when you want and where you want.

    What do you want to learn? Do you want to:

    get a degree online train for a new career learn web design find corporate training resources take professional development courses learn new software continue your education learn a new skill or hobby

    Whatever your goals are, World Wide Learn is here to help you find the online courses, learning and education that you want.

    Use this site as your first step towards continuing your education online.


    Bob Jensen's threads on quality and assessment are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 


    American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) --- http://www.adec.edu/international.html 

    The American Distance Education Consortium --- http://www.adec.edu/admin/adec-background.html

    What is ADEC?
    ADEC is a non-profit distance education consortium composed of approximately 65 state universities and land-grant colleges. The consortium was conceived and developed to promote the creation and provision of high quality, economical distance education programs and services to diverse audiences, by the land grant community of colleges and universities, through the most appropriate information technologies available.

    ADEC Mission and Guiding Principles The driving vision behind the organization is the extension of educational content and opportunity beyond the traditional boundaries of the university walls, to serving not simply on-campus students but lifelong learners, broader domestic and international communities, under-served populations and even K-12 schools and the corporate/business community.

    Through ADEC, members engage in a teaching and learning model that epitomizes a university without walls that is open, accessible, and flexible. The model seeks to provide instructional delivery and/or access anywhere, anytime, and to virtually anyone who seeks it.

    Primary emphasis is placed on educational and informational programs and services that fall within the traditional areas of competitive advantage for land-grant institutions. Specifically, this includes programs related to food and agriculture; nutrition and health; environment and natural resources; community and economic development; and children, youth, and families.

    Guiding Principles
    The consortium draws upon the best and most effective subject matter specialists and information resources to share knowledge and content with learners. ADEC programming is offered locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally and is characterized by the following guiding principles:

    Design for active and effective learning.

    Principle: Distance learning designs consider context, needs, content, strategies, outcomes and environment.

    Support the needs of learners.

    Principle: Distance learning opportunities are effectively and flexibly supported.

    Develop and maintain the technological and human infrastructure.

    Principle: The provider of distance learning opportunities has both a technology plan and a human infrastructure.

    Sustain administrative and organizational commitment.

    Principle: Distance education initiatives are sustained by an administrative commitment to quality distance education.

    ADEC members seek to meet local, state, national and international demands through provision of distance education opportunities and place equal emphasis on each of the traditional land grant imperatives of teaching, research and service.

    ADEC is designed to serve diverse audiences using appropriate combinations of technologies including: Internet2, commodity Internet, satellite uplinks, downlinks, VSATs, digital television and audio conferencing. These communications tools help ADEC member institutions interact with learners domestically and internationally. Typical methods of distance learning include: one-way video/two-way audio satellite, two-way video and audio conferencing, multiple user audio-only conferencing, Internet based access to educational programs.


    International Cooperation

    International Distance Education Directory --- http://aie.msk.su/english/dist.html 

    ASSOCIATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS


     DISTANCE   EDUCATION  CENTRES


    I N S T I T U T E S,      U N I V E R S I T I E S        A N D       A C A D E M I E S

    Distance Education World Wide

      We would like to offer you several web-links, which we consider worth looking up. We hope this will help you to find more information on the subject.

    Distance Education Web Sites list and link to 12 distance education sites world-wide.

    New Promise Inc server with a search system presents online courses.

    There are such very useful search engines as   Lycos,   Yahoo!,    EuroSeek, “Excite”, “Infoseek” and AltaVista. They offer many interesting things for both children and adults.

     

    ASSOCIATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS

      The site of International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE), which is a global membership organization of educational institutions, national and regional associations, corporations, educational authorities and agencies and consists of 7000 members from 130 countries of the world.

     

    I NSTITUTES,  UNIVERSITIES AND ACADEMIES

    Australia

    Canada

    Spain

    The Netherlands

    The UK

    The USA


    Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth Center for Distance Education  --- http://www.jhu.edu/gifted/cde/ 

    Get the instruction you need when and where you need it! If you are self disciplined and highly motivated, the Center for Distance Education's math and writing courses will suit your learning style.

    Join our unique on-line community. You'll share a learning experience with others who have a zest for math or a passion for writing. Math and Writing Tutorials courses are offered throughout the year so you can continue to enrich your education and develop your skills.

    Our on-line community now includes these partners:


    Global Education Network --- http://www.gen.com/ 


     

    The Open University is Enormous --- http://www.open.ac.uk/frames.html 

    The United States Open University ceased operations at the end of the Spring 2002 semester.  This was a branch of the huge Open University of Great Britain.  The U.S. branch tried to make a go of it with a partnership strategy, especially partnerships with community colleges.  Partnerships also included the Indiana State University and University of Maryland---Baltimore County.  One factor attributed to its closing is the failure to obtain accreditation for most of its distance education courses.

    The USOU homepage is at http://www.open.edu/site_map.asp  


     

    University of Wollengong's CLEU International Distance Education:   Hong Kong, Japan, and Dubai --- http://imm-web.uow.edu.au/Education/CLEUW/distedInt.html 


    India:  International Centre for Distance Education and Open Learning (ICDEOL) --- http://hpuniv.nic.in/icdeol.htm 

    In India, it was the first to start Master of Arts in different disciplines and Master of Education and Master of Commerce. Over the years, its Directorate of Correspondence Courses gradually absorbed the emerging philosophy of distance education and adopted multi-media approach for imparting instruction. In view of this, the Directorate of Correspondence Course has been rechristened as the International Centre for Distance Education and Open Learning (ICDEOL). It is located on the Campus of the University at Summer Hill. It has its own independent complex consisting of two four-five storied buildings.


     

    Centers and Associations for Southeast Asian Studies --- http://www.niu.edu/acad/cseas/centers.html 


    Universitat Koblitz-Landau's Distance Education Course on European Environmental Law --- http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~eelaw/nn.html 


    Excite Canada Links --- http://www.excite.ca/education/online_and_distance/distance_learning/ 


    Jesuit Distance Education Network --- http://www.universitybusiness.com/0104/update_jesuit.html 

    JESUIT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES HAVE BANDED together to form an e-learning network. The Jesuit Distance Education Network—JesuitNET for short—gathers onto one Web site resources from 25 of the nation's 28 Jesuit institutions.

    Phase one launched in March, offering public access to existing courses from six Jesuit schools: Regis University, Loyola University Chicago, Saint Louis University, Creighton University, Loyola University New Orleans, and Wheeling Jesuit University. After a three-year development project, JesuitNET's main feature will be up and running: 20 online courses created through collaborations among Jesuit schools.

    The schools, all members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), vary widely in their current involvement with distance education. Colorado's Regis, one of the most technologically advanced in the group, currently offers five online master's degrees, several online certificates, and an e-baccalaureate completion program. Georgetown University, though it is perhaps the best-known of the country's Jesuit schools, has next to no online courses.

    That disparity seems to be one of the points of the project. "There's no question that Regis benefits from being part of JesuitNET," says the university's director of information technology Ellen Waterman. "If JNET has done nothing else, it has alerted us to what resources we each bring to bear and how we can benefit each other with those resources."

    Mike Neuman, Georgetown's divisional director of university information services, agrees. He says that Georgetown will benefit from JesuitNET, especially because of the opportunity to have faculty collaborating through the network with faculty at the other Jesuit institutions.


    Distance Education Clearinghouse --- http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html 
    Extensive and well maintained site from the University of Wisconsin that is a particularly good starting point for those new to distance education.  Includes glossary of terms, explanations of technologies and other useful information.


    Globewide Network Academy --- http://www.gnacademy.org/ 
    Nice distance education resource for teachers and students.  Include searchable database for locating online courses.

    Peterson's --- http://www.petersons.com/dlearn/dlsector.html 
    Offers large searchable database for locating schools offering marketing and marketing-related courses.

    The Wellspring --- http://wellspring.isinj.com/home.html
    Identifies itself as "an online community for distance educators", this site contains articles, academic papers , FAQs on distance education and a page providing links to distance education resources and materials

    "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html

    MOLINE, Ill., Oct. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Deere & Company, the world's leading manufacturer of agricultural equipment, has entered into a Web-based academic partnership with Indiana University's Kelley School of Business to provide a Master of Business Administration degree program for Deere's finance professionals, beginning in August 2002.

    The customized online program is designed as a three-year course of study to be completed in parallel with the participants' full-time job responsibilities. Course content is centered around the business knowledge, technical skills, and behavioral competencies for Deere's future leaders to use in responding to challenges facing the company. Kelley's senior faculty designed the program specifically for John Deere, with input from the Deere finance division's senior management team.

    ``This is a rigorous program drawing from the strengths of both the Kelley School and the Deere management team. It is designed to create value for our enterprise and allow us to attract and retain high-quality employees,'' said Nate Jones, chief financial officer at Deere & Company. ``Graduates of this program will learn skills that help them better meet the challenges of improving business performance and delivering value to shareholders.''

    ``The Kelley School of Business takes pride in its ability to build curricula,'' said Dan Dalton, dean of the Kelley School. ``Our faculty's talent in educational innovation enables us to create close relationships with the corporate community and construct programs according to their specific criteria. We are delighted to extend this ability to include a corporation with the integrity and strong international reputation of John Deere.''

    The MBA program curriculum will consist of twenty courses structured to meld individual student goals with the organizational needs of Deere & Company. Each academic year will consist of three twelve-week sessions. The program will be launched each year with a one- to two- week residential module on Indiana University's Bloomington campus.

    Teaching tools will include discussion and debate forums, on-line testing, audio streaming and video streaming, simulations, and time-revealed scenarios for case-based learning. Course materials may be accessed directly from the Worldwide Web. The program will use only full-time tenure-track faculty recognized for their quality of teaching in other Kelley School programs.

    The John Deere MBA program is a customized adaptation of the Kelley Direct Online MBA program, which is the first fully online MBA offered among nationally ranked top-20 business schools. It has been available since 1999 to qualified working professionals who continue their employment while earning their degrees. It was created in collaboration with the Kelley School's corporate executive education clients, who voiced a need for MBA skills throughout their work forces. About 150 students are enrolled in the Kelley Direct Online MBA program today.

    Bob Jensen's threads on universities that have similar contracts with other universities are given at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm 


    From Syllabus News on January 29, 2002

    e-Learning Firm Readies Section 508 Compliance

    e-Learning software developer SmartForce said 5,000 hours of its e-learning content conforms with the accessibility standards under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 508 requires government agencies to ensure its employees and other people with disabilities have equal access to IT services. The company has worked with Octavia Corp. since last June to make its content and "learning paths" accessible using screen readers and other assistive technologies. The partnership will yield other accessibility approaches, including accessibility reviews, consulting, training, and legacy content conversion and remediation, the companies said.


    Gratz College Announces Online Courses

    Gratz College, the oldest independent college of Jewish studies in the western hemisphere, has announced registration for five online course for the spring 2002 academic term. Interested students can take the courses for credit toward a Gratz College credential, undergraduate or graduate transfer credit, or for general study. Each course will be taught by a Gratz College professor and will meet in real-time, weekly, in the evening. Students must be available at class times and have access to a computer with speakers.

    For more information, visit: http://www.gratzcollege.edu 

     



    Government and Military Online Training and Education

    Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 
    This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.  The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 

    Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation.  It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000 more students in 2002.  It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities.  The consulting arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system.  

    February 2003 Update

    Army University is an online university that was originally organized around 20 respected colleges and universities under an original $500 million grant to the consulting division of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  That division has now be come IBM Business Consulting Services, Inc. and 12 new colleges have been added --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/IBMExpandseArmyU1.html All U.S. soldiers are eligible for free training and education certification and degree programs.  

    The number of colleges and universities participating in eArmyU will increase to 32, in 19 states, during 2003.  The academic institutions will offer more than 3,000 courses and more than 150 academic degree programs, tripling the degree programs since eArmyU’s inception.  eArmyU has delivered educational opportunities online to more than 30,500 enlisted soldiers since the program began in January 2001 and will enroll approximately 80,000 soldiers by 2005 at military installations around the world. The program is accessed at www.earmyu.com .

    “eArmyU is helping our enlisted force to pursue higher education online while they serve their country,” said Lt. Col. Anthony Jimenez, eArmyU Program Director for the Army. “With this expansion of academic offerings, we are taking the program to a new level.” 

    IBM Business Consulting Services identified colleges and universities to provide online degree programs for enlisted soldiers through a competitive process.  In concert with U.S. Army needs, the company recommended schools based on their ability to address the higher education goals and interests of soldier-students, meet the program’s technological and administrative requirements, and optimize value to the Army.   

    The demand for education through eArmyU is astounding, and we built the online program so that it can meet not only a growing enrollment, but also demands for different kinds of courses,” said Jill Kidwell, IBM Business Consulting Services partner. “We are helping the Army supply higher education quickly and efficiently using the e-learning techniques pioneered in this program.”

    Twelve new undergraduate and graduate schools and at least 68 additional degree programs will be phased into eArmyU over the next six to nine months. All eArmyU schools must adhere to requirements and be approved for membership in Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges for credit transferability among eArmyU schools.  IBM Business Consulting Services anticipates adding more targeted degree programs and schools over time to meet the Army’s goals. 

    The newest eArmyU schools include:

                Atlantic Cape Community College, Mays Landing, N.J.

                Coastline Community College, Fountain Valley, Calif.

                Grambling State University, Grambling, La.

    Hampton University, Hampton, Va.

    Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.

                Jefferson Community College, Watertown, N.Y.

                Pierce College, Lakewood, Wash.

                Southern Christian University, Montgomery, Ala.

                Southwestern College, Wichita, Kans.

                University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Ala.

                University of California Los Angeles Extension, Los Angeles, Calif.

                University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, Md.

    The new additions to the program join 20 colleges and universities already participating which also competed for continuation in eArmyU:

    Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, Md.

    Baker College, Flint, Mich.

    Central Texas College, Killeen, Texas

    Cochise College, Sierra Vista, Ariz.

                Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla.

                Excelsior College, Albany, N.Y.

         Fayetteville Technical Community College, Fayetteville, N.C.

                Franklin University, Columbus, Ohio

    Lansing Community College, Lansing, Mich.

                Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

                North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, N.C.

                Pennsylvania State University World Campus, University Park, Pa.

    Rio Salado Community College, Tempe, Ariz.

                Saint Joseph's College of Maine, Standish, Maine

                Saint Leo College, Tampa, Fla.

                State University of New York, Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

                Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, N.J.

                Troy State University, Columbus, Ga.

                University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas

    University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas

    About IBM Business Consulting Services

    With more than 60,000 consultant and professional staff in more than 160 countries globally, IBM Business Consulting Services is the world’s largest consulting services organization.  IBM Business Consulting Services provides clients with business process and industry expertise, a deep understanding of technology solutions that address specific industry issues, and the ability to design, build and run those solutions in a way that delivers bottom-line business value.

    The Army University Access Online homepage is at http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html 

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance training and education alternatives are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


    Wal-Mart University Tuition Discounts

    From Syllabus News on January 13, 2004

    Wal-Mart Signs Capella U. as ‘Preferred’ Online Ed Provider

    Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has signed a deal for Capella University to become the online education provider for its new My Education Connection program. Under the offering, Walmart customers can receive tuition discounts for online degree programs from Capella, which has 9,000 students and offers degrees and certificates to working adults in business, technology, education, human services, and psychology.

    You can read the following at http://www.capella.edu/GATEWAY.ASPX 

    Capella University Overview In Brief Capella University is an accredited online university that offers courses, certificates and degree programs, including MBA, doctorate, graduate and undergraduate degrees in business, technology, education, human services and psychology. Founded in 1993, Capella is the world's fastest-growing e-learning institution.

    A pioneer in online learning, Capella University is a results-oriented educational institution geared specifically to the goals and lifestyles of adult learners. Capella redefines the higher education experience for non-traditional learners, thereby offering an accessible and flexible education program that allows technology to remove the barriers of time and place.

    Accreditation Capella University is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), the same body that accredits Big Ten universities. The NCA has recognized Capella for "its pioneering role in translating an adult learning model into action." Capella is the first and only online academic institution to participate in the NCA of Colleges and Schools Academic Quality Improvement Project.

    Enrollment Capella University's student body currently comprises students from all 50 states and more than 40 countries. The majority of Capella's learners are working adults who often are balancing family, work and educational achievement. 

    More than 600 corporations provide tuition reimbursement to employees enrolled at Capella University. Check the Capella Learner Organizations list for your employer's name.

    Additionally, some Organizations have signed Corporate Alliance Partnership Agreements with Capella University. Employees of our Corporate Partners receive several additional benefits such as tuition discounts, streamlined enrollment process and cohort learning opportunities. Our programs are designed to have an immediate impact on the individual learner and the organization, positioning both for greater success.

    Capella is also a leading provider of courses in all branches of the U.S. Military --- http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/military_index.aspx 

    Corporate partnerships and alliances are listed at http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/corp/index.aspx 


    The U.S. IRS offers Internet education opportunities. IRS employees who want to get ahead in the organization are heading back to the classroom - 21st century style. College level courses in accounting, finance, tax law, and other business subjects will be available on the Internet to IRS employees. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/46816/101 

    For example, the IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 


    From Syllabus News on February 26, 2002

    Online Masters Degree in Health Law Enters Second Year

    Nova Southeastern University said a second class of students had begun its online master's degree program in health law. The graduate program is designed to educate non-lawyer health care professionals about health- related legal issues. The masters is a two-year program taught almost entirely over the Internet. Short residential sessions each year supplement the program, which is designed for working professionals, full-time practitioners, administrators, military personnel, nurses, and leaders in the health care industry.

    For more information, visit: http://www.mhl.nsulaw.nova.edu .

    From Syllabus News on February 26, 2002

    Columbia Dental School Takes to the Web (Medicine)

    The Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery said it would develop online continuing education courses for dentists in collaboration with ArcMesa Educators, a multi-profession provider of continuing education. The school will select and develop the content for the courses, which ArcMesa will develop for both Internet and traditional home study. According to the American Dental Association, 47 states mandate continuing dental education for practicing dentists, totaling over 200,000 dentists. "We are a forward-looking institution that believes in providing education beyond the traditional walls of a dental school," said Dr. Ira Lamster, dean of the school. "Offering CME courses online will benefit our practicing faculty and alumni, as well as dentists across the country. In addition, foreign institutions seeking an affiliation with us will now have an opportunity to do so via the Internet."

    For more information, visit: http://www.arcmesa.com 

    From SyllabusNews on July 30, 2002

    Small Colleges Collaborate on Online Degrees

    Michigan-based Jackson Community College (JCC) and Walsh College signed an agreement to provide JCC students an opportunity to finish their bachelor's degrees via the Internet. JCC students will be able to obtain a bachelor of business administration degree online by transferring a maximum of 82 credit hours in business and general education courses from JCC and then completing 45 credit hours online with Walsh College. Majors in the new program would include general business, management, or marketing. Through the partnership, Walsh College, an upper division school offering only junior and senior level course work, said it would increase its strength in business education in the Jackson area while enhancing the quality of JCC's business program.


    Places to Learn from Krislyn --- http://www.placestolearn.com/ 

     

    LearnKey
    More than 950 self-paced multimedia-based training courses taught by experts on interactive CD. Educational areas include business applications (like Microsoft Word and Excel), software development, IT certification, and networking.
    Rosetta Stone
    Language Learning Software on CD-ROM and online. Selected by the Peace Corps, the U.S. State Department, and NASA.
    eLearners.com
    Your key to online learning. They can help you find the best courses, programs & schools for your needs, as well as all the resources you will need to succeed as an e-learner.
    LearnITSoftware.com
    Self-paced IT Training in everything from Desktop Basics to Linux RHCP.
    Kaplan Test Prep
    Get higher scores on those important tests by taking Kaplan courses for AP, SAT, PSAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, PCAT, OAT, DAT, NBDE, NCLEX, CGFNS, USMLE, CSE, COMLEX, CME, and others.
    Delmar/Thomson Learning
    They've got products to help you learn agriscience, allied health, business & economics, CAD and graphics, computers & technology, cosmetology, driver education & transportation, education, engineering, legal studies, math & statistics, personal health, science, behavioral sciences, and trades & technology.
    Linguaphone
    A complete range of Language courses to suit your needs.
    IStudySmart.com
    provides interactive online study materials for over fifty CLEP, RCE, DANTES, and GRE exams.
    BrainBench
    Register now for a FREE online Brainbench Certification Exam in hundreds of categories.
    Ddigital Media Training
    A video-based training series which brings viewers cutting-edge strategies and techniques, straight from the industry leaders. For anyone who works with film, video, advertising or marketing.
    University of Phoenix
    One of the first accredited universities to provide complete online degree programs almost a decade ago. They offer an Associate in Arts, Bachelor of Science in Business (with specializations), Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, and a number of Masters and Doctorate programs.
    Computer Training Online
    Over 370 premium courses you can take online. Courses are sold as sets. Each set may include from 35 to 117 courses. When you sign up for one set of courses, you may take any or all of the courses, in that set, as many times as you wish, for one full year. They currently offer 6 different sets of courses including discounts if you buy more than one set. The cost to take one set of courses begins at $48 per year.
    Tutor.com
    The National Registry of Instructors. Founded in partnership with the The Princeton Review, it is a primary destination for those searching for an experienced and trusted tutor in any subject, online or face-to-face.
    Chadwick University
    M.B.A. programs through self-paced distance education, including: Business Administration, Criminal Justice and Psychology. Increase your marketability and earning power with this program. Approved by more than 375 companies and approved for Sallie Mae long-term,low-interest financing. Request your free catalog.
    Graduate School Programs
    Comprehensive online source of graduate school information.
    Distance.Gradschools.com
    Distance.Gradschools.com is a comprehensive online database of distance graduate programs.
    University of Phoenix
    Get a free informative course brochure from the University of Phoenix Online.
    Motivator Pro
    A software-based goal-setting system, designed on a motivational theme, to effectively guide you through the process of defining, tracking, maintaining, and ultimately achieving your business and personal goals. Free trial download.

     

    Caliber Learning Network
    Partners include Georgetown, Columbia, USC, Johns Hopkins, Wharton, Syracuse, Babson.
    Cardean University
    Online business courses from their academic consortium members who include Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia Business School, London School of Economics and Political Science, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
    Cognitive Arts
    Forms partnerships with leading Fortune 500 companies to create courseware with a "learn by doing" approach which gives employees an opportunity to develop and practice real-world skills by placing them in compelling, interactive simulations of their actual work environment.
    Digital Think
    A leader in designing, developing and deploying e-learning solutions to Fortune 1000 companies. They specialize in courseware for attracting and retaining customers, improving sales channel performance,and ensuring employees have the skills to execute on business strategy.
    DeVry Inc
    Includes the DeVry Institutes (which provide career-oriented, technology-based education to high school graduates and working adults), and the Keller Graduate School of Management (which provides high-quality, practitioner-oriented graduate management degree programs to working adults).
    EduPoint
    Provides Fortune 1000 Corporations with centralized access to over 1.5 million learning opportunities through more than 4,000 learning providers.
    ExecuTrain
    Provides certified technical instruction from leaders like Microsoft, Lotus and Novell -— including skills-based certifications like A+, Network+ and Internet Webmaster certifications.
    Global Knowledge Network
    Provides technology training in a classroom environment or online, with certifications.
    Knowledge Anywhere
    A leader in Web-based e-learning. Uses proven processes and technology to deliver turnkey, customized online training solutions in less than eight weeks.
    Learning Network
    Their initial focus is on K-12 students, parents, and teachers, with plans for Higher Education, Professional Development, and Lifelong Learning.
    Learning Tree
    Over 140 hands-on IT courses.
    LearnStream
    A custom courseware design firm, delivering CBT and WBT solutions.
    McGraw Hill Online Learning
    Self-paced, interactive business and management courses.
    MindLeaders
    Web-based training providing enterprise-quality courses in desktop computing, home and small business, and business skills development.
    National Technology University
    They offer a variety of degrees in business and management, computer science, and engineering via Satellite, the Internet, or CD-ROM. They have a working alliance of more than 50 universities.
    NETg
    Technology, IT, and management and professional development training.
    OptimalThinking.com
    Multi award-winning global community website for personal and professional optimization. Seminars, speeches, products, consultations, and writing services to optimize -- not merely improve -- your life.
    Pensare Knowledge Community
    Offers validated content from the world’s top business schools. Content is licensed from authorities and institutions with expertise in General Management (Sales, Negotiation, Service Management, Leadership, Management, Teamwork, Marketing and other related topics) and e-Business (subjects that include e-Commerce, e-Business Strategies, Customer Relations, e-Marketing, and others).
    Provant
    Programs include leadership, HR, project management, managing change, and many others.
    Quisic
    Combines a free online resource for the most current business thinking on the web with business education solutions for corporations and academic institutions. They've won numerous awards for their courseware. Academic partners include the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, London Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and professors from Duke University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
    SkillSoft
    A provider of total e-Learning solutions for Global 2000 companies with over 325 courses in the areas of professional expertise and business expertise.
    SmartForce
    Formerly CBT Systems. Courses in the areas of IT, business, professional skills.
     

    See Also ...

     

     
    Open Directory Project Sites
    The Open Directory Project provides an additional extensive list of sites in the following topic areas:

     


    International Journals, Resources, and Newsletters for Distance Education


    Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Overview of Education Technologies --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Assessment of Education Technologies --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

    Bob Jensen's education bookmarks are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 


    Web Portals and Higher Education: Technologies to Make IT Personal
    ID No. PUB5006 
    Category Publications From the EDUCAUSE Office 
    Author Richard N. Katz 
    Organization EDUCAUSE Year 2002 
    Subject Terms Enterprise Portals 
    Price $18.00


    "Seton Hall has developed free software that helps instructors turn their lectures into multimedia presentations for course Web sites. The software, called SyncStream ( http://tltc.shu.edu/initiatives/streaming/syncstream.htm  ), makes it easy to mix video of a lecture with a PowerPoint presentation or other slide show. To use the program instructors must first record their lectures in the streaming-video format developed by RealNetworks."
    Tracey Sutherland [tracey@AAAHQ.ORG


    Distance Education Magazines and Journals http://www.wisc.edu/depd/html/mags.htm 


    INSEAD Knowledge http://knowledge.insead.edu/index.cfm 

     

    Welcome to INSEAD Knowledge, your portal to today’s most prominent business research.

    Knowledge presents:

    • Easy-to-read abstracts of working papers and cases
    • Longer, in-depth explanations of research
    • Professors’ personal insights
    • Features (click the “New” link on the home page) with Professor interviews, news-related items, INSEAD conferences and more
    • INSEAD's recently published books (click the “Books” link on the home page)

    Navigating Knowledge is simple.

    • Click on the headline of any abstract to read more
    • Click on a primary theme of research (in the green menu on left-hand side). You will arrive on a theme page with several topical abstracts. Then, click on a headline to read more and download the full text of the case or working paper.
    • Find links to INSEAD’s research centres under “Related Research” on relevant theme pages (right-hand side).

    You may customise Knowledge by setting your preferences on My Knowledge. The site will automatically provide you with abstracts on the topics that interest you the most.

    • Click on My Knowledge (always in the top menu) to set it up
    • Each time you log on to your personal page thereafter, the new abstracts relevant to your favourite themes appear automatically.
    • My Knowledge library allows you to store abstracts for as long as you wish
      (for more information, see FAQs).

    Subscribe to our email newsletter
    Knowledge will directly send you new abstracts each month.

    Please send feedback to the Knowledge team if you have any difficulties or problems. Enjoy the Knowledge!

    INSEAD
    Boulevard de Constance
    77305 Fontainebleau Cedex France

     

     


    Knowledge Knows No Boundaries --- http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42660,00.html 

    Developing interesting math and science lessons for local school districts can be a daunting and time-consuming task, but what about a curriculum for three countries?

    Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia are attempting to do just that in a new transnational software program.

    The International Virtual Education Network (IVEN) combines the brainpower of educators in South America in the development of math and science software over the Net.

    "This is really a watershed," said Pedro Paulo Poppovic, the secretary of distance education for Brazil. "As far as I know this has never been done before."

    Teams of educators will develop software that emphasizes learn-by-doing and simulation that covers the entire math and science curriculum at the secondary level, including math, biology, chemistry and physics.

    Because costs for implementing technology into Third World classrooms can be prohibitively high, the partnership enables the three countries to reap greater benefits at a lower price.

    Each country will have teams made up of a master teacher, a graphic artist, a content specialist, an instructional designer and a software developer. As a team works on a particular curricular unit, called a module, they post the design online for the other teams to comment on and critique.

    The lessons will be distributed on a browser-based network but they will not be Internet-dependent. For those schools with no connection to the Net, a version of a browser will be copied onto a proxy server, and the lessons will be downloaded from CD-ROMs.

    "Teachers in all three countries will be able to communicate and exchange ideas," said Wadi Haddad, the president of Knowledge Enterprise, who is chief coordinating advisor for IVEN in the United States. "These pilot schools will be well supported technically and educationally."

    Teachers may, for example, use animations

     


    Students paying for college can get financial help from a new website, if they agree to pay investors a fixed percentage of their future income --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/school/0,1383,43977,00.html 

     

    MyRichUncle claims to offer students an alternative method of paying for college. The site boasts a network of investors who will help finance a student's undergraduate or graduate education, and upon graduation, the student must pay the company a percentage of their income for up to 15 years.

     

    The MRU Education Investment supplements other grants, scholarships or subsidized loans that students receive to pay for school.

    Rate payments are determined by the type of program the student is in, the school they attend, the year of enrollment, work experience and other factors.

    The company also plans to offer mentorship opportunities for students with MyRichUncle's network of investors.

     

    The MyRichUncle site is at http://www.myrichuncle.com/ 

     

    Related to this is "Dear Student:  We Pay If You Stay" at http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,38080,00.html 

     

    Multinational companies with offices in Central Europe and Asia are quietly trying to plug the brain drain that's siphoning technical talent to the United States by offering to pay for the education of their best and brightest applicants

    The catch: Students have to attend local schools and then work in their home countries for a specified period of time after graduation.

    The United States is still the most popular destination for foreign students, drawing about 578,000 in the 1998-99 academic year, according to the Department of States International Information Programs.

    But the number of foreign students attending college in the United States has been dwindling, according to SIIP. Five years ago, about 40 percent of all international students studied in the United States. Today, it's 32 percent.

    The decline is attributed to aggressive recruiting problems in students' own countries and in others, especially in the computer science fields. The high cost of tuition at American colleges and universities is also to blame.

    U.S. schools are battling back.

    President Clinton recently suggested that "educational institutions, state and local governments, non-governmental organizations, and the business community" should "review the effect of U.S. government actions on the international flow of students and scholars as well as on citizen and professional exchanges, and take steps to address unnecessary obstacles, including those involving visa and tax regulations, procedures, and policies."

    In response, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has eased work rules for foreign students. And some colleges are considering adjusting the amount of funds made available for grants to foreign students in order to fill in the gaps caused by weak exchange rates.

     

    See also:
    Internet2 Crosses the Border
    S. Africa Broadband Plan on Hold
    In Mexico, Net Not a Priority
    Math and Science Seek Fed Funds
    New Toys for Cheaters
    MIT Cheered From a Distance

    Bob Jensen's education bookmarks are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

     


    Professor Darling's site on Resources for Distance Education is outstanding --- http://webster.commnet.edu/HP/pages/darling/distance.htm 

    Until I found this site, I was not aware there were so many journals and other resources for distance education.


    From Infobits on June 1, 2001

    TUTORIALS ON USING THE WEB FOR SCHOLARLY STUDY

    The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) launched the Virtual Training Suite, a collaboration between 30 universities providing 40 tutorials to help people learn more about using the Internet as a source of scholarly information. Tutorial topics cover the categories of engineering and mathematics, humanities, social sciences, business and law, health and life sciences, and physical sciences. The tutorials offer self-directed learning with the help of an expert "tour guide" commissioned from universities, libraries, museums, and research institutes across the United Kingdom. The Virtual Training Suite is on the Web at http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ 

    The RDN is a national Internet service for academics and professionals funded by the Higher and Further Education Funding Bodies via the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and by Research Councils such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It is coordinated by the Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC), a center run jointly by staff from UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking at the University of Bath) and King's College London. For more information about the RDN, contact: RDNC, Kings College London, 3rd Floor, Strand Bridge House, 138-142 The Strand, London WC2R 1HH UK; email: info@rdn.ac.uk; Web: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ 


    OPPORTUNITIES FOR NONTRADITIONAL LEARNERS

    The Lumina Foundation for Education, a private, independent foundation, addresses issues surrounding financial access, educational attainment, and opportunities for nontraditional learners. The foundation recently published "Funding the 'Infostructure': A Guide to Financing Technology Infrastructure in Higher Education" by Ronald A. Phipps and Jane V. Wellman. The report "makes recommendations that can help campus officials and state and federal policymakers develop regular funding policies for information technology . . . identifies a range of options for funding information technology, examining the advantages and drawbacks of each... [and] urges state and federal policy-makers to address the disparities in institutions' ability to pay for technology." The report is available online at http://www.luminafoundation.org/Publications/New%20Agenda%20Series/infostructofc+title.htm 

    For more information about the foundation and its other publications, contact: Lumina Foundation for Education, 30 South Meridian Street, Indianapolis, IN 46204-3503 USA; tel: 317-951-5704; fax: 317-951-5063; Web: http://www.luminafoundation.org/index.htm 


    About.com:  A Great Site for News About International and Distance Education --- http://internationaled.about.com/education/internationaled/cs/distancelearning/index.htm


    Grants and Other Funding Alternatives


    AskEric Database --- http://ericir.syr.edu/ (Includes options to communicate live with experts)

    From Infobits on June 2, 2001

    ERICNEWS CHANGES FORMAT

    ERICNEWS, the U.S. Department of Education ERIC system's bimonthly electronic newsletter, will no longer be published in email format. Starting with the June 2001 issue, each month ERICNews will be published and archived on the ERIC website. Weekly ERIC announcements will continue to be published in the "New From ERIC" section at http://www.accesseric.org/ 

    ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is a national information system designed to provide ready access to an extensive body of education-related literature. Established in 1966, ERIC is supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement and is administered by the National Library of Education. The ERIC system is made up of sixteen subject-specific clearinghouses, associated adjunct clearinghouses, and support components which provide a variety of services and products on a broad range of education-related issues. ERIC also maintains a database of more than one million abstracts of documents and journal articles on education research and practice. For more information, contact ACCESS ERIC, 2277 Research Blvd., MS 4M, Rockville, MD 20850 USA; tel: 800-538-3742; email: accesseric@accesseric.org ; Web: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ 


    Distance Education Clearinghouse --- http://www.uwex.edu/disted/home.html 
    This is a tremendous resource site that includes links to online courses and programs.


    Telematics Distance Education Resources, Links and Contacts --- http://www.fae.plym.ac.uk/tele/resources.html 

    Distance Education Resources
    Distance Education Related Journals
    Distance Education Institutions
    Distance Education Associations
    Personal Home Pages
    Distance Education Projects
    Distance Education Related Conferences

    Distance Learning Webring
    Distance Learning Web Resources --- http://www.kimsoft.com/dista.htm 


    A Collection of distance education resources,  Lund University Electronic Library --- http://www.lub.lu.se/lub/services/distansundervisning.html 
    There is a lot of information here.


    BUBL LINK Catalogue of Internet Resources --- http://bubl.ac.uk/link/d/distanceeducation.htm 

    1. CEDL Published Articles
    2. Collection of Distance Education Resources
    3. Commonwealth of Learning
    4. DERAL: Distance Education in Rural Areas via Libraries
    5. Distance Education at a Glance
    6. Distance Education Bibliography
    7. Distance Education Clearinghouse: Electronic Mailing Lists and Discussion Groups
    8. Distance Education Clearinghouse
    9. Distance Education Journal
    10. Distance Learning: Promise or Threat?
    11. Distance-Educator.com
    12. Educate the Children
    13. Exploit Interactive
    14. International Centre for Distance Learning
    15. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
    16. Journal of Library Services for Distance Education
    17. Library Services for Distance Learners
    18. Mindweave: Communication, Computers and Distance Education
    19. MUDs and MOOs: An Experimental Virtual Helpdesk
    20. NODE: Library Services for Distance Education
    21. Occasional Papers in Open and Distance Learning
    22. Online Journals in Distance Education
    23. Open University
    24. Report of the University of Illinois Teaching at an Internet Distance Seminar
    25. Role of Virtual Learning Environments in the Online Delivery of Staff Development
    26. Sheffield Hallam University Distance Learner Support Service
    27. Telematics for Libraries - Distance Learning: Projects, Resources and Research
    28. Tutorial Markup Language and NetQuest
    29. Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature
    30. World Lecture Hall: Distance Learning Institutions

    Annenberg/CPB's Top Ten Distance Education Sites --- http://www.learner.org/edtech/distlearn/topten.html 
     
    1) The American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE)
    ACSDE was established in 1988 with the aim of becoming a network of scholars who have a common interest in studying, teaching, and doing research in the field of distance education. Dr. Michael G. Moore founded the ACSDE under the College of Education, and continues as its Director. Today, the ACSDE has become a hub for the dissemination of distance education information through both a printed and electronic journal and other publications.

    2) Distance Education Resources
    A vast index of distance education resources, this site is an excellent starting point to the riches of international distance education on the Internet. Open universities are among the useful resources, in particular the British Open University, The Dutch Open University, and Flanders' EuroStudy Centre for Distance Education.

    3) Distance Education Clearinghouse
    This site provides a wide range of information about distance education and related resources. This comprehensive and widely recognized site brings together distance education information from Wisconsin, national, and international sources. New information and resources are being added to the Distance Education Clearinghouse on a continuing basis. The Clearinghouse is managed and maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Extension, in cooperation with its partners and other UW institutions.

    4) Educational Technology Leadership Program--The George Washington University
    This index links to sites that offer information about the process of distance education as well as distance education institutions offering courses and degrees via distance education.

    This site also includes very interesting full-text articles regarding distance education.

    5) Going the Distance (GTD)
    Going the Distance is an educational initiative of the PBS Adult Learning Service and public television stations. Developed in response to the growing population of adults who want to earn a college degree at a distance, this initiative makes it possible for students to earn a two-year college degree through distance learning.

    6) Educause
    Educause is a consortium of higher education institutions dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of education using the latest developments in information technology. Their World Wide Web and gopher servers offer access to resources designed to support this goal, such as information on educational conferences, publications detailing the latest developments in information technology and educational advancements, material on lobbying activities and related legislation, and more. Users will also find information on becoming a member of the consortium and the benefits that being a member provides.

    7) Distance Education and Related Links
    This site links to a wide variety of distance education institutions and resources.

    8) U.S. Department of Education--Star Schools
    This Web page looks at the Star School Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of the program is to encourage improved instruction in mathematics, science, and foreign languages as well as other areas, such as literacy skills and vocational education. Using telecommunications, the program reaches underserved populations, including the disadvantaged, illiterate, limited-English proficient, and individuals with disabilities. The program is a good model for K-12 institutions looking into distance education.

    9) The World Lecture Hall
    The World Lecture Hall page contains links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web to deliver class materials. Some of the materials provided include course syllabi, assignments, lecture notes, exams, class calendars, multimedia textbooks.

    10) Maricopa's
    Here you will find over 470 (and counting!) examples of how the Web is being used as a medium for learning including everything from sites that relate directly to a Maricopa class to courses delivered entirely via the Web to activities related to class assignments or course materials.



    Athabasca University's RIDE --- http://ccism.pc.athabascau.ca/html/ccism/deresrce/de.htm 

    About this Database Theory and Practice
    Learning about the INTERNET Distance Education Issues
    Searching the WEB Associations, Conferences, Special Events
    Distance Ed & WWW Design Distance Education Organizations
    Educational Technology Resources AU Staff & Student Papers and Projects

    Guidelines for Distance Education (including library guidelines) from The Higher Education Learning Commission --- http://www.ncahigherlearningcommission.or 

    Review our General Institutional Requirements (GIR) and Criteria for Accreditation in section I.A of our on-line Policy Manual...


    International Centre for Distance Learning ---  http://webster.commnet.edu/HP/pages/darling/journals.htm 

    This list of Distance Education journals and newsletters was put together by The International Centre for Distance Learning (ICDL) and is used here with the Centre's permission and with the understanding that such lists, from time to time, go out of date. Please advise the maintainer of this site, Charles Darling, of suggested changes, deletions, or additional journal & newsletter titles in Distance Education.

    The International publication ABOUT DISTANCE EDUCATION, first published in 1974 by the International Extension College, which contained a high proportion of items relating to less developed countries, was incorporated in NEWS ABOUT IEC, published twice per year (first issue 1988). NEWS ABOUT IEC has been replaced by IEC NEWS, the first issue of which appeared in September 1991. IEC's address is
    95 Tenison Road
    Cambridge, CB1 2DL
    UK
    Tel: +44 1223 353321
    Fax: +44 1223 464734
    email: info@iec.ac.uk

    AMERICAN JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION (ISSN 0892-3647. Three issues per year. Subscription enquiries to AJDE, Rackley Building, University Park, Pennsylvania State University, PA 16802, USA. First published 1987.) 'Created to disseminate information and act as a forum for criticism and debate about research and practice of distance education in the Americas.'
    Editor: Michael Grahame Moore,
    American Centre for the Study of Distance Education
    College of Education, The Pennsylvania State University,
    403 South Allen Street, Suite 206, University Park,
    PA 16801-5202, USA

    DISTANCE EDUCATION (ISSN 0158-7919). Two issues per year, in May and October. First published 1980. A refereed journal published for the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia (formerly the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association (ASPESA). Aim is to 'disseminate information about theory, research and practice in distance education including correspondence study, external studies, individualised learning, open learning, educational technology, educational radio and television and other educational media'. International in coverage.
    Distance Education Centre
    University of Southern Queensland
    PO Darling Heights
    Toowoomba
    Queensland 4350
    AUSTRALIA

    THE DISTANCE EDUCATOR A quarterly newsletter. Subscription information and even a subscription form is available online at http://www.distance-educator.com/ 

    EPISTOLODIDAKTIKA: THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION. (Subscription enquiries to The Rapid Results College, Tuition House, London, SW19 4DS, United Kingdom. Two issues per year. First published 1963.) The journal of the Association of European Correspondence Schools, not always restricted to European coverage nor to the specific concerns of correspondence schools.

    INDIAN JOURNAL OF OPEN LEARNING (ISSN 0971-2690). First published 1992. Two issues per year, in January and July. Set up to: 'i) disseminate information about theory, practice and research in the field of open and distance education, including correspondence and multi-media education,educational technology and communication, independent and experiential learning and other innovative forms of education, and ii) provide a forum for debate about these areas of concern, particularly for India, allowing reasonable space to contributions from outside the country.'
    Indira Gandhi National Open University
    Maidan Garhi
    New Delhi 110 068
    INDIA

    ISTRUZIONE A DISTANZA(IAD) First published in 1989. Quarterly. The language of the journal in Italian, but coverage is international.
    Istruzione a Distanza
    Piazza San Carlo III, 42
    I-80137 Napoli
    ITALY

    JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION(ISSN 0830-0445. First published 1986. Published twice yearly, in November and May). 'An international publication of the Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE). Its aim is to promote and encourage scholarly work of an empirical and theoretical nature that relates to distance education in Canada.
    CADE Secretariat'
    205-1 Stewart Street
    Ottawa
    Ontario
    CANADA, K1N 6H7

    THE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING First published in1994. A refereed journal from the Distance Education Association of New Zealand
    Dr. Terry Hearn
    7 Tui Street, St Leonards
    Dunedin, NZ
    Fax +64-3-4677522
    e-mail: TJHEARN@rivendell.otago.ac.nz
    Book reviews editor: Dr. Ken Stevens
    Department of Education, Victoria University of Wellington
    PO Box 600, Wellington, NZ
    Fax +64-4-471-5349
    e-mail: Ken.Stevens@vuw.ac.nz 

    OPEN FORUM: DISTANCE EDUCATION AND OPEN LEARNING First published 1991. Gratis. The journal 'provides a vehicle for the communicaiton of current theory, research and practice related to teaching and learning through distance education and open learning systems.'
    Distance Education Centre
    University of Southern Queensland
    Post Office Darling Heights
    Toowoomba QLD 4350, AUSTRALIA

    OPEN LEARNING (ISSN 0268-0513. Published three times per year, in February, June and November. First published 1986 as successor to TEACHING AT A DISTANCE, 26 issues of which were published by the Open University between 1974 and 1985.) The journal comprises two sections, the first including longer articles with references, the second including issues for debate, grass roots observations, research notes, conference reports and reviews. 'The primary audience of the journal is those involved in post-school education and trainers in the public and private sectors in the UK; a substantial secondary audience is in distance education throughout the world'.
    Longman Group UK Ltd
    Subscriptions (Journals) Department
    Fourth Avenue
    Harlow, Essex
    CM19 6AA
    UK

    OPEN PRAXIS (ISSN 0264-0210). Two issues per year, in April/May and September/October. First published 1993 as successor to ICDE Bulletin. Welcomes 'articles, news items, letters, cartoons and copies of publications for review from institutional and individual members of ICDE'.
    The Permanent Secretariat
    ICDE
    Gjerdrums vei 12
    N-0486 Oslo 4
    NORWAY

    REVISTA DE EDUCACION A DISTANCIA (ISSN 1131-8783 First published 1991. Three issues per year. The journal is in Spanish, but overseas contributions are included. Issues include sections headed Informe, Estudios, Experiencias, Nuevas Tecnologias, Informacion and Documentation).
    RED
    CIDEAD
    C/Argumosa
    No 43
    Pabellon 6
    28012 Madrid
    SPAIN

    REVISTA IBEROAMERICANA DE EDUCACION SUPERIOR A DISTANCIA (ISSN 0214-3992. Three issues per year, in October, February and June. First published 1988 to replace AIESAD's BOLETIN INFORMATIVO, which first appeared in 1983.) The journal of the Asociacion Iberoamericana de Educacion Superior a Distancia, carrying articles, information and reviews from member institutions.
    Secretaria Permanente de AIESAD UNED
    Apartado de Correos 50.487
    28080 Madrid
    SPAIN

     

    The following regional and national publications, some of which are journals and some newsletters, are invaluable sources of current information on distance teaching activities and on topics of special interest to the countries or regions in which they are produced:

    CIFFAD (Consortium International Francophone de Formation a Distance) BULLETIN D'INFORMATION (First issue published March 1991. Secretariat du CIFFAD, Direction General de l'Education et de la Formation, Agence de Cooperation Culturelle et Technique, 13 Quai Andre Citroen, 75015 Paris, France. Gratis.)

    COMLEARN: news publication of the Commonwealth of Learning (First issue published 1990. Published by the Commonwealth of Learning, P.O. Box 10428, Pacific Centre, 1700-777 Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver, B.C. CANADA, V7Y 1K4. Gratis.)

    COMMUNIQUE (Six issues per year. Enquiries to Canadian Associaton for Distance Education, 151 Slater, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1P 5N1. The CADE newsletter, providing members with news and information from within Canada and outside.)

    DEANZ Bulletin. (A Distance Education Association of New Zealand publication carrying papers which did not get into the published DEANZ Conference Proceedings. Contact the DEANZ Secretary Alison Rowland, Centre for University Extra Mural Studies, Massey University, Private Bag, Palmerston North, NEW ZEALAND

    DEH (Distance Education in Health) NEWS. Bi-annual newsletter published by the Distance Education Unit of AMREF, the African Medical and Research Foundation. Gratis. Subtitled 'A forum for the exchange of news and views among health workers in distance education'. The Editor, DEH News, AMREF, Distance Education Unit, PO Box 30125, Nairobi, KENYA

    DEOSNEWS (An online journal published by the Distance Education Online Symposium, The Pennsylvania State University, College of Education, 403 South Allen Street, Suite 206, University Park, PA 16801-5202, USA. Publishes papers on a range of distance education topies, from the USA and other countries. To subscribe, post the following command to LISTSERV@PSUVM or LISTSERV@PSUVM.PSU.EDU by typing SUBSCRIBE DEOSNEWS, skip one space, and type your First and Last names.)

    DERUN (Distance Education Research Update Newsletter) was first published in January 1997 by the Division for Distance and Continuing Education(DDCE) at Central Queensland University in Australia. It is published twice a year (January and July) and is typically ten pages long. DERUN provides summaries of the research and development work of DDCE staff, brief reviews of selected journal articles, commentaries, short conference reports, and researcher profiles. This publication is now available in an online format that will increasingly take advantage of the power of the Web. The URL for this version is http://www.online.ddce.cqu.edu.au/derun/start.html The print version will continue to be produced. To be put on the mailing list for a free copy of the print version contact the editor Dr Colin Macpherson at c.macpherson@cqu.edu.au

    DISTANCE EDUCATION AND TRAINING NETWORK NEWSLETTER (Four issues per year for members of the Distance Education and Training Network of the National Society for Performance and Instruction (NSPI). Enquiries to Bob Spencer, DETN Vice President - Finance, Athabasca University, Box 10,000, Athabasca, Alberta, CANADA, T0G 2R0. First published 1987.)

    DISTANCE EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY NEWSLETTER Covers issues and events in distance education and educational technology from the United States and around the world! Details from Joan E Connick, Distance Education Publications, RFD No.2, Box 7290, No.3, Winthrop, ME 04364, USA.)

    DISTANCE EDUCATION NEWS AND VIEWS (ISSN 0794-540X. Irregularly published -- last issue received by ICDL is vol.III, no.1 &2, December, 1986. Subscription enquiries to B.C. Marumo, Dept of Non-Formal Education, Ministry of Education, P.M.B. 0043, Gaborone, BOTSWANA. First published 1983.)

    DLA Newsletter (A name change is presumably forthcoming since the March 1993 issue announces that the Distance Learning Association (DLA) of Southern Africa is to become the Distance Education Association of Southern Africa (DEASA)). The Editor, DLA Newsletter, DLA of Southern Africa, c/o PO Box 11350, Johannesburg 2000, SOUTH AFRICA

    EADTU news: newsletter of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (Irregularly published. Available from the EADTU Secretariat, P.O. Box 2960, 6401 DL Heerlen, NETHERLANDS. First published 1989.)

    EDEN Newsletter (Gratis. The newsletter of the European Distance Education Network. Kerry Mann, Executive Secretary, EDEN, PO Box 92, Milton Keynes, MK7 6DX, UK.)

    EUROSTEP COURIER (Monthly. EUROSTEP Courier subscription, EUROSTEP, PO Box 11112, 2301, EC Leiden, THE NETHERLANDS.)

    INDIAN JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION (One per year, two per year planned. First published 1988. Subscription enquiries to Professor S. Bhatnagar, Director, Correspondence Courses, Panjab University, Chandigarh, INDIA. Latest issue received in ICDL at the time of writing is vol.III, in May 1990.)

    KAKATIYA JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION (published twice yearly. Subscription enquiries to Director, School of Distance Learning and Continuing Education, Kakatiya University, Warangal, 506 009, INDIA.First published January 1992.)
    Editor: Professor K. Murali Manohar
    Director, School of Distance Learning and Continuing Education,
    Kakatiya University, Warangal, 506 009, INDIA

    MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY FOR HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT (Published quarterly. Subscription deatils from Dr (Mrs) Kailash Khanna, Lady Irwin College, Sikandra Road, New Delhi 110 001, INDIA)
    Chief Editor: Professor M. Mukhopadhyay
    Media and Technology for Human Resource Development, NIEPA, New Delhi 110 016, INDIA

    NEVER TOO FAR (Irregularly published. Issued by Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in cooperation with the Unesco Regional Office for Edcuation in Asia and the Pacific. Available from Never Too Far, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, Pakkred, Nonthaburi 11120, THAILAND. First published 1983. Gratis.)

    ODLAA Times (ISSN 1320-7954. Succeeded ASPESA NEWS in 1993 when the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association became the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia. ODLAA also publishes the international journal DISTANCE EDUCATION).
    Open Learning Unit
    Queensland University of Technology
    Kelvin Grove Campus
    Locked Bag No.2
    Red Hill
    Queensland 4059
    AUSTRALIA

    ONLINE CHRONICLE OF DISTANCE EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (Published online twice per year. Co-edited and published from Nova Southeastern University, USA. 'Seeks to share information related to distance education and communication and to help create a "living network" of resource people on distance education. To subscribe, send the following command to LISTPROC@PULSAR.ACAST.NOVA.EDU
    SUB DISTED your_full_name).
    For help, contact chron@fcae.nova.edu

    ON PIRADE (First published in 1994 as the newsletter of the Pacific Islands Regional Association for Distance Education. The PIRADE Treasurer is Christiana Garo (in care of) DEC, Solomon Islands College of Higher Education, PO Box G23, Honiara, SOLOMON ISLANDS

    OLS (OPEN LEARNING SYSTEMS) NEWS (Quarterly, with issues in June, September, December and March. Subscription details from NCET, OLS News, Sir William Lyons Road, Science Park, Coventry, CV4 7EZ, UK.)

    OPEN LEARNING TODAY: the newsletter of the British Association for Open Learning (Quarterly. Standard House, 15 High Street, Baldock, Herts, SG7 6AZ, UK. First published 1989.)

    PAKISTAN JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION (Two issues per year. Latest issue received in ICDL at the time of writing is vol.III, no.1, 1986. Subscription details from Dr Ahmed Noor Khan, Research and Statistical Centre, Allama Iqbal Open University, Sector H-8, Islamabad, PAKISTAN.)

    RADIO Y EDUCACION DE ADULTOS (Gratis. Subtitled 'Boletin Cuatrimestral ECCA', but contains information from round the world, particularly from Spanish speaking countries). Radio ECCA, Apartado 994, 35080 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, SPAIN

    SATURNOVA (Quarterly. SATURN Head Office Keizergracht 756, 1017 EZ Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS. First published 1987. Gratis). 'The newsletter and journal of the SATURN Community: Europe's Open Learning Network (a European partnership between industry and distance teaching and training institutions)'

    USING TELEMATICS IN EDUCATION AND TRAINING (Published ten times per year. Subtitled 'The European Newsletter', contains current information on technology based education. pjb Associates, 10 Green Acres, Stevenage, Herts, SG2 8ND, UK.)

    Document created by
    Charles Darling
    cdarling@commnet.edu
    Most recent modification: 12 September 2000


    U.S. Copyright Office
    Promotion of Distance Education Through Digital Technologies, 
    Federal Register Notice - 63 FR 71167 Docket No. 98-12A
    http://www.loc.gov/copyright/disted/comments.html 

    This site provides a long list of resource documents.

    Example:  Testimony of Dr. Lynne Schrum On Behalf of the International Society for Technology in Education Before the United States Copyright Office,  January 27, 1999 --- http://www.loc.gov/copyright/disted/comments/init058.pdf 


    NB TeleEducation (New Brunswick) --- http://teleeducation.nb.ca/ 

    Useful resources and references to assist you in the development and delivery of your distance education courses. Choose from Faculty & Developers, K-12 Teacher or Workplace Trainer and you're on your way


    Website access to distance education International --- http://www.spc.org.nc/phs/Distance%20Education/Other%20location.htm 


    This directory has been developed jointly by the Association of Business Schools and Biz/ed. It offers, in a user-friendly format, a comprehensive and unique resource for anyone considering studying Business and Management in the UK.

    All Business and Management courses offered by ABS members are included in a fully searchable database.


    Distance-Educator.com --- http://www.distance-educator.com/ 

    Solutions For

    "THE ROLE OF THE ESCs IN EUROPEAN DISTANCE EDUCATION" 
    André le Roux 
    University of South Africa 
    http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/buo/progressio/21(2)1999/main2.html
     

    This article reports findings and conclusions resulting from research undertaken in Western Europe during a recent study tour. The topic was: The role of the EuroStudyCentres (ESCs) in European distance education. Several interviews were conducted with academics at various institutions in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The project was undertaken with a travel grant awarded by the Research and Bursaries Committee of Unisa.

    The EuroStudyCentres offer the following products/services:

    • an information/documentation service on a European level, e.g. (on-line) databases;

    • development/provision of courses, degrees and training programmes, for individuals as well as for business and industry;
    • tutoring and counselling services (see also Whiting 1987), telematic facilities such as computer and teleconferencing systems, audio (graphics), video
    • training courses (e.g. new media and technology).
    •  

    The courses provided by the EuroStudyCentres have been developed by members of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities. Each member has full legal status to develop and deliver courses and nationally recognised qualifications. For the ESC Network a model of peer evaluation was developed. This includes visitation of the nominated ESC as well as the production of a self study report.

    As part of a research project about the role of the ESCs in European distance education interviews were conducted with academics at the following institutions:

    • ZENTRUM FÜR FERNSTUDIEN WIEN (AUSTRIA)
    • EURO STUDIE CENTRUM OPEN UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN (BELGIUM)
    • ESC DE PARIS ILE DE FRANCE SORBONNE (FRANCE)
    • OPEN UNIVERSITEIT EURO STUDIE CENTRUM DEN HAAG (NETHERLANDS)
    • ZENTRUM FÜR UNIVERSITÄRE FERNSTUDIEN BRIG (SWITZERLAND)

    Maple Square (Canada's Internet Directory)  --- http://www.maplesquare.com/directory/education/distance_education/ 

     


    Cal Berkeley's Labor Research Portal --- http://iir.berkeley.edu/~iir/library/webguides.html 
    Note especially the Labor Education guide at http://iir.berkeley.edu/~iir/library/laboredgd.html 


    "Web Resources," by Sylvia Charp, T.H.E. Journal, August 2001. Page 10 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3553.cfm 

    At present, a great deal of information is free on the Web. But how long it remains free is in question. For example, a bill is now pending before the U.S. House of Representatives that could force the U.S. Department of Energy to end Pub Sciences, its Web database that allows scientists to search abstracts and citations from more than 1,000 scientific journals. Universities are now charging for the use of their resources. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is selling a program it developed to provide the school's faculty and senior students with Web-based access to financial data from such providers as Dow Jones and Co., Standard and Poor's and Thomson Financial Services. They claim 55 clients, including 21 of the top 25 ranked business schools.


    Yahoo Distance Learning Resources (K-12) --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/Distance_Learning/K_12/ 

    Most Popular

    Government Agencies for Education http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/Government_Agencies/ 


    Philosophy Around the Web, by Peter J. King --- http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/phil_index.html 

    The main purpose of this site is to act as a guide and a gateway to philosophy resources on the Internet. If you're interested only in the other things on offer (which have now expanded to take up more than half the space), you should skip to Everything Else.
    There's also a simplified index of the main sections.

    The heart of the site is a set of links organised into fourteen main categories. It's not always easy to categorise Web sites; I've cross-referenced where I can, but if you don't find what you're looking for straight away, try browsing through the other pages.



    International Teacher Training and Lesson Sharing


    "The Chronicle's special report on Online Learning explores how calls for quality control and assessment are reshaping online learning," (Not Free), Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2011 ---
    https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=78602&cid=ol_nlb_wc

    The Chronicle's special report on Online Learning explores how calls for quality control and assessment are reshaping online learning. As online learning spreads throughout higher education, so have calls for quality control and assessment. Accrediting groups are scrambling to keep up, and Congress and government officials continue to scrutinize the high student-loan default rates and aggressive recruiting tactics of some for-profit, mostly online colleges. But the push for accountability isn't coming just from outside. More colleges are looking inward, conducting their own self-examinations into what works and what doesn't.

    Also in this year's report:
     
    • Strategies for teaching and doing research online
    • Members of the U.S. military are taking online courses while serving in Afghanistan
    • Community colleges are using online technology to keep an eye on at-risk students and help them understand their own learning style
    • The push to determine what students learn online, not just how much time they spend in class
    • Presidents' views on e-learning
    Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm


    Update on free sharing of courseware from MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities.
    "CourseWork: An Online Problem Set and Quizzing Tool," by Charles Kerns, Scott Stocker, and Evonne Schaeffer, Syllabus, June 2001, 27-29.  I don't think the article is available online, although archived table of contents for the June edition is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/magazine.asp?month=6&year=2001 

    A Web-based learning support tool that helps faculty assess student understanding will soon be a component of the Open Knowledge infrastructure under the development at Stanford, MIT, and other universities.

    THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE (OKI)

    MIT, along with its principal partner Stanford University, has launched The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), an ambitious project to develop a modular, easy-to-use, Web-based teaching environment for assembling, delivering, and accessing educational resources and activities.  The initiative emerged from the realization that our institutions were repeatedly building specialized Web applications that shared common requirements for enterprise data and services.  Existing commercial products still require extensive customization to integrate into student information, authentication, and authorization systems, and related data stores.  Faculty using these tools frequently complain that while sometimes helpful, they require extra effort, forcing them to impose their style of teaching upon the rigidly structured course system format.  And changing the color of the screen or shape of the buttons isn't the level of customization that really supports different pedagogical approaches.

    What is OKI?

    OKI is about tools, a system, and a community.  It is not a new browser, document editor, or pre-packaged content.  OKI tools are the elements that enable basic teaching on the Web and that support specialized discipline-specific needs, pedagogical methods, or group logistics.

    OKI is being developed with careful attention to IMS, SCORM, AICC, Dublin Core, and related standards efforts.  In keeping with another recently announced MIT project, the OpenCourseWare Initiative (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw-facts.html) which will make content from MIT courses available on the Web for free, OKI is based on an open source licensing model (there are  no proprietary components).  It allows the tools, no matter who creates them, to:

    • Save information about learners, subjects, and teaching methods in the same format
    • Share information
    • Access other systems like the library, the registrar, and authentication and authorization systems
    • Extend the system; anyone can add new features and new tools.

    OKI is being built by institutions that have dealt with large open systems in academic settings.  Besides MIT and Stanford, core initial collaborating institutions include the Dartmouth College, North Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin.

    Recalling the vitality and success of another open source effort, the development of the Linux operating system, OKI hopes to build a community of developers, teachers, educational technologists, librarians, and researchers who will collaborate to continually improve and extend the OKI learning management system.  OKI is committed to working with its partners and early adopters to establish a dynamic open source framework for continued development, support, and training.

    Getting Involved

    Information about the progress of OKI can be found on the OKI Web site:  http://web.mit.edu/oki .  For updates subscribe to the list oki-announce@mit.edu using the form on the OKI Web site.  If you'd like to contribute more directly to this effort, e-mail oki-suggest@mit.edu.

     


    Princeton Review Buys Distance-Education Provider for $170-Million

    The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory company, announced today that it would pay $170-million in cash to purchase the Penn Foster Education Group, a 118-year-old company that operates three accredited distance-education institutions serving 223,000 secondary and postsecondary students in more than 150 countries. In a news release, the Princeton Review, which is not connected with Princeton University, said the deal would increase the company's "cash flow generating capabilities

    Jensen Comment
    What surprised me is the number of students served by the Penn Foster Education Group ---
    http://www.pennfoster.edu/index.html?semkey=Q092344
    One contributing factor to the large number of online students is the granting of high school diplomas. Penn Foster also offers career training as opposed to education --- http://www.pennfoster.edu/programs_diplomas.html

    American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers Certification Exam
    One of the training programs is a certificate bookkeeping program --- http://www.pennfoster.edu/bookkeeping/index.html

    Bookkeeping

    CAREER OUTLOOK

    Your New Career

    Thousands of new businesses open each year and every organization, large or small, needs someone with the right training to maintain and update its financial records. Bookkeepers hold vital positions within the companies they work for. They verify and balance receipts, post debits and credits, and record transactions.

    Some Bookkeepers have offices in their own homes and make extra money in addition to their regular salary. Newspaper ads regularly appear for payroll clerks, accounts receivable and payable clerks, and Bookkeepers for large and small businesses. Enjoy career independence in this exciting profession!

    Whether you work for an established business or earn extra income at home, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects more than 263,000 new job opportunities for Bookkeepers through 2016.*

    Your New Skills

    Learn to prepare a balance sheet, create a profit and loss statement, and produce a financial report for any business. You'll have the skills others depend on in the business world, earning the respect of your employers, and making you a vital asset to any corporation.

    You'll learn all of the important skills you need in Bookkeeping.
    • Get the necessary accounting skills. Learn to prepare the balance sheet and income statement, as well as accounting for cash and payroll accounting.
    • Gain practical experience. Maintain the accounting records and prepare financial statements for a model company.
    • Learn valuable computer skills. Master the first steps in using a computer and learn to create notes, documents, and drawings using Microsoft® Windows® and Windows® accessories. (Software not included in program.)
    • Prepare for certification. Penn Foster encourages students to take the American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers Certification Exam, provides special supplements to assist with your studies, and even includes an $85 voucher to help defray the cost.

    EDUCAUSE Effective Practices and Solutions --- http://www.educause.edu/ep/ 

    EDUCAUSE has developed this Effective Practices and Solutions (EPS) service to

    • offer you a way to easily share the practices and solutions you have implemented on your campus that you have found to be effective in managing and using information technology;
    • provide an information service to help you learn "who is doing what" among your colleagues to solve common challenges; and
    • bring your practice or solution to the attention of the planners of EDUCAUSE professional development activities, who are always looking for interesting new content and contributors for publications and conferences.

    This service is entirely member-driven; its success depends on your willingness to share your successes with your colleagues to help them save time and resources. The more practices contributed to the service, the more valuable it will become. Please note that practices in the EPS database have been identified as effective and replicable by their contributors; their value has not been judged by EDUCAUSE. 


    "Program Trains Teachers in Cross-Border Sharing of Knowledge," by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times, March 15, 2000 --- http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/03/cyber/education/15education.html 

    Sometime soon, a high school student studying chemistry in Florida could be using supplemental course material developed for the Web by a high school teacher in Rio de Janeiro. 

    That kind of international exchange is the goal of Partnership in Global Learning, a new project that will use the Internet and other communications technology to offer high school and college-level course materials for classrooms around the globe. In the initial phase of the pilot project, universities in the United States and two Latin American countries will train high school teachers to develop course materials that can be used in their own countries and across borders.


    An International Survey of Teacher Training and Distance Education: From Smoke Signals to Satellite II --- http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~cornell/fsu3.htm 

    Current trends in education include collaborative learning and learner-centered instruction, as many practitioners move away from more traditional forms of education. The more interactive distance delivery forms are conducive to teaching and learning collaboratively in learner-centered environments. A number of authors in this report articulate the problems and solutions that result from making dramatic paradigm shifts.

    Anita Pincas, in the U.K., in comparing the ways that students learn by asynchronous computer conferences, reports that the way a course is designed makes a vast difference in the quality and quantity of learner participation, particularly later in the course. Patricia Kirby, from Maryland, offers an "Alice Through the Looking Glass" view of the collaboration that develops among learners at remote site in courses offered by interactive video conference. Thea de Kock, from South Africa, describes the challenges in re-educating the total teacher workforce, including teacher education, using learner-centered instruction via one-way video and two-way audio conference.

    Judi Repman and Robert Price, in Texas, posit the factors related to the institution's snail-like pace of adoption and use of interactive video conference for teacher training. James Shaeffer & Charlotte Farr, from Wyoming, describe the challenges of preparing university faculty to teach courses via distance education. Carla Payne, from Vermont, describes a learner-centered teacher education program offered at a distance and culminating in a Teacher Licensure Portfolio for each graduate. Patricia Winkler and Stephen Harmon, from Texas, use the metaphor of pioneers to describe the opposite poles of frustration and enthusiasm associated with the training, technical difficulties, and time issues involved in a partnership linking the university and school districts by interactive video conference.

    Also writing from Texas, Lauren Cifuentes et al. describe the collaboration that occurs within computer conferences among pre-service teachers and graduate students of distance education.

    Cultural Challenges

    Culture, defined broadly, incorporates not only the traditional geographic delineations of cross-cultural issues, but also includes aspects of "virtual" or simulated cultures that develop in computer-mediated environments (Bonham, Cifuentes, & Murphy, 1995). The cultural entanglements and misunderstandings that can arise from teaching foreign languages or crossing cultural boundaries are endless, as several authors attest.

    Maureen Hogan, writing about Israel, describes the vagaries of planning and implementing an Internet-based global curriculum project in Jerusalem, using a constructivist teaching model. Colin MacKerras, from Australia, describes the challenges in developing and implementing the supplementary video programs on Chinese language, "Dragon's Tongue," for non-Chinese speaking students in Australia. Writing about a program for teachers of Mexican Indian languages, Harold Ormsby proposes that bilingual or multilingual faculty use a variety of distance delivery forms to teach trainees in their own language in Mexico.

    Malcolm Beazley, from Australia, describes his experience in providing students with "a multi-cultural society in their own classroom regardless of its location in the world" as they develop teleliteracy skills through Computer Pals Across the World. Guy Bensusan, from Arizona, presents his insights into using interactive video conference to teach Native Americans pre-service teachers in a constructivist manner. Diane Thompson, from Australia, illustrates the differences in concepts of silence in audio conferencing in comparison with face-to-face silence.

    Martin Rich, from the U.K., describes the virtual culture that arises among British and French MBA students when they use a case study exercise that has been adapted to the Web. Ruth Vilmi, from Finland, reports on the initial nightmare involved in organizing, maintaining, and evaluating e-mail projects that require university students to form small groups across cultures to develop a technology product.


    From Infobits on July 27, 2001

    NEW JOURNAL ON INFORMATION AND COMPUTER SCIENCES TEACHING AND LEARNING

    INNOVATIONS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IN INFORMATION AND COMPUTER SCIENCES ELECTRONIC JOURNAL (ITALICS) is a new a peer-reviewed online journal published by the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Information and Computer Sciences (LTSN-ICS). ITALICS Electronic Journal will contain papers on current information and computer sciences teaching, including: developments in computer-based learning and assessment; open learning, distance learning, collaborative learning, and independent learning approaches; staff development; and the impact of subject centers on learning and teaching. 

    The journal is available, at no cost, at http://www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/pub/italics/index.html


    The Partnership in Global Learning (PGL) aims to establish a program of collaboration of Bell Labs with highly ranked universities in the Americas --- http://grove.ufl.edu/~pgl/ 

    The project will start with the creation of a Distance Learning Network (DLN) connecting some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the Americas, including the:

       » University of Florida (UF/USA),
       » Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP/Brazil),
       » Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ/Brazil),
       » Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV/Brazil)
       » Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM

    "Distance Education:  Access Guidelines for Students with Disabilities," August 1999, Chancellor’s Office California Community Colleges --- http://www.htctu.fhda.edu/dlguidelines/final%20dl%20guidelines.htm

    This is a very informative discussion regarding access law in the U.S. and alternatives for dealing with this law.


    If you know any accounting educators with helpful materials on the web, please ask them to link their materials  in the American Accounting Association's Accounting Coursepage Exchange (ACE) web site at
    http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/ace/index.htm
    Please send these professors email messages today and urge them to share as much as they can with the academy by easily registering their course pages with ACE.


    International Teacher Education Program at Simon Fraser University --- http://www.educ.sfu.ca/InternationalEd/default.html 


    WorLD Links for Development --- http://www.worldbank.org/worldlinks/english/index.html

    The World Links for Development (WorLD) program provides Internet connectivity and training for teachers, teacher trainers and students in developing countries in the use of technology in education. WorLD then links students and teachers in secondary schools in developing countries with schools in industrialized countries for collaborative learning via the Internet.

     

    countries

    - Africa -

    Botswana

    • 

    Cape Verde

    • 

    Ghana

    • 

    Mauritania

    • 

    Mozambique

    • 

    Senegal

    • 

    South Africa

    • 

    Uganda

    • 

    Zimbabwe

    - Mediterranean & Middle East -

    • 

    Turkey

    • 

    West Bank / Gaza

    - South America -

    • 

    Brazil

    • 

    Chile

    Colombia

    • 

    Paraguay

    • 

    Peru

    - rest of world -

    • 

    partner schoolnets

    countries

    Countries

    WorLD is currently active in developing countries on four continents -- Botswana, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Ghana, Mauritania, Mozambique, Paraguay, Peru, Senegal, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda, West Bank / Gaza and Zimbabwe

    Please note: In addition to these countries, WorLD has formed partnerships with many regional schoolnets and other partner organizations (like I*EARN) to help link teachers and students around the world. 

    world map South Africa Zimbabwe Mozambique Ghana Uganda West Bank - Gaza Colombia Peru Brazil Chile Paraguay Senegal Mauritania Turkey Cape Verde Australia Europe Canada and USA Japan

    Note: Information on WorLD pilot schools and partner schools in industrialized countrie

     


    EURYDICE at NFER --- http://www.nfer.ac.uk/eurydice/index.htm 

    The EURYDICE Unit at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) is the National Unit for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The NFER is Britain's leading independent educational research body. A separate Unit exists in Scotland.

    EURYDICE is the information network on education in Europe. Its main role is the exchange of information on education systems and on national policies in the field of education.

    Mission of EURYDICE at NFER

    Our mission is to contribute to the quality of education policy making and improve the transparency and understanding of European and International education by collecting, managing and disseminating information on education policies and on the organisation and structure of education systems. We primarily aim to serve policy makers at European, national and local government level but also seek to make relevant information available to the wider education community, and in particular, to support activities under SOCRATES and other European programmes.

    The key objectives of EURYDICE at NFER are to:

    • Collect and disseminate general information on education systems.

    • Provide policy makers with detailed information on specific areas of policy through a targeted enquiry service.

    • Inform policy makers, and other users, of new developments in education in the UK and overseas through current awareness services.

    • Improve understanding of education systems through the compilation of European comparative studies.
      .
    • Facilitate the comparison of education systems through the development of education indicators.

    • Improve access to information on education systems and policies through the development and management of databases and websites.

    EURYBASE is a database on education systems in Europe. It provides a wealth of information on each phase of education from pre-school to higher education, including:

    • general organisation and administration of education
    • evaluation and quality mechanisms at all levels
    • curriculum and assessment arrangements
    • provision for special educational needs
    • teacher training and conditions of service.

    For further information on EURYDICE at NFER please consult our Annual Report (pdf file for downloading).


    GATE:  The Global Alliance for Transnational Education (GATE) is an international organization concerned with issues relating to quality in Transnational Education (TNE) --- http://www.edugate.org/ 

    GATE has devised a standard of best practices (The Principles for Transnational Education) to which institutions should adhere when offering TNE; it also outlines a process of certification for these institutions that adhere to these Principles

    GATE is a board-governed organization. GATE operations are headquartered in Englewood, Colorado, USA.

    GATE Mission --- "Achieving Worldwide Access to Quality Education and Training"

    The global marketplace, new technology and new economy are contributing to the rapid globalization of higher education. Today's business environment draws its professional work force from all corners of the globe. Human resource development divisions of multi-national corporations face the increasing challenge of evaluating courses and degrees from other countries when selecting personnel. Further, higher education and teaching are no longer provided solely confined within national borders. With the use of online tools, provided both by the higher education and corporate sectors, transnational education can be found in multiple forms, provided both electronically, and through traditional instruction and training programs. Issues of quality, purpose and responsibility abound in this new borderless educational arena and the time is ripe for an international alliance of business, higher education and government dedicated to principled advocacy for transnational educational programs. This alliance is GATE - the Global Alliance for Transnational Education.

    A Strategic Partnership

    The multi-national corporate community, national associations and governmental agencies, and institutions of higher education must partner to maximize information and assure quality in a rapidly globalizing education and human resource market. Each of these communities of interest is represented on the GATE Board of Directors and the Academic Advisory Committee. GATE's programs are designed to meet the needs of each constituency while maximizing cross-fertilization through:

    Analyzing trends in international employment and trade; Exploring current issues universities face in international admissions; Networking across national borders with corporations and educational associations and institutions; Accessing global information about educational systems, institutions and transnational educational offerings; and Developing principles of good practice and recognition for quality international education and training.

    GATE Publications

    Demand for Transnational Education in the Asia Pacific. Published 2000 US $25.00

    The Changing Face of Transnational Education: Moving Education -- Not Learners (1998 GATE Conference Proceedings). Higher Education in Europe. Volume XXIV Number 2 - 1999 US $15.00

    Transnational Educational Provisions: Enabling Access or Generating Exclusion Higher Education in Europe Volume XXV Number 3 - 2000 (Access or Exclusion? Trade in Transnational Education Services - 1999 GATE Conference Proceedings) US $25.00

    Trade in Transnational Education Services: A Report by the Global Alliance for Transnational Education November 2000 US $30.00


    "Program Trains Teachers in Cross-Border Sharing of Knowledge," by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times, March 15, 2000 --- http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/03/cyber/education/15education.html 

    Sometime soon, a high school student studying chemistry in Florida could be using supplemental course material developed for the Web by a high school teacher in Rio de Janeiro. That kind of international exchange is the goal of Partnership in Global Learning, a new project that will use the Internet and other communications technology to offer high school and college-level course materials for classrooms around the globe. In the initial phase of the pilot project, universities in the United States and two Latin American countries will train high school teachers to develop course materials that can be used in their own countries and across borders.

    ...

    The universities will adopt selected high schools in their areas and train teachers there in the development of Web-based curriculum materials for business and science subjects, including biology, chemistry and physics. Lowe said the program is concentrating on these fields because they are considered important areas of knowledge for students who want to work in an increasingly technological global economy. It is also hoped that some students who use the materials might become interested enough in the subjects to pursue university degrees in them.

    Lowe said the course material might include tutorials that would let students proceed at their own pace, or even sites using videogame techniques to drive home lessons.


    The Euroregional Center for Democracy (CED) is a non-governmental and non-profit organization, that promotes democracy and stability in Central and South - Eastern Europe http://www.regionalnet.org/english/about/about.html 

     

    CED is located in Timisoara, a city in the Western part of Romania. Timisoara represents an ideal learning location for a laboratory seeking to devise programs of great importance for the future of democracy and regional stability. This multi-ethnic and multi-cultural space encourages the dialogue between individuals and institutions that promote democratic values.



    "Reaching Across Boundaries:  The Bryant College-Belarus Connection," by G.A. Langlois, J.B. Litoff, and J.A. Ilacqua, Syllabus, October 2001, pp. 12-14 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5088 

    Using the Internet’s sphere of influence, one small college is making an impact on the education of students in Belarus, a country that has achieved only limited structural reform since its independence from the former Soviet Union. Despite the country’s economic isolation from the West, Belarusian institutions are reaching across traditional boundaries to forge new collaborative relationships.

    Emerging national consciousness in the Newly Independent States (NIS) of Europe has produced dramatic alterations in business, politics, economics, technology, and culture, requiring innovative educational methodologies that better match the needs of these countries in transition. In 1996, in response to these challenges, Bryant College spearheaded the Collaborative Learning at a Distance (CLD) program between Bryant and Belarus. This comprehensive joint venture is an excellent model for using Internet technologies to advance collaborative learning, communication competencies, and policy making.

    In implementing the CLD Program, we encountered many philosophical, logistical, and technical challenges. Two distinctly different Belarusian institutions, the Information Technologies Center (ITC) of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and the European Humanities University (EHU), bridged political boundaries to create a close working relationship between a state (government-owned) and non-state (private) institution. The shared enthusiasm of the ITC and EHU for the CLD Program enabled them to overcome their political differences.

    A Non-Hierarchical Approach

    The program uses a non-hierarchical model, emphasizing reciprocal, interactive learning across national and academic boundaries (see figure). It is based on our belief that learning is a collaborative process and that we learn better when we teach each other and learn in multiple ways. Our Internet-based CLD Program focuses on a small-scale, personalized interactive learning experience, which directly involves the teacher/mentor, student/learner, and all other stakeholders in the process.

    This non-heirarchical pedagogical approach is relatively unfamiliar to university educators in the NIS. A history of centralized education and strong governmental control over curricula has resulted in a teaching environment that does not encourage the interactive exchange of ideas between faculty and students. At a time when funding for educational innovation in the NIS has been curtailed, cost-effective, collaborative distance learning projects can help address the problem of dwindling educational resources and compensate for the legacy of 70 years of communism.

    Fostering Collaboration

    Collaborative projects—including seminars for scientists and engineers who worked for the Soviet defense industry, distance learning courses, and the development of environmental policy initiatives with the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus—have been led by scholars representing diverse academic disciplines. These projects have utilized a wide array of information technologies, including International Virtual Roundtable Discussions via e-mail, seminars on Web site construction, Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing between the U.S. and Belarus, software training and development, and the use of the Internet to promote collaborative learning across diverse cultural and political boundaries. (The entire CLD Program is available at http://web.bryant.edu/~history/new/course.htm).

    Using these technologies, faculty, students, and entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Belarus have formed strong ties. Faculty exchanges have permitted collaborators to teach at participating universities, conduct research, present training programs, lead trade missions, and deliver papers at international conferences. On-site visits, ranging in length from six days to six months, have played a critical role in our ability to develop trusting relationships and set the CLD Program in motion. We have learned that even sophisticated distance learning technologies cannot replace the power and intensity of human interactions.

    Student-centered, collaborative group projects, standard on American campuses, are virtually unheard of in Belarus. The introduction of divergent points of view on controversial topics into classroom discussions is also largely absent. In fact, the educational system of Belarus, including all curricula issues, continues to be tightly controlled by the state. Still, the CLD Program’s use of Internet technologies has had a powerfully democratizing influence on Belarusian learners who have participated in this project.

    Technology-enabled interactions between students from different cultures and with different expertise and skill sets have presented challenges. For instance, American students display an almost casual approach to e-mail correspondence, often failing to use proper punctuation or sentence structure. By contrast, Belarusians take particular care in constructing well-written messages, exacerbating the time constraints caused by limited computer laboratory access. Mentors in both countries encouraged collaborative techniques for negotiating these barriers to communication.

    History professor David Lux noted that crucial pedagogical issues arose during the initial offering of his course, “The History of American Technology.” Viewing the course as an experiment to field-test technological and pedagogical issues associated with distance learning, Lux observed that cultural differences significantly affected how students approached the course. Belarusian students “proved voracious in their willingness to digest readings and engage in very sophisticated dialogue about the meaning and content of what they were reading.” Yet, Lux concluded that “the collaborative learning, student-project features of the course,” so popular with Bryant students, did not initially “translate meaningfully” into the educational culture of Belarus. With guidance and examples from Bryant faculty and students, however, Belarusian students gradually came to appreciate the value of collaborative projects.

    In the course, “Cultures and Economies in Transition in the Post Soviet Era,” Professors Judy Barrett Litoff and Joseph Ilacqua described a high level of energy by students representing diverse countries. Heated debates often ensued as students tackled the difficult challenge of understanding societies in transition. However, their shared experiences as students helped them to negotiate their diverse perspectives. For example, during the Kosovo crisis in the spring of 1999, spirited e-mail exchanges of conflicting student perspectives took place. These discussions demonstrated the value of exploring cross-cultural and comparative political differences in order to better understand complex global problems.

    Belarusian students enrolled in “Environmental Policy: Technology, Business & Government,” a course offered by Professor Gaytha Langlois, lacked a basic understanding of the governmental infrastructure necessary to implement well-designed environmental policy initiatives. Even Bryant students were poorly informed about how policies are actualized in the U.S., but in Belarus, the differences in governmental structure and practices further complicated this problem. The process of acquainting Belarusian students with the roles that government and non-governmental organizations play in crafting environmental and business policy has proved to be more cumbersome than expected. Through the use of structured International Virtual Roundtable Discussions, the ability of government and non-governmental organizations to formulate environmental policies became clearer.

    Technical Considerations

    Time differences, Internet delays, and the technological realities of Belarus presented challenges that limited the use of complex distance learning technologies. Consequently, we designed a relatively inexpensive and modest program. Since access to the Web in Belarus is often slow and unpredictable, we have provided CD-ROM versions of the CLD Web site to Belarusian students. CD-ROMs that are run on computers connected to the Web provide students with full entry to the CLD courses, including the ability to access hyperlinks. In addition, through the cooperation of information technology specialists at Bryant and EHU, a mirror Web site has been established to enhance connectivity.

    Because of the seven-hour time difference between the east coast of the United States and Belarus, and because Belarusian students have limited access to e-mail and depend primarily on under-equipped (by U.S. standards) university computer laboratories for electronic communication, synchronous and asynchronous e-mail communication between the United States and Belarus has proved to be more difficult than we had originally anticipated. U.S. students are routinely assigned personal university e-mail addresses, but as a rule Belarusian students are rarely provided one. Even when students are assigned e-mail addresses, however, they often discover that access to university computer laboratories is limited to 2-3 hours a week. To encourage synchronous e-mail communication with students, Bryant faculty have adopted e-mail office hours between 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. in Belarus). By choosing these e-mail office hours, we are able to avoid the busy use of the Internet in Belarus during the mid- and late afternoon.

    The most useful and successful distance learning technique that we have introduced is the International Virtual Roundtable Discussion (IVRD) via e-mail. This tool, utilizing the Internet to promote cross-cultural and comparative perspectives, has been incorporated into all CLD courses and has been enthusiastically embraced by learners. The IVRD features structured discussions that avoid the pitfalls of unmoderated chat rooms, yet it encourages learners to share informed opinions about specified topics that often result in lively exchanges of viewpoints.

    On occasion, we utilize Microsoft’s NetMeeting program to provide live, two-way, global “see and talk” communication over the Internet. The Microsoft NetMeeting program, standard on new computers, uses simple computer accessories, including microphone, speakers, headset, and small video camera, that cost about $100. This inexpensive technology, although dependent upon a relatively new computer (about $1,000), replaces the high costs of long-distance telephone charges and video conferencing. Although two-way video and audio communications are exciting and hold great promise, they frequently require users to have great patience and perseverance in order to make them work properly.

    The rest of the article is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5088


    There are thousands of distance education courses in the U.K.

    The Guardian has a really interesting education search page for U.K. students.  It first lets you choose from hundreds of distance education course topics.  Then you choose what type of credential/degree your are seeking and what college you want to pick --- http://www.ecctisclearing.co.uk/

    When I searched for "accounting" and "degree" courses on August 27, 2005, I found links to 820 courses in many colleges and universities.




     


    Links to Bob Jensen's Workshop Documents on Education and Learning

    The Shocking Future of Education 

    First File

    Second File

    Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
    (Includes helpers for finding online training and education courses, certificate programs, and degree Programs)
    Detail File

    Alternatives and Tricks/Tools of the Trade

    First File

    Second File

    The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education

     Detail File

    Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research Detail File
    History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies Detail File
    Knowledge Portals and Vortals Detail File
    Bob Jensen's Advice to New Faculty (and Resources) Detail File
    Threads of Online Program Costs and Faculty Compensation Detail File
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    educators, including me, have misinterpreted the concept of OpenCourseWare (OCW) as envisioned by MIT and some other major universities.  

    "OpenCourseWare:  Simple Idea, Profound Implications," by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus Magazine, January 2002, pp. 12-16 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5913 

    On April 4, 2001, Charles Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced the beginning of the OpenCourseWare project (OCW) in a press conference that was simultaneously Web cast. “As president of MIT, I have come to expect top-level innovative and intellectually entrepreneurial ideas from the MIT community.... I have to tell you that we went into this expecting that something creative, cutting-edge, and challenging would emerge. And, frankly, we also expected that it would be something based on a revenue-producing model—a project or program that took into account the power of the Internet and its potential for new applications in education. OpenCourseWare is not exactly what I had expected.” Frankly, neither did anyone else.

    What is OCW?

    Since its inception, OCW has been misunderstood. The academic world has seen one or another online degree program or commercial venture stake a claim to its part of cyberspace. OCW is not about online degree programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll. That’s what it isn’t. What, then, is it?

    OCW is a process—not a set of classes. This process is intended to make the MIT course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available free online to any user in the world.

    The goal of OCW is to provide the content that supports an MIT education. Ultimately, the OCW Web resource will host the materials for more than 2,000 classes taught at MIT, presented with a coherent interface that will include sophisticated search algorithms to explore additional concepts, pedagogies, and related attributes across the site as well as within a course.

    The OCW announcement elicited varied reactions. Many wondered how this effort differs from any number of instances where universities have made their course Web sites available to the public, all or in part. The more cynical expressed admiration for the public relations success. The announcement made the front page of the New York Times, but skeptics asserted that OCW would be nothing more than a traditional Web site dressed up with a new acronym. But the elegance is in its simplicity. The closer one looks, the more one sees.

    Still, an important and often overlooked implication of OCW is another aspect of what it is not—it is emphatically not an MIT education. This has been emphasized by Vest and other spokespeople for the initiative, but it bears repeating. It is the firm tenant of OCW that the core of an MIT education is the interaction between students and faculty in an environment that invites and supports inquiry and questioning. OCW makes no claim or effort to encapsulate this on the Web.

    Competing Demands

    Even given the support generally garnered on the MIT campus, some obstacles must be overcome if OCW is to be successfully implemented and maintained.

    • Time. The prospect of putting up the content of some 2,000 courses in the next 10 years is daunting for anyone, even on a campus like MIT. This is all the more challenging given the one thing faculty members have least available—time. The enthusiasm and commitment toward the project is tempered by the uncertainty surrounding the level of effort faculty will be required to invest to make content suitable for OCW.

    Teaching and research remain prime concerns for faculty throughout institutions of higher education nationwide and abroad. A project like this must not add significantly to the workload of already challenged faculty members, nor can it detract from their current commitments. A research question for such an effort is therefore: How can we assemble and distribute content with minimal faculty involvement?

    • Reusable learning objects. A corollary to the time-constrained faculty member is the requirement that learning objects created for a course must be found suitable for other purposes, such as OCW. Faculty members cannot be expected to create content twice, once for teaching and again for presentation to the broader academic public. Thus, a second objective for the project is understanding the requirements for transformation of learning objects from their in-class instructional use to their representation as meaningful content for those interacting out of the context of the faculty/student/course/setting intersection.

    • Production process. Putting together a Web site for a course is, despite current technologies to assist site designers, a significant effort. Currently, trade-offs are made in order to achieve some degree of scalability in the various systems used to aggregate content for teaching. For example, learning management systems may provide a limited suite of templates with form-based content uploading, designed to distribute the labor required to ingest and position the content within the site’s framework. The trade-off is often restricted pedagogical flexibility and relatively basic, cosmetic design choices for the reduction in the effort needed to auto-generate large numbers of course “shells.” A project such as that undertaken by OCW must incorporate new opportunities to achieve scalability for content development while not entirely sacrificing individuality in site design.

    Courseware as Product

    The higher education community has become subject to a new force in recent years. The trend has been referred to as “education as a good” (Schlais, 2001), describing the increasing trend toward the privatization of knowledge. Colleges and universities, in his view, are becoming more and more like vendors to students, who perceive themselves as customers of college education services. During the bloom of online distance education—curtailed only recently by the general economic recession—competition for students among universities led to increasing costs. Revenues were sought to replace declining public subsidies and to support competitive consumerism. Not-for-profit subsidiaries of traditional colleges, for-profit private universities, and corporations emerged, seeking to gain a larger share in what seemed an infinitely expanding demand for anywhere, anytime learning.

    The privatization of knowledge has many manifestations. One is the frightening rise in the cost of scholarly journals. The pattern is familiar to anyone working in the academy. Schlais describes the conundrum like this: “A faculty member spends years of her life learning, researching, thinking, organizing, teaching, and writing. Her university invests substantially during this process. She publishes the fruits of her labor in a highly respected journal. And finally her library buys a subscription to the journal, sometimes costing in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.” Something is amiss, and our library colleagues have been painfully aware of it for years.

    Copyright and legal interpretations deepen the concern. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the General Agreement on Trade in Services, education is an international commodity. In the United States, compliance with the WTO agreements was accomplished in part by the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Jessica Litman described the relevance of these changes in her book, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (2001):

    “1. The use of digital works, including viewing, reading, listening, transporting, etc., requires a reproduction of the original of the work in a computer’s memory. 2. Copyright statutes give clear and exclusive control over reproduction (as defined above) to the copyright holder. 3. For each use of the copyrighted material, that is, each viewing, listening, transfer, the user needs to have the statutory privilege of the copyright holder.”

    Faculty members at MIT, as well as other universities, are concerned that their intellectual property may be locked away from their peers, as well as potential students, behind proprietary barriers. Participating in OCW is a proactive statement that “reflects the idea that, as scholars and teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our research and teaching” (Miyagawa, 2001). As Vest noted, “OpenCourseWare looks counterintuitive in a market-driven world.” Indeed.

    A New Model of Scholarly Sharing?

    OCW is often thought of as the educational content equivalent to the open source software movement. The analogy is appealing and reflective of many, but not all, of its goals. Taking a closer look at what constitutes open source software might help.

    Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5913


     


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