Research Area: Learning Theory
The Instructional Technology Council put community colleges under the microscope in its 2012 Distance Education Survey Results, but the findings certainly have implications for higher education as a whole. 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, … Continue reading
The New Media Consortium and Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) this month jointly released the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition, which identifies six emerging technologies as well as key trends and challenges that will shape the industry over the next one to five years. 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 … Continue reading
Even as much of the academic world becomes convinced of the effectiveness of online education, some still have serious reservations about how one discipline in particular — science — can be taught efficiently outside a “traditional” classroom. 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 … Continue reading
In a campaign year, it’s commonplace for fictional claims to make headlines and affect public opinion. But that strategy is also being levied against online education, especially as the field rapidly and ambitiously expands in ways some people never imagined. 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 … Continue reading
Noted online course developer Debbie Morrison discusses in her latest blog entry the ways in which instructors can help curb what many in the field of online education know to be true: cognitive overload is rampant among online students. This entry is the first in what Morrison says will be a four-part series “that presents instructional strategies addressing the unique needs of online students.” And the greatest of those needs, she argues here, is support. Morrison’s post provides a learner … Continue reading
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
[A message from Dave King, associate provost of Oregon State University Outreach and Engagement; and Lisa L. Templeton, executive director of Oregon State University Extended Campus] No doubt you’ve seen several stories lately in the news about what some people are calling MOOCs – Massive Open Online Classes – with 160,000 or so students in online open courseware classes. (See below.) The increased profile of these classes and the new enterprises involved in their development raise questions about what it … Continue reading
Simply adding a video component to an online course does not automatically improve its quality, but a recent study seems to show pretty conclusively that learners respond well to video lectures as a way of receiving course content. The study was conducted by Debbie Morrison, an online course developer at The Master’s College near Los Angeles, and as she noted in her blog post, the pool of students surveyed was relatively small. However, 90 percent of the learners who took … Continue reading
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog last week highlighted a new study that bolsters the notion that student learning outcomes are the same in hybrid courses as they are in a traditional classroom. The findings come from a study released last Tuesday by Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the academic community use technology to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. Hybrid courses are taught partly online and partly face-to-face, and an increasing number of studies … Continue reading
One of the week’s hot discussion topics among college faculty stems from the findings of a study that suggests many instructors aren’t properly taking advantage of Web-based tools to make their online courses more interactive. As detailed yesterday in a blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the study claims that the community college professors who were observed for the study relying “on static course materials that aren’t likely to motivate students or encourage them to interact with each … Continue reading