Research Area: Enrollment
Chicken sandwiches and presidential politics aside, perhaps no topic is as divisive in the United States these days as the future of higher education and its relationship with the Internet. The results of a recent nationwide survey underscore that notion. More than 1,000 Internet experts, researchers, observers and users were polled in the Pew Internet/Elon University survey, called Bricks and Clicks: What is the potential future of higher education and the Internet by 2020? In their responses, some technology stakeholders view … Continue reading
[Summary from: The Journal of Educators Online, January 2012.] Online education is becoming an increasingly important component of higher education. The Sloan Foundation 2010 Survey of Online Learning reports that more than 30 percent of all students take at least one online course during their college career. Because of this, attention is now turning to the quality of student outcomes that this instructional method provides. However, there is a huge gap in empirical investigations devoted to the link between technology … Continue reading
When you replace the traditional classroom with the Internet, it’s easy to lose the vital face-to-face connection between instructors and students. That makes it imperative for distance-education instructors to find new, effective ways to interact with the diverse group of people taking their courses. And thanks to the magic of the Internet, there are a host of innovative resources that can replicate the physical classroom. One of the newest and best tools is Google Hangouts, a video chat program that … Continue reading
In search of a solution to the problem of student attrition in online learning, three Midwest-area Ph.D. faculty members looked closely at how student expectations affect student retention and persistence in online learning. The trio developed a survey to assess exactly that, and they published the results this month in the winter issue of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration. The Student Expectations of Online Learning Survey (SEOLS) examined expectations regarding overall instructional quality, course content, social interactions, the … Continue reading
[Summary from: Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, December 2011.] As a core project, a university eLearning Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community (FLC) chose to apply recommendations for the “art” of good teaching to the online realm. There is relatively little discussion of this issue in the literature. In this paper, we use Ken Bain’s (2004) book “What the Best College Teachers Do” to discuss some of the major ways that the practices of effective teaching in general can be applied … Continue reading
A pair of education professors at the University of Illinois Springfield are in the midst of a research project that aims to improve the learning outcomes of their online students by evaluating and — where necessary — enhancing online course design. Karen Swan and Daniel Matthews are faculty in the UIS Master of Arts in Teacher Leadership program, and they developed a short video that explains their ongoing research, which they believe will help them better understand the processes of … Continue reading
A study released this month takes an in-depth look at the state of online education in the United States and produced some noteworthy findings, chief among them the fact that most academic leaders consider online learning to be superior or equal to face-to-face learning. But the authors of the report, “Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011,” also predict that the growth of online learning in the U.S. is nearing its plateau. In addressing the future of … Continue reading
The New York Times published an intriguing op-ed column regarding online education on Oct. 2, a piece that examines how the all-powerful universities have largely withstood the disturbance of the Internet — at least for now. Columnist Bill Keller contends that “the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize … Continue reading
Oregon State University is a nationally recognized leader in the field of fisheries and wildlife science, a reputation that was bolstered recently when it became the first university in the country to offer an online bachelor’s degree in fisheries and wildlife through OSU Extended Campus (Ecampus). It didn’t take long for skeptics to come out of the woodwork and denounce the idea, saying it wasn’t possible to replicate the same learning outcomes of a site-based program in an online setting. … Continue reading
[Summary from: The Sloan Consortium, 2010] Online Education in the United States, 2010 represents the eighth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education. This survey is designed, administered and analyzed by the Babson Survey Research Group with support from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Data collection is conducted in partnership with the College Board. This year’s study, is aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education. Based on … Continue reading