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In This Issue Current Issue Archives
June 1, 2006
| Distance Education Report - June 1, 2006 - Full Issue PDF … |
| Dividing Up Faculty Roles Makes Instruction More than the Sum of its Parts By Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti “[We needed to] avoid the stigma of being a diploma mill,” says Dennis Bromley, Director of Business Programs for Western Governors University (WGU). Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, WGU is an institution founded with distance education in mind. WGU’s model, Bromley says, is to “increase access to education to underserved populations.” It serves as a portal to existing programs at a variety of other accredited institutions. But its competency-based approach to degree-granting had to be clearly distinguished from the “credit for life experience” pitch of the diploma mills. They did this with an inventive system of mentoring that “unbundles” instructing, advising and assessing. |
| Ask Naj Dear Naj Our instructional designers keep talking about all the cool things we could do using game technology to create simulations for our courses. I agree it sounds interesting but cost, as usual, is an obstacle. The money for the kind of high quality simulations that we would like to create is just not in our budget right now. Plus it seems a little technologically beyond us. Any ideas as to how we might incorporate some of this technology into our courses? Strapped |
| Faculty Training for Small Schools: New Options? “Small colleges can’t train faculty as well as they’d like,” says Dr. Boria Sax, former director of online research development and training at Mercy College in New York. He’s referring to online faculty, and he knows from experience how a small school with a big online program can run into problems. |
| Add a Little Mentoring for More Effective Instructor Evaluation It didn’t take long for distance educators to realize that faculty evaluation based on the model of the face-to–face classroom was inadequate. It’s taken longer to come up with good alternatives. Park University of Parkville, Missouri-- a school with 45,000 enrollments (second only to University of Phoenix for online enrollments, according to U.S. News & World Report) and employing over a thousand adjuncts -- has developed an evaluation system geared to the requirements of the online classroom, one that serves the dual purpose of faculty mentoring and faculty evaluation. |
| 7 Ways to Improve Student Satisfaction in Online Courses Preparing students for the online learning experience and managing expectations are critical to student satisfaction, says Marie Gould, assistant professor and program manager of Business Administration, and Denise Padavano, associate professor and program manager, Information Technology, both of Peirce College. |
| Does Broadband Make a Difference? Bandwidth and Student Performance Does greater bandwidth necessarily benefit online learning? In tech-driven environments, that’s almost a given. Yet there have been few studies that actually looked at the role that different bandwidth connections play in student performance in online courses. Philip Turner, Vice Provost for Learning Enhancement at the University of North Texas (the institution with the largest online program in Texas), decided to take a systematic look at assumptions about bandwidth, and found out that the truth is a little more complicated |
