California Virtual Campus

"At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

These days, they say, students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages - from 10 a week to 10 after every class - that are too informal or downright inappropriate.

‘The tone that they would take in e-mail was pretty astounding,’ said Michael J. Kessler, an assistant dean and a lecturer in theology at Georgetown University. ‘ ‘I need to know this and you need to tell me right now,’ with a familiarity that can sometimes border on imperative.’

He added: ‘It’s a real fine balance to accommodate what they need and at the same time maintain a level of legitimacy as an instructor and someone who is institutionally authorized to make demands on them, and not the other way round.’

While once professors may have expected deference, their expertise seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers, are buying. So students may have no fear of giving offense, imposing on the professor’s time or even of asking a question that may reflect badly on their own judgment.

For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility."

More for NY Times website registrants at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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“I would argue that the knowledge promoted under the guise of electronic portfolios is hardly student-centered. Very little research exists integrating student voices into the dialogue of electronic portfolios. The voices that are integrated are primarily those of administrators and some faculty.

The over-emphasis on assessment and accountability issues in relation to electronic portfolios also indicates that student issues and concerns remain at the margins, not at the center of the discussion. Student issues and concerns involve promoting student learning. To date, no discussions mentioning student-centered pedagogy or student development theory have infiltrated the discussion on electronic portfolio development and design.

No doubt many are riding the electronic portfolio wave with no real vision of its optimal development and ultimate value. Once the surge of interest recedes, many folks will tumble, fast. The ones most hurt by this will probably be the students who created electronic portfolios in response to campus or course requirements established without adequate regard to their effectiveness in higher education.”

More at http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm06/eqm0613.asp?bhcp=1

"Americ Azevedo taught an ‘Introduction to Computers’ class at UC Berkeley last semester that featured some of the hottest options in educational technology. By visiting the course’s websites, the 200 enrolled students could download audio recordings or watch digital videos of the lectures, as well as read the instructor’s detailed lecture notes and participate in online discussions.

But there was one big problem: So many of the undergraduates relied on the technology that, at times, only 20 or so actually showed up for class.

‘It was demoralizing,’ Azevedo said. ‘Getting students out of their media bubble to be here is getting progressively harder.’

Skipping classes, particularly big lectures where an absence is likely to go undetected, is a time-honored tradition among college undergraduates who party too late or swap notes with friends. These days, however, some professors are witnessing a spurt in absenteeism as an unintended consequence of adopting technologies that were envisioned as learning aids.

Already, even as many academics embrace the electronic innovations, others are pushing back. To deter no-shows, they are reverting to lower-tech tactics such as giving more surprise quizzes or slashing their online offerings."

More for LA Times website registrants at http://www.latimes.com/business/careers/work/la-me-noshow17jan17,1,1838810.story?coll=la-headlines-business-careers&ctrack=1&cset=true
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"Congress is poised to remove a controversial restriction on distance education after more than a decade of heated debate. Supporters say the move will spark a boom in online programs at traditional colleges, as well as the creation of for-profit businesses specializing in cybereducation, while critics argue that it will lead to an increase in diploma mills.

Lawmakers originally passed the rule in 1992 to counter a rash of fraud perpetuated by diploma mills and some correspondence programs in the 1980s. Known as the 50-percent rule, the regulation prevents any college that enrolls more than 50 percent of its students at a distance or provides more than half of its courses via distance education from participating in federal student-aid programs.

Back then, before the popularization of the Web, few traditional colleges offered online courses. Now many colleges that never imagined they would enroll many online students are nearing the 50-percent limit. For instance, Bellevue University, a traditional institution based in Nebraska, says it is likely to have more than half of its students taking courses online within the next year or two.

‘We are getting to the point that more of our students are choosing online,’ says Mary B. Hawkins, Bellevue’s provost. ‘It’s the direction that the industry is moving.’

In response to the growing demand for distance courses, and after an eight-year experiment in which a few colleges were given waivers of the rule, Congress is expected to do away with it in the next few weeks."

More for Chronicle subscribers at http://chronicle.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i22/22a00101.htm

“The process of exclusion is a vital learning process. We cannot possibly consider every facet of a new idea. We exclude in order to be able to move to the point of active cognitive interaction with an idea. Exclusion occurs during the filtering process. What we choose to ignore speaks to our larger worldview (beliefs and values). When we are trying to influence the values of others (for example, in helping students learn about other cultures), we spend our time trying to get the learner to acquire new mindsets. We need to take a step back and focus on what is happening during the filtering process.

By analyzing what we exclude in our own reasoning, we are able to gain a better understand of our own learning process. It’s unrealistic to regularly evaluate our core beliefs and values, but a periodic evaluation may provide the ability for more effective learning in general. What we ignore in learning can be a valuable tool to ensure that our perspectives are properly balanced (and at minimum acknowledge the existence of other viewpoints contrary to our own). Sometimes, the ability to step out of our thought corridor, and into the corridor of an “opponent”, can lead to deep insight and understanding. Not all learning (or cognitive activity) is logical. The choice to include/exclude information may be the point were emotional intelligence exerts its greatest influence.”

More at http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/15

“In May, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education posted the inevitable culmination of a trend: Last year for the first time, women earned more than half the degrees granted statewide in every category, be it associate, bachelor, master, doctoral or professional.

Cause for celebration - or for concern?

Before you answer, consider the perspective of Jim McCorkell, founder of Admission Possible, a St. Paul program to help low-income high school kids prepare for college. Last year, 30% of the students were boys. This fall, that has inched up to 34%, but only because ‘we actually did a little affirmative action,’ McCorkell says. ‘If we had a tie (between a male and a female applicant), we gave it to a boy.’

As women march forward, more boys seem to be falling by the wayside, McCorkell says. Not only do national statistics forecast a continued decline in the percentage of males on college campuses, but the drops are seen in all races, income groups and fields of study, says policy analyst Thomas Mortenson, publisher of the influential Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Since 1995, he has been tracking - and sounding the alarm about - the dwindling presence of men in colleges.

College administrators shy away from the term ‘affirmative action,’ a murky concept rooted in redressing historic inequities and loaded with legal implications. Yet the imbalances do trouble some admissions officials.”

More at http://articles.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051020074109990031

“The most difficult hurtle in teaching the online sections was convincing online students that was it acceptable to challenge me and to critique other students’ work as long as it was done in a professional manner. For the face-to-face students, this was a non-issue. Online students, however, who met their classmates and me only though our online homepages, seemed more reserved. Not until I modeled open discussion and critique in the weekly discussion boards did they begin to warm up. For example, if an online student made a particularly good point, I could re-title my reply with a ‘heads up’ for the whole class to read that dialog. And, if someone really missed the point or leapt to the wrong conclusion I could explain (in a supportive way) how and why their comment missed the mark.

When a teachable moment occurred, I reiterated the point in the announcements section of the course site. Likewise, if a student or I found a good new web resource, I mentioned that link in announcements. Although the traditional approach is to reserve announcements for course management issues, I have found that area to be an extremely effective place to deliver newly found instructional content. I think of announcements as the beginning of my class meeting since it is the first thing students see when they log in….

It was interesting to see friendships develop among the face-to-face and online students, and they developed at about the same pace. Students often shared training-design examples from their professional lives, and those conversations occasionally drifted into personal chat. If it became too chatty, I posted a reminder note that when we wanted to share a comment with everyone, we used the reply button but if it was a personal (out of class) comment, we could use the personal email link. I made the decision for both course sites not to allow anonymous postings with the exception of a feedback section about the course itself. Perhaps because all postings were identified, or perhaps because we had built a good learning community, no students were ever rude or inappropriate in their online comments.”

More at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=case_studies&article=34-1

"Those stumbling out of James Hilton’s rapid-fire speech at last week’s Educause meeting might have been forgiven if they weren’t sure whether to return to their campuses absolutely terrified or terrifically excited about the explosion of technological innovation in higher education.

Hilton, associate provost for academic, information and instructional technology affairs at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, described a landscape in which ‘disruptive forces’ are radically altering the state of publishing, threatening to diminish the role of libraries, and rendering obsolete traditional methods of delivering information. Those forces threaten to relegate colleges to the periphery of society, he suggested.

But the technological advances are also creating enormous opportunities for colleges and universities to become key players in democratizing the collection and sharing of knowledge, Lipton said, offering ‘hope amid the disruption.’…

The great risk to colleges and universities, Hilton warned, is that they view themselves as providers of information rather than knowledge. While higher education has ‘profited from the fact that we’re seen as gateways to information,’ the ease with which people are now and will increasingly be able to get information from other sources makes that an insufficient role for colleges to play, he said."

More at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/25/hilton

“Whether in New Mexico, North Carolina, or Florida, you can hear the same concern aired by veteran police officers and deputy sheriffs nationwide: they need college education to compete for promotions, but their rotating schedules slow down their eagerness to get back into a traditional college environment. Heavily marketed online college degrees seem to be the answer to many, but it is not a path to be taken without some knowledge of the online education industry.

Care needs to be taken to avoid throwing money at a degree that may be viewed as the product of a diploma mill. Online colleges that promise ‘credit for life’s experience’ with little academic work or rigor are probably too good to be true and may backfire on you later.

Accreditation

Many online colleges advertise themselves as accredited. It is important to dig through their website and find out who their accrediting organization is. The next move is to go to that accrediting body’s website and confirm through a search that the accrediting organization is legitimate. There are six regional accrediting entities that are recognized by established educational institutions. This is important if you are seeking to go on for a higher degree and want the lower degree acknowledged or if your employer or prospective employer will view a non-accredited degree as ‘resume fraud.’”

More at http://www.officer.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=19&id=26513

"Take your typical college student - bright, curious, but probably a bit sleep-deprived and short on attention span. Stick that student in a lecture hall with a professor droning on for 50 minutes about macroeconomics or teleology. Then give the student a laptop with wireless access to the Internet, which lets him or her furtively chat with friends via instant-messenger software.

What you have is a situation in which a professor’s teachings do not completely sink in, says Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, an assistant professor of international relations at American University.

That scenario is all too familiar to Mr. Jackson, who aptly describes his speaking style as ‘blitzkrieg speed’ and his students as voracious consumers of technology. But the professor says he no longer worries, as he once did, that pieces of his lectures will slip through the cracks. And for that, he credits a technology known as podcasting.

Podcasting allows anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection to create audio files that others can download automatically to their iPods or similar digital-audio players. Listeners can download the files one at a time, or they can subscribe to a podcast and have a series of recordings transferred to their players whenever they hook the devices up to their computers. Podcasts allow students to go over passages while, for example, working out at the gym or jogging to lunch.

More and more professors, including Mr. Jackson, are turning to the technology to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling ‘coursecasting.’"

More for Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i10/10a03901.htm?top20