eLearning Roadtrip

My World Series Bet with Darcy Hardy (Go Giants!)

The World Series gets started in San Francisco this evening. As a Bay area resident, I am showing my Giants pride by wearing my black and orange Buster Posey jersey today. 

Turns out that the Giants are playing against the Texas Rangers. I have many dear friends who live in Texas. Dear Friends. I am so sorry. For the next several days, we are on opposite sides of the river. 

Bring it. Giants.

My very dear friend, Dr. Darcy Harcy, University of Texas San Antonio (and about-to-be announced appointee to a very important position in an unnamed city on the East Coast) happens to be a Rangers fan. I suppose it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. So you know there has to be a bet.

I expect that she and Dr. Rob Robinson, also of UTSA, and I will exchange a toast with an adult beverage when we see each other at the upcoming WCET Annual Meeting in LaJolla in a couple of weeks. And so it would be easy to make the bet that the loser needs to buy a round of adult beverages.

Call me a sap - I want to turn this into something a little more meaningful than a mojito or a Mexican martini. Not that there's anything wrong with either one of them, of course.

How a challenge for the benefit of the winner's favorite educational technology cooperative?

The winner gets to choose, either to star in OR have the loser star in, a webcast on a topic of the winner's choice that will help further the mission of said favorite higher educational technology cooperative. Loser must promote said webcast using the word "hieroglyphics", and must appear in said webcast (via photo, slide webcam or video) wearing hat / headgear of the winner's choice. 

Perhaps there should be a preview of said webcast while we are in LaJolla?

Go, Giants.

 

 

Shameless Plug for and Heartfelt Thanks to WCET

As I have been immersing myself in the issues, politics and nuances of post-secondary educational online learning this past year, I have come to appreciate the role that a cooperative community of interest can play. Can I just say, It's quite nice having a posse that I can count on to watch my back, to help keep programs on point, and to keep an eye on the horizon so I'm not taken by surprise by some hot unexpected blip on the innovation screen.

So I want to take a moment to give the crew from WCET a shout out, and to thank them for (1) contributing to institutional quality through their focus on implementation (2) focusing on excellent execution of services that online students AND faculty need to succeed; and (3) sharing their knowledge, experience and wisdom with the other members of the Cooperative.

I'm not just talking about the WCET staff, but of course we wouldn't even be having this conversation if it weren't for the rock star staff.

I am also talking about my Executive Council - leaders actively engaged in the work of enabling excellence in post-secondary education in their executive roles in universities and companies.

I am talking about my Steering Committee - dedicated individuals who run for office to represent the interests of their fellow Cooperative members.

I am talking about our Common Interest Group members, busy  people who actively share successes and places for improvement, documenting the collective knowledge in resources available to all individuals who work at our member institutions and companies.

I am talking about our Annual Meeting Program Committee, who have put together a great agenda for our face-to-face time together in LaJolla, CA, November 10-13.

I am talking about all those people who take the time to send me notes, feedback, suggestions, advice.

If you are from a company or institution that cares deeply about making a difference in how learning and learners can be better served by learning technologies, we may be just the ticket. Check us out at wcet.wiche edu. Come join us at our annual meeting. Come register for a webcast.

We're heeee-r-e.

Why For Profit Universities Matter to Online Learning

IMHO, Online learning is one of the best things to happen to higher education in a long time. Also - and this is my provocative poke for the day - IMHO for-profit universities may be one of the best thing to happen to online learning.  Both matter, because both have been huge catalysts for change in US post-secondary education.  

Online education is coming under some interesting fire right now, under the auspices of quality oversight. And as questions are raised on the quality/relevancy/appropriateness of online learning (which, in 2010, is a question that I really don’t quite understand...) I’ve also observed a tendency for critics to equate online learning with for-profit education.

For-profit higher education – that is, colleges and universities run as businesses, funded by investors who buy shares of stock and use investments and tuition and student fees to fund operations and programs profitably enough to return financial dividends – is under full-blown attack.

I am uncomfortable with the hostility aimed at colleagues in for-profit institutions. In the same way that I am uncomfortable when someone goes after an online program in ANY environment, just because it’s online. I’m all for eQuality. I’m all for fairness, too. And I'm all for giving adult learners choices. I want anyone interested in pursuing the dream of a college degree to have the opportunity to pursue – and achieve – that dream.

I’m not suggesting that for-profits will ever replace Harvard and Stanford, OR Sonoma State or your local community college, for that matter. And I am certainly not suggesting that they should. But I AM suggesting that they are obviously filling a demand that has not been met by traditional institutions. And we all need to pay attention to that.

Now, there are some darn good reasons for some of the frothing and flaming that is going on. Diploma mills are a bad thing.  Buying a credential with no requirement of demonstrating skills or competence is cheesy. Tricking prospective students into borrowing more money than they can afford to pay back is as evil as tricking people into buying mortgage instruments with rates that blow payments into the stratosphere as they mature.

But tarring every single for profit institution with the same brush, categorizing all such institutions as being evil and predatory is just wrong. It obfuscates the very important conversation that needs to take place around the critical need we have in this country to provide adult learners with choices for pursuing the dream of a college education. 

Not all of us will find our educational aspirations met on an R1 residential campus. Some of us work full time and can’t get to campus for a 50 minute class, three times a week. Others of us live hundreds of miles from a campus, any campus. Some of us find that getting to class gets trumped by rush-hour traffic. Some of us are serving our country oversees. Some of us try to take classes at our local community colleges but can’t get the required courses we need because there is simply no room and all the classes are over-subscribed.

And so for some of us, the online options from publicly traded educational enterprises are some of the best options we’ve got. 

I'm getting a little tired at the ad hominem logic used to lump anything online with anything for-profit, and that any school run as a for-profit enterprise is a bad thing.

I would hope, instead, that those of us who care about online learning quality – eQuality -  will focus on working on rubrics that matter, programs that build capacity, technology that open the walls of the campus, standards and benchmarks that promote student success and faculty engagement.

WCET sponsored and I hosted a webcast with Dr. Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project today, October 5^th. Casey is also the voice behind Digital Tweed, a column in Inside Higher Education. The topic of our webcast was Data-Driven Decision-Making, D3 – It’s So Trendy. (I’ll post the url to the webcast as soon as it’s posted.)

Casey and I talked about the role that data have in helping people get their arms about what is meant by quality in digitally enabled learning settings. We talked about how the higher education community’s heightened awareness about the pervasiveness of data collection from our consumer lives. How many of you use the Like button on Facebook? Did you know you were leaving a datum behind? The more we know about social media, web statistics and web analytic services, the harder it to ignore that the numbers are telling us some very important things.

I would suggest that, given the fires of criticism leveled against the for-profit sector these days that they are not sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. I would suggest that they are learning from other web companies that use their data to figure out what their constituencies are looking for, and acting on that information in ways that generate demonstratable improvements and positive results.  You can be fairly certain that strategies and steps being taken to actively build more eQuality into these systems and programs are all actively informed by data.  

Our online learning systems have given us a way to collect more information about the teaching and learning process than has ever been available. Our for-profit brethren are showing all of us that paying attention to our bottom lines and our consumer demands might not be such a bad idea.  And I'm betting that they are going to have the data to prove it.

Data change everything. We’re all learning the new lessons that it’s what we do with that data that counts.

So perhaps we all owe our colleagues on the for-profit side a tip of the hat for drawing attention to these very important developments that can't help but influence the future of online learning.

 

Welcome to the New WCET

On behalf of the entire team at WCET, I’m very pleased to share two big announcements.   

As of August 2, WCET became the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE)'s Cooperative for Educational Technologies.  We continue to be known as WCET, but now our acronym better reflects who we are, and what we do: We are a community of practice consisting of North American higher educational institutions, learning technology vendors, coordinating agencies and foundations that share a passion for learning technologies excellence in the service of more effective teaching and learning. 

We know that in these changing times, when money is tight and expectations unrealistic, that like-minded thinkers and doers are better served when we work together toward common shared goals. So we have sharpened our focus toward accelerating the adoption of learning technologies innovations in practice, and are raising the bar to reset expectations for excellent digital experiences that engage and inspire. We now actively feature WICHE’s well-established expertise in higher education policy and analysis circles to make sure our stakeholders are positioned for success at each point along the practice-to-policy learning technologies value chain. 

In honor of our new name change, we are quite pleased to launch our new WCET website: wcet.wiche.edu.   Please bookmark the NEW url so you can find us when you need us!

The updated site design is only part of what’s new. We’ve used this site launch to highlight WCET’s core programs and services that help our members Connect, Learn, and Advance higher education learning technology excellence. 

In the next few weeks you will be hearing a lot more about our upcoming annual membership meeting that will be held in LaJolla, Ca November 10-13. We will be making some noise with a new membership campaign and sponsor/partner programs that drive real results for our academic and corporate members alike. We’ll be looking for ways to help you engage with us as we take on the challenge of accelerating adoption of innovations that improve the quality and experience of learning online.

But for now we wanted to tell you our news, invite you to explore the new site, and hope you will take a look at what we are doing to help raise the bar on online learning excellence.

And now, it’s Distance Teaching and Learning 2010 (#DTL_2010) Time!! I'm off to Madison. See you at the Monona Terrace. 

Next Week in Madison for #DTL_2010

If you are an elearning/ distance learning / online learning practitioner you should plan to join your peers and peeps at the 26th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, WI August 4-6, 2010 at the Monona Terrace Conference Center. 

The conference has been addressing challenges facing practitioners and administrators of distance learning programs since 1984. Back in the day, a crew of learning activists from the University of Wisconsin and others were convinced that distributed education experiences were the answers for responding to the growing demand for adult education programs. They created a conference that brought together other like-minded non-traditional educators, researchers and administrators, all looking for alternatives to the traditional residential campus experience. After more than two decades, the conference has become a distance learning tradition.

Drs. Michael Allen, Jane Bozarth and Etienne Wenger are featured keynote presenters at this year's event. There are lots and lots of concurrent sessions – poster sessions – demo session – deep dives and short intensive blasts of information. Something for every learning preference and attention span.

I’m a long-time fan of the DTL conference. No attempt at objectivity here – for me the DTL conference has been a part of my summer for so long I can’t imagine not being there, except under extreme conditions.  I’ve keynoted, been a part of forums and panels and concurrent sessions, been an exhibitor and a sponsor. I am a total fan of the Conference team. I’m a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate 2X, so I love to get back to Madison in August when the weather is magnificent.

WCET is pleased to be a part of this year’s conference exhibition – my colleague, Cali Morrison, will be on site to tell you about Transparency by Design, and College Choices for Adults an innovative “consumer education” project funded by the Lumina Foundation and managed in partnership with the Presidents’ Forum.

I’ll be wandering around, as well, so if you want to grab a coffee and talk about whatever is on your mind, ping me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/edwsonoma.

For more information about DTL 2010 click here

Hope to see you in "Mad Town"!

Yes, I DO have a Point of View

In the few moments since I posted my rant about a recently posted article by a leading higher education newspaper publisher, I received a note from a colleague suggesting that perhaps it might not be such a good idea to poke at a major publisher in my particular vertical market space. Especially when on the verge of rolling out the first of the news things that my organization, WCET, will be launching over the next few months. (Since we're not quite launched yet I am not going to include the links here....if you are really curious you can find us on "the Google". PS - We are not the TV station in Ohio.)

Here's a little preview of what's coming up for us: The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies is the leading higher education cooperative focused on accelerating adoption of innovation and learning technology excellence. We've been a community of practice since before community of practices were cool. In the past six months we've been preparing an  agenda for our institutional, corporate, foundation and SHEEO members that focuses on support and services needed in a time where things are changing like crazy and money is tight. We are a collective helping each other do our jobs better than we could ever do alone.

My POV about the Chronicle article and Flash is mine. Has nothing to do with WCET. 

Since WCET is a like-minded collection of fair-minded people, doing their collective best to serve the needs of learning technologies communities, I don't expect that anyone is going to get too cranky that I expressed an opinion on a subject about which I know a thing or two. 

WCET Stands up for eQuality in Online Learning

You may remember that my June 28th post reported on some of the fire and brimstone being directed against the education industry sector in the business of running colleges and universities. Generally speaking, these institutions are aimed at adult students, generally offer their courses and programs where significant components can be completed online, and are typically aimed at providing students with flexible means of completing academic courses, certifications and degrees. They are often generally lumped into the category known as "for-profits".

In recent weeks there have been a lot of shots taken at the for-profit education industry: Frontline "exposed" College Inc. Investors have howled that for profit education is the next sub-prime crisis. Congress has held hearings. 

Frankly, I have been a little concerned about the vitriol being aimed at my for-profit institutional brethren in recent weeks. Lots of broad brush strokes being used to swipe. So I was particularly interested in these remarks from Russ Poulin, my WCET colleague,  that come from a posting he distributed to our members this afternoon.  (Note: yes, I have done some editing. For space, not for substance):

"We ALL need to be paying attention.

 

"If you have not heard about it, there are several links below to coverage of the U.S. Senate’s hearing last week regarding for-profit institutions. I could not make it to DC for the hearing, but I followed the tweets and watched most of the testimony online. Committee Chair Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa raised concerns about the growth in for-profit institutions and some of their practices. 

 

"My concern is that there are times when those testifying painted with a broad brush.  Some for-profits have engaged in questionable activity, but not all.  Worse yet, there are times where all online education is lumped in as having the same dubious practices.

 

"I agree that regulation to stop the ‘bad actors’ needs to be considered at this point.  All of us in the WCET family are for integrity and stopping fraud.  What we do not want are regulations that punish the innocent more than the guilty.

Thank you Russ. You're right. WCET will stay on top of this.

Roadtrip Service Announcement - 26TH Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning

Registration is now open for the 26th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning - August 4 - 6, 2010 in Madison, WIsconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, my alma mater.

This year’s conference provides over 20 workshops and events on Wednesday, August 4th, many focused on higher education issues, followed by over 130 concurrent sessions and special events on Thursday and Friday, August 5th & 6th. You may access a PDF of this year’s Conference Program, sign up for future mailings, follow on Facebook and Twitter, and register for the conference from the Web site.

I personally like that it takes place in Madison Wisconsin. As an alum of the real UW,X2, I always like a reason to go back and visit. I also love Madison in the summer, so August 4 - 6 is a great time to be there. (bratwurst and beer on the Terrace overlooking Lake Monona...priceless!)

But the main reason I like to go is that I always get such a good look at what is happening in the various facets of academic distance learning, which as most people who follow higher education know is going through an explosion of mainstream adoption. Even the University of California has discovered the online university!! It's different that what happens at a policy-and-practice event like the one hosted by WCET (this year - LaJolla, CA, November 2010)  More focused on things that matter for distance learning than EDUCAUSE. More pragmatic than Sloan's research or emerging tech conferences.

Several of my colleagues from WCET will be there to tell people about Transparency by Design, a project of the Presidents' Forum funded by the Lumina Foundation, to create  a data driven, consumer oriented website comparing post-secondary universities from the for-profit sector, not-for-profit sector and public sector for prospective students looking to evaluate and compare online learning institutions.

If you DO plan to go to the conference, don't wait too long to get registered and get your hotel room booked if you want to overlook the lake.

"Roadtrip Service Announcement" - Changes in Federal Distance Ed Policy: How You Can Respond

Every so often we offer "Roadtrip service announcements" about events and activities that align with the projects that we are working on.  I especially like to highlight events where colleagues are featured.

Magna Publications will be sponsoring a webinar on “Changes in Federal Distance Ed Policy: How You Can Respond,”  on April 15th. The program will cover the latest developments in Washington regarding distance education, including: student authentication, financial aid fraud, diploma mill legislation, accrediting agencies, and funding for the American Graduation Initiative.  You will also receive recommendations on actions your college should take and resources for staying informed as these issues evolve.   

Russ Poulin from WCET will co-present with Fred Lokken (Truckee Meadows Community College and the Instructional Technology Council) on the April 15 webcast. WCET members receive a 10% discount on their webinar registration.

Contact Magna Publications <http://www.magnapubs.com/wcet/100415.html?s=wcet&p=wcet>  directly for more information and to register.Publish

Do You Care about Accelerating the Adoption of Learning Technology Innovation??

IF you care about accelerating the adoption of learning technology innovation, and IF you have a solution you would like to share with a community of post-secondary education practitioners that cares about solutions as much as you do, THEN I would like you to join us in La Jolla CA, Nov 10-13 at the 22nd Annual Meeting of WCET.

Even better than that - I'd like to invite you to submit a proposal to share your ideas and results with higher educational academic technology decision-makers who are actively seeking better ways to meet the informational, instructional, educational demands of today's adult learners

You can find the call for proposals here.

Conference strands include (1) Innovative pplications of Technology (2) Teaching and Learning Success, (3) Student Success (4) Institutional Success and (5) Beyond the Institution.

You don't need to be an educator to have a solution to share, but it helps if you have some direct experience with education. Your audience are educators and the vendors that serve them. We are keenly interested in innovation. But not in the 5 year plan, "bleeding edge" kind of way. There are other associations that are far better at that than we are.

The place(s) where WCET members excel is in implementing technology innovations into solutions that improve access to learning that directly contribute to student success. We care about what we can do NOW,and anticipating what we will have to deal with next quarter, next semester, next fiscal year.  We cares deeply about academic excellence and student success in technology-enabled (distributed, distance, and elearning) education.

(I know all associations say they are the most inclusive place on the planet. Having done my time in many a professional association, I testify that WCET is one place where my ability to engage in meaningful ways wasn't compromised by my job title. Didn't matter if I was faculty or administration, worked at a public institution or for-profit college, an institutional representative or a member of the corporate caucus)

I came in as ED of this fine group in November 2009. We are in the midst of rolling out our new agenda,  focused on accelerating the adoption of learning technology innovation in support of educational excellence.

We're looking for sessions built on real evidence that provide other like-minded educational activists with empirically validated tips, tricks and ideas and case studies.

Proposals are due Tuesday March 16th.

Let me know if you have questions about WCET, the conference and how to get involved.