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Researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia found no consensus among academics about the definitions of “e-learning,” “online learning,” and “distance learning,” which they say makes it difficult to assess the strengths of each approach.

“As education researchers, we don’t get the true context of the instructional environment, and without that, it is impossible to compare learning results,” says Joi L. Moore, an associate professor in the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at Missouri, who led the research, which was published recently in the journal The Internet and Higher Education.

Wired Campus would like to know, what do you think is the difference between the three? How important is it that researchers settle on a common definition of each?

Wired Campus

Philadelphia—Like a lot of other people, academic librarians are wondering what happens now that a federal judge has tossed out the proposed settlement in the lawsuit over Google’s book-scanning project. Some of them got together for an informal roundtable discussion of the ruling at the Association of College and Research Libraries’ conference, which runs here through Saturday.

The discussion was led by Corey Williams, the associate director of the American Library Association’s Washington office. (The ACRL is a division of the ALA.) Ms. Williams tracks legislative issues for the association. She made it clear that her remarks did not represent any official ALA position.

“The world has changed a lot since 2005, when this lawsuit began,” Ms. Williams told the group. “Now it’s 2011, and the marketplace, many have observed, is just moving forward. Where does this leave us in our day-to-day operating of our libraries?”

Librarians are especially keen to figure out what to do about…

Wired Campus

This Chronicle piece about a new MIT Press book released using an ebook tool called “Scalar” interested me and got me spending time exploring EBook formats, seeking an answer to the question, “If we were going to do a good CS Ebook, one in which programming experimentation could be done from within the book, what format is most promising?” Scalar is not so interesting because you can only link to fixed digital media. I found Monocle much more interesting, because the content of pages can be defined with JavaScript, and so could include simulations and even a programming environment (a Lively Kernel?). I was disappointed and intrigued by the below comment — Sophie is considered a failure, but there’s a new Sophie in development?

The fate of Scalar, which has not yet been released to the public, also remains to be seen. Mellon had backed an earlier attempt to build multimedia-authoring software, called Sophie. The first version failed, says Bob Stein, a director of the Institute…

Computing Education Blog

I liked this piece in the NYTimes about why online courses aren’t taking off.  The author’s point about online courses “lacking the third dimension” (social, face-to-face interactivity) is a good one (and that’s where OpenStudy comes in), but the side point he makes is more interesting to me.  The media of online courses just is nowhere near what it needs to be!  Powerpoint slides, PDF tests, and no feedback is just abysmal, and we can do so much better!

When colleges and universities finally decide to make full use of the Internet, most professors will lose their jobs.

That includes me. I’m not worried, though, at least for the moment. Amid acute budget crises, state universities like mine can’t afford to take that very big step — adopting the technology that renders human instructors obsolete.

via Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension – NYTimes.com.

Tagged: computational media, distance education, educational technology
Computing Education Blog

At CE21, I met Aman Yadav, an assistant professor in educational studies at Purdue.  He’s actually teaching a CS methods course (how to teach CS effectively), in a program that teaches pre-service high school teachers!  How exciting!  He only has one student.  Aman says that he doesn’t know how many semester that they can afford to offer the class with so few students.  The one teacher he has is a math education major, who is taking a minor in CS education.  Nobody there is going after CS education as their main focus.

We were sitting at breakfast Tuesday morning with Wayne Summers, my collleague at Columbus State University where they have a program to give teachers an “endorsement” (a kind of certification that comes after a teacher’s initial certificate in teaching math, science, business, or whatever) to teach high school computer science.  He had one student, but she dropped out in the first semester.

I mentioned in a previous blog post that UTeach has been in existence for 14…

Computing Education Blog