Innovate-Live Spring Seminar Series

A message from James L Morrison (morrison@unc.edu) to the Instructional Technology Forum listserve (ITFORUM@listserv.uga.edu).

The Innovate-Live Seminar Series is a series of webcasts produced by our partner, ULiveandLearn, that cover timely issues that arise when educators attempt to use information technology tools to enhance the educational process writ broad. These seminars will be archived within the Innovate-Live portal. Particularly relevant discussions may give rise toa rticles that could be considered for publication in Innovate. If you would like to lead a seminar on an issue you regard as timely and important to the community, please send me a paragraph or two framing the issue and suggest who would join you in the audio discussion. The deadline for the fall 2007 seminar series is August 15, 2007.

The 2007 spring seminar series is described below. If you would like to participate in any of these seminars, please go to http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/ and either login if you have participated in a previous Innovate-Live webcast or take a minute toregister if you haven't. (Registration is free.)

[Note that Ididn't include all of the seminars, only the one(s) that may be of interest to readers of this blog]

June 8, 2007, 2:00 PM EST
Implications of the Sloan 2006 Report
Seminar Leader: Alan McCord, Lawrence Technological University

The recently published Sloan Consortium found that online learning continues to grow dramatically with no signs of an enrollment plateau. Lower-level undergraduate students comprise the largest segment of online learners, but graduate students appear to be taking advantage of online programs as a way to help balance academic and workplace demands.

While perceptions of online program quality are improving, significant barriers to the growth of online programs remain, including increased faculty skepticism over the past three years about the value and legitimacy of online learning. More faculty agree than disagree with claims regarding the value and legitimacy of online education, but a notable increase in the percentage of faculty who are concerned about the value of online education deserves discussion. This online dialogue will identify faculty concerns about online programs, identify institutional and pedagogical practices that may contribute to increased skepticism, and consider how faculty skepticism may be addressed.

Please forward this announcement to colleagues who may want to participate in them.

Thanks!
Jim
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James L Morrison
Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
http://www.innovateonline.info
Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership
UNC-Chapel Hill
http://horizon.unc.edu
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As a side note: The Sloan report is the latest statistics we have as to exactly how many virtual school students there are t the K-12 level. This report, released in March, indicated that during the 2005-06 school year there were approximately 700,000 students taking one or more courses online. NACOL currently estimates, based on extrapolations of the Sloan figure and previous data that this year there are more than a million students. This guess-timate should be taken with a grain of salt, as a report five years ago by Fulton indicated that a majority of K-12 students would be taking online courses by this point in time - a figure that has yet to be realized.

Tags: open source, online journals, e-journals, academy, digital natives, generational differences, virtual school, cyber school, high school, education