Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges

The Instructional Technology Council (ITC) is an organization that provides leadership and professional development to its network of eLearning experts by advocating, collaborating, researching, and sharing exemplary, innovative practices and potential in learning technologies. The organization recently released a report titled 2008 Distance Education Survey Results: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges.

The report is a must read for faculty, administrators, technical staff, graduate students, anyone involved with distance education at any level - not just community colleges. Here's some of the key findings:

• Campuses reported an 11.3 percent increase for distance learning enrollments, while increases in overall campus enrollments averaged less than two percent -- 70 percent of the respondents stated student demand exceeds current distance learning course offerings.
• Many colleges have significantly increased their number of blended or hybrid and/or Web-enhanced or Web-assisted courses.
  
• Most colleges have rapidly expanded their student services and technology support services to meet accreditation expectations of “equivalency” with traditional face-to-face courses.
  
• Thirty-one percent of the campuses surveyed are considering switching from Blackboard/WebCT, which had seen a near monopoly in the past. The merger of Blackboard and WebCT has prompted a number of campuses to review their learning management system commitments.
• Administrators continue to identify finding and/or compensating adequate “support staff needed for training and technical assistance” as their greatest challenge. Workload issues are their greatest challenge related to faculty.
  
• Assessing student learning and performance in the distance education environment emerged as the greatest challenge for students in 2008.
  

The report was authored by Fred Lokken , Associate Dean for the Truckee Meadows Community College Web College.

A downloadable PDF of the 9 page report is linked here.

Pew Study: The Internet In 2020

A couple of weeks ago the Pew Internet & American Life Project released their third internet evolution report titled The Future of the Internet III. To prepare the report, Pew surveyed internet leaders, activists and analysts and found most believe portable hand held devices (what we all call "phones" now) will become our primary online devices as voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

Here's a list of the key findings from the report:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
  
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
  
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
  
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.
  

You can download a copy of the Pew Report summary here and full report here.

Recruiting and Retaining Students Using Web 2.0 Apps - Some Examples

CNET News has published an interesting slideshow showing how different Colleges are using Web 2.0 applications to entice and engage students. Here's a brief summary of some of the examples:

At Dartmouth:

- Undergraduate students are required to use wikis and blogs in a film studies and

comparative literature course.
- A neurology-neuropathology class at Dartmouth Medical School used wikis to
research and create case studies.
- To learn library research and analytical writing skills, Dartmouth freshmen are using
wikis to create encyclopedic entries on topics like "African American Music and Voice"
for their required expository writing class.

At Texas A and M:

- iTunes University is being used as a public relations tool to reach perspective students.
- Professors are making short 3-minute videos describing their background, interests
and classes they teach.

At Seton Hall:

- Potential freshman are sent a log-in and password along with acceptance materials -
this is done before students have formally accepted an invitation to attend. The linked
site includes information on campus life, summer reading assignments, orientation
information and the ability to contact potential roommates and others in their major.
- Prior to the invitation to attend students get a web-based Seton Hall email account.

Yes - these are all big name schools but take a look - iTunes University is free! In addition, the Dartmouth links are especially interesting because they are using the blooging and wiki features/functionality of the Blackboard learning management system (LMS). If you are not an academic, LMS's are essentially online classroom portals providing discussion forums, assessment, lecture content, etc. At first look Blackboard version 7 includes limited blog and wiki functionality - it does provide RSS feed functionality for blogs. Like many of the academics that read this blog, our campus has upgraded over the summer to version 7 - we'll be giving it a good look this fall.

CafeScribe: Textbooks 2.0

Fourteen40, a Salt Lake company that derives it's name from the year 1440 when Gutenberg invented the printing press, has released (in beta) CaféScribe, an e-book marketplace and social network for students. CafeScribe is much more than just a bunch of PDF's students pay for and pull off the web. Provided are some interesting and useful tools including the ability to share notes with others and organize digital books based on things like subject matter along with other tools like digital color-coded color-coded highlighters.

The social networking component is most interesting - to give you an idea of how it works - here's some details from the CafeScribe website:

Upload and share any of your PDFs with your friends or classmates.

Share notes with others who are reading the same stuff. Academics call it "collaborative learning", we call it "divide and conquer" Why not share notes and figure out what is most important more quickly?

Rank others on how well they take notes. Find the genius note taker for your classes

The ability for students to form virtual study groups on their own campuses and across other campuses is very appealing for both the traditional classroom and distance delivery,

Even though CafeScribe is currently in beta you can still register on the website and start using it. This may be an interesting way for faculty to distribute documents for student collaboration. I'm going to experiment with it this fall with my students.

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