Here is an extensive list of resources on various aspects of distance learning.The best way to find information on these or any other topics is to conduct a search using the search tool below. You should also visit our site Journals, Links and Resources for more resources. Categories include:
• academic advising
• academic resources - business,
humanities, math, sciences,
social science
• accessibility issues
• accreditation
• best practices
• blended/hybrid learning
• broadband
• career and technical education
• case studies
• cheating and plagiarism
• computer software
• copyright and fair use
• corporate e-learning
• costs for distance learning
• course management
• the digital divide
• digital libraries and learning object repositories• effectiveness of e-learning
• e-books
• e-portfolios
• faculty compensation and support
• faculty training and education
• gaming and simulations
• Higher Education OpportunitiesAct (HEOA Authentication)
• instructional design
• intellectual property issues
• interactivity and teaching online
• K-12 technology
• marketing
• national data and statistics
• online student orientation
• open source
• quality assessment
• rural distance education• science labs/courses
• second life
• security
• social networking
• statewide virtual colleges
• strategic and policy plans
• student retention
• student services
• students and technology
• technologies
• testing and assessment
• Twitter
• videoconferencing/ITFS
• Web design
• Web tools
• wireless
• wikis
• women and the Web
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G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc:“General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs. The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices. But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.” . . . Website | |
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Game-Based Learning: A Different Perspective:(April/May 2008) by Karl Royle for Innovate. Because the goals of games and the object of school-based learning are fundamentally mismatched, efforts to integrate games into the curriculum have largely fallen flat despite the best intentions of teachers and the gaming industry. Arguing that educational game designers should be investigating ways to get education into games rather than getting games into education, Karl Royle describes how this might be accomplished. The discussion is contextualized by a brief outline of the shortcomings of video game usage within education. Royle demonstrates a link between the kind of learning that typically occurs in game playing and project-based learning and illustrates how curriculum-related learning material can be integrated into commercial-quality video games. Web site | |
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Game-Informed Learning: Applying Computer Game Processes to Higher Education:(2005) Michael Begg, David Dewhurst, and Hamish Macleod. The authors advocate a "game-informed learning" approach that would make conventional learning activities more game-like. The two medical simulations they describe immerse students in a professional identity and generate highly motivated constructivist learning. Web Site | |
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Gaming Helps Students Hone 21st-Century Skills: Environments Such as Second Life Can Both Stimulate and Educate, Experts Say:(April 22, 2008) by Laura Devaney for eSchool News. “Virtual worlds and games can help students develop necessary skills. Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, agreed educators who spoke during an April 16 webinar on gaming in education.” Web site | |
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Gangster Confidential: | |
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Gaps and Bits: Conceptualizing Measurements for Digital Divides:(2006) by Karine Barzilai-Nahon Full Article | |
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Gender Differences and Computer Competency:The Effects of a High Access Computer Program on the Computer Competence of Young Women: | |
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Genesee Community College:Web Site | |
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Geography Emerges in Distance Ed:(November 2007) by Andy Guess for Inside Higher Ed. “If it’s been possible so far to paint a generalized picture of the online student - an adult starting a second career, for example, enrolled in a large institution such as the University of Phoenix - that’s only because the market for distance education hasn’t fully matured. Now, a new report suggests, that process is well underway.” Web site | |
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Getting an Edge in Online Education: Developing an Online Learning Web Portal:(2005) by Beate Winterstein. For online institutions, this paper offers a list of questions, organized in different categories (e.g., is online learning for me, technical requirements, online learning environment), that potential students might ask to determine whether online education at a certain institution fits their needs. This tool can be used as a guide to develop an online learning Web portal. Web Site | |
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Getting Open Source Software into Schools: Strategies and Challenges:(2006) by Gary Hepburn. The authors describe implementation strategies available to schools considering open source software and address the key sociopolitical factors that must be taken into account by advocates of such implementation. Web site | |
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Getting Ready for College: A Report for National College Week:(2000) by Department of Education. A report released at a National College Week event recognizing GEAR UP, a program in which business, schools, and community groups work together to prepare disadvantage youth for college. Web Site | |
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Gifted Students Connect Online with Colleges:(August 19, 2005) Neil Parmar for the Wall Street Journal (requires subscription). Web Site | |
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Global Competition Selects 19 Innovative Digital Media & Learning Projects to Share $2 Million:Nineteen projects from around the world were awarded funding today to explore digital media’s ability to help people learn. In a $2 million competition funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, winners include a radically affordable $12 TV-computer, a video blogging site for young women in Mumbai, India, and a cutting-edge mobile phone application that lets children conduct digital wildlife spotting and share that information with friends. The competition is part of MacArthur’s $50 million digital media and learning initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. Other winners include: - Tecno.Tzotzil, a project that leverages low-cost laptops to help indigenous children in Chiapas, Mexico learn by producing and sharing their own media creations; - Digital Ocean, an online platform for 200 classrooms around the world that allows young people to monitor, analyze, and share information about the declining global fish population; - Voces Móviles (Mobile Voices), a low-cost, mobile, multimedia platform that lets low-wage immigrant day laborers in Los Angeles share, create, and publish multimedia stories to become citizen journalists; and - M-Ubuntu (“I am because we are” in Zulu), a project that uses inexpensive mobile phone technologies to connect teachers in South Africa to each other and to teachers in the United States.” See http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.5106073/k.A5AF/Award_Recipients.htm | |
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Going For Distance:(Aug. 31, 2009) by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed “Online education is no longer a peripheral phenomenon at public universities, but many academic administrators are still treating it that way. So says a comprehensive study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the Sloan National Commission on Online Learning, which gathered survey responses from more than 10,700 faculty members and 231 interviews with administrators, professors, and students at APLU institutions.” “‘I think it’s a call to action,’ said Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts and chair of the Sloan online learning commission. ‘The leadership of universities has been trying to understand exactly how [online education] fits into their strategic plans, and what this shows is that faculty are ahead of the institutions in these online goals.’” “According to the study, professors are open to teaching online courses (defined in the study as courses where at least 80 percent of the course is administered on the Web), but do not believe they are receiving adequate support from their bosses. On the whole, respondents to the faculty survey rated public universities ‘below average’ in seven of eight categories related to online education, including support for online course development and delivery, protection of intellectual property, incentives for developing and delivering online courses, and consideration of online teaching activity in promotion and tenure decisions.” “Still, more than a third of the faculty respondents had developed and taught an online course. ‘The urban legend out there was that many faculty out there don’t want to participate’ in online education, said Wilson. ‘Contrary to popular myths, faculty at all ages and levels are participating.’” “Indeed, neither seniority nor tenure status held a significant bearing on whether a professor had ever developed or taught an online course. At the time the survey was administered, there were more professors with at least 20 years’ experience teaching an online course than professors with five years’ experience or less. This despite the fact that developing and teaching a course online is more taxing than doing the same in a classroom -- according to the survey respondents, teaching online isn’t easy. ‘Faculty who get involved in online teaching have to be more reflective about their teaching,’ Wilson said. Professors need to organize lecture notes and other materials with more care. They get more feedback from students. It’s more apparent when a student is falling behind and needs special attention.” . . . Web site |
Good Communication: The Other Social Network for Successful IT Organizations:(November/December 2009) by Lisa Trubitt and Jeff Overholtzer, EDUCAUSE Review “Social networks of the electronic variety have become thoroughly embedded in contemporary culture. People have woven these networks into their daily routines, using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online gaming environments, and other tools to build and maintain complex webs of professional and personal relationships. CIOs likewise have recognized the importance of building social networks, using not only these electronic tools but also the old-fashioned methods of face-to-face communication and relationship-building. Today, establishing these networks is more important than ever in order to manage changes in technology and expectations in the current economy. Sharing information and developing a common understanding with campus partners have become keys for success in IT organizations.” . . . Web site | |
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Good Teaching is Good Teaching: An Emerging Set of Guiding Principles and Practices for the Design and Development of Distance Education:(1995) Created by a project of Innovations in Distance Education, the guiding principles and practices are grouped into five components: learning goals and content presentation, interactions, assessment and measurement, instructional media and tools, and, learner support and services. Web Site | |
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Google Adds Live Updates to Results:(Dec. 7, 2009) by Brad Stone, New York Times “As part of its much-anticipated entrance into the field known as real-time search, Google said that over the next few days its users would begin seeing brand-new tweets, blog items, news articles and social networking updates in results for certain topical searches. Previously it took a few minutes for updates from social networks and blogs to filter into Google’s results. . . . A search for ‘Copenhagen’ on Google, for instance, where global climate talks are under way, produces the standard Web results, but with a box in the middle of the page where blog items, press releases, news articles and tweets scroll past. The box updates every few seconds.” . . . “Google Goggles, allows people to send Google a cell phone photograph of, say, a landmark or a book, and have information about the contents of the image returned to them instantly. . . . But Google said image recognition technology would have to improve and the privacy implications would have to be more fully considered before it would make that possible. Google Goggles works on phones running Google’s Android operating system and will be available for other phones soon.” “Google also outlined developments in voice search, which will make it easier for people to search the Web from a mobile phone. It said it would now allow people to speak their queries to Google in Japanese, in addition to English and Chinese. The company plans to add new languages next year.” . . . Web site |
Google Apps for Education: | |
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Google Expands Its Bid to Run Student E-Mail Systems, Offering Additional Services:(October 2006) by Jeffrey R. Young. “Google has expanded its efforts to provide student e-mail services to colleges, and while some campus officials are not yet ready to hand over such a critical function to an outside company, they are tempted by the price -- it's free.” Web site (requires subscription) | |
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Google Introduces a Cartoonlike Method for Talking in Chat Rooms:“Google, known for its plain-Jane approach to Web design, has come up with something much wackier. On Tuesday the company introduced Lively, an online tool that allows people to embody a cartoonish online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms. The rooms can be added to any blog or Web site.” “Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog - its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company’s site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase. Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional - they include text, and sometimes voice and video.” . . .Website | |
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Google Releases News-Reading Service:(Sept. 14, 2009) by Miguel Helft . . . “On Monday, the company introduced an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news articles from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as quickly as they would the pages of a magazine. Google will place ads around the news articles and share resulting revenue with publishers.” . . . Fast Flip - http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ Web site |
Google Sidewiki:"Next, Google announces sidewiki. Sidewiki lets users post comments on Web pages through the Google Toolbar. This isn't new - StumbleUpon and Diigo offer similar services. But Google has scope, reach, and the ability to integrate the service quickly into the online habits of users,” George Siemens. Web site |
Google Social Search:George Siemens writes, “Google just announced Social Search. The services helps you "to find publicly available content from your social circle". Google extracts information on your social circle from three sources: Google Reader subscriptions, Google Profiles, and Google chat (GMail). They use the term "surfacing" connections to describe not only adding your friends, but one additional degree: your friend's friends.” “This move by Google is a direct assault on Facebook. Facebook has emphasized social connections over content. Google has, to date, primarily emphasized information sorting, filtering, and ranking. Facebook's model of emphasizing social rather than information connections is a problem for Google. What is unique in Social Search is the focus on aggregation rather than place-based interaction. In theory, Google emphasizes pulling together various pieces of online interactions through aggregation, whereas Facebook emphasizes housing interactions in their environment.” See the introductory video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlpTjP6h6Ms Web site | |
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Google to Add Captions, Improving YouTube Videos:(Nov. 19, 2009) by Miguel Helft, New York Times “In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site. The technology will also open YouTube videos to a wider foreign market and make them more searchable, which will make it easier for Google to profit from them.” “While the technology can insert captions only on English-language speech, Google is giving users the choice of using its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.” “The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service. But Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system, said the technology had never been applied on such a large scale.” . . . Web site |
Google Unveils News-by-Topic Service:(Dec. 8, 2009) by Richard Pérez-Peña, New York Times “Google on Tuesday introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the “living stories” project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry.” “Living stories is a much-enhanced version of what some newspaper Web sites already do by grouping material by subject matter. In the case of The Times, the paper’s Web site has thousands of “topic pages.” But those efforts have not yielded heavy reader traffic or much advertising. The Google project, presented without ads, is now at livingstories.googlelabs.com, part of Google Labs, where the company tries out experimental products. If it is judged a success, it would eventually reside on the site of any publisher that wanted to use it. Those publishers could also sell ads on those pages.” . . . Web site |
Google Unveils Tools to Integrate Its Digitized Books Into Campus Library Catalogs:(March 14, 2008) by Jeffrey R. Young for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Google has now scanned over a million books as part of its controversial partnership with major libraries, but many students and professors don’t know when Google has a copy of the book they’re looking for. Google wants to change that by getting college libraries to integrate Google’s book search into online library catalogs. This week Google unveiled a set of software protocols that allow libraries to essentially merge Goolge’s collection with their own.” Web site | |
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Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication:“Google has set out to rewire the e-mail inbox with a new product called Wave. Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication and collaboration, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character-by-character.” “Google Wave, which was demonstrated Thursday at the Google I/O developer conference taking place here, is now live as a private developer preview. Conference attendees can start playing with it now, and Google has its eye on a public beta launch within a few months. It’s a peculiar model we haven’t seen before, sort of a “chat inside e-mail” approach that has the potential to profoundly alter the way we share information and collaborate with one another.” “There are few effective ways to communicate within small groups, whether co-workers, friends, or family. Most of us use e-mail, just addressing a new message to a bunch of people. This starts a thread, which eventually gets twisted and fragmented into side conversations and becomes more and more confusing. The more-organized among us use tools like IM or IRC chat rooms, wikis, group blogs or web apps built for threaded communications, such as FriendFeed.” . . . See a 20-minute video on Wave on Michael Feldstein’s blog E-Literate: http://mfeldstein.com/uhwow/ | |
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Government Agencies and Resources:• Thomas from the Library of Congress - Legislation on the Internet • U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions • U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations Committee on Energy and Commerce Committee on Education and Labor House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies • U.S. Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education • United States Code A searchable version generated from the most recent version of the Government Printing Office CD-ROM. It contains the law in force as of January 1994 | |
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Government Urges Changes to Google Books Deal:(Sept. 18, 2009) by Miguel Helft , New York Times “In the latest challenge to Google’s plan to establish the world’s largest digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department said late Friday that a proposed legal settlement between Google and book authors and publishers should not be approved by the court without modifications. The Justice Department said that while the agreement would provide many benefits to the public, it also raised significant issues regarding class-action, copyright and antitrust law.” “The Justice Department described recent discussions with the parties as “productive,” however, and asked the court to encourage them to continue talks to modify the agreement and overcome its objections.” . . . Web site | |
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