Sunday, April 25, 2010

Online courses Increase in community college and open courses

Online Learning Increases in Community Colleges

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Distance-Educations-Rate-of/22540/
Enrollment in community college is growing. In the 2008-2009 academic year enrollment increased 20%. Meanwhile administrators find that “, the greatest challenge in distance learning was a lack of support staff needed for training and technical assistance.” Faculty find the greatest challenge in work load.

Open courses backed by Learning Research
Carnegie Mellon has a grant to develop Open Courseware
Instructors are allowed to incorporate these “Open courses, backed by learning research” into their curriculum.
http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Teaching tips? from a professor who has the students do all the work

In a humorous article, a English teacher views the teaching style of a colleague who seems to have the time factor beat. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/04/13/galef

The article is making fun of the professor who puts most of the responsibility for the class on the students, but the responses to this post are interesting. Many respondents say that the teaching techniques are valid if not overused.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Online courses taught by Masters Degree students from India.

Can online teaching be outsourced to professionals in other countries?

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education post http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/05/statistics entitled “The Specialists” recounts how http://www.Statistics.com hopes to produce college credit courses. It now produces courses, designed by college faculty and private sector statisticians, for professionals.

However, the article states that: “The company outsources grading and other work to master’s degree-holders in India for much less than it would cost to employ similarly qualified teaching assistants in the United States.” This would seem to indicate that the company owns the copyright to the courses and that they then use Indian professors, presumably at a lower salary, to do the actual teaching.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Arrranging content in a Web site

Scrolling vs Print Type Interfaces
http://casanchez.faculty.asu.edu/pubs/scroll.pdf
To Scroll or Not to scroll:
According to a recent paper many students retain more if the material is presented in print-like format, on separate pages.
Arizona State University Christopher A. Sanchez, Arizona State University, Mesa, and Jennifer Wiley, University of Illinois at Chicago

Students were presented with material that they had to scroll to read or as material in separate pages, navigating by the next-back functions of the browser. The students who used the material in separate pages did better in reading comprehension.
I wonder what this implies for sites like Blackboard, where you can break content into Folders or arrange in a Learning Unit. It probably says that having all content in one Item is not a good way to arrange information. However, I find that students who print out all material prefer that form of presentation.