Desire2Blog

In the previous post I wrote about the second round of discussions by the rulemaking committee that took place this week at the Department of Education in Washington D.C. This is the group that will decide how the distance learning student authentication issue in the Higher Education Opportunities Act will play out. Thanks to Chris M, the Executive Director of the ITC, I can provide you with a sense of how those conversations have gone so far. The third and final meeting for this group will occur on May 18-20, at which time we expect to have clear language about how accrediting bodies should apply the law as handed down for the HEOA. Based on the conversations late yesterday afternoon, this is how we expect (best guess?) the language will be handled: (expected changes to the proposed language in red) 602.17 Application of standards in reaching an accreditation decision. (g) Requires institutions that offer distance education or correspondence education to have processes in place ...

The second round of discussions by the rulemaking committee occurs at the Department of Education in Washington D.C. on Tuesday through Thursday, April 21 - 23. It is this group that will decide whether the final resolution of the distance student authentication issue goes beyond the clarifying language attached to the Higher Education Opportunity Act . You can read the draft language ( PDF submitted by the Department of Education ) for the second round of discussions by Team III - Accreditation. Of primary importance to distance educators is Issue #1: Definitions of correspondence and distance education and Issue #10: Authentication of distance ed and correspondence ed students. Issue #1: The lesser of the two issues, this one is an attempt to determine definitions for correspondence courses and distance education. The draft language defines various features of correspondence courses and then states that "Correspondence education may not be considered distance education." (...

... but of course, we already knew that. Now, the USPTO seems to have figured it out as well. Today they released their Action Closing Prosecution (nonfinal) . decision ( announced at D2L Patent blog ) Rather than write a long blog post, I'll share my initial thoughts (from Twitter) as I first heard about this and as I was reading the USPTO report (read from bottom up). Basically, the USPTO agrees that prior art renders the Blackboard patent baseless. However, we're still not done with this mess. What next? More Blackboard shenanigans, without any doubt.

Just when I was ready to recommend ScreenToaster (a couple of months ago) as a slick browser-based (no download) way to make screencasts, I ran into a problem. Today I tried the new kid on the block, ScreenCastle . The assignment that I was trying to illustrate with ScreenToaster was the possibility of having a student make a screen recording of how they created a chart using Microsoft Excel. I remember teaching those classes years ago where the students had to turn in a paper copy of their completed chart. Seems to me that this is the same question that is raised all the time about distance learning - "how do I know that Billy Bob is really the person who made that great chart and that somebody else didn't do it for him and now he's just turning in the printout?" or some other long run-on question like that. By having the students make a screencast of their work they would be able to talk through the steps that they completed. However, to avoid technical problems I r...