Friendly Web Tools Blog

Even small universities can reach large student audiences through online learning programs. Take, for example, the University of Illinois, which has an exemplary online learning program and wants to reach 10,000 new online students by next year, according to a report this week by NPR.

Nowadays, many colleges require students to take at least one course online, so it’s little wonder that U. of Illinois, which has a relatively small on-campus student population, is looking for a new way to break ahead with this new learning.

The students, many of whom are plugged in 24/7 anyway, aren’t the hiccup to adoption. It’s the teachers. Learning the basics of podcasts, blogs and Second Life is a crash course for many of the educators, who are the same ones who teach in-person classes. The U of I puts teachers through a tech-ed bootcamp before turning them loose on the online sector of their students.

This makes me think the market for e-learning-only educators will continue to shrink as everyone becomes an expert in e-learning.

To that end, here are some handy tools that I share with the educators I work with so they can learn more about teaching online:

Illinois Online Network
http://www.ion.illinois.edu/Resources/tutorials/overview/index.asp

Simple Course Planning Worksheet
http://www.talance.com/planning.html

Weblogs, part II: A Swiss Army website?
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Winter2002/feat.weblogging2.html

Second Life Education Wiki
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

Education Podcast Network
http://www.epnweb.org/

A fascinating report from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation indicates that more educators are finally catching on to online learning. The study indicates that “Online enrollments have been growing substantially faster than overall higher education enrollments.”

To wit:

• Almost 3.5 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2006 term
• The 9.7 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.
• Nearly twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2006.

Heading the curve are 2-year colleges, which have the highest growth rates and account for over one-half of all online enrollments for the last five years. Surely because online learning is extremely valuable for working adults, who can squeeze the lessons into their work schedules.

I’ve been working in e-learning for five years, and battling skepticism has been an uphill struggle. It’s good to hear that more people are loosening up to the notion.

But as an online course software developer, I still see huge roadblocks with many of the online learning platforms. They can be ungainly, unintuitive, quirky and expensive. Especially in early days of adoption, we find making a usable system is paramount.

For more reading, listen to this related report from NPR.