Desire2Blog

This is part 4 of 4. In this 13-minute segment I get the audience reaction to six potential myths about online learning. I briefly share my views/opinions about each of these items after the voting is concluded. e-Learning Mythbusters - Part 4 - The Final Segment 13:21 Part 4 of 4 from my Online Learning Mythbusters keynote at ITC conference Follow this link to view the part 4 natively (and full-screen) in Zentation . The six statements that might be myths include: 13) A VLE is an important component of e-learning. 14) Second Life will be the second coming for teaching and learning. 15) Through web analytics reporting, we are learning a tremendous amount of useful information about the behavior and activities of our online students. 16) Through the use of rubrics and standards for related to the quality of online courses (i.e. Quality Matters), we are sufficiently addressing the questions about the quality of online learning. 17) The cost to the institution and the price (tuition) to t...

This is part 3 of 4. In this 12-minute segment I get the audience reaction to six potential myths about online faculty. I briefly share my views/opinions about each of these items after the voting is concluded. Follow this link to view the part 3 natively (and full-screen) in Zentation . The six statements that might be myths include: 7) Faculty are embracing the concept of shared electronic learning objects 8) Online faculty work harder 9) As faculty become facilitators rather than teachers, they are less and less important in the e-Learning classroom 10) Web accessibility is NOT my job! 11) Entertaining students is NOT my job! 12) Highly interactive online courses are better than courses with little interaction.

This is part 2 of 4. In this 17-minute segment I get the audience reaction to six potential myths about online students. I share my take about each of these items after the voting is concluded on the six questions. Follow this link to view the presentation natively (and full-screen) in Zentation . The six statements that might be myths include: 1) e-Learning students believe that a sense of community is important 2) Online students plagiarize more than traditional students. 3) e-Learning enables anytime, anywhere learning. 4) Digital natives are well prepared for e-Learning. 5) Cheating is rampant among online students. 6) We are winning the bandwidth war in relation to delivering media-intensive courses.

This is the first of four shorter videos made from my keynote presentation at e-Learning 2008, the ITC annual conference held in St. Pete Beach. This first 11 minute segment is just the introduction and the warm-up act to the audience response portion. In the next three video segments (coming soon) you will see the 6 Reality/Myth statements for the a) student category, b) faculty category, and c) general category. You can click on the embedded player below, or go to this link to view the presentation natively at the Zentation site . The remaining three video pieces will be coming shortly.

If all goes well (that should be a small if), I plan to use UStream.tv to provide live video of my keynote address tomorrow evening at the e-Learning 2008 conference here at the Tradewind s in St. Pete Beach. If there is a usable recording of the broadcast I will come back here and post it after the fact. There are two ways that you could view the keynote live: 1) At my wiki page for LSC Online events , or 2) at my Ustream.tv page . In both cases, there is a live chat indow provided along with the video. If you load the page before the broadcast begins you will not see any activity. You may need to refresh the page occasionally if the video doesn't start playing on your screen. Date: Saturday, February 16, 2008 Time 5:30 PM Eastern (4:30 Central) Duration: 1 hour Topic: E-Learning Mythbusters : is conventional wisdom wrong? I'm going to use a student response system (clickers) to ask the audience about 18 (if time allows) different e-learning topics, asking their opinion about...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...