If you are a student in an online university, I'd like to hear from you and post that information on this weblog. What I'll likely do is ask you a set of questions about your program, and then allow you to write basically what you want about your experiences. Hopefully we could get a database of testimonials about most of the online universities, or at least the most well known ones.
If you are interested, please contact me at michael@creative-weblogging.com
Thanks.
Danny Taggart's Blogarama links to this story at the PhillyBurbs about fraud online degrees. He makes the good point that some news articles often don't seperate the real online university programs from the fake in their reporting.
This kind of reporting, which does not unambiguously differentiate between fraudsters and real, Accredited Online Universities issuing real diplomas hurts the latter tremendously. The efficacy of online instruction is debatable, but should be evaluated on its own merits, rather than instinctively associated with fraud.
Nice post over at Weblog-Ed about wikis in online learning.
Here's a pretty interesting article about using wikis as a learning tool. I like the icebreaker exercise that the authors use to get students familiar with the technology, and I think it can serve as a good model for the ways to introduce much of these new tools. The best way to really understand the power of personal publishing is to, well, publish personally, put yourself out there, talk about who you are and what you want from life.
From Business Wire:
Capella Education Company, parent corporation of Capella University, an accredited online university headquartered in Minneapolis, announced today that Lois Martin, 42, has been hired as senior vice president and chief financial officer.
Over at MSNBC, a story about online gaming.
In "RL" (otherwise known as real life), Collier is a graduate student studying electronic visualization at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His goal is to, one day, write and design video games.
But in the virtual world, he is Gestalt, a lumbering, mostly peace-loving "wookiee," akin to the Star Wars character Chewbacca. Gestalt has two homes — one of them a beach house on the planet Corellia, the other a smallish mansion that's the equivalent of a space geek's bachelor pad. Gestalt is also a member of the Knights of Ash, a "guild" of about 80 Star Wars Galaxies players from points all over the globe.
The game is one of the increasingly popular and sophisticated "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" — with emphasis on the "multi," since tens of thousands of people can play at once. These games range from the widely known EverQuest to the newly released World of Warcraft, and let players create characters and socialize with people they've often never met in person. Other games, such as Halo 2 and Counter Strike, allow smaller groups of players to meet online to fight computer-generated enemies or each other.
About.com has a nice overview of various funding options for distance education students.
College can be expensive. That's why, whether you're dorming at a university or are taking classes from the Comfort of your own home, financial aid is necessary for just about everyone. Financial aid is monetary help offered to individuals though government agencies, individual schools, or other sources. There are several types of aid available to students.
Here's another resource from NoteSysHome with funding information.
From Penn State University, via Distance Educator …
Mark Leslie Louw is an American citizen living and working as a missionary in africa's Ivory Coast. The father of four daughters, Louw is also enrolled in Penn State's World Campus, working toward a bachelor's degree in Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Recently, however, Louw had been forced to abandon or delay his educational progress because of a lack of finances to put toward tuition. But, thanks to a new World Campus Student Fund‹a scholarship fund supported voluntarily and entirely by numerous World Campus staff members‹Louw will be able to continue his studies.
From Distance Educator …
CEU.com, a leading nationwide provider of online continuing education (CE) for insurance professionals, has been selected by Business Insurance, the trusted voice of the commercial insurance market place, as the Best Education Web site of 2004.
From Inforbits …
According to a recent article in THE TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT (26 October 2004), "[c]omputer games should be taught in schools because they are good for children's development." Research by the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Medias suggests that computer games can develop literacy skills and "help children learn concepts such as critical appreciation of narrative structure or character development which they might otherwise study in a novel."
From AACE Journal.
"The need for mentors within eLearning environments emerges when the faculty are constrained by their limited time to spend toward assisting students overcoming eLearning barriers, meeting student expectations and, simultaneously, assuming regular teaching responsibilities. Mentors can take up part of the faculty roles and serve as an intermediary between the faculty and the students to alleviate the faculty time limitation." In "The Roles of Mentors in Electronic Learning Environments" (AACE JOURNAL, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 331-42, 2004) Shujen L. Chang discusses the factors that impede effective online
learning and the roles mentors play in alleviating these factors. She also provides guidelines for setting mentor roles, responsibilities, and contributions.
Also, check out Education and Distance Learning Resources 2005 for Marcus P. Zillman's Internet Miniguide to online education.
