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...