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Online University for Healthcare Professionals - posted on Aug. 15, 2004
Healthcare industry might be the industry that is adapting e-Learning more aggressively than any other industry, even more than IT industry possibly. While e-Learning is being adapted widely in the healthcare industry, education providers are also introducing number of new programs including Beverly Healthcare to meet the demand. One of leading providers of healthcare services to the elderly, has just launched Beverly University, an online continuing education program for its nursing home administrators and nurses. I'd expect that many more new programs will be launching this year and the next year, and I will be following up on this topic.
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A nurse honored as an online education pioneer - posted on Aug. 14, 2004
Rachel Boersma, PhD(c), MS, RN, CARN, a resident of Nashua Road was honored as an online education pioneer at the first annual Massachusetts Colleges Online (MCO) E-Learning Conference at Bridgewater State College. As we look back the history of e-Learning 50 years from now, we will probably find different roots in e-Learning, but one thing that I'd like us to notice here is that a person in healthcare industry is recognized as a pioneer. We have been discussing about the importance of e-Learning in this forum, but it is interesting that one of roots is, in fact, the healthcare industry.
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Name matters? - posted on Aug. 11, 2004
Number of traditional schools are offering online degree programs today and UMass is one of them. They started offering programs very recently, but according to this article, the revenue is up 47% and enrollment is up 30% from 2003. Name recognition was one of problems for those who study online as employers often do not recognize names of online universities; however, getting a degree from UMass will surely solve this problem. Does name matter after all and traditional schools will be enrolling most online learners in the coming years?
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Online education for seniors - posted on Aug. 10, 2004
ASA, American Society on Aging starts offering two free web events to address the issue of family caregiving. Here is an article reporting these events and the following is from a quote from the article; "The first event is a web-hosted chat wherein leaders in the field will address policy issues, after which they will answer questions from participants. The second event is a web seminar, which will address some of the major issues faced by these caregivers and ways that professionals can address them effectively." As many of seniors have number of health problems, they have limited access to traditional classroom learning environments. Online education can become very helpful to them as it can solve the problem of accessibility for them.
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Brief Overview of Online Education, Past, Presence and Future - posted on Aug. 6, 2004
Online education was expected to revolutionize education; there was a huge expectation in 90s. However, it did not suddenly change the way we learn; it was mostly because online education was dysfunctional for the most part. If you have been on the web since 90s, you may recall days that you waited several minutes to see a web page. Listening to audio was painful; it took forever to download a clip, too. Watching any video was simply unbearable. Online education's technology backbone is essentially a combination of text, audio and video, so the infrastructure did not allow us to engage in online education comfortably for some time. Online education finally started being adapted widely after Year 2000; that is when broadband finally started being adapted widely, and consequently, we were able to see and experience some potential of online education.
Year 2004, University of Wisconsin. "More than 225 of the 750 graduate students enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's Master of Business Administration (MBA) take courses exclusively online, while most others enrolled in a combination of both in-class and online courses." Though not every single higher education institution has a huge enrollment number in its online programs, a case like University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's MBA is nothing unusual today. In particular, courses and programs that attract working adults such as MBA programs have number of students enrolled. Online education is widely deployed in healthcare industry and some of education providers for healthcare industry are doing quite well. Since many of healthcare workers do not have regular work hours(like 9 - 5), online education is a great fit to them; it allows flexible hours and also they do not need to be at a certain place. They can study wherever they want, given access to the internet.
Online education is finding its niche market, but we have not seen its full potential yet. We have not yet seen what it will become. Online education will revolutionize education, but it will take longer than expected. As bandwidth increases, we will have access to better audio and video education materials; it will take much shorter time to download texts and other study materials. Smoother communication and much more comfortable interaction between instructors and students. As all these improvements are made, we will see much more dynamic learning environment. When we see that, online education will no longer be categorized into "online education", but it becomes how we learn.
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This is how college professor works in the 21st century - posted on May. 16, 2004
Professor Louis Beatty spends much time at home while he works as a professor at Colorado Mountain College. He is capable of doing this because he mostly teaches online distance courses. As the popularity of online education grows, many college professors will probably be teaching like Professor Louis Beatty in the coming years. There is a lot of debates going on over the quality of online education, but online education is here to say and it will be gaining much more popularity in the coming years; this is inevitable. Consequently, the nature of the profession, college professor and lecturer will be changing rather dramatically. Looking at positive aspects of this transition, professors and lectures can spend more time with their family members, they no longer need to spend hours commuting to work, and they can also have much more flexible work hours. Whenever online education is discussed, the discussion is centered around its quality, its economics, its convenience and other aspects of online education from the perspective of students, but online education is making a dramatic change in the other side of participants, teachers, as well.
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Bubbles of online education? - posted on May. 4, 2004
The article gives good overview of the current trend of online education. The article specifically mentions about emerging players like Universitas 21 Global and how they are attracting working adults. Online education is solving number of problems in education such as time constraint and location constraint many people have, which is great, and it is fair to predict that online education is here to stay. However, there are literally hundreds of online education providers today and there are tens of thousand of online courses available today. The number is expected to keep increasing in the coming years. Online businesses are often concerned about the saturation of niche market, as each and every online business has such a wide reach. Does this apply to online education as well? Are we going to see the bubbles of online education and burst of online education bubbles? I am certainly not trying to brand this online portal as "pessimism of online education," but I'd like to make a concerning comment or two on online education.
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Introducing LearnKey, an online education provider - posted on May. 2, 2004
LearnKey just added 17,000 unique new users during the first three months of 2004 right after the company added 11,000 new users in the last quarter, fourth quarter of 2003. The growth is just remarkable. While we recognize their obvious success, we'd also like to mention how their technology is delivered and exactly where the number is coming from. LearnKey is not an academic institution; it is not a college or university, or high school. They are a provider of online education and they primarily deliver their education to high schools and middle schools. They are delivering a standardized education to a large population, and since their delivering mechanism is internet based, this is possible at all. Online education is truly changing the dynamics of today's education, but LearnKey's approach, how the (online)education provider provides education to existing education institutions simultaneously utilizing the internet is unique; this mechanism and their approach can dramatically change how we learn and how we teach in the coming years. We'd like to be following up on this in the coming weeks.
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Conflict between traditional courses and online courses - posted on Apr. 19, 2004
Some universities offer both traditional courses and online courses; however, interoperability of traditional courses and online course have problems even in those schools. Daily Bruin(Student Media UCLA) has an article on online education this week, and it describes some interoperability problems between traditional courses and online courses. Specific problems include 1. Students cannot enroll in both traditional courses and online courses and 2. Online course credits cannot easily be transferred to traditional degree program credits so students still need to complete almost all courses in traditional way to get a traditional degree. Presumably, there are some technical problems, but also there are probably resistance to the online education coming from inertia. Courses are essentially offered by the same university, yet they cannot be easily transferred if courses are offered online. It is an unfortunate reality, but it is a rather dramatic change that has a huge ramification on the dynamics of today's higher education so it is understandable.
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Online education is getting some attention - posted on Apr. 18, 2004
OOEN is not a stock market watch, but there is an interesting report that reflects the current political and economical climate, so we reference the report; VCampus Corp is a public company that provides online education solutions and the company recently announced that they will start offering courses to prepare for jobs related to homeland security. Upon the announcement, the company's stock was up $4.13 at $6.92 at midday on the NASDAQ Stock Market(the event took place on April 15th). Stock market is very sensitive about the current climate; online education is a hot topic, and so is homeland security. When these two met, it triggered a reaction like this. We don't debate the behavior of day traders, but it is an interesting event and it tells that online education is getting some attention nowadays.
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