Now witness the firepower of this fully written and delivered WCET / UPCEA /Sloan-C letter! – D. Poulin One of the policies that we’re tracking at e-Literate is the proposed State Authorization regulation that the US Department of Education (DOE) has been pushing. The latest DOE language represents a dramatic increase in federal control of distance education […]
Sloan-C
WCET, UPCEA & Sloan-C call on DOE to change State Authorization proposal
What does it take to get all of the higher education institutions and associations to agree? Apparently the answer is for the Department of Education to propose its new State Authorization regulations. As part of DOE’s negotiated rulemaking process over the past half year representatives from schools (Columbia University, Youngstown State University, Benedict College, Santa Barbara […]
One Line of Argument Against the Blackboard Patent
Several folks on the Sloan-C listserv have raised a strong second line of argument in the Blackboard prior art fight. In addition to identifying specific LMS precursors that had most or all of the functionality outlined in the claims, we should be building the case that LMS’s were directly and consciously copied from and evolved […]
Learning Effectiveness Via Learning Affectiveness
I just read a great article by Karen Swan called “Immediacy, Social Presence, and Asynchronous Discussion,” published in one of the Sloan-C’s books. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available online.) The paper appears to be an empirical study to follow up an earlier paper by Swan and several colleagues (which is available online, albeit […]
Teaching Hands-On Classes Online
From the Sloan Consortium, whose web site is turning out to be a gold mine of solid higher ed distance learning research, come articles on teaching electronics and Chemistry through distance learning. They used multimedia simulations of electronics in the former case while resorting to kitchen chemistry assignments in the latter case. For both courses, […]
Sloan-C – Resources
This article [PDF], though two years old now, has some still eye-opening figures on distance learning adoption in higher ed. Among the more interesting findings: Nearly one third of all higher ed institutions and one half of all public higher ed institutions now offer complete degree programs online. On average, in institutions that had distance […]