California Virtual Campus

New Teachers: Alone in the Classroom, Together in the Chatroom
Flint Christensen teaches math at a middle school in Oakland, CA. He is also a candidate for a MS in Education, Option in Online Teaching & Learning from California State University, East Bay.
Introduction
New teachers enter their profession with wild-eyed optimism and equipped with an abundant […]

The Perfect Online Campus: What’s Missing
By Lisa Ramsey-Simpson
July 27, 2008
About the author: I have had the opportunity to take both online and face to face university classes. My first experience was over 10 years ago as a student of San Francisco State University. Although the campus and classes were great, I left San Francisco […]

Kelsey seems like an average American town. Many of its 53,000 residents work in plastics for Riordan Manufacturing, a subsidiary of the Fortune 1000 company Riordan Industries. They give birth at the ordinary Patton-Fuller Community Hospital. On weekends they stroll through the historic downtown or stop by the gourmet grocery, Kudler Fine Foods. And Kelsey’s […]

As a whole, the education industry is usually relatively slow to integrate technology into the classroom. In lots of schools nationwide, unbridled access to computers and the Internet is still the exception rather than the rule. Sure, school districts use computer networks, e-mail and teacher pages on school Web sites to more efficiently communicate with […]

The changes and challenges that new technology has brought to teaching and learning are well documented. New technology has changed how people receive, understand, and apply new information and ultimately has changed student expectations and thinking skills. Educators often refer to 21st Century thinking skills, technology skills, and knowledge skills to describe both the current […]

Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students’ homes.
It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress […]

With 2.5 million students and 75,000 faculty, the California Community College system has considerable shopping clout with vendors. Using those numbers to its advantage, the CCC has created an immense and cost-effective state-wide Web conferencing system for its 109 member colleges. The conferencing system, originally set up in 2001 and moved to a new vendor […]

NEWTOWN, Pa. — First, Ryan Gibbons bought a Hyundai so he would not have to drive his gas-guzzling Chevy Blazer to college classes here. When fuel prices kept rising, he cut expenses again, eliminating two campus visits a week by enrolling in an online version of one of his courses.
Like Mr. Gibbons, thousands of students […]

Several Web sites have emerged in recent years that encourage students to upload old exams to build a bank of test questions and answers that can be consulted by other students. But some professors have objected, many of them demanding that their tests be removed.
Demir A. Oral, a Web designer living in San Diego, said […]

I’ve been getting this question a lot lately from administrators, parents, and taxpayers. The question isn’t malicious, but rather comes from folks with a vested interest in making sure that our technology dollars directly benefit students. Does giving teachers laptops directly benefit students? For people who aren’t actively teaching in a classroom, that’s a hard […]