e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Online

  • Digging Deeper Into CCSF Story: $39 million for non-usage of LMS not really about DE

    When I wrote my initial post on Tuesday about the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) having to repay the state $39 million for non-usage of LMS, there was one number that kept bugging me.

    We’re not talking about an isolated problem with some faculty forgetting or refusing to use the official LMS. 92% of all courses (based on FTES count) did not comply with collegiate policy, and therefore there are no official participation records ensuring students understood the course requirements or that faculty interacted with students.

    The original San Francisco Chronicle article described the problem as occurring “in hundreds of online classes from 2011 to 2014”, and the independent audit document describes their charge to “review compliance of contact hours claimed for distance education” by CCSF. But 92% of faculty choosing to not use the campus LMS for an online course goes beyond sloppy processes or faculty resistance. There had to be more to the story. (more…)

  • Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    Price Of Faculty Not Using LMS? $39 million for CCSF

    This morning the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about City College of San Francisco (CCSF) having to repay the state of California $39 million due to an audit of distance education courses.

    City College of San Francisco, struggling for every dollar it can muster, must repay the state nearly $39 million because it can’t prove that instructors taught thousands of students in hundreds of online classes from 2011 to 2014, an audit revealed.

    City College has been unable to verify teaching about 16,000 students in 587 online courses — from Accent Improvement to Cardiorespiratory Emergencies — over the three-year period, according to the state-commissioned audit that ended in September.

    It took a little bit of digging during a conference call (shh, don’t tell the hosts), but it looks like the issue was that the vast majority of faculty teaching online or hybrid courses chose to not use the centralized Moodle LMS system despite district policy that the LMS is the official record of student and faculty interaction.  (more…)

  • Cal State’s New Online Concurrent Enrollment Program: A Student’s View

    Michael and I have written about California’s efforts to leverage online education to address the challenge of students having access to needed courses, but it would help to hear what students have to say. Towards that end, I am sharing a student newspaper article about Cal State’s new online concurrent enrollment program. The student is my daughter, Hillary Hill, who is in her third year at Sonoma State University. You can find the original article here.

    As a student attending a school that is part of the California State University system, specifically Sonoma State University, I know the dread and frustration associated with registering for classes.

    In some ways, it seems like we are being set up to fail; we have a 16 unit cap, registration times get mixed up, and it seems like every class you need is full after five minutes.

    (more…)

  • MOOC Mania: Stanford AI Course Creates Media Sensation Two Years Ago

    It was two years ago, give or take a week, that the MOOC mania started. Think about the effects on higher education of this seminal event and how short a time it has been. In the past two years online education and ed tech have moved into the front pages, being discussed in the front pages of leading newspapers, popular media magazines, and in president’s cabinets and board meetings for most institutions. Previously, online education was discussed in small circles and specific contexts, but not as a dominant theme whenever higher education was the topic.

    Below is a brief (and incomplete) timeline of the national media articles as MOOC mania started in August 2011. I have not included ed tech blogs in this list, but it is worth noting that George Siemens wrote about the new MOOC on August 4 – exactly two years ago.

    And the rest, for better or worse, is history. Let me know if I’ve missed any key articles in this time frame, and I’ll update.

  • Online Education and the College Crisis: A Student’s View

    There are a lot of useful opinions and debates on the role of online education in solving various problems of higher education, but I find that we too often lack the student’s view on the subject. Towards that end, I am sharing the comments from a student about affordable access to the courses needed for a degree and one role of online education. The student is my daughter, Hillary Hill, who is entering her second year at a California State University campus.

    “We should change the name of this [Sonoma State University Class of 2015] group to “Sonoma State University Class of 2056.”

    “I am not even a full time student…”

    “I’m not paying double what I used to to not get classes!”

    These are just a few of the Facebook posts I read from my friends on the day of open registration for Fall 2012 started. At 9 AM, MySSU [portal and administrative system] went live, and students scrambled to get units. Unfortunately, there were very few units to be had. People are stuck taking classes they don’t need or want just for the unit value, and even they are better off than the ones who couldn’t even register for 12 units (the amount which makes you a full-time student). To make matters worse, MySSU shut down before it even reached 10 AM. Students who had taken off work or postponed plans were stuck refreshing their webpages in the hopes they’d be the first person on when it came back.

    (more…)

  • MOOCs: Two Different Approaches to Scale, Access and Experimentation

    In part 1 of this series, I described a new landscape of educational delivery models. In part 2 I described the master course concept and how it presents a cultural barrier that most traditional institutions cannot cross, at least without a dedicated online organization or an outsourced partnership.

    Why does it matter that we describe these educational delivery models with finer granularity than just traditional and online? Because the aims of the models differ, as do the primary methods of how these models are created and delivered.

    With all of the recent interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it would be worth summarizing the two branches of MOOCs including recent posts or interviews by the founders of the concept.

    Scale and Access

    In most online programs, at least those with more than few thousand students, the delivery method of this scale is the duplication of course sections in the manner of tract housing (for a better description, see part 2). But are there other methods to achieve scale (and therefore access) without duplicating sections? MOOCs represent an alternate approach where the actual course itself provides scale, allowing essentially unlimited enrollment in the single course section in the manner of a large apartment building.

    (more…)

  • The Master Course: A Key Difference in Educational Delivery Methods

    In part 1 of this series of posts I presented a view of different educational delivery models based on course design and modality.

    Why does it matter that we describe these educational delivery models with finer granularity than just traditional and online? Because the aims of the models differ, as do the primary methods of how these models are created and delivered.

    To show an example of how the methods differ, let’s look at one of the most significant, but overlooked, concepts in this landscape – the master course. This concept of the master course changes the educational delivery methods of an institution, and in my opinion is the real differentiator between traditional institutions and for-profit institutions (both blended and fully online) and even non-profit fully-online organizations.

    (more…)