 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!
Recent Posts
Advocates for the Blind Sue Arizona State U. Over Kindle Use | Comment [50]
A California Dream: Saving State Universities With an Online Campus | Comment [22]
Are Scholarly E-Mail Lists Fading in an Era of Blogs and Twitter? | Comment [7]
David Wiley: The Parable of the Inventor and the Trucker | Comment [21]
Introducing Guest Blogger David Wiley | Comment [1]
Submit to Wired Campus
Tell us about stories we should be covering, and what you don't like.
Wired Campus Writers
Internet issues, new technology, security, computing
Jennifer Howard
libraries, publishing
Sara Lipka
piracy, student technology use
Marc Parry
distance education, security, the technology marketplace
Jeffrey R. Young
video, audio, how technology is changing scholarship and teaching
Need more tech news?
Read our complete IT section.
Categories
June 19, 2009
The Online 'Attrition Puzzle': New Study Revisits Dropout Debate
Online students are much more likely to drop out of courses than their campus-based peers, according to a new study that confirms earlier research on what has been a longstanding concern in the distance-education industry.
The study, conducted by two researchers from East Carolina University, examined graduate-level online and campus programs in two subjects, business administration and communication sciences and disorders.
In the business-program sample, 43 percent of online students dropped out, compared with just 11 percent of campus students. In the communication program, 23.5 percent of the online students abandoned their studies while just 4 percent of students in bricks-and-mortar classes jumped ship.
The researchers cautioned that their study, published in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, was limited to selected programs at one research university in the southeastern United States and “may not be representative of other institutions and programs.”
Online students who dropped out and those who stuck with their studies “did not differ significantly” when it came to academic variables the study tracked, such as undergraduate GPA. That lends credence to the possibility that outside factors may be affecting attrition.
“Students in the online cohorts were significantly older than those in the campus cohorts, so one might assume that the higher dropout rate is possibly a result of an older student population with greater family obligations and job responsibilities,” wrote the study’s authors, Belinda Patterson and Cheryl McFadden.
The bottom line: Plenty of “unanswered questions” remain about online student attrition.
Same goes for the future of distance education in the researchers’ home state. Growth of the University of North Carolina system’s online programs is “in peril” because of state budget cuts, reports The Triangle Business Journal. (Check out this 2007 Chronicle story for more on the system’s online-education ambitions.) The North Carolina situation is the latest case of budget troubles in the public online-education sector.—Marc Parry
Posted on Friday June 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [27]June 3, 2009
Online Educators Won't Have to Spy on Students Under New Federal Rules
Distance educators won’t have to become FBI-style investigators, scanning fingerprints and installing cameras in the apartments of online students to ensure that people are who they say they are.
At least not yet.
The recently reauthorized Higher Education Act required accreditors to monitor the steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work, leaving distance educators worried they would have to buy expensive technology to ensure that students didn’t have other people take their tests. They feared the cost could be so high that programs would be in danger.
But, as The Chronicle reports on its Web site today, proposed federal regulations would allow colleges to satisfy the mandate with techniques like secure log-ins and passwords or proctored examinations, according to people involved in the negotiations that ended last month.
After an emotional controversy that touched on cheating, privacy, and Congress’s lingering discomfort with distance education, some in the field are welcoming the developments.
Some distance educators believed they were being held to a higher standard than their peers at bricks-and-mortar institutions. And some technology vendors exacerbated the anxiety through “purposeful distortion” of the law, said Fred B. Lokken, an associate dean at Truckee Meadows Community College, in Nevada.
“There were companies who saw a chance here to get their business base by, I think, exaggerating what the [act] was requiring for distance-education programs,” said Mr. Lokken, chair of the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges.
Do you think secure log-ins and passwords are enough to verify a student’s identity?—Marc Parry
Posted on Wednesday June 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [14]May 28, 2009
Rocky Start for Colorado State U.'s Online-Education Start-Up
Colorado State University’s new Global Campus online-education venture laid off more than 25 percent of its operation in recent months as the start-up failed to bring in money at the pace officials had expected, according to the program’s leader.
The reduction of staff and faculty members took place over three months ending in February, a period that followed the abrupt departure of Larry E. Penley, who was chancellor of the Colorado State system and president of the Fort Collins campus. Hunt Lambert, the new chief executive of the Global Campus since March, insists the effort is now on track.
But the rocky start has raised some eyebrows in Colorado higher-education circles. And it marks the latest in a series of struggles at public online-education programs around the country.
In contrast to the University of Illinois, which last week pulled the plug on its strategy for a similar venture, also named Global Campus, Colorado is soldiering on.
Brashly, even.
Mr. Lambert argued that his about-to-break-even start-up has “cracked the code on how publics can do online.”
“What we’re doing is working,” he told The Chronicle. “So few of our peers are working.”
The Global Campus got under way in 2007, supported by a $12-million loan from the system’s Board of Governors. It hires adjuncts to teach courses based on curricula licensed from the system’s brick-and-mortar campuses. But it exists as a third campus distinct from those institutions, and, like the aborted Illinois program, it is pursuing independent accreditation.
With 757 active students on the eve of its first full year of teaching, the Global Campus hopes to expand to 12,000 students by 2012 by catering to an unserved market of working adults.
But its staff has shrunk to 32 (not including teaching faculty) from a peak of 49. Seven left through what Mr. Lambert described as “normal attrition,” and 13 were laid off. Revenue grew “more slowly than expected” as the Global Campus grappled with a recession and an accreditation delay, Mr. Lambert said.
Russell J. Meyer, provost at Colorado State’s Pueblo campus, praised the Global Campus but lamented this reality about budget pressure and the economy: “I couldn’t think of a worse time to try to start a new venture like this.”
He added, “I think we’ve got the will, and most of the wherewithal, if not all of it, to make this work in the long run.” —Marc Parry
Posted on Thursday May 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [14]May 26, 2009
Online Professors Pose as Students to Encourage Real Learning
Jane Malan and Bill Reed are cousins in deception. They infiltrate online courses and secretly collect information about students by blending in with them.
She comes off as a clever thirty-something, with a photo that shows strong features. He poses as a silent twenty-something with some skill at fishing — his photo depicts him holding what appears to be a large rockfish.
A classmate once asked the goateed fisherman to get together, a doomed romance for one reason: He does not exist.
Both Mr. Reed and Ms. Malan are the alter egos of real professors. As The Chronicle reports today, the characters belong to a small group of “ghost students” that academics in Indiana, Connecticut, and South Africa have injected into online courses to kick-start discussions among students, keep them from dropping out, and spy on their communications.
The deceit has provoked questions about faculty ethics. Two of the professors admit that their unreal students teeter on an ethical precipice, because the technique could be abused. Others in the distance-education community accuse them of falling over the cliff. The critics worry such behavior could scar the image of an education sector many still regard with skepticism.
What do you think? Is posing as students ethical? Or does it cross the line? —Marc Parry
Posted on Tuesday May 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [58]May 22, 2009
The Growing Pains of Public Online Education
Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories this past week. The University of Texas’ online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. And in Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium.
A Chronicle article today takes a look at how those predicaments reflect the growing pains of public online education. As programs mature, their business models have come under more scrutiny. What role should these consortia play? How should states pay for them? Or should they? —Marc Parry
Posted on Friday May 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [20]May 21, 2009
U. of Illinois Gives Global Campus the (Re)boot
The old Global Campus is dead.
The new version of University of Illinois’s distance-learning program began in Chicago today, where the Board of Trustees unanimously backed a fundamental shift for the troubled venture.
The expensive project suffered from unspectacular enrollments and faculty opposition. The system will now scrap its drive to build a centralized stand-alone virtual university and will instead leave authority for online learning to its three campuses. The so-called Global Campus 2.0, described here, will be based on this report from a task force of faculty and administrators.
“I’m very optimistic,” said Ray Schroeder, director of the Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “I think that the trustees retained their commitment to access and online learning. I think the campuses do as well. I think we’re going to see growth and that the restart, the 2.0 version, is going to work.”
Chester S. Gardner, leader of the current Global Campus, will return to a faculty role, University of Illinois President B. Joseph White announced at the board meeting today. —Marc Parry
Posted on Thursday May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [29]May 19, 2009
U. of Illinois Weighs More Humble Version of 'Global Campus'
Early hopes for Global Campus were as ambitious as its name: a distance-education venture that could draw 70,000 new students to the University of Illinois.
Now, facing unspectacular enrollment and a punishing recession, the Board of Trustees will consider a much humbler plan.
The board plans to take up a resolution, released late Monday, that calls for rebuilding the controversial project based on the blueprint laid out in a new report from a task force of faculty and administrators.
That plan would brake Global Campus’s current drive to become a separately accredited entity with its own programs. The venture wouldn’t compete with campus online efforts. Instead, “Global Campus 2.0” would shrink to a much cheaper office — from today’s $9-million budget down to $1.75-million — that supports those campus courses with centralized services like marketing, student recruitment, and technology help. The current Global Campus would be phased out this year. Its successor would open for business in January.
“It pushes the bulk of the initiative and the activities back down into the campuses,” said Nicholas Burbules, a professor in the department of educational-policy studies who worked on the report.
The scaled-back project appears to have broad support. The resolution that the board will address on Thursday notes that the university’s leaders — the president, chancellors, provosts, and vice presidents — have “reached consensus” that Global Campus 2.0 is the way to go.
But recent developments in Texas and elsewhere show that support-focused distance-education portals can run into financial trouble, too. —Marc Parry
Posted on Tuesday May 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [19]May 18, 2009
Utah Disbands E-Learning Consortium
It was supposed to help students “swirl,” or take classes from different colleges at the same time.
Most Utah public-college students apparently prefer their distance education straight.
By next month, the Utah System of Higher Education plans to disband its Utah eLearning Connection. The decade-old consortium didn’t grant degrees, but it served as a central broker where students could access online courses offered by 10 public colleges in Utah through one application and one registration site.
Sound familiar? The latest victim of recession budget cut carnage is closing as a related program in Texas also faces steep budget cuts. Analysts predicted the recession would be a “bumpy economic ride” for such consortia in a recent paper, “The Funding of Academic Collaborations,” prepared by the technology cooperative WCET and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
The Utah consortium was “a fairly small operation,” said Gary Wixom, assistant commissioner for academic affairs at the Utah System of Higher Education.
“As the Legislature and others looked at what needed to be done,” he said, “it didn’t have a high enough priority to withstand the reduction in funding.”
With an annual budget of about $250,000, the Utah eLearning Connection served just 200 students. An announcement on the program’s Web site says the consortium will work with its partners to “transition students to your designated home colleges.” Three people are being laid off, Mr. Wixom said.
Two ideas animated the consortium. One was to help rural students gain access to college. The other was to make it easy for students to take courses at more than one campus simultaneously, says Charles A. Wight, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah.
“I think they thought that market was larger than it really turned out to be,” Mr. Wight says. —Marc Parry
Posted on Monday May 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]Financing Gap Leaves Uncertain Future for U. of Texas' Online Arm
The future of the University of Texas’ online-education arm is under scrutiny as the system phases out a major subsidy that has supported the venture for years.
The UT TeleCampus is the latest virtual university to confront hard questions about its business model as online education matures from its upstart days, as The Chronicle reports today in a story about the Texas situation. The University of Texas has invested roughly $22-million from endowment earnings into the TeleCampus over more than a decade. But it plans to end the subsidy by 2012, and some are worried about how the program will continue without the money.
This Thursday, meanwhile, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees is expected to revisit the issue of its Global Campus distance-education program, which has fallen short of enrollment projections and generated friction within the system.
Are any other distance-education programs also in a bind? —Marc Parry
Posted on Monday May 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]May 7, 2009
Tech Therapy: What's the Future of Online Learning?
Charles A. Wight, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah, joined the Tech Therapists recently to talk about the growth in online education. At the University of Utah, online education was at a “hobby level” for the past 10 years. But this spring the proposals for online courses had tripled, and Mr. Wight suspects this is a trend for the future.
“Right now, we teach about 5 percent of our credit hours in fully online courses,” he says. “I think in the next few years that will triple to 15 percent, then it will level off.”
“We have to be pretty careful,” he says, “because the people who are doing this are the early adopters and people who are into technology anyway. … As this becomes more mainstream, we have found that we have to help faculty incorporate good practices into their teaching, or we find that [online teaching] is done less carefully.”
Posted on Thursday May 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [12]