Search Results matching tag 'distance learning'

From the Plagiarism Department

WheelCipher — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Being on vacation does not mean I am not keeping up with the trends in distance education. In fact, I found an article that made me quite angry. “Case of the purloined term paper” from USA Today touches on something that can be a black mark on distance education. People who buy term papers from the Internet are cheaters. End of story. These papers are offered by an underground operation that seeks to make money at the expense of others. If you read further into the article, you will read one example where an on-line student from University of Phoenix found her paper available for sale and she did not even know how it was ‘leaked’ to these people.

I am not sure what to make of the people who offer the papers for sale. Other than finding one with YOUR paper for sale, I am not sure what, if any legal action might be taken. It may be legal, but it is certainly unscrupulous. In my opinion, students who buy papers from these unprincipled vendors are doing two things: Cheating themselves out of an education and the appreciation hard work and dedication will bring. Also, they are essentially supporting these people by purchasing the product. I think if people took responsibility for their own work and had the integrity that is expected by every institution, people who sell term papers would go out of business.

I don’t like to preach. You are free to do what you want. But believe me when I say cutting corners because you are too lazy to do the right thing is a bad deal. You are cheating yourself. If you didn’t really want an education, why are you spending all the money? Take some time to reflect on this. We have heard the old saying, “nothing is free”. Academic work is no exception. By purchasing and submitting someone else’s work, you are cheating yourself.

Is Harvard Extension School Really Harvard?

SteveFoerster — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:35:00 GMT

“I won't say there aren't any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know.” — Derek Bok, President Emeritus of Harvard University

For many years I've seen people mention the Harvard Extension School as a possible way for eLearners and others to earn a Harvard degree at a reasonable price. HES is one of thirteen schools that make up Harvard University, along with Harvard College (the campus-based school for undergraduates), Harvard Law, Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical, and others. HES offers evening and online courses that apply to certificate programs, as well as Associate's, Bachelor's, and Master's degree programs.

The primary difference between HES and Harvard University's other twelve schools is that anyone who meets basic eligibility criteria is welcome to enroll in HES courses, and if one does well enough in those courses, to apply them to a degree. Unfortunately for eLearners, degree programs from HES require at least one semester in residence taking courses on campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Still, for those who live in the Boston area, or who might conceivably live there for a few months, it's an enticing possibility.

Now, over on the forum, the subject of HES has come up again. This time, though, someone has referred to an opinion piece by an IT consultant named Don Burleson on HES and its relationship to Harvard University. Now, I've seen some whoppers in my time, but I have to say that this piece ranks as one of the most poorly-informed screeds I've ever read about higher education. Basically, Mr. Burleson believes that people who earn degrees from HES have not only not earned degrees from the "real" Harvard, but are liars and frauds for saying that they have!

As pretentious as this shows this fellow to be, before we summarily dismiss him as a crank, why not get it from the horse's mouth and see what Harvard University itself has to say? We can start with the About Us page on the HES site, which offers this:

As Harvard University's primary resource for continuing education for a century, Harvard Extension School offers an open and comprehensive academic curriculum, with courses and programs to meet the interests and needs of a diverse public. Explore a subject in depth. Gain advanced training for a career change. Earn specialized field credentials. Whether you take a course or work toward a degree, we have options for you.¹

That's clear and concise, but since that's merely on the HES part of Harvard University's web site, maybe it's just part of the vast conspiracy of fraud that has Mr. Burleson so upset. Fortunately, for those who want more, there was also a lengthy article just three weeks ago in the Harvard Gazette celebrating the centennial of HES. Since the Gazette is an official university publication, it's undeniable that HES is not only part of Harvard University, but an integral part of which they have long been very proud indeed.

The underlying issue here is that some people, for whatever reason, just can't accept the idea that a program that is open access could possible also be rigorous. And that's nonsense. It is the coursework, assignments, and examinations that determine whether a course or program is rigorous. In no way does it diminish that rigor just because a school's policy is to let anyone who want to find out if they can handle that course or program give it the old college try.

So basically, when it comes to whether a degree from Harvard Extension School is really one from the "real" Harvard, we have two choices. Either we can believe an elitist curmudgeon who, as it turns out, never even went to Harvard, or we can believe Harvard University itself. I don't know about you, but that's the easiest thing I've had to decide all day.

Next up, bloggers and freedom of the press.

Photo of John Harvard statue courtesy of Tim Sackton

Non- Traditional Student

cjhudd55 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:02:19 GMT

Hello my name is Carrie and i am 55yrs. old i have an Associate Degree and i am seeking futher education into my Bachelors Degree.

I will be majoring in Psychology/ Substance Abuse Counseling is the concentration point for my academic and career goal.

I do not have the Financial Aid i need to pursue a full academic education, however, i will not give up on trying to win a Scholarship to an online University some day.

Distance Learning, War, and I

aliadn — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:29:20 GMT

Hello,

I am currently serving active duty in the US Army and am interested in doing some distance learning to facilitate the transition back to college when I get out. Basically I just want to take a few general studies courses like Math, English, History, etc... to knock out some of the boring classes I will have to do at some point or another to get any degree. I cant attend a normal university due to my constant training and deployments to the Middle East, and am shopping around for an online learning program that will most likely transfer its credits to an average state university. Ive done about a day of research so far and I was thinking about attending classes at University of Phoenix. I have come across some troubling reviews and posts about said university, and am reconsidering my options.

My questions are, should I stay with UoP since I don't plan on getting an all-out degree with them? Since I am in the military, money for classes is not an issue as they all get paid for while I am in. Would credits earned in UoP most likely be transferable to an average state university given that it is a regionally accredited university? If UoP is not the one I want, what university should I go with? Keep in mind, however, I have grown a lot in the service and unfortunately my terrible GPA from back in high school (<2.5) will not show that to any ivy league colleges, so it is unlikely that I would be accepted into their ranks.

A lot of this is new to me, so bear with me. Thank you for your time.

Dan

Fan Mail From David Regarding Walden

WheelCipher — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:50:00 GMT

My name is David. I enjoyed reading your comparison between Walden and Capella and I have found myself in the same dilemma. I have also begun the move towards the DBA program at Walden. Would you have some time to tell me how your experience has been to date? Have you found Walden to be a good decision? Quite frankly, my biggest fear has been that I did not want to end up with a “joke” degree. I am not sure if I will ever want to teach, but I would like to know that the degree will be taken seriously in the business world. Have you have any insight to this yet?

I have since left Walden and enrolled in a Masters degree at Gonzaga University. For a couple of years, I thought that a doctorate was the next logical step for me. I had every intention of just moving forward without stopping or slowing down. During the middle of the second class, I discovered that was not what I wanted. The material was so incredibly dry and impersonal. On top of that, I did not see a lot of participation from some of the other students in the class. Maybe it was just me. I am not sure.

There was no personality to the class. Everything seemed robotic and people appeared to be afraid to loosen up and think outside the box. Nearly every post made in the message forums was chocked full of scholarly references and very little creative thought. This is completely contrary to what I am used to. I am sure this is probably how the curriculum was designed and the students were really trying hard. But that is not the environment for me.

As far as it being a “joke” degree, I don’t feel that way. You will get out of it what you put into it and nobody can take that from you. As far as being taken seriously, it all depends. I would suspect that some employers will and some will not. It’s hard to tell. I have yet to run into an employer that looks down on distance learning. And the more distance learning grows and the more people understand, the better off we will be.

Learning Foreign Languages By Distance?

SteveFoerster — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:48:00 GMT

“Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it” — Christopher Morley

I've often thought that some subjects are more conducive than others to learning online or otherwise at a distance. I've said in the past that many people might prefer to learn subjects like math, accounting, economics, and even some aspects of computer science in a classroom, but that humanities, social sciences, literature, and the like are at least as easy to do online and sometimes easier.

My reasoning is that those subjects I think of as difficult to do by distance are ones where students are likely to ask a series of questions in a row to try to zero in on understanding of the material. Since most online and distance learning takes place asynchronously, meaning that the participants are not all online at the same time, a series of exchanges that might take five minutes in a classroom might take five days online. It's the other side of the coin to the convenience of logging on whenever it's convenient.

That asynchronous attribute makes another set of subjects an interesting choice to study online: foreign languages. In an opinion piece at Inside Higher Ed today, Dan Edelstein, an assistant professor of French at Stanford University, laments the decline of foreign language instruction at universities generally, and refers to a recent initiative by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to move their introductory Spanish courses online as a sign of this decline.

Now, we eLearners know that there are many faculty members who don't like much of anything about online study, and that's understandable, people natually fear new things that conflict with the old ways they've been using for so long. So are the misgivings about foreign language study by distance legitimate? I think to an extent that they are. Many of the naysayers make a good point, that an important part of learning a foreign language is the ability to be immersed among others who are also speaking it. That's tough to do with a text-based model of online course that consists mostly of readings, discussion boards, and written examinations.

But that doesn't mean that foreign languages can't be studied at all without physical proximity. I would suggest to schools that are considering teaching them online to make better use of multimedia so that students get a real sense of how the language is supposed to sound, and to require students to participate in live audio online chats among one another and with their instructors using headsets. It's not that difficult to add these additional elements to online courses, especially since in most cases a headset can be purchased for less than twenty dollars and is as easy to use as simply plugging it into one's computer.

So for written languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and the like, I think there's no reason for them not to be studied online, even asynchronously. And I'll even maintain cautious optimism that modern conversational languages can be learned effectively online, so long as instructional designers and faculty members break out some of the newer tools in the eLearning toolbox.

Next up, I move a little closer to switching from ATSU to Cape Peninsula.

Image courtesy of Slugger O'Toole

We're Not Cheaters After All

SteveFoerster — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:26:00 GMT

“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.” — John D. MacDonald

I don't know about you, but as a distance learning student I get really tired of the objection raised by those in classroom based higher education that one of the problems with online learning is that it's too easy to cheat. The questions are always, "How does anyone know it's you doing the work, writing those papers, taking those tests?" I always wonder how they really know that the students who come to class are who they say they are. When was the last time you heard of someone getting carded in a classroom setting to prove who they are?

The latest re-authorization of the Higher Education Act even had a provision where schools that participate in federal financial aid programs must have some sort of system to positively identify the students who are taking part in a distance learning course. Fortunately at the last second cooler heads prevailed and the requirement was watered down to near nonexistence by saying that if students had to log in to a learning management system, like Blackboard or Moodle, that fulfilled the requirement.

That's why the latest edition of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is so timely. They have an important article by Donna Stuber-McEwen, Phillip Wiseley, and Susan Hoggatt called Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom. These researchers found that not only do distance learning students not cheat any more often than classroom based students, they actually cheat less often! Their explanation was that distance learning students tend to be older, more mature, and better able to recognize that a cheater's primary victim is himself or herself.

This makes perfect sense to me. Most of us aren't learning online because we want to find ourselves or decide what we want to be when we grow up or because that's what Mom and Dad expect. We're doing it because we want to get somewhere better in life, we have goals that we want to reach, and we know that with all the money we're paying to learn all this stuff, we want to get as much out of it as possible!

So these researchers have my thanks for looking into this critical issue, and providing distance learning advocates with even more ammunition against those dinosaurs who still don't get why learning online can work so well. It's always nice when research confirms what those of us in the thick of things already knew!

Next up, is your student loan made in China?

Image courtesy of Anna Duncan

Open University Opening to Americans?

SteveFoerster — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:41:00 GMT

“The English never draw a line without blurring it.” — Winston Churchill

One of the pioneers of distance learning — one of our forefathers, if you will — is the Open University in the UK. Founded forty years ago, it has grown over the years into being one of the success stories of distance learning, now with nearly 170,000 students. They've gone from being considered a questionable experiment to being one of the best respected universities in Britain.

Despite this, most Americans have never heard of it, because they limited their enrollment to those in the UK, and then to those elsewhere in Europe. So when my friend Gavin Baker asked me about one of their Master's degree programs, I responded that sure it was probably a great program, but alas, as an American he wouldn't be able to enroll in it.

Ah, but it seems that in this case what I know wasn't so. The program in question is a Master's degree in Society and Science and it requires three courses, one that is a project and two others from a list of three. Gavin pointed out that the site has a list of acceptable countries for applicants, and that the U.S. is on it. And he's right, the list of courses available to Americans includes all four of the ones that pertain to this degree, and many more besides. Moreover, at three courses required and £2000 per course, the total fees are six thousand pounds, a shade more than ten thousand dollars at today's exchange rate. (Note that their courses are very comprehensive, about the equivalent of four courses at most U.S. universities.) For a Master's degree from a world class university that's a very good deal.

So now I'm intrigued. The list of courses available to Americans was much longer than I expected, and evidently there's been a change in the "Yankee go home" attitude that the Open University used to have. They attempted to enter the U.S. market years ago with a failed "Open University of the United States" that was a separate institution based in the U.S., only to find that this market was a tough nut to crack. With their excellent reputation and reasonable tuition rate, however, it could very well be that this renewed willingness to serve American students could now position them as a strong new competitor in the American distance learning marketplace, a position that eluded them last time around.

Next up, it seems that distance learners aren't a bunch of cheaters after all.

Another Way to Deliver Distance Learning

SteveFoerster — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:11:00 GMT

“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.” — Kurt Lewin

Many times over on the forum, we're asked to compare the different experiences of what it's like to take courses online from different schools. But usually there aren't a whole lot of differences. Most schools deliver courses using something called a "learning management system", or LMS, which basically means a web site that keeps track of who is enrolled in which courses, and provides a standard set of features to each course, things like a place to put documents like the course syllabus and other handouts, a way to link to external resources like audio files and videos, and a place to have bulletin board style class discussion where only those in the class can participate or see.

Most schools that offer distance learning these days do so through an LMS like this. A.T. Still University does, as did all of the other schools that I've attended online. There are a very few exceptions, schools that offer independent study or correspondence courses, but they typically are institutions that started that way before the rise of the popular Internet, and are simply still doing things the old way.

That's why I thought it was interesting to read recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education that Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey is adding something new. TESC serves a lot of American military personnel who are trying to earn a degree even while deployed overseas, and they found that their students weren't always able to keep up with their coursework not because of a lack of time, but because they did not have reliable Internet connectivity. TESC has responded to this by developing special courses that are sent to students on a flash drive, those little storage devices like the one shown here. The flash drive contains all the course materials, and also additional tools like media players, and even a free office suite, a set of tools called OpenOffice which is almost exactly like Microsoft Office except for being free.

The idea is that the student, armed solely with this flash drive, has everything he or she needs to learn what they need to know to pass the all-important final exam. The student doens't even need to have his or her own computer, since everything necessary is on the flash drive, the student can take the drive from one computer to the next, doing work whenever an opportunity arises.

At the end of the Chronicle article, I thought it was interesting that some commentators thought that this is a step backwards. They said that a course on a flash drive is no different then an old fashioned pre-Internet correspondence course. And to some extent that's true, but I don't see that as a bad thing. The lesson of the last few decades is that higher education has finally realized that different students have different levels of access when it comes to technology and time, and that as the education experts, we ought to be able to develop curricula that can help student learn what they need to know in many different circumstances, not just an old fashioned classroom. Now, some may ask, what about academic quality? But these students must pass the same final exam that students preparing in other ways must pass in order to get credit. The bottom line is whether or not the student can demonstrate mastery of the material. If so, then credit is given, no matter how the student learned that material. To me, that makes this high tech correspondence course a giant leap in the right direction, not the wrong one.

As a final thought, TESC was initially inspired to develop these courses because they wanted to find a better system for military personnel. As an educator with a special interest in the developing world, however, when I saw what they had done my first thought was that it would be very well suited for those parts of the world where people have access to computers and the Internet, but only intermittently, like through telecenters and cybercafes. American institutions aren't always very good at thinking internationally, especially when it comes to the developing world, but I hope TESC and schools like it are considering this gigantic opportunity.

Next up, meet Dr. Roxanne Shanté.

Analysis: Online Beats the Classroom, But Blended Learning Is Best

SteveFoerster — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:38:00 GMT

“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” — Will Rogers

The U.S. Department of Education has released a new analysis of existing research that shows that distance learning is more effective for adults than learning that only uses a classroom setting. This analysis didn't conduct new research, it looked at a number of studies that had used sound methodology, and looked for common threads that could be found throughout all of them. Two points from the report stood out:

Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.
Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.

I took away a few things from all this. The first is that as these sorts of studies and analyses continue to pile up, those professors, like this one, who claim their colleagues oppose online learning even though they work for institutions that offer it, just look more and more out of touch. I've worked at a number of universities, and have yet to hear this point of view from a faculty member who was actually well informed about online learning — it always came from older faculty members who were afraid of change in general and technology in particular.

But the other thing I took away from this was the point that blended learning beats learning that's only online. The naysayers may be wrong about online learning, but that doesn't mean they can't also be right about the benefits of the classroom experience. And I have to admit, there are times when I think that one week per year at A.T. Still University might have been helpful, at least at the start.

To that end, it's amazing how little blended learning is available. Distance learning providers seem to want to be available to as many students as possible, and I can understand that requiring residencies in a certain city can dampen a nationwide or worldwide marketing plan. Still, perhaps if this analysis keeps getting confirmed by research schools should consider offering a short classroom session, even if it's just an optional one. That's what my wife's British law school does: one can do the program entirely from afar, but they also offer four "study weekends" per year for those who want to take advantage of them. American schools take note!

Next up, my plans to travel around the neighborhood in eighty days.