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Newsletters:
In This Issue Current Issue Archives
April 1, 2006
| Distance Education Report - April 1, 2006 - Full Issue PDF … |
| Step-by-Step into the Mainstream: A Case Study People talk about mainstreaming distance education but few have such a practical program for achieving that as William McCaughan, Ph.D., dean of Oregon State University’s (OSU) Extended Campus, or E-Campus. |
| How NOT to Run an Orientation Course: Research Reveals Flaws in Orientation Course for Online Students By Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti When Steven Malikowski of the Learning Resources & Technology Services department at Saint Cloud State University (Minn.) talks about the research he undertook for his doctoral dissertation, it is clear that he did not set out to unilaterally critique distance education orientation courses in general, or the one he studied in particular. But when he delved into two sections of a required, 12-week, zero credit course offered at a university that had served distance education students exclusively for 30 years, he found weaknesses that very likely plague many other such efforts at other institutions. |
| The Future of the For-Profits: A Look Ahead To many students and would-be students who have yet to experience them, online colleges are viewed with suspicion. Occasional newspaper headlines talking about some CEO who received his or her advanced degree at an online “diploma mill” do not help these impressions. And many in the traditional academic institutions – including some institutions that offer online courses – continue to quickly turn their noses up at online colleges, believing that any for-profit college online could not possibly offer the same quality education that they could. Well, as Dylan once remarked, “the times they are a-changin’.” |
| The Challenge of Teaching Across Generations Instructors need to take steps to make the online classroom a comfortable and supportive learning environment regardless of students’ online learning experience or learning style — a particularly important consideration when teaching students from multiple generations. |
| Understanding the Changing Role of Teachers Three kinds of innovative approaches to instruction found on most campuses today are changing the role of faculty, replacing the self-reliant, self-contained model with one that is collaborative -- with other faculty, but also with staff assistants and with students. |
| UW Engineers Efficient Quality Control Many distance education programs are created with a sort of “build it and they will come” attitude; that is to say with only an informal or intuitive system of quality control. This doesn’t work well when your students are professional, working engineers at companies like Boeing and GE, says Tom Smith, director of telecommunications programming in the Department of Engineering Professional Development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
