Online Universities Weblog

From the Northern Light, this story about students evaluating their teachers online.

Don Mohr, a professor of history, was surprised when he found out students were evaluating his performance via the World Wide Web.

The site has become a craze among college students all over the nation. It is a venue for them to anonymously write about the performance of their instructors.

According to a study by Red Vector, noted here at Distance Educator, demand for online courses will double in 2005, especially in the area of professional specialization and corporate learning.

• Spending on online continuing education passed the $9 billion mark in 2003, according to IDC Research, and grew to between $12 and 14 billion in 2004, according to Bersin and Associates.
• IDC predicts a 30% increase in yearly e-learning spending worldwide through 2008.
• The number of companies using online learning to train employees will grow by 50% in 2005, according to Bersin and Associates.
Economics has been a driving force behind growth in online professional education. With online courses, companies no longer have to pay travel and hotel costs and employees can be more productive since they aren't spending time traveling.
Here are a few examples of how this is already taking off with CyberGrad providing training for Department of Transportation officials, UHS-Pruitt Corporation's affiliation with healthcare learning providers, and GeoLearning's work in the outsourcing arena.

Danny at Blogorama links to us and an article from CIO magazine we had posted, and gives his in-depth breakdown of the so-called 'education crisis' …

The publisher of CIO Magazine, Gary Beach, writes an ominously titled article, "The Education Crisis", in the December 15, 2004 issue. I suppose it's the fad nowadays to bemoan America's fall from its position as world technology leader. This collective sense of doom oftentimes produces incoherent arguments from otherwise smart people. This is one of those times.

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From TMCnet.com, this story on New Jersey Institute of Technology.

NJIT has just launched a customized e-learning program for pharmaceutical workers and is deepening counter-terrorism education for the New Jersey State Police. A professor has just won a prestigious national e-learning award, and the institution continues to deliver the nation's second-largest online graduate computing and engineering programs.

"Whether we're helping a pharmaceutical plant avoid shutdowns, State Police combat terror, or the next generation of engineers and computing professionals meet the great challenges of the future, we're aggressively pursuing the NJIT's mission of economic development through education," said Gale Tenen Spak, Ph.D., NJIT's associate vice president of continuing and distance education. "WebCT Campus Edition is the platform for this pursuit and supports our activities by being flexible, reliable, powerful and easy to use."

From E-school News.

A virtual school controversy in Pennsylvania that centers on the definition of "residency" points to an area of concern that cyber schools in other states might one day have to grapple with, too.

The dispute involves more than $100,000 in tuition that taxpayers in a suburban Pittsburgh school district paid for U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's children to be educated via computer at their Virginia home–revealing a basic flaw in Pennsylvania's 2002 cyber-school law.

More on this story at The Washington Times.