Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This research explores student perceptions of course quality and instructor effectiveness in a hybrid MPA distance learning program. The MPA distance learning program under analysis utilizes a synchronous computer software program for 21 hours of instruction per course, an asynchronous computer software program for 21 hours of instruction per course, and six hours of on-campus in-person instruction per course. Survey data from students who have completed eight (8) courses in this distance learning program (repeated samples n = 90) will be compared to the evaluations of students who have taken the same courses from the same instructors in the on-campus program (n=100). The purpose of the research is two-fold. First, the research will determine if there is a significant difference between the perceptions of course quality and instructor effectiveness between students in the distance learning program and students enrolled in the on-campus program. Second, the research will explore student satisfaction with the use of the synchronous and asynchronous computer delivery methods. It is anticipated that students will express satisfaction levels with course quality and instructor effectiveness equal to, or exceeding, the satisfaction levels expressed by students in the on-campus program.

AECT STANDARDS FOR INITIAL AND ADVANCED PROGRAMS IN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY (ECIT) The following text consists of excepts from the AECT document dealing with standards for instructional technology PROGRAMs. Some minor editorial revisions have been made to the original text to allow concurrent discussion of the initial and advanced standards. Also, sections of the document that deal primarily with the institutional role, rather than the student role, have been omitted. These standards are concerned primarily with candidate competencies in the area of educational communications and instructional technologies (ECIT). Initial ECIT PROGRAMs are defined as those which represent initial entry into the field. For example, a Baccalaureate or Master's PROGRAM which prepares individuals for either initial school certification or entry level positions in business or industry may be considered an initial ECIT PROGRAM. Advanced ECIT PROGRAMs are defined as those which represent additional study in the field. A graduate PROGRAM which advances knowledge and skills beyond the entry level for the profession constitutes an advanced ECIT PROGRAM. It is expected that advanced candidates are able to demonstrate the competencies outlined in the initial PROGRAM.

March 11, 2012 An Australian University Boosts Retention With Mentoring David Dare ParkerSamantha Saw (left), mentor-program administrative assistant, and Amy Hetherington, prospective-student adviser, help run Curtin U.'s mentorship program. The university started the program after discovering that 95 percent of students who dropped out had talked to no one. By David L. Wheeler Seven years ago, Curtin University administrators were unhappy to discover that their institution had middle-of-the pack student-retention numbers among Australia's 39 universities. They set out to change that. Now, with the addition of student-led mentoring and other programs, the university calculates that it prevents about 300 students a year from dropping out and thus saves at least $3.2-million (U.S.) annually in tuition and fees that would have been lost. The mentoring program also helps students "make connections and friends sooner than if they were left on their own," says Amanda Smith, the mentor-program coordinator.

Early Alert Program The Early Alert classroom assistance Program at Sinclair Community College is an intervention Program teaming faculty, counselors, and advisors together in order to promote the success of students facing challenges.   An Overview:    Early Alert is an intervention Program that allows for faculty to notify advisors/counselors of issues that may affect the success of a student.  It is a simple way of assisting students in difficulty find the help they need while taking very little time. Web-based Early Alert notifications are easy ways to promote the retention efforts of the college and the success of students. Utilized currently in all DEV courses, English 111, select Math courses, and SCC 101 courses.  

Faculty Development Programming: If We Build It, Will They Come? © 2008 Ann Taylor and Carol McQuiggan. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3 (July-September 2008) A faculty development survey analyzed what faculty want and need to be successful teaching online By Ann Taylor and Carol McQuiggan The number of courses offered online grows every year, resulting in an increasing number of higher education faculty entering a virtual classroom for the first time.1 It has been well documented that faculty need training and assistance to make the transition from teaching in a traditional face-to-face classroom to teaching online.2 Faculty professional development related to teaching online varies widely, from suggested readings to mandated training Programs. Various combinations of technological and pedagogical skills are needed for faculty to become successful online educators, and lists of recommended competencies abound.

"A Dozen Strategies for Improving Online Student Retention By: Al Infande, EdD in Online Education Add Comment Online student retention is one of the most critical components for the success of any college or university. The key to a successful online retention program is the realization that student retention is everybody's job. The main objective of a well-established online retention program is to maintain a student's enrollment and to keep him highly satisfied with the level of education he is acquiring in an online environment. This is not an easy task since there are many reasons why a student might need or want to withdraw or leave the program of study. Below are a dozen strategies for improving online student retention for administrators and faculty:"

"Broadly, Knight calls for students applying for programs in the 39 universities to be considered under the least onerous visa arrangements. Immigration will effectively accept the judgement of the universities that a student with an offer is a genuine student (provided they meet other threshold requirements). Applicants for programs in most other sectors will be assessed according to the existing framework. The Department of Immigration will therefore retain direct influence over growth in the non-university sector. The immigration handbrake can be engaged at any time. Universities, on the other hand, are expected to regulate their own growth strategies. "Government departments will monitor the responses of the universities, with the ultimate and humiliating penalty of exclusion from the streamlined visa arrangements available if universities become intoxicated by their new 'freedom'. "We don't yet know the metrics that immigration officials will monitor, these are under development, but we can assume that they will include a range of visa-related measures combined with assessments of student progress and outcomes..................................... "If we are to truly live up to the expectations that the new arrangements place upon us, we will need to focus squarely on recruiting new students at the front end and providing outstanding outcomes (education, research, professional and visa outcomes) at the other. Our international student support programs, already strong by world standards, assume a new importance. Our ability to monitor student progress and to jump in to provide assistance when it is required, will also assume a new importance. We will need to find new and proactive working relationships with DIAC as universities and immigration officials share accountability for visa outcomes."

New York Times to Suspend Online-Education Program June 11, 2012, 6:37 pm By Angela Chen The New York Times is bowing out of the online-education business just as a growing number of colleges are putting their own courses on the Web. Knowledge Network, the distance-learning initiative started by the company in September 2007, will suspend operations on July 31, a company spokesperson said today.

"Background Student authentication in distance education has been an issue of interest to federal policy makers for several years. The growth in enrollments and in the number of educational providers of online learning fueled concerns about the ability of institutions to verify the identity of online students throughout the cycle of an online course: registration, participation, assessment, academic credit. Passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, followed by federal rulemaking, resulted in new regulations. One regulation required accrediting agencies to assure distance and correspondence education programs have processes in place to verify student identity. Photo of Asian female student in front of computer The issue is complex and frequently misrepresented. Among many e-learning professionals, the issue seems unfairly aimed only at online education when similar concerns of identity falsification could apply in traditional higher education settings. The policy and regulatory conversations concerning identify authentication, originally focused on academic dishonesty, now encompass the serious problem of financial aid fraud, as reported in some high profile cases. WCET has led a number of important efforts aimed at informing policy makers, accrediting agency leaders, and online program administrators of different approaches-pedagogical as well as technological-that ensure their compliance with the regulation but also raise the conversation to a more widely relevant discussion of academic integrity. WCET's Study Group on Academic Integrity and Student Authentication, established in March 2008, continues its work to identify and disseminate information on promising practices to promote academic integrity of which identity authentication is but one component."

Selecting technology is perhaps the easiest part of developing a distance learning program. Most colleges and universities find an array of available delivery systems ranging from interactive television to sophisticated Web-based asynchronous learning networks (ALNs). As these institutions strive to provide quality alternative instructional delivery and enter the increasingly competitive race for new students, two areas often receive little attention - policy development and planning. Soon the courses are on the air or travelling through cyberspace, and unprepared educators find themselves in legal, academic, fiscal, logistical and union controversies. "Regardless of the delivery system…the technology often precedes planning and policy development" (C.E.T.U.S., 1997, p. 7). Clearly, advanced policy deliberation and development is essential to the success of distance learning programs and their students.

With most critics of higher education focused on rising prices or on whether American colleges and universities are producing enough degree and certificate holders with sufficient skills to keep the U.S. economy vibrant and competitive -- the latter known in shorthand as the "completion agenda" -- a few analysts are homing in on the quality and rigor of what students are learning (or not) en route to those credentials. Last year's Academically Adrift set the tone, providing data suggesting that many colleges are imposing relatively minimal academic demands on their students and that, perhaps as a result, many students do not appear to gain in some measures of cognitive abilities as they move through college. The authors of We're Losing Our Minds (Palgrave MacMillan) add their own clamoring to the agenda focused on the quality of learning. Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators, describe themselves as "friendly critics" of higher education, and unlike many of academe's naysayers, they don't spend a lot of time trashing the faculty as overpaid and underworked or bashing administrators as fat-cat corporatizers (though they do complain that institutions have overemphasized rankings and enrollment growth and sports and research -- take your pick depending on institution type).

NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Ed Edition The NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program. This ninth edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning.

National Survey of Student Engagement What is student engagement? Student engagement represents two critical features of collegiate quality. The first is the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other educationally purposeful activities. The second is how the institution deploys its resources and organizes the curriculum and other learning opportunities to get students to participate in activities that decades of research studies show are linked to student learning. What does NSSE do? Through its student survey, The College Student Report, NSSE annually collects information at hundreds of four-year colleges and universities about student participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college. NSSE provides participating institutions a variety of reports that compare their students' responses with those of students at self-selected groups of comparison institutions. Comparisons are available for individual survey questions and the five NSSE Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice. Each November, NSSE also publishes its Annual Results, which reports topical research and trends in student engagement results. NSSE researchers also present and publish research findings throughout the year.

"Wednesday, July 10, 2013 Bring Your Own Device #BYOD - 5 Lessons for Success Guest post by Craig Crittendon The Network Engineer's Nightmare.. I knew it was going to be an interesting phone call (any call usually is before 8:00 in I.T.).    When the teacher asked why she couldn't get to "insertwebsite.com" and her kids were arriving in 15 minutes for the first BYOD pilot class, I took my first deep breath of the morning…. The second call came about 8:25…  She was still trying to get students logged into their devices…  A technology specialist and a tech were trying to assist….  Some had limited connectivity to our wireless; others were trying to reach their carrier network, which didn't have a good signal in that part of the building.  The app she was trying to get everyone on wasn't working and wouldn't pull up for everyone… And that's how the first couple of weeks went... The teacher was frustrated and her students were behind schedule.  The principal was not pleased.  One month and a half into the program, they ordered 30 iPads, and the official BYOD pilot unofficially became a 1:1 iPad project. What happened?  The teacher seemed prepared the week before. Here are lessons we learned."

"The University of California at Davis is creating what may be higher education's most promising digital badge system. But the badges are no threat to the university's degrees. They're add-ons - perhaps valuable ones for students."

Updated E-Learning Definitions By John Sener, Founder/CKO, Sener Knowledge LLC | No Comments | July 7, 2015 | Leave a comment Definitions of E-Learning Courses and Programs Version 2.0 April 4, 2015 Developed for Discussion within the Online Learning Community By Frank Mayadas, Gary Miller, and John Sener As e-learning has evolved into a global change agent in higher education, it has become more diverse in its form and applications. This increased diversity has complicated our ability to share research findings and best practices, because we lack a shared set of definitions to distinguish among the many variations on e-learning that have arisen. This paper is designed to provide practitioners, researchers, and policy makers with a common set of terms and definitions to guide the ongoing development of the field. Our hope is that it will move us toward a set of shared, commonly understood definitions that will facilitate the sharing of research data and professional standards in our field. In developing the definitions below, we have tried to incorporate existing definitions developed by others and have incorporated comments from colleagues who have reviewed earlier drafts. We do not present these as the ultimate definitions, but as a step toward more commonly held standards as our field continues to evolve. Additions and revisions will be published periodically, as needed.

Presents the elements of a scaffolding model in early childhood teacher preparation programs. Describes the theoretical foundations provided by Piaget, Vygotsky, and Dewey. Discusses supports in the scaffold for preservice teachers including child development knowledge and national standards, the role of technology, modeling appropriate instructional practices, field experiences to apply skills, and opportunities for reflection.

Australian government office web portal for teaching and learning related information.

Publications and News Mapping Australian higher education The Rights of International Students Australian higher education: trends, policies, performance Subsidy review plan neither fair nor enticing Filling the university information gap The Rise of University Rankings The University Gender Gap

Publications and News Mapping Australian higher education Publication | 29 Jan 2012 | Andrew Norton Australia's higher education system is entering one of its most significant years in recent history. To meet a government goal to increase the number of young adults holding a degree, restrictions on undergraduate student numbers have been lifted. Yet despite the system's importance to Australia's economy and society, it is often hard to know what is going on inside it. Mapping Australian higher education, the first report from Grattan Institute's Higher Education program, puts in one place facts, figures and analysis relevant to understanding institutions, students, and outcomes.