Desire2Blog

There's somewhere in the vicinity of 25 football players and at least one tutor and one academic advisor who are losers in the cheating scandal at Florida State University (FSU). Chances are also good that the FSU football team will lose to Kentucky in their lower-tier bowl game coming up at the end of the month . However, I think the biggest loser in all of this is going to be e-Learning in general. (CC Flickr photo by Matthew Stinson is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 ) Of course they just had to have cheated on tests in an online course. In our one-size fits all world, that means everyone will be talking about how easy it is to cheat in online courses, as if cheating is somehow unique in online courses or more rampant than in other forms of higher education. I don't believe that, but many people do believe it and they will now have more ammunition as they talk negatively about e-Learning. As I have read the somewhat sketchy (not very detailed) stories on the Internet a...

Myth or Reality? By using the Quality Matters™ (or similar) rubric and a rigorous quality review process, we have sufficiently answered the persistent questions about the quality of online learning. The embedded SlideCast below takes a little over 9 minutes to explain my take on the answer to this question (click the green play button at the bottom of the slideshow window). I posed this question as part of the e-Learning Mythbusters presentation because I very often hear QualityMatters (TM) being offered as the solution to the persistent questions about whether we are attending to the quality concerns about e-Learning. Lastly, as I state during the SlideCast, we have used an adaptation of QualityMatters at Lake Superior College for the past three plus years now, and it has been an extremely positive experience overall. See the LSC Peer Review blog for more info. View Upload your own

For the second year in a row I volunteered to be on the committee that chooses the Best Online Course and Best Blended Course awards for the annual ITC conference - e-Learning 2008 to be held in St. Pete Beach in February. Yesterday we made our selections and chose one winner in each category. I can't tell you who the winners are just yet, but I can talk a little bit about the process. ( Past winners here ) We used a scoring rubric that was new and improved this year. A few of the other board members worked hard on revising the award rubrics and I found these two rubrics to be much better and more helpful in selecting winning courses than in the past. The rubric contains a total of 20 items with each worth 5 points maximum for a total possible score of 100. I find it interesting how different people using the same rubric can come to very different conclusions about whether what they're seeing satisfies the rubric requirement or expectation. First of all, let me say this committ...

A while back I submitted a proposal to a conference related to teaching with technology. This is the presentation title and abstract (limited to 75 words) that I submitted: (some of you may recognize it as one of my standard presentations) Web 2.0 Whirlwind--Free Web Tools There are many new Web applications that are free and easy to use. Many of these services have specific applications in higher education. The presenter will demonstrate these free applications currently being used by students, faculty, and staff. Applications related to digital photos and video, digital music tools, one-to-one and one-to-many communications, web office, and other services are demonstrated. A presentation wiki containing all resources is shared for use after the conference. This week I received an email that started with the following: " Congratulations ! Your session has been accepted for (blah-blah-blah). " Normally that would be a pretty good email. However, by the end of it I was more th...

This one is sure to tick off a few people. That's really not my intention, but I guess it goes with the territory. Sure do wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone say how much harder online teachers work than those old-fashioned classroom teachers. This is the question I asked during my keynote at the ETOM conference in October. I didn't give them the opportunity to be on the fence; they couldn't say "well, some of them work harder," or any other weasel options. They had to pick a side with their hand-held clickers. True or False? Online Faculty Work Harder Below you see the results of the voting. 60% say yes, it's true. Of course it's true that some online faculty work harder than the off-line faculty members. It's also true that some of the women work harder than the men, that some of old teachers work harder than the young ones, that some of the short people work harder than the tall ones, and that some of the attractive faculty me...

The Committee on Education and Labor in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "College Opportunity and Affordability Act" (H.R. 4137 ) on November 15, 2007. This means we are nearing the end of the long road leading to reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA). The House committee bill now joins the bill passed by the U.S. Senate (S.1642) in July 2007. House link: H.R. 4137 , go to part H, section 496-A Senate link: S. 1642 , go to part G, section 491 (formerly 496) At some point the language differences between the House and Senate will need to be hammered out. However, with regard to accreditation concerns for distance education, the House committee bill is identical to the Senate bill. The current language would allow college and university accrediting agencies to address the quality of a school’s distance education offerings without the need to create separate standards, procedures or policies related to distance education (for a while this looked to be the dire...

What do you think? Is e-learning part of the answer to our climate problems? Is e-learning green-learning (or g-learning)? This is not something that I have spent much time contemplating, but at the ITC Board Meeting a couple of weeks ago this topic came up and I found myself somewhat intrigued by it. Board member David Hutto from North Carolina has done some research about this. What I heard him say is the following (paraphrased slightly): if 1,000 commuter students per state moved to e-learning (rather than driving to campus for F2F classes) we would save $5.4 million in energy costs (gasoline) per year. I wonder if he was basing these calculations on the current price of over $3.00 per gallon or some earlier, lower amount. Either way, I think there is probably some potential for the idea of leveraging e-learning for gasoline savings, reducing dependence on foreign oil, and reducing carbon emissions. Of course, I don't think that anyone else actually cares, but at least David and...

The ITC Audioconferences keep getting better and better. These are the next 5 topics: Dec. 4, 2007 - iTunes U: Podcasting Made Easy Dec. 11, 2007 - Building Quality: Using QM Standards in Online Course Development Jan. 8, 2008 - Ten Ways to Improve your Faculty Online Training Course Jan. 15, 2008 - A Collaborative Approach to Online Student Support Services Jan. 22, 2008 - Moodle - an Online Course Management System These are one-hour audioconferences and cost $25 per connection ($50 for non-members), although you can have as many people listening to that one connection as you choose. Check out the link above for more info.

In this short (under 12 minutes) recording, I share some thoughts about the possible future development of virtual learning environments (VLE) and how they could be more like current Web 2.0 tools, more open to the public (where appropriate), and probably a lot more engaging and productive places to get your work done. Since I'm not playing fantasy football this year, I thought I would try my hand at fantasy e-learning. I admit that this is not the deepest of thinking. Just some thoughts that have been rolling around in my head, plus an effort to jump start the Desire2Pod series that has been dormant for several months.

This post begins with a definition of terms. One problem in e-learning is that we have so many terms that are used interchangeably which leads to the confusion of many. Example: Digital Natives (not a fan), Millennials, Net Generation, NeXt Generation, iGen, Gen Y, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah until you wanna puke. Let's end this stupidity and all decide to use the following term when referring to the newest crop of college-bound students - "Native Net-gennials." Please enunciate carefully - notice that there is a "t" in the first word, a "t" in the second word, but no"t" in the third word. e-Learning Myth #4: Native Net-gennials are well prepared for e-Learning Ummmh, no, they aren't!! Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The native net-gennials don't get the technology used in e-Learning. They get MySpace and FaceBook. They get IM and text messaging. However, they have very few technology skills that we expect them to use in e-L...

This video shows the use of Protopage inside Desire2Learn. Protopage is an easy to manage widget-driven website. Near the end of this less-than-5-minute video I state that using ProtoPage inside a VLE (virtual learning environment) might be a little glimpse of the future. It seems to me that any VLE would be more flexible, more customizable, more personable (think PLE or personal learning environment) with a widget-driven structure. Of course I could be wrong. You can load your own background graphic, which I have done on the Protopage used for this particular D2L embed. You can change the color scheme. You can make it private, semi-private, or public. Anyone can move the widgets around but only someone logged in with editing rights can make permanent changes. Here is the link to the video in blip.tv (full-screen option available). Click To Play

There was an increased usage of the SMARTHINKING online tutoring service at LSC as reported previously (two posts below). It turns out that about half of the increase (46 hours) comes from natural causes (due to the lack of a better phrase), and the other half of the increase (a little more actually) comes from two particular students who used a total of 58 hours between them (in one month!!). In the first three of years of offering this service we imposed a limit of 10 hours per student per semester. There were only a few times when students reached that limit and tried to exceed it. In the fourth year we decided that the limit wasn't necessary since few people reached it, and it didn't seem like a big deal if they needed a few extra hours of tutoring help. Obviously we didn't anticipate the situation where one student would use 39.5 hours of tutoring in a single month. Now we're taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen again. Live and learn.

Here's my next pitch about the ITC annual conference. e-Learning 2008 will be held in St. Pete Beach (small town, next to the big city of St. Petersburg) on February 16-19, 2008. No word yet on whether the wi-fi will extend all the way to the actual beach. However, they are promising a sunset every night. ITC e-learning 2008 Conference Program The schedule looks great. Compared to many other conferences that I go to, I've found the quality of the concurrent sessions at the ITC conferences to be better, pound-for-pound. There are 7 sessions to choose from at each time slot, not 30-35. Movers and shakers from most of the top PUBLIC e-learning schools are there and making presentations. I'm not saying that the private providers and the for-profit providers are not there at all, but this conference has a heavy dose of influence from state colleges and universities. That works for me. CC photo by porkfork

I'm a bit baffled about why our student usage of online tutoring hours has gone through the roof. This is our fifth year of providing free online tutoring services to students at Lake Superior College. I'm going to look at the usage to ensure that only LSC students are accessing the hours. As long as that is true, then apparently many more faculty members are encouraging the use of the SMARTHINKING service than in previous years. Sounds like a survey topic to me.

Go to any e-Learning conference and you will hear a great deal about the importance of building a sense of "community" for your e-learners. This is one of the myths/realities that I try to explore in my e-Learning Mythbusters presentation. At the ETOM conference at Mott Community College I posed the following question to the audience (about 60 people responded with clickers): As you can see, 71% of the educators in the audience indicated that developing a sense of community for the students is either important or very important. Before we explored this question any further, I asked the second question which is whether they think students want (desire) to develop a sense of community in their e-learning. I think that the audience came pretty close on this one, at least in a round about way. I actually think that 40% of the audience gave the wrong answer - because I believe that (generally speaking) online students are not very interested in spending their time developing commu...

Here are some of the things that I learned about e-learning recently from my blog aggregator. In total, I spent about 15 minutes learning about things that might take me several hours to track down by myself, if I knew they were out there at all. 1. via Michael Feldstein : Blackboard continues to look like a very bad partner for higher ed institutions (if you think ethics are a good thing) - also from the D2L Patent Blog (10/24 entry) 2. from Inside Higher Ed : Sloan-C reports continued online enrollment growth , but slowing 3. from Rapid e-Learning : this post seems to get at what I was trying to say about the difference between "action" and "interaction" in e-learning exercises - making the distinction between passive engagement and active engagement. 4. via Stephen Downes and Michael Feldstein : this Educause report about Academic Analytics is worth the reading time, although that time was not included in my 15 minutes.

I've been playing around a bit with Jing (from TechSmith) to make screencasts. It works pretty well. Here is an example. Screencast of embedding Zoho Show presentations inside Desire2Learn. I would like Jing better if it was a web-based application. I don't recommend very many apps that require a download and install. However, this one appears to be worth it.

On Friday (10/12) I had my first opportunity to deliver a keynote address. The topic was e-Learning Mythbusters and the audience was the ETOM group: Educational Teleconsortium of Michigan . Prior to the conference I had gathered a list of 36 potential myths about e-learning. I knew that there were some that I was forgetting about, and sure enough I was reminded of two more right away early in the day. These two are things that I have actually ranted and raved about previously, so it just provides further evidence of the fact that I have an increasingly weak memory. Overall it went pretty well, but I have already made about a dozen significant edits to the presentation and also to the clicker questions that go along with it. The clicker questions are fun, but I think they need to be tightened up significantly to increase effectiveness. I am also busy analyzing the wheat and separating it from the chaff. There is no point in having a list of 38 things when you only have time to get throu...

I'm just returning from a 2.5 week trip to Asia learning more about e-Learning there and trying to teach them more about the type and quality of e-Learning that is going on in the states. I visited Indonesia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, and Korea. Suffice it to say that pretty much everything I heard falls into one of these categories, in decreasing order of commonality: questions about how e-Learning could possibly be any good (same questions we faced 8-10 years ago when things were just starting to get serious in the U.S.) outright dismissal of the idea as something that doesn't merit serious consideration shock and surprise that so many American students are choosing e-Learning as an option a genuine curiosity about e-Learning as a delivery method and how it might impact international students who desire to earn U.S. degrees. Of the countries visited, this is my ranking of the enrollment potential in U.S. e-Learning for each of the countries, starting with the highest potenti...

This video shows the use of Zoho word processing and spreadsheet documents inside Desire2Learn. I'm a big fan of Zoho and find it very useful for managing documents that I want displayed on the web and works great for student group projects for collaborative writing. Here is the link to the video in blip.tv (full-screen option available). Click To Play

Putting video inside your online course can enhance learning if it is done well. That's a big IF, but still, good videos are useful ... as long as you can see and hear them. Unless your college has a dedicated multimedia streaming server, you should look at alternatives rather than uploading your video files directly into D2L. Click To Play This video above promotes embedding videos inside a Desire2Learn online course by using the free video hosting services such as YouTube and Blip.tv where they will convert your video to flash and give you the html embed code for you to paste into your D2L course. Easy, peasy. Direct link to Blip where there is a full-screen viewing option.

Myth or reality? The "distance" in distance education means something? Ummm, no, it doesn't! At least not for the vast majority of e-learners. The GIS map above shows the geographic distribution of 98% of the e-learners for LSC Online in the fall semester 2005. The other 2% (corrected 9/25/07) came from other places besides Minnesota and Wisconsin. About 50% of the students indicated on the map (probably more) could not have easily attended LSC by coming to campus since they are more than 30 miles away. So, that makes it sound like there really is something to this distance thing, right? Wrong. When you ask these students (as we have) why they signed up for online courses they do not indicate distance as a leading reason. In fact, it comes out quite far from the top. We have seen this data collected using two different instruments. The Noel-Levitz PSOL includes ten "factors to enroll" for students to rank how important the factor was in their decision-making to ...

I'm putting together a presentation titled "e-Learning Myth-busters." The goal is to explore and explode a dozen or more myths about e-Learning. Here is an example: "E-Learning is anytime, anywhere learning." Here's one quote : " AAL – Potentially the single most significant educational initiative in decades" No hype there. It's also nice that it has an acronym: AAL, although some people call it anyone, anytime, anywhere learning which must be AAAL. Busting the myth: it's a nice catch phrase, but it really isn't true when you consider the individual student experience. If you work 45 hours per week, have two kids, and all the other normal demands on your time and attention - you can't just engage in your learning anytime and anywhere. You may have a 3-hour window on Friday nights (oops, the library with their wireless access is closed? - so much for anywhere) and another large window on Sunday afternoons when your spouse is watch...

Here is a third short video from the presentations that I make about using Web 2.0 tools inside D2L. This video shows the use of embedded del.icio.us pages inside D2L content pages, and suggestions for using the social bookmarking tool for group projects and other web research objectives. You can also view this video at Blip.tv with a full-screen option available. Click To Play

Here is a second short video from the presentations that I make about using Web 2.0 tools inside D2L. This video shows a couple of embedded SlideShare presentations inside D2L content pages. You can also view this video at Blip.tv with a full-screen option available. Click To Play

This first video (4 min.) is a demo of using an embedded YackPack inside Desire2Learn using a content page. This is very simple to set up by just linking to the URL of the YackPack that you have created. YackPack is free. (UPDATE: It appears that YackPack will no longer be free , which probably means that I will no longer recommend it. It's cool, but not that cool. $35 bucks a year per user probably won't work for us. Free account still allows 10 second messages, but that is pretty limited.) You can also view this video at Blip.tv where you have a full-screen option in the lower-right hand corner of the player.

The proposal deadline is nearing for the ITC e-Learning 2008 conference. Friday, September 28 is the deadline for submitting a proposal for the conference. Year in and year out, this is the best e-Learning conference that I attend. If you're looking for a high-powered research-based conference where everyone makes presentations about their dissertation results, then look elsewhere. This conference is all about online teaching and learning with presenters coming from most of the leading schools in online learning. The fact that this next conference will be held in St. Petersburg Beach is just a little icing on the cake. I will be presenting two half-day pre-conference workshops which will be hands-on sessions in the computer labs at St. Petersburg College. My friends at SPC have great facilities to share and are genuinely a great bunch of people to work with. I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm going to begin writing a somewhat sporadic series of posts related to lessons learned (and that sort of junk) from the past ten years of e-learning at Lake Superior College. Our first online class was delivered to eight Cell Biology students during the winter quarter of the 1997-98 academic year. That was the only online class offered that first year. In our tenth year of e-learning we taught 304 sections of online classes with a total of 7,850 student enrollments. Needless to say, some things have changed over the years. I remember when I was still a faculty member and e-learning was just beginning to take shape. There were many doom-and-gloom stories out there about how the sky was falling in higher ed because of this online learning thing. I clearly remember sitting in an auditorium at Normandale Community College listening to many people grouse about all the fears related to e-learning. Some of the most common (or maybe the most popular) fears went something like this: ...

I've been mostly out of touch and not in the blogging mood since the Desire2Learn User Conference ended in mid-July. I haven't really kept up very well on many of the maneuvers in the D2L-Blackboard-Turnitin craziness. In case you have also been somewhat asleep at the switch, here is a brief recap of recent events. Blackboard unveils plagiarism prevention service (July 10) Markman Decision Announced (Aug 4) that dismissed claims 1-35 of Blackboard's suit against Desire2Learn. Major victory for D2L. Turnitin and Blackboard engage in a catfight over more edupatents. (Aug 8) ( Also here ) Blackboard and Turnitin (iParadigms) decide to play nice - even though that is completely contrary to their natures. (Aug 23) Have my opinions changed about Blackboard (sucks) and Turnitin (sucks)? Nope.

I've been disconnected most of the past two weeks and am just now getting caught up on over 1,000 new posts in my Bloglines account. Of special interest to me is the battle between two of my least favorite companies from the higher ed arena of edupatents. I love it when Blackboard and Turnitin start taking shots at each other. I've still got a lot of reading to do before I'll really understand what is going on (if I do), but in the meantime just let me say that there aren't two sets of lawyers that I would rather see beating each other up than these two. More later as time permits.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. ( CC photo by Alan "Cogdogblog" Levine ). But soon the jig will be up and we will all be safe from those crazy non-students out there. In a move that has been expected for about eighteen months now, the Senate has passed a bill (S.1642, Higher Education Amendments of 2007) that " requires an institution that offers distance education to have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit ." So far, it is anyone's guess as to what methods/gadgets they might accept for the required "processes.' Informed people (like Steve Crow of the Higher Learning Commission) have told me that they probably won't dictate methodology, but that we will be required to determine our own processes, communicate them widely, and then follow them. Will...

I just spent three days in Annapolis attending my first board meeting for the Instructional Technology Council (ITC). What a great bunch of people and what a great location to spend a few days getting to know them all a bit better. We spent a fair amount of time planning for the 2008 e-Learning Conference which will be held in St. Pete Beach and hosted by St. Petersburg College. Building upon the incredible momentum of the 2007 conference, I predict that this next conference will once again break attendance records and be a huge success. I was almost chosen by the group to give my first keynote address at a national conference. Almost, but not quite. This is an opportunity that I am actively preparing for in hopes that I will someday be asked. I have about four different keynote topics in mind right now, some of which are ready for prime time, and others that still need a bit more nurturing and development. A couple of the board members were very supportive of the idea of naming me to ...

This will be my last post about the IMS Global Consortium LTAC meetings in Redmond, WA held last week. Thursday early afternoon - Panel Presentation: Standards and Best Practices for Providing Online Programs - Me, Russ Adkins of Broward CC, and John St. Clair of Tennessee Board of Regents. $ - I talked about best (or at least pretty good) practices from the perspective of both LSC and MnOnline, including the following: 1) LSC Online Student Mentors, 2) LSC Events-based Distance Learning, 3) Quality Matters at both LSC and MnOnline, 4) Noel-Levitz PSOL data gathering at LSC and MnOnline, 5) online tutoring at LSC and MnOnline, 6) Minnesota efolio, 7) Statewide electronic library services. $ - Russ talked about how BCC went from almost no e-learning five years ago to a very large e-learning operation today. BCC overall has about 23,000 FTE and about a 60,000 student headcount. In 8 years, they grew from nothing online to about 200 full-time and 350 part-time faculty teaching something o...

The best part of the IMS-LTAC meetings in Redmond was the opportunity to meet Michael Feldstein. After reading his e-Literate blog for more than a year and listening to a couple of audio interviews/presentations, I felt as though I already knew him. He has been one the most prolific writers about the Blackboard-D2L debacle , and about edu-patents in general. We spent the better part of two days engaged in conversations (and presentations) about e-Learning standards, IMS Global Consortium projects, and other things related to educational uses of learning management systems and the like. Michael is one of those deep thinkers and no-B.S.-kind-o-guys that I enjoy spending time with. We were also able to have a casual conversation at the end of the events while enjoying the halibut at the Coho Café in Redmond. I won’t even mention that he spilled his beer across the table and into my lap. I will mention that his opinion matches mine about how Blackboard is doing irreparable harm to their ...

Craig Bartholomew, general manager of the Education Products Group at Microsoft, welcomed us to the Evil Empire (his words). Example of not being evil - 60% of the MS employees donated over $72 million to charity last year (employee donations matched by company). Gates Foundation's 3-R's: Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. Panel Presentation: Establishing Course and Content Quality Standards - Keith Hampson, Bill Evans, and Michael Feldstein. Bill Evans, Cal Sate Chico - Data warehousing and analytics have been largely ignored but they are now starting to get more attention. Anecdotes from the CSU & Beyond: 1) Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI): universal design improves courses for all students. 2) Assessing Online Facilitation (AOF): peer evaluation of facilitator skills/process, 3) Exemplary Online Instruction (EOI) Awards: faculty recognition and reward 4) Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL): support for the highest standards of university teaching excellenc...

Notes from the LTAC Summit, July 19, 2007 at Microsoft. John Falchi : IMS GLC Overview and Role of LTAC : Formal project charters are developed when they are attempting to address a challenge. We started to develop a charter yesterday around the standards for Distance (Flexible) Learning. They focus on the use and accessibility of work product. Practical application: (Challenge) usable, quality digital content availability; (Outcomes) increase faculty productivity, reduce costs, etc.; Possible solutions: IMS Common Cartridge , IMS Tool Interoperability . Kevin Riley (IMS Senior Strategist for New Activities): Common Cartridge - Benefits: lower integration costs (hooking together tools, content, etc.), greater choice of content, reduces vendor/platform lock-in, greater assessment options, increase flexibility, sharing and reuse. Why will it succeed? 10 years experience in interoperability work, based on the most widely used standards, widely supported even by the platform vendors, eas...

Wednesday at the IMS Global Consortium Meetings, I attended a workshop on Standards for Distance Learning. This is an attempt to develop the definitive list of best practices for e-Learning programs. Starting with definitions. What are we talking about? Are they standards or best practices or something else? Is this targeted at higher ed, K-12, corporate learning, all, or what? Is "distance learning " the correct term? Probably not, but what is? Scope? Level of education Course or program? Distance? Type of technologies What else? What do we call it? Michael Feldstein asks what the outcome will be. Who will use this information and why? Why the IMS guidelines rather than Sloan-C or others? Possibly because the IMS is a more international organization and not just focused on U.S. higher ed which is not true of several of the other organizations working on similar issues. He wants to make things "less odious," which came up many times throughout the day...

I'm in Seattle (Bellevue/Redmond actually) for the IMS Global Learning Consortium Quarterly Meetings and Learning Technology Advisory Council (LTAC) Summit. I think it will be more interesting than the name implies. It's my first time here, both in Seattle and at Microsoft. I've been completely turned around since arriving yesterday afternoon. North seems south and east seems west. Not sure how that happened. Of course it's raining this morning. Not that I expected anything else. First impression? This is another one of those places where it is next to impossible to find a Diet Dew. What is up with that? I went into a RiteAid (like Walgreens, if that helps) and they don't even have shelf space for Diet Dew, not in the cooler and not on the shelves of 12-packs. I'm heading for the Microsoft campus in about five minutes and hope to report out on the activities of the Summit as they progress. But I need to find a Diet Dew.

The D2L User Conference is over so it's time to start concentrating on the next big conference event. As a newly-elected board member, I will be promoting the ITC's e-Learning 2008 conference far and wide to any and all who will listen. ITC ( Instructional Technology Council ) is a great organization of leaders in e-learning and other uses of educational technology. There is a great mix of single stand-alone institutions as well as multi-campus districts; community colleges and technical colleges; four-year institutions and graduate schools; non-profit organizations along with a few for-profit organizations. The common thread that runs throughout is that they are all interested or involved in instructional technology. There are two reasons why I know that this is going to be a fabulous conference. First is that it is being hosted by St. Petersburg College . At the last e-Learning conference in Albuquerque I had the privilege of getting to know some great people from the Web an...