Student Loan Blog : online learning

Free Online Global University to Debut This April

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:51:00 GMT

This fall, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef will open the world’s first tuition-free internet university called the University of the People, reports The New York Times (“Israeli Entrepreneur Plans a Free Global University That Will Be Online Only,” Jan. 25, 2009).

University of the People — which will operate solely based on open-source courseware, a type of learning tool that has allowed universities all over the globe to post education materials online at no cost to the public — will allow its students throughout the world to access written materials and lectures for thousands of courses via its website.

In lieu of tuition, students will pay enrollment fees of $15 to $50 and exam fees of $10 to $100, both of which will vary depending on the student’s country of origin. And instead of physically attending lectures, students will participate in online study communities and weekly discussion topics and will be asked to submit homework and exams online.

“The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” Reshef told the Times. “The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free.”

With about $5 million in start-up funds, including $1 million of his own capital, Rashef will open the school, initially, to approximately 300 students who will be able to pursue bachelor’s degrees in business administration and computer science. The school will support the students with both paid and volunteer professors, along with librarians and other professional educators that will monitor curriculum and evaluate exams.

In five years, at which time Reshef expects the university to be self-sustaining, Reshef hopes to have increased enrollment to 10,000 students.

Critics Question Plan

Although close to 4 million U.S. students took at least one online course in 2007, according to a survey by the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online learning, online education experts still wonder how Reshef’s new venture will come together.

John Bourne, Sloan Consortium executive director, says, “It’s true that the open courseware movement is pretty robust, so there are a lot of high-quality course materials out there, but there’s no human backup behind them. I’d be interested to know how you’d find and train faculty and ensure quality without tuition money.”

Despite these uncertainties, Reshef, who is currently the chairman of Cramster, an online study community for students, and who offers an extensive entrepreneurial background in the business side of higher education, is convinced that his new venture will be a success.

“We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works,” Rashef said. “Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, [to] anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.”

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Down Economy May Be Driving Students to Online Education

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:05:00 GMT

As jobs continue to disappear and unemployment soars, large numbers of adult learners may soon be enrolling in online programs, particularly at two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, according to a new online education survey (“Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 9, 2009).

These two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, which offer programs tailored to working adults, will likely see the biggest boost in enrollment, but all types of colleges could experience an enrollment surge as more people turn to higher education to gain marketable skills in the recession, revealed the 2008 online education survey by the Sloan Consortium, a non-profit organization working to improve online education.

“A lot of people want to increase their skill levels or get that degree they didn’t have,” said I. Elaine Allen, one of the report’s authors. The threat of losing their job can be as big a motivator for people to get a degree as actually losing their job, Allen told The Chronicle.

She said that the primary motivator for adults turning to online education over a traditional classroom-based education may be one of convenience. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want,” Allen said. With Internet -based courses, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

Over 20 percent of all U.S. students enrolled in higher education were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007, according to data from the Sloan Consortium. And, The Chronicle suggests, if the recession were to drive more students to take courses online as expected, the percentage of online education students is likely to rise sharply.

Most of that growth will likely come from the two-year and for- profit colleges that have not yet maximized their potential for online enrollment, Allen predicts, while public institutions likely won’t see “huge growth” in Web-based learning. Of all the colleges surveyed, 58 percent said that online courses were critical to their enrollment strategies, and a full 70 percent reported that competition for the growing number of students pursuing an education online is increasing.

Allen said, “For the first time, [schools] are seeing students choose another college for its online program.”

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Provision of Higher Education Act May Force Schools to Spy on Online Students

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:24:00 GMT

Language in the bill, currently before Congress, to re-authorize the Higher Education Act could lead distance-learning institutions to use home-monitoring devices to police their students who take courses online, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“New Systems Keep a Close Eye on Online Students at Home,” July 25, 2008).

The provision, contained within a single paragraph of the 1,200-page bill, is intended to prevent students enrolled in online programs from cheating. The clause requires providers of online postsecondary programs to prove that the person submitting the online classwork is the student who’s actually enrolled.

Hearing no objections from Congress to the provision, a handful of online colleges are now testing home-monitoring systems that authenticate online test-takers through fingerprinting, watch students in their homes via webcams, and record key strokes on students’ home computers.

Some colleges claim one chief advantage to these types of devices: Students will no longer be required to travel to a distant location where a proctor can oversee them taking the test in person. Instead, students will be able to take tests online in the comfort of their own home, with an installed approved monitoring system acting as an on-site proctor.

A few administrators, however, are concerned that these new technologies, which will are managed by third-party vendors, may not adequately safeguard students’ privacy. “This is taking a step into a student’s private life,” said Rhonda Epper, co-executive director of Colorado Community Colleges Online. “I don't know if we want to extend our presence that far.”

Debates about privacy and institutional intrusions aside, there may be at least one upside: The provision could bring online degrees a greater reputability since the schools would be verifying that their graduates had actually completed the coursework, said John Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, an online institution in Albany, N.Y.

“If it raises confidence and credibility in the eyes of regulators and traditional educators,” Ebersole said, “it’s worth it.”

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Learn This, Professor: Shorter is Better

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:14:00 GMT

Traditional college professors attempting to venture into online learning may be in store for a rather unpleasant surprise: What works in the classroom doesn’t necessarily work on the internet, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Technology Shrinks the Lecture,” June 20, 2008).

And a few educators are learning this lesson the hard way. Dalton Kehoe, a professor at York University, in Toronto, had won teaching awards and praise for his lectures for decades, but when asked to do his first online class, he failed miserably. Students said his 50-minute video talks were too long and his course evaluations suffered because of it.

“It was the most extremely boring thing my students had ever seen,” Kehoe said. “I had to sit to down and look at these lectures and realize that when you're looking at someone online as a talking head and shoulders in video, you just want to kill yourself after about 20 minutes,” he commented.

Kehoe and others who are creating effective online learning programs have quickly come to the realization that shorter really is better. To make his internet-delivered lectures more engaging for students, Kehoe broke them up into focused, 20-minute segments that only covered single topics.

Professors Adapt Online ‘Mini-lecture’ Model to Classroom

Kehoe and other professors like him are beginning to apply the teaching strategies that work for online programs in the traditional classroom and they are experiencing great results. Instead of teaching in lengthy 50-minute segments, Kehoe breaks up his material into 15-minute sections, interspersed with three-minute breaks.

During the short “laugh breaks,” Kehoe shows the funniest comedy video selected from several video submissions chosen by his students in class. He claims that those short breaks pay off.

“When they move back to listening to me, they’re concentrating in a way they weren’t before,” Kehoe said.

His students seem to like the breaks as well.

“It made classes feel shorter,” said Adelaida Ortega, a former student. “By having the lecture divided up into smaller sections, the course content seemed less overwhelming. I didn’t feel like the material was zooming by me.”

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