Posted 9:12 AM by George Siemens
A New Role in Higher Education (.pdf)
Quotes: "Until technology becomes a core part of the teaching environment, it will not be seen as truly strategic...higher education must move technology beyond the nineteenth-and twentieth-century paradigm of text-based education. E-mail, threaded conversations, chat rooms, and "containers" for depositing electronic essays are simply extensions - very poor extensions - of very old communication protocol."

Comment: YES! I agree completely. We bring our old mindset to new technology. Currently, most elearning is not innovative - it is a duplication of classroom teaching. We still do not completely understand how this media will evolve...and currently, we are untethering (is that a word?) from previous views of learning...only problem is we haven't really latched on to anything new. We're sort of in a limbo stage - knowing what we don't want to be...but not yet knowing what we will be.

Ten Keys to Quality Assurance and Assessment in Online Learning

Quote: "This paper summarizes the results of a nationwide empirical study performed in the United States, in an effort to systematically identify the factors that determine the quality of e-learning courses. We investigated how to design quality into web-enhanced courses, how to ensure delivery of a quality support system for online learners, and how to assess the quality of online courses. This is the first in a series of reports on the outcomes of this investigation and how to use what we learned. This first report focuses on instructional design of quality courses."

Comment: Nothing new here...but still a good review of quality elearning...two statements stick out "Learning is spiral"..."Learning is messy".