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2010
Pennsylvania-based Tandem Learning designs training and education programs, with an emphasis on games-based learning and alternate reality games, for a wide variety of organizations and corporations. Founded by Koreen Olbrish, CEO, and Kristen Cromer, vice president of learning design, the company has been creating and rolling out e-learning content since 2008. Here, the two co-founders speak about what kinds of things they see and hear being repeated from one client to the next, as well as how they know a client is truly ready to take on a games-based learning approach.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
Jane Bozarth is a tour de force in the online social world that encompasses e-learning. She is the author of Social Media for Trainers (2010), as well as three other books: eLearning Solutions on a Shoestring (2005), Better than Bullet Points (2008), From Analysis to Evaluation (2008). In this interview with eLearn Magazine editor-in-chief Lisa Gualitieri, Bozarth shares her opinions about the film The Social Network and how her constructivist background frames her current work.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
The BODYexplorer project is an in-development video game for educational purposes that helps teach disadvantaged citizens about lifestyle diseases, such as obesity, and how to cure and treat them.
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The e-learning industry in Europe needs a single, independent, and impartial voice to promote e-learning to government in every country in Europe, according to delegates of a summit hosted in Sheffield, England, in November 2010.
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Over the past two years, eLearn Magazine (a publication of the ACM) has grown at a good clip. As we prepare to roll into 2011, we wanted to reflect on these changes and let our readers and future authors know a little more about who makes up the eLearn Magazine community. The biggest segment of the eLearn Magazine community (just less than half), are readers in the U.S. (45%). And while the raw number of American-based visitors to the site has increased between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of U.S.
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Michelle Everson of the University of Minnesota shares the hurdles she finally cleared before becoming a blogger, and why blogging has been an immense help to her own teaching.
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TYPE: OPINION, OPINION
"Stay in touch" marketing is a key strategy for promoting an e-learning consulting practice. In this article, Hal S. Richman shares 5 tips for what has worked (and not) for him over the past 15 years of sending his own newsletters to promote his businesses.
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For years, studies have shown that less than 10 percent of those who start an e-learning program ever complete it. However, thanks to advances in learning delivery technologies, e-learning (which was formerly prescriptive and characterized by the authoring of traditional educational content) has given way to self-generated, grass roots learning content production, profiling, and exchange. This change was possible when subject matter experts got hold of rapid authoring tools that they could actually use. And the result is the emergence of learning communities.
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TYPE: OPINION
DevLearn 10, a U.S.-based e-learning conference put on by eLearning Guild, took place November 3-5 in San Francisco. While a multitude of blog posts, web sites, and Twitter messages using the tag #dl10 have given various snapshots of the event, eLearn Magazine brings you this unique review of the coverage: 20 take-away ideas from the sessions, keynote speakers, and thought leaders at the event.
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If you've been following public discourse in education over the last couple of years, you have likely witnessed the emergence of a new, ubiquitous catch phrase: "21st century skills." What is still lacking in the landscape of 21st century education, however, are examples of 21st century student work.
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In our era of ubiquitous and almost free publishing, those who want to teach and learn now have almost limitless resources. However, this wealth of information brings a whole new perspective on literacy. As Howard Rheingold suggests, we, which includes educators and learners alike, might now have to deal with not one, but six literacies.
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REVIEW: EVENTS,
TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
In our era of ubiquitous and almost free publishing, those who want to teach and learn now have almost limitless resources. However, this wealth of information brings a whole new perspective on literacy. As Howard Rheingold suggests, we, which includes educators and learners alike, might now have to deal with not one, but six literacies.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: OPINION
Libraries and Twitter have been united to transform the functional environment of libraries into a more effectual classroom, community, and workplace. Twitter has the potential to change the workflow processes in modern libraries and be a relevant teaching and research tool for library patrons.
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TYPE: NONFORMAL/INFORMAL LEARNING
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REVIEW: SOFTWARE,
TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Providing learning and development opportunities to people who, for one reason or another, would not be able to access these opportunities any other way, has to be one of the most noble and beneficial uses of e-learning. Columnist Bob Little discusses a new initiative in the European Union known as the ENABLE project, which aims to find ways to bring e-learning to society's marginalized learners.
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TYPE: OPINION
Student accountability is paramount, says Brett Hicks in a new op-ed. In order for distance education institutions to overcome the stigma of online education, faculty must act as gatekeepers, protecting the integrity of their respective institutions. This defense begins in the classroom. Distance education institutions distinguish themselves in the same manner as traditional institutions of higher learning. They produce educated, student professionals -- even virtual ones
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TYPE: OPINION
Educators spend their lives on the tactics of education, but ultimately, they don't get to devise the grand strategy. Education is shaped by legislators and agencies that create public policy, which determine how technological tools will be used in education. Unfortunately, the development and implementation of government policy can't match the ever-accelerating speed of technological innovation. This creates a challenge for policymakers, who must try to write policy that won't become outdated before the metaphorical ink is dry.
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Education has seen big changes, many of which have been technology-driven: the rise of online collaboration tools, the expanding role of e-learning, sophisticated learning-management systems, and new communication tools. There has been a greater need for learning technologists to step in and help communities benefit from technology. The role of learning technologists is essential to integrate new technologies and education. This article provides an overview of the role of learning technologists as a professional group.
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People write memos, create project plans, issue report upon report, but no one can keep up. Document management systems have been created in an attempt to handle all this traffic, but eventually these systems are overwhelmed with documents, and finding what you want is difficult if not impossible for the casual user. Columnist Roger Schank reminds us of the fundamental connection humans have to stories and why they could be so powerful if used properly in training and education.
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TYPE: OPINION
In an exclusive eLearn Magazine article, an e-learning all star team of authors defines the new learning age, approaching in the next 2 to 5 years: Terra Nova! Unlike the industrial age, when workers were told they were not paid to think, or the information age, when people were encouraged to think but only "inside the box," Terra Nova embraces a dynamic flow of power, authority, know-how, and trust. Change is so fast and furious that work and learning blur into one activity. Workers respond to novel situations as best they see fit, governed by the organization's values and their own gut feelings.
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When many industries first gain maturity, the individual companies that make up the sector often begin to cluster in certain geographic regions. And Sheffield, U.K., is becoming one such magnet for e-learning businesses. Apart, perhaps, from access to broadband internet services, the e-learning industry is geography-neutral. However, the concentration of e-learning companies in one area does lead to the growth of a pool of skilled labor, from which all may draw. Bob Little explains which companies are now calling Sheffield, U.K., home.
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TYPE: OPINION
The effectiveness and quality of online teaching would leap forward if it took more advantage of the science that originated in the work of psychologist B. F. Skinner, according to his daughter and learning expert Dr. Julie Vargas, in this eLearn exclusive article. One of Skinner's invention, the teaching machine (shown at left), was an early example of technology-based education.
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The U.K. Skills Minister John Hayes has called on all U.K. businesses to promote informal learning at work, following pledges from 64 companies to increase informal workplace training for their staff. These companies, including 11 from the FTSE 350, represent nearly 2 million employees. They formed part of a recent campaign run by Business in the Community on behalf of the U.K.'s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to improve workers' skills.
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TYPE: OPINION, NONFORMAL/INFORMAL LEARNING
Mary Burns of Education Development Center explains the five best practices used to train teachers to integrate technologyespecially computer useinto their instruction and course design. These universal methods, which have been used in places ranging from Indonesia to the United States, emphasize not only skills training, but also implementation.
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Learning technologists have stated innumerable times that delivery technology is irrelevant. What really matters is that the learning materials are designed and developed in line with accepted best practice in instructional design whichever formula that happens to be at the time. Yet, as soon as that statement is made, everyone becomes sidetracked by the latest piece of learning delivery technology. Do delivery technologies indeed matter, or is content really still king in e-learning?
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TYPE: OPINION
Demand for higher education continues to rise at double-digit rates, boosting the number of students taking one or more online courses in the U.S. in the fall of 2008 to 2.4 million. Yet while elite schools are reaching the masses as a philanthropic gesture, they tend to avoid granting more degrees. Writer Marina Krakovsky investigates this trend in an article that originally appeared in Communications of the ACM. (Both Communications and eLearn Magazine are owned and operated by the ACM, a non-profit membership organization.)
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Anytime, anywhere e-learning, requires tools to support e-learners in the management of their learning objectives and activities. Collaborative e-learning requires tools that support participants as both learners and users (Smulders, 2002). Being users as well as learners, e-learners interact in a complex space which includes the tools, their peers and their e-tutors. Contextual information from the interactions can improve e-learners' awareness, organizational and learning activities. Therefore tools need to support e-learners by exposing the contextual information within the interactional space.
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When teachers do anything for more than 20 minutes, students get restless. One way to deal with this is to keep a collection of relevant film clips on hand to break up the monotony of discussion, to reenergize a class grown bored. A well-paced, technology-enhanced class feels like it's going by faster and is more enjoyable for students. And when students are enjoying themselves, it's a lot easier to teach them. This article explains the tools you will need to create video clips for class, as well as an explanation for why and how to use them.
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Why do we assume that Internet communication tools are only useful for studying online behavior? Why not also for studying offline behaviors? Online Interviews in Real Time by Janet Salmons (2010) is a book for qualitative researchers and graduate students who want to make good decisions about the use of online communication tools for conducting interviews. Although the title calls attention to synchronous forms of communication for interviews, the book also focuses on asynchronous technologies in the context of pre- and post-interview best practices in research and ethics.
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Between 300,000 and 500,000 women die each year from problems related to pregnancy. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths, which are often preventable, occur in developing countries. One of the leading causes of maternal death in the developing world is pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy condition that is characterized by high blood pressure and protein in the urine. In an effort to drastically reduce cases of pre-eclampsia, Italy-based Giunti Labs is helping the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology and the Oxford Maternal & Perinatal Health Institute (Green Templeton College) at the University of Oxford in the U.K. develop educational material on maternal health for midwives, nurses, and doctors in developing countries, notably India, Mexico, and Nigeria.
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TYPE: OPINION
Didaskaleinophobia, more commonly referred to as school phobia, is a panic disorder affecting roughly 1.4 million American adolescents. For these children and young adults, e-learning and other learning grounded in social media tools may provide some of the best opportunities for them to succeed in their education.
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In a recent article ("Finding a Place for Twitter in Higher Education," May 20, 2010, eLearnMag.org), Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa reported some of the findings in a Faculty Focus 2009 survey, "Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today's College Faculty." In the article, Al-Khalifa summarizes the findings of the more than 2,000 respondents, writing that according to the survey, the majority of higher education thinks Twitter is a gigantic time suck with little to no educational value. While she accurately reported the findings, she missed reporting the bigger picture, namely, that while approximately 30 percent of the surveyed higher education professionals tweet, currently only 10 percent of the general Internet-using public makes regular use of Twitter.
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You may think the differences between British English and American English are just a few spelling differences along with an accent and cadence change. Superficially, yes, but don't assume that there isn't any baggage that goes along with the way you speak. Culture goes hand in hand with language, and even within the U.S. Southerners conduct business in quite a different fashion from their Northern "time is money" brethren. It's important for an American to have a good grasp of British English along with the British way of life, and vice versa.
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TYPE: OPINION
For many years, e-learning suppliers (at least, those in the U.K.) have been frustrated by having to sell their products twice to the same potential buyer. That's because they need to convince not only a potential customer's HR specialists, but also their IT specialists that they should buy what the supplier is offering. Now comes news that that sort of frustration could soon become a thing of the past. Newly published research suggests that a new job title is coming to the business world: the human systems director.
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TYPE: OPINION
Jessy Keiser is an organization development professional whose career path lead her to teach for the University of Phoenix, the for-profit learning institution best known for its online presence and open-enrollment policy. In this interview, she spoke about how she came to teach at Phoenix, what kind of training and assessment was required, and some of the pros and cons of its system.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
Linda Formichelli has written for more than 120 magazines since 1997, including Health, USA Weekend, Writer's Digest, Redbook, Woman's Day, Inc., and Alternative Medicine. She's also the co-author of eight books, including The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success and The Renegade Writer's Query Letters That Rock. Linda teaches a popular e-course called Write for Magazines, which takes the student through the eight steps to writing and sending a winning query letter, from generating a salable idea to doing interviews to finding markets to send the query to. The next session starts July 19, 2010.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
Everyone wants value for money even from their e-learning solutions. But getting value for money can be confused with merely trying to save money, which is far from being the same thing. Bob Little has some pointers for helping you get the most out of your e-learning tools.
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TYPE: OPINION
In an online learning community where interaction occurs primarily through reading and writing, podcasting is an ideal way for instructors to better connect with their students. Podcasting can enhance instructor-student relationships, and provide an avenue for instructors to speak to the students whenever it is most convenient for them, even repeatedly. Heather Zink explains why adding this on-the-go content is invaluable.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Jay Cross's latest book, Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud, is his second title about informal learning. Acquiring knowledge through informal contacts and casual conversation, as Cross indicates, is as old as the campfire. However, the rise of social networking technology and Web 2.0 tools have worked as a force multiplier, greatly enhancing the power of people to acquire knowledge.
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REVIEW: LITERATURE,
TYPE: NONFORMAL/INFORMAL LEARNING
The current model of higher education in the U.S. is deeply flawed and unsustainable, says journalist Anya Kamenetz, in her new book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. Kamenetz's critique is both economic and social, encompassing such topics as the cost of tuition and textbooks, loan-based financial aid, admissions patterns, and the deteriorated job market.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
Participatory activities that tap and foster social and emotional learning and new media literacies enrich student learning, boost physical wellness, and support social functioning. Skeptics dismiss social and emotional learning as being too "touchy-feely," but empirical research has found that they can help lead to holistic health and achievement. Author Laurel Felt, a doctoral student, is staunchly committed to social change. Informed by her background in social policy, developmental psychology, and multimedia curriculum design and instruction, she is currently working for Senegal's African Health Education Network (RAES) to help leverage entertainment-education to foster young people's education and well-being.
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IMC (UK) Learning, an eLearning content solutions provider, published research on how organizations use learning-management systems (LMS) and virtual learning environments (VLE). The study examined how much functionality is being used and how beneficial LMSs are at meeting business needs. Bob Little, who writes frequently for eLearn Magazine on the state of e-learning in the U.K., summarizes some of the key takeaways of the report.
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TYPE: OPINION
Opinion columnist Roger C. Schank describes how he came to use a specially-written novel to teach business students. Becoming engrossed with fiction, characters, and story can be just as engaging as getting wrapped up in an interactive activity.
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TYPE: OPINION
How do you train customer service reps or other employees to think on their feet, to provide satisfactoryor even exemplary service to potentially irate customers? And better yet, how do you know they are applying the training correctly?
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In online learning, there is a need to create more effective interaction between e-learning content and learners. In particular, increasing the learners' motivation by stimulating their interests is very important. However, for any e-learning system to be effective, the knowledge transfer must occur in a usable, accessible, and functional manner. Eye tracking can be used to improve the functionalities of an e-learning system.
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A survey of learning technologies in the voluntary sector encompassing more than 80 charities, representing more than 50,000 staff and volunteers has found that the top four benefits of adopting learning technologies are: 1) improving flexibility of learning, 2) improving access to learning, 3) cutting costs and 4) increasing reach.
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TYPE: OPINION
In this exclusive three-part series, Susan Landay of Trainers Warehouse has been identifying the best ways for face-to-face trainers to add a component of e-learning to their repertoire, without the assistance of a fancy IT team or tens of thousands of dollars of investment. In Part I, she focused on tools for authoring and course development. In Part II, she looked at software for games and interactive learning. Here in Part III, she finishes with learning-management systems and conferencing applications to conduct live webinars.
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REVIEW: SOFTWARE,
TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
The first part of this three-part series focuses on authoring and course development tools and techniques for integrating e-learning. In Part II, Susan Landay explores games and interactivity solutions for e-learning. Part III looks at tools used for web conferencing, as well as learning-management systems.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
What are the mistakes that even an experienced online trainer and educator can make? As resources for training and education collapse (time, budget, personnel), e-educators hunt for new efficiencies and shortcuts. However, we don't spend as much time as I think we should thinking about what we personally should be doing differently. I can't say I wasn't warned.
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TYPE: OPINION
In Part II of this three-part series, Susan Landay explores the range of games and "interactivities" that can easily be created and posted for online learning reinforcement; selection criteria for the various offerings; plus some features and benefits of a few reputable, cost effective solutions. Part III looks at tools for web conferencing, as well as learning-management systems
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
The high attrition rate for computer science students has generated significant debate as to the cause and possible actions to address the problem. For the introductory courses some departments have switched to new programming languages like Alice or Scratch that are much more visual than traditional languages and are considered easier to learn. Many instructors have also turned to hardware and software technology in search of better ways to inform and motivate their students. Fortunately, computer science educators are in an enviable position. As programmers, they have the means to write software to meet the pedagogical goals of their courses if existing software doesn't fit the bill.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Twitter has recently flourished in its number of registered users. Amazingly, nearly 73 percent of all Twitter users have joined the service in the first five months of 2009. This Twitter trend can and should be utilized to benefit education. Twitter has various educational uses in both developing countries and more developed ones. But the real tipping point for Twitter in education will only come if teachers can manage to add Twitter to their arsenal of teaching tools. The question is can they do it?
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A business associate of mine told me I must sign up for Facebook. I figured he probably had an investment in it and if I wanted his business, I'd better do it. So we became "friends." But I didn't see any value in Facebook whatsoever. Then I discovered Twitter, where everything is different.
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TYPE: OPINION
Jack E. Kosakowski is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of JA Worldwide, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating young people about work readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy. He is also president of Junior Achievement USA. Kosakowski was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve a two-year term on the President's Advisory Council on Financial Literacy in January 2008. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Achievement Foundation, and is a member of the United States Commission for UNESCO.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
When authors refer to a Professional Learning Community (PLC) within a school, they commonly mean a community of stakeholders that are all working together focused on the best interest of the students, where results are measured by an increase in student achievement. These stakeholders are anyone with an interest in that particular school from within the school communityschool leaders or administrators, teachers, staff, parents, and community members. Collaboration is a key factor in a PLC. Imagine everyone working together for the best interest of the students and focused on a culture of assessment-driven continuous improvement, and you have a PLC.
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A recent report from Learning Light found that the annual size of the U.K. e-learning industry in 2009 was between £300 million and £450 million, with growth rates forecast of between 6.7 and 8 percent.
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TYPE: OPINION
Lessons learned from a synchronous online interaction.
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Too many people subscribe to the idea that better design takes too long. This, if true, would be a significant barrier to more quality, and an explanation for the undesirable amount of bad e-learning out there. However, Clark Quinn says he doesnt buy it.
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TYPE: OPINION
People around the globe love ratings, from "Car of the Year -- Slovakia" and "Los Grandes De Nuevo Mexico Music Awards" to Cook's Illustrated's ratings of catsup. Corporate trainers are no exception. We pay attention to awards contests for training products and often make choices based on them. The contests can serve a valuable function. They help make sense of the sprawling training industry, which is awash in products but has few well-established authorities to guide buyers' choices. Contests are also popular with companies that run them. The reason is simple: they make money.
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TYPE: OPINION
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TYPE: OPINION
Public education is compulsory in Cyprus and is under the auspices of the country's Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC). The majority of re-service teacher education is provided by local universities, while in-service public school teacher training is provided by the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and other public and private agencies. This article contains information from a survey in which teacher in Cyprus gave reasons for not adopting technology.
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It's not unusual for online course instructors to write books based on their courses. Online courses have an advantage in this regard, since much of the course material is already written down in narrative form. Creating a book, though, is quite a different endeavor from creating an online course. If you're considering converting your online course to a book, at the outset you need to ask yourself certain interrelated questions...
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Bryan Chapman, chief learning strategist at the Chapman Alliance, is focused on the application and delivery of e-Learning. Here, he discusses innovations in online learning delivery, as well as what changes he sees coming to the e-learning landscape.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
There are several policies and procedures that online instructors can implement that will help them provide specific, fair, consistent, and effective feedback to their students in an online, asynchronous course.
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Designating a day, or even a week, as special to adult learning or learning at work gives the distinct impression to those who aren't "learning professionals" that learning can -- or, worse still, should -- only take place at that time.
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TYPE: OPINION
This article discusses how creativity and innovation can be enhanced with e-learning systems based on digital storytelling. A story creation model called movement-oriented design (MOD) is introduced for systematically developing effective digital stories, in conjunction with story creation principles articulated by Robert McKee, a Hollywood guru of script writing.
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As facilitators of e-learning in corporate environments, it is our responsibility to do what we can to ensure that both the organization and the individual learners gain the maximum benefit from all learning or training initiatives. We have a responsibility to ensure that as many success factors as possible are in play.
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The E-Learning Handbook covers the good, the bad, and the ugly of e-learning and provides a glimpse into the industry's future. The Handbook provides a broad look at the past expectations of e-learning and then follows up those expectations with myriad instructions, ideas, and concepts to carry the industry forward.
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In 2002, GOTEVOT, the government authority responsible for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's technical education and vocational training, established the E-Learning Training and Resources Centre. The Centre provides an e-library of more than 50,000 books and 3,000 training programs for lifelong learning and community services with electronic training portfolios. The organization publishes its technical and vocational courses in both Arabic and English on the web.
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Just as the quality of an automobile can be judged by its engine construction, so too can the caliber of an e-learning course be evaluated by its outline structure. An effective e-learning project starts with an effective project outline.
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I teach at the only School of Information and Library Science (SILS) on the east coast of the United States that does not offer a single online coursenot a program or a blended option either. (I discovered this through a search of the American Library Association accredited programs, which maintains a list of LIS programs with online course options.) Are were a bunch of luddites, teaching our students the way of the past, when libraries were the primary sources of high-quality information, and librarians were the gatekeepers to that world of knowledge? Certainly not.
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TYPE: NONFORMAL/INFORMAL LEARNING
One of the hurdles to getting faculty and students to use technology in education is introducing them to the right tools for their needs. A number of technologies are indispensible for any online course, but some apply specifically to teaching composition. Here are 30 that every English instructor should explore.
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Dr. Anthony J. Cernera has been the president of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, since 1988. Beginning in 1997, the university started to add online degree programs and coursesmore than a dozen in all, including a doctorate in physical therapy and one in nursing practice, set to launch this fall. Enrollment has more than doubled. eLearn Magazine interviewed Cernera, who is also president of the International Federation of Catholic Universities, about how and why SHU has committed to online students.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
Public policy is what will make distance learning truly mainstream, increasing access to education and training opportunities. Reggie Smith III, president of the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA), believes that these transformative changes are just around the bend, and he is working to make them a reality. The USDLA is a non-profit association that advocates for the development and application of distance learning across the board, from children's schooling to employee training.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
When the best online instructors can see a viable and attractive career track for themselves, they are more likely to be satisfied and more productive with the institution and their students. To increase instructor retention in online education, we propose four separate but interchangeable career tracks that instructors can move between.
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TYPE: OPINION
Technology frames and reframes our society. Technology has accelerated our move into the post-industrial era, where the primary good is the immaterial knowledge that, thanks to the net, flows like liquid continuously in our "stay," wherever we are. Technology is also reshaping the physical environment so that spaces and artefacts become more and more sensitive and responsive, and become more prominent in our net-lives. Technologies will --and have already begun to -- enable individuals to interact in an extremely natural way using gestures, words, and emotions.
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What are the predictors of adult students' success in online learning environments? Is there a difference in undergraduate versus graduate online learners and their motivations? Does age play a factor? Do the course's characteristics have an impact on performance and learner satisfaction? What are the implications of these findings for online instructors, and how could that affect their practices and approaches to retaining students in the future?
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"This is too much work for an online class." For the last two years I've heard that comment repeatedly from students. I've been teaching since 1995, but about two years ago, I started teaching online. The "too much work" these students refer to is actually the exact same amount of work as in the face-to-face equivalent course. So what's behind what these students are saying?
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Howard Rheingold, writer, educator, and thinker, is renowned for tracking not just what is going on now in the digital world, but where the digital world will be going next. His books, such as Tools for Thought (1985), Virtual Reality (1991), The Virtual Community (1994) and Smart Mobs in (2002), usher in the next adventure in computer-human interaction. Here, he talks about skills that matter, such as locating and verifying the accuracy of information in a digital age.
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TYPE: INTERVIEW
Whatever the times, education is an important vehicle to rise above certain of life's inequities. While many countries, including so-called third world nations, have slowly been building their educational systems, Americadespite its policies, programs, and good intenthas paid mere lip service to the realization of its educational goals. Consequently, education in many states in America is witnessing a breakdown.
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What do people need to learn? Every curriculum committee and every training organization has at one time or another convened a committee to answer this question. Their answers are always given in terms of subjects: "more math," "telecommunication," "risk management," "company policies." But subject matter is far less important in learning than you think.
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TYPE: OPINION
In his recent predictions for the development of learning technologies in 2010, Clark Quinna U.S.-based independent consultant with a PhD in applied cognitive science, and (full disclosure) on the advisory board of this web sitesuggests that "several technologies are poised to cross the chasm: social tools, mobile technologies and virtual worlds...
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TYPE: OPINION, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Eery day millions of Internet users click on millions of web pages. This results in more than people being connected with websites. It creates a tremendous aggregation of data about what people are thinking about. Bill Tancer's book "Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters" is intended to be an introduction to Web mining.
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Will GoogleWave flourish or perish? Are mobile phones going to be the next big learning devices or are they already on their way out of the e-learner's toolbox? At the start of each year, eLearn Magazine's contributors predict what changes are afoot for the coming 12 months. Here are our predictions for 2010.
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TYPE: OPINION
In Part I of this article, Patrick Lambe provided a brief background on the economics of e-learning. Here in Part II, he looks at some of the most common ways that organizations deploy e-learning to support their strategic objectives, and shows how measurement of viability and impact can be approached within those situations.
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TYPE: CORPORATE LEARNING
Telling stories by building comic strips is a way to strengthen struggling students' emerging English-language skills and make the difficult job of language learning a much more enjoyable experience. Comic strips are a perfect vehicle for learning a language. Each strip's three or four panels provide a finite, accessible world in which funny or compelling characters live and go about their lives. And readers with limited reading skills are not as overwhelmed in dealing with the size of a comic strip as they can be with a book of many pages.
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Learning is learning and technology is technology. The two are related if and only if the technology makes it possible to learn something that can be learned in no other way. E-learning is quite often a watered down version of school. Whether it relies on computers, mobile devices, or any other technology the question is, "Is it any better than what it replaced?"
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TYPE: OPINION
Giving an effective webinar requires some presentation redesign and technology skills that you don't necessarily need in a face-to-face presentation. A great speaker in a face-to-face environment can easily crash and burn in a webinar setting if he or she isn't prepared for the unique challenges and needs of that environment. Here are some tips to help you pull off a webinar that will get you asked for an encore!
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TYPE: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Jonathan Finkelstein says there are certain learning objectives that cannot be met without real human interaction. To remove live interaction from the learning environment is to remove the lifeblood of learning. This is why asynchronous online training solutions sometimes fall short. But when the asynchronous and the synchronous are combined in a synergistic way, the results can be highly effective.
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Patrick Lambe explains in this article ways that e-learning professionals might assess the return on investment of their programs. Here in Part I, he provides a brief background on the economics of e-learning. Part II looks at some of the most common ways that organizations deploy e-learning to support their strategic objectives, and shows how measurement of viability and impact can be approached within those situations. The article is adapted from Patti Shank and Saul Carliner's book, The E-Learning Handbook, Past Promises, Present Challenges (Pfeiffer, 2008).
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TYPE: CORPORATE LEARNING
