Results of Kenneth Green’s “Campus Computing Project”

An online seminar entitled  Managing Online Education Programs was held on Oct 28, 2009.  The handouts and archived webcast are now available – Here are some of the key points:

• Institutional efforts to expand online education impeded by: faculty resistance- 68%, lack of key resources -58%
• Limit class size on online courses: 77% limit the class size for online courses, the enrollment cap averages 37 students/class or section.
• Tuition – 70% charge higher tuition for online
• Instructional Media used – traditional textbooks, online text, asynchronous text discussions
• Tech training for faculty -53% mandatory
• Quality online vs on campus – tech prep & tech use by faculty better online, most others same for both
• LMS (learning management system) strategy – 88% use the same LMS for online as for on campus courses, Blackboard is the most popular 59%
• Resources receiving high ratings – tech support for faculty & students, lowest – assessment

Albany Law School’s First Online Course

 

Government Ethics taught by Dean Salkin this spring will be Albany Law School first totally online course.  (Judge Stein has previously taught several HYBRID courses where 1/2 of the class interaction was online).

Students who participate in this course will be guided through interactive class lessons over the Internet, working closely with Professor Salkin and exchanging ideas with fellow classmates online. Required interactivity will be asynchronous, meaning that students do not need to access their online course at any particular time during the day. The only class meeting will be an orientation held at Albany Law School to discuss course requirements.  This course will utilize Westlaw’s TWEN, a course management system that law students are already familiar with. At the course site, students will find reading assignments, links to materials pertinent to the course, a syllabus, a statement of the course goals, a number of hypothetical problems, lecture notes, video clips of lectures, audio clips, PowerPoint slides, slides with narration, a threaded discussion board, live chats, and assessments. Each week, within periods of time designated by Professor Salkin, students will be responsible for covering the material assigned, accessing materials as instructed, viewing lecture clips and participating in online discussions. The discussions will take place on the class’s threaded discussion board. They also may take place in live “chat” sessions, during which the professor may meet with students, or a group of students may arrange to meet, online. Participation in “live” chat will be optional, to preserve student flexibility in time and place. Professor Salkin will be able to track student participation and progress through the TWEN site.  

Study input will be sollicited periodically to make sure students needs are met.  This important feedback will also be used  in designing other online courses that  may be offered at Albany Law School.

More on Online Learning

Today’s Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article. I’ve extracted some key statements from the article:

… many colleges still know precious little about how best to organize online programs, whether those programs are profitable, and how they compare to face-to-face instruction in terms of quality. …And while a strong majority of the administrators surveyed said they believed the quality of online education was comparable to classroom learning, about half said that at their colleges the professors are in charge of assessing whether that is true.

The growth of online programs, especially at public institutions, continues to be based largely on the anticipation that such programs are the wave of the future in terms of broadening access and increasing enrollment.

A study released earlier this year by the Sloan commission and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities found that many in higher education — particularly professors — still had doubts about whether Web-based learning measured up to the kind that happens in the classroom.

Bourne said that despite the reservations of some faculty members (most of whom, he suggested, have little experience with online teaching or learning), the question of whether online teaching produces similar learning outcomes to traditional methods has been settled by 15 years’ worth of research saying it does.

But Green contended that institutions’ complacency with respect to scrutinizing online learning outcomes is misguided. “I don’t think the campus conversation about quality is over by any means,” he said. The reason, he said, is that broad-lens studies cannot offer insight on the effectiveness of a specific online program at a specific institution. “The burden still falls on the campus” to find out whether the online equivalents of its degree programs measure up to their face-to-face forbears, Green said. “If you’re teaching the same course and not using common assessment, then you just don’t know. And for too many of these things, we just don’t know.”

Here at Albany Law School, we are in the process of offering our first completely online course.  This course has been offered several ways in the past:

• entirely at Albany Law
• at Albany Law with some students participating at George Washington Law via videoconferencing
• at Albany Law with some students participating in their DC apts via Adobe Connect

More details to come…

 

Harvard Law Class is Online and on TV

Michael J. Sandel’s “Justice,” long one of the most popular classes at Harvard, will now be available for free online and on public television. Complete NYTimes artticle - Morals Class Is Starting; Please Pass the Popcorn

Interesting excerpts from the article:

• when it comes to the Web, Harvard lags behind Duke and Stanford, whose lectures are already available on iTunes U, and M.I.T., which developed its own software years ago to make classes available.
• We looked at what other universities had done and realized that they didn’t have the full classroom experience…Watching a video that looks as if it were made with a convenience store security camera, as most Internet courses do, without the slides, syllabus and other materials available to actual students, dilutes the experience
• Harvard had been searching for a while to find a way to deliver academic content, but finding dynamic yet cost-effective ways to share the classroom experience beyond the university’s walls has been trickier than one might think…Mr. Sandel’s proposal can serve as a working model for the dissemination of many courses.
• Discussion is an essential part of the course, Mr. Sandel said, which is why the Web site, justiceharvard.org, offers beginner and advanced discussion guides.

Distance Learning Update

Today’s article in Inside Higher Ed entitled: Going the Distance reports:

The American Federation of Teachers report on guidelines for good practice in distance education acknowledges that it takes “anywhere from 66 to 500 percent longer” to prepare an online course than a face-to-face one, and “additional compensation should be provided to faculty to meet the extensive time commitments of distance education.”

Not surprising information.  Using technology taken more preparation time than not using technology.  Online learning content takes even more time.

Then again, anything worth doing usually takes time.

Westlaw’s TWEN or Lexis’ Blackboard?

or as I heard it described at 1L Orientation:

 or ?

Both are online course management systems that can be used for electronic copies of syllabi, ppt slides and class materials so that paper is not wasted. Both would allow for interactive classes being held outside of class time (in case of school closure).

Differences:

TWEN	BLACKBOARD
NA	Safe assign plagiarism software
NA	Sync with Facebook & iPhone
NA	blogs
NA	glossary
NA	journal
Password-protect pages	NA
Online chat	class chat(that doesn’t  seem to work here)
sign up sheets	appointment scheduler
forum	discussion
Master icalendar	icalendar
easy course creation wizard	use control panel, not as user friendly

 Only one professor here is using Lexis’ Blackboard and claimed that it took 30 hours to set up.  All others are using TWEN and are not finding it too challenging.

Will Distance Learning be an option for law schools in the future?

Above the Law blog  had a great post on the status of distance education for law schools.  Currently the ABA does not accredit online only law schools but will be re-visiting this topic (Standard 306) in the fall of 2010.

Rethinking Higher Education had an article on distance education and the moot court competition. 

Ross Mitchell graduated from the nation’s first online-only law school four years ago and in November won the right to take the Massachusetts bar exam.

So things may be changing….

Skype bridges the distance

Last week an adjunct professor approached me about a presenter for his evening class who was in New Hampshire and could not be part of his panel.  This presenter would be at home and did not have access to videoconferencing equipment.  I suggested that he may want to try SKYPE.

I created a skype account (albany.law.school) for us and he downloaded the software onto his laptop, used his cell phone for Internet access and we tested it. 

I hooked up a microphone to the laptop in class, connected speakers and projected it onto a large screen and for over 2 hours, this presenter from New Hampshire was LIVE!!  It worked like a charm and cost nothing!!  Everyone in the room was impressed.

Update on Government Ethics at a Distance

http://albanylaw.acrobat.com/bierman
URL for the Feb 12, 2009 recording: https://admin.na3.acrobat.com/_a795806695/p96506281/

Five weeks done – 10 to go!

As mentioned in a previous post, this semester, we have 6 students interning Washington DC who need to take a Government Ethics class here at Albany Law School.  Last year, we used our videoconferencing codec and coordinated with similiar equipment at George Washington Law School.   This year, this option was not available to us.

We decided to have the students in DC use webcams in their apartments and we would use Adobe Connect here to have them virtually attend class.

Each week, we faced challenges but it seems to be working. 

The positives:

• It is easy to set up and easy to adapt to a professor’s style.
• It is web-based so no software is necessary.
• Voice over IP works well.
• We can see the DC students on their webcam and can project them on the screen
• Students in DC can see the professor and hear the students in Albany as well as the professor.
• The class can easily be recorded and the URL posted.
• DC students text their answers or questions which can be seen on the screen & on the professor’s laptop.

The negatives:

• DC students can only see the professor and only if he/she stays in front of the camera
• The audio for the DC students (due to bandwidth issues) only works sporadically so they prefer to text.
• The professor does not share any digital content such as pdfs, websites, ppt slides, use the whiteboard or polling functionality so much of the Adobe Connect product is wasted.
• We are always worried about bandwidth issues.

All in all, Adobe Connect offers a promising solution  for sharing digital content and audio/video transmissions of lectures for those students who cannot attend classes in Albany and have access to the Internet.

 

Is the LCMS Still Relevant? (inspired by ELearning Newsletter)

Changing the notion of learning content, access and management

One of the most interesting aspects of …technology has been the role of the learning content management system (LCMS). The LCMS was originally envisioned as a flexible platform to enable learning content to be easily created, stored and managed, customized for each learner, and published and consumed in multiple learning formats.

Over the last eight years, the industry has changed dramatically. Rapid e-learning tools were developed and many of these companies developed content management systems, as well. Now, other technologies (e.g., software as a service, mobile, learning portals, search and collaboration, and social networking tools) are changing the notion of what learning content is and how it is accessed and managed.

Today, content takes many forms, is sometimes self-published, and almost always needs to be accessed quickly.

Consequently, the role of the LCMS must evolve. ..customers will realize more value from a system that better supports less structured and more collaborative forms of knowledge sharing. ..

The notion of learning content is changing. We believe that the traditional LCMS will continue to play a niche role for some time. However, the market’s sophisticated content needs are fast outpacing these systems.

This article hits home as we look at the same issues and compare the technology options: Westlaw’s TWEN (our LCMS), our intranet, a portal, a blog, our website, Facebook, Classcaster, Westlaw’s Exchange (document sharing option), Concourse (syllabus management tool,  iTunesU, AdobeConnect, Google, etc.