A new, collaborative study on online education programs reinforces the need for interaction in order to achieve student satisfaction in “fully online learning settings,” but it also suggests (perhaps surprisingly) that interaction among learners is not a predictor of satisfied students.

In addition to interaction, the study’s four researchers also investigated how Internet self-efficacy and self-regulation play a role. The study revealed the following:

“Learner-instructor interaction, learner-content interaction, and Internet self-efficacy were significant predictors of student satisfaction in fully online learning settings, while learner-learner interaction and self-regulated learning did not predict student satisfaction.”

To help offset the finding that interaction among students does not result in student satisfaction, the study encourages instructors to “design more collaborative activities in undergraduate courses to enhance learner-learner interaction.”

Read the complete study in the March issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).

The survey, which is subtitled “Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges,” polled 142 ITC member institutions and asked them to help paint a picture of how online education is evolving nationwide. Topics addressed in the survey include massive open online courses (MOOCs), blended and hybrid courses, open educational resources (OERs), challenges facing distance-ed programs, and faculty and student support.

Here are some highlights of the survey.

• As online instruction continues to mature, distance education administrators see a pressing need to address course quality and design, faculty training and preparation, course assessment, and improvements in student readiness and retention.
• The gap between distance learning and face-to-face student completion rates has significantly narrowed. Nearly half of the survey respondents indicated that they have achieved equivalency.
• 42 percent of respondents said they have no plans to develop MOOCs, while 44 percent reported they are exploring options for incorporating MOOC content into their entire courses.
• 60 percent of the survey respondents don’t expect OERs to have much impact at all at their institutions. What’s more, two-thirds of the reporting institutions expressed a concern about the time faculty need to locate and evaluate OERs.
• Faculty training to teach online is required at an all-time high rate, with 72 percent of participating colleges saying that their institutions have mandated some level of training program.
• Administrators again reported a chronic gap between student demand for online learning and the number of online courses their colleges offer. At the same time, administrators complained that many students are unprepared to learn online, citing the students’ poor study skills, among other factors.

The complete 32-page report is available in PDF format.

If MOOCs are to be accepted for credit, will lecture halls go the way of the dodo bird?

That day came with much fanfare earlier this month when the American Council on Education put its stamp of approval on five MOOCs.

As if on cue, debate raged over the decision and the havoc it might wreak on the age-old credentialing system of universities and colleges. Entering the fray was the president of Excelsior College, John Ebersole, who said his institution would disregard ACE’s recommendation that certificates earned in these massive courses be accepted.

“We would hope that ACE would support a more rigorous process, as is the case with other forms of noncredit instruction, whereby those seeking credit would complete a psychometrically valid assessment in a secure testing facility,” Ebersole told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

And today, Jill Rooney, a longtime educator and blogger for OnlineColleges.net, weighed in with some of the pros and cons of accepting MOOCs for credit. She lists the cost effectiveness and improved quality of the courses as two positive marks for MOOCs.

But she also echoes the widely discussed notion that struggling students receive little help and can easily get lost in a class with massive enrollment.

All five of the approved MOOCs are offered by Coursera, which began the pilot project with ACE in November.

The NMC Horizon Report and its findings are designed to give campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. It’s the 10th such annual report conducted by the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project that identifies and describes emerging technologies that are expected to impact learning, teaching and creative inquiry in education.

“The NMC Horizon Report goes beyond simply naming technologies; it offers examples of how they are being used, which serves to demonstrate their potential,” said ELI director Malcolm Brown.

This year’s report lists massively open online courses (MOOCs) and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use within one year. Gamification and learning analytics will reach similar standing in the next two to three years, while 3D printing and wearable technology are expected to emerge in four to five years.

Read the full report and watch this short video synopsis.

Tan, a teaching and learning developer at Dublin City University in Ireland, wrote a guest blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education last week that espoused many of the benefits of online education, as she sees them. The blog post was appropriately titled “Bitten by the Online Bug,” because Tan previously had serious reservations about the effectiveness of teaching in a virtual environment:

Having lectured entirely through face-to-face experiences, I came to online teaching thinking it would be a pale comparison to “the real thing.” How could I convey passion and curiosity through a discussion forum or a computer screen? How could I build a community if students didn’t see one another? …

Oh, how naïve I was. After a couple of weeks of teaching through a combination of Moodle, Blackboard Collaborate, Twitter, YouTube, Articulate, and other tools, I was hooked.

Tan’s post is a must-read for anyone who’s on the fence about online education. She says the experience challenges educators to develop innovative teaching skills and reach students in new, improved ways.

And shouldn’t that be the goal of every educator and every institution?

The Colorado Community College System (CCCS), however, has been successfully delivering hands-on, laboratory-quality instruction to its distance students for more than a decade. The same can be said of Oregon State University Ecampus and many other providers of online education.

And the effectiveness of the CCCS methods were proven in a study released last month by the Colorado Department of Higher Education, which found that “students who took online science courses at the community college level perform just as well in science classes at four-year institutions as students who took traditional on-campus science classes.”

The study examined the grades and GPAs of 4,585 students (some online, some traditional) enrolled in first-year biology, chemistry, and physics for their major course work. Students in the on-campus biology and chemistry courses received, on average, higher course grades than their online counterparts, but the grades earned in physics were similar for both online and traditional students.

Additionally, the online students in all three science disciplines boasted higher GPAs and higher cumulative credit hours, which CCCS suggests “could be the result of more experienced and academically prepared students self selecting online courses.”

Read the WCET blog post about the study, written by CCCS assistant provost Rhonda M. Epper, Ph.D.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Thankfully, Ward reflected on his shortcomings as an online instructor and the weaknesses of his course in a recent blog post for The Chronicle of Higher Education. As it turns out, he was doomed from the outset:

I started the online class with what I thought was a good plan: re-create online what I had done in a recent seminar. It didn’t work.

Ward’s blog post makes it clear that he had the best intentions for his students, but he was far too ambitious and not adequately prepared. Those are common mistakes made by even the most accomplished professors in higher education when they make their initial foray into online instruction.

The author discusses in detail the key blunders he made, and here they are in bullet form:

• Don’t let the technology get in the way
• Think differently
• Prepare as much as you can before the semester starts
• Temper your ambition
• Establish limits
• Don’t give up

Read the full post for Ward’s compelling commentary. Perhaps his best piece of advice is this: “[I]nstructors must be willing to adapt, experiment and innovate. They also must be prepared to take their knocks online without abandoning the format in frustration.”

John Ebersole, however, is out to dispel the most common misconceptions about online and distance learning. Ebersole writes about higher education and is a regular contributor to Forbes.com. Late last month he wrote a piece about “six commonly heard myths that are often used to denigrate” online education.

Leading off the author’s list is the notion that faculty will become unnecessary as online learning grows. Ebersole explains why that’s not true by pointing to the recent Inside Higher Ed/Babson survey that shows “faculty at institutions with more extensive online offerings are more positive about online learning than those who have little or no such involvement.”

Ebersole expands on each of the other five myths, which he says are:

• All online courses are the same.
• The quality of outcomes is less for an online student than for one who has received the same instruction in a classroom.
• “Online” instruction is synonymous with “for profit” institutions.
• Credentials earned online are not accepted by employers.
• You don’t know if the person doing the work is the person receiving the credit.

It’s an interesting read. Check it out for yourself.

Some of them, such as Twitter, YouTube and Google Docs, are extremely well known and frequently utilized, whereas others are more obscure despite the fact that they offer plenty of value to educators and their students.

The blog post separates the Internet-based resources into four categories:

1. Social learning (e.g. Skype, Pinterest, OpenStudy)
2. Learning content (e.g. StudySync, Khan Academy, Animoto)
3. Lesson planning (e.g. Prezi, Glogster, TED-Ed)
4. Useful tools (e.g. Dropbox, Jing, AudioBoo)

Many instructors for Oregon State University Ecampus use some of these tools and/or others to enhance the content of their courses and develop new, interactive ways for students to grasp the concepts. Hopefully you find a takeaway or two from the list.

Piazza, a social Q&A web service, analyzed over 18 months the behavioral trends of students in 3,600 online courses at more than 500 institutions, and the fledgling company shared the results of its analysis with The Chronicle of Higher Education this week.

Out of the study comes evidence that asking students to post more will, of course, yield more posts. But the data suggest that students better understood the course material when instructors required fewer posts.

Piazza’s vice president for operations, Philip Soffer, wrote in a report on the data that grading less strictly will “[keep] content quality higher, while grading rigorously turns the online environment into yet another place for students to grind for grades.”

Also of note is the finding that students who are asked to make an introductory post to the online forum are much more likely to post frequently, at an average rate of 25 comments per term. Conversely, students who were not asked to introduce themselves in other courses posted an average of 9.5 comments per term.

Read The Chronicle’s blog entry for additional intriguing data and hypotheses from Piazza.