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March 15, 2006
| Distance Education Report - March 15, 2006 - Full Issue PDF … |
| Business Model for Online Offerings Benefits Students, Program The idea of a university distance education program as a semi-independent profit-making entity has fallen into disfavor since the crash of so many of the late-90’s academic ventures in for-profit distance education. People in academia are allergic to talk of students as “customers” and institutions as “enterprises,” and they have some good reasons to be. But Albert Powell Jr., Ph.D., director of independent learning and educational outreach at Colorado State University, maintains that the very nature of distance education makes it work best with businesslike approaches and structures, and he’s eager to show people how to apply them. |
| Ask Naj? Dear Naj, I’ve been reading about the merger of WebCT with Blackboard with some apprehension. If the two leading course management systems combine, how does that benefit the consumer? Should I be looking at an alternative CMS for our program? And what are the alternatives? CM-Mess |
| What Should Administrators Know about Instructional Design? Talking with Larry Ragan, part 2 “Often the dean or chair doesn’t have a clue about online education.” So says Larry Ragan, director of instructional design and development for Penn State’s World Campus, one of the nation’s most successful university-affiliated distance education enterprises. In his position as director, Ragan coordinates, manages and directs the design, development, delivery and evaluation of all instructional materials for all the courses offered through the World Campus. In Part Two of our interview with Larry Ragan, we asked him what distance education administrators should know about how an online course gets created. Here’s what he said. |
| How Federal Activity Will Affect Your Program Washington, D.C. doesn’t seem awfully close when you’re in the midst of the day-to-day demands of running a distance education program. But things that happen there have affected you, will affect you, and are affecting you right now. |
| Course Evaluation Project is Model For Content Assessment By Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti About two years ago, the California-based Monterey Institute for Technology and Education considered the role of course evaluation in its overall objectives. The Institute embraces as its mission a quest to identify and modify online courses so that they may be transferred into other contexts for use by organizations other than those of the course creators. The first step in this process is evaluation. "We wanted a review process [that showed] how courses meet the criteria and how courses compare,” said Butch Gemin, director of business development for the Monterey Institute. |
