An organization called Reclaim Open Learning held its first symposium last week. The organization promotes innovation in higher education through the use of technology, online resources and open learning in unconventional ways.
Connecting with students in online courses challenges even the best instructors.
I was reminded of that recently when I spoke with Tracy Russo, an associate professor of communication studies, at the C21 Course Redesign Consortium (There was link, but the page no longer exists).
Two recent surveys help illustrate the barriers that block much-needed changes in teaching, learning and course design at colleges and universities.
In a discussion among faculty earlier this week, a conversation about online education quickly turned skeptical.
James Burns of Boston College uses a term I hadn’t heard before: “swirling students.”
Writing in The Evolllution, Burns says swirling students are those who move in and out of college, collecting a few hours here, a few hours there as they move toward a degree. They often have full-time or part-time jobs, families, health problems or financial challenges, he says.
The online training site Lynda.com announced this week that it was canceling its lyndaClassroom program.
The classroom program allowed instructors to choose up to five online tutorials for students in a designated class to use during a semester. Students then signed up through Lynda.com and paid $10 a month, or about $35 for a semester.
Financing public higher education has grown increasingly challenging, with state funding for research universities declining by an average of 28 percent since 2003. What were once state-supported institutions have in many cases become quasi-private institutions to which states provide some money but still want full control.
The fog that settled on the Lawrence campus Monday morning seemed all too fitting.
Classes officially resumed after an extended spring break, but Jayhawk Boulevard was mostly empty, as were the buses that passed by. Faculty and students alike ventured into a hazy online learning environment cobbled together with unseen computer chips and hidden strings of code. Even the most optimistic took slow, careful steps onto a path with an uncertain end point.