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RESOURCES
FOR HIGHER
EDUCATION
Newsletters:
In This Issue Current Issue Archives
April 15, 2004
| Full issue in PDF format |
| Integrated library Services Boosts Online Recruitment and Retention By Susan Gaide As online distance education becomes more and more prevalent, so does the need for online library support services. |
| MIT Releases Free Course Management System Following on the heels of MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, which gives the public free online access to materials for more than 500 MIT classes, the MIT Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory (IESL) has unvieled Caddie.net, an open source course management system using Microsoft Web technology that can be used with almost any kind of web service application or database. MIT is giving the software away free to help institutions create and run distance-education programs. |
| Virtual Learning Communities Lead to 80 Percent Retention By Mary Lou Santovec Students involved in learning communities have higher retention rates than those who don’t. At Western Governor’s University, where learning communities are cultivated in multiple ways, the communities have led to an 80 percent retention rate. |
| To Drop or Not to Drop: Findings from West Texas A&M University By Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti In online classes, as with traditional classes, getting students to enroll is only half the challenge. Equally important is yielding a high number of students who persist until the end of the term, i.e., reducing the percentage of students who drop the class. |
| Resources Report Forecasts U.S. Online Student Enrollment Will Top One Million in 2005; TEACH Act Tool Kit; MERLOT International Conference; New Open Source E-Learning Book from Athabasca University |
| Online Course Provides One-Stop, Just-in-Time Student Support With a growing reliance on technology and approximately one-quarter of its students taking distance courses, Northern Arizona University needed a way to help students navigate the university’s IT infrastructure. Each semester, the academic computing helpdesk was overwhelmed with phone calls from students having difficulty finding and accessing their web courses. And the university has recently switched from a homegrown student administration system to PeopleSoft, so Georgia Michalicek, distance education consultant in NAU’s IT services department, created a one-stop resource that provides just-in-time information in the form of a WebCT course. |
