Pam Ice, online support director for the Colorado Department of Education, said recently, “Students in Colorado continue to see the value of online learning. The 2008-09 school year brought improvements in student success in many of Colorado’s online programs. Graduation rates and completion rates increased, more programs employ guidance counselors and credentialed staff for special education and English Language Learners. These efforts are paying off for the programs.” The Colorado Department of Education monitors 18 online programs around the state, ranging in size from the six-student Crowley County Online Academy to the Colorado Virtual Academy with more than 5,000 students.

The stage for redemption, it turns out, can be a dingy, florescent-lit room tucked down a long hall at Sharpstown High School. Here, on mismatched chairs and a second-hand sofa, teens toil on laptops for hours on end — trying to atone for bad decisions and reclaim their dreams of earning high school diplomas. The Grad Lab — as it's being called at Sharpstown and the Houston Independent School District's 26 other comprehensive high schools — has become a focal point for would-be dropouts since opening in January. More than 100 students come each day, even Saturdays, trying to make good on their second chance.

In Berkshire County, where online courses weren't available even 10 years ago, more than 1,000 high school and college students are enrolled today in online courses -- ranging from bio-ethics symposiums to Mandarin Chinese."This is the technology generation," said Carol Arnold, a Virtual High School spokeswoman. "They live on instant messaging and email and Facebook, so this is really tapping into that."

Under the bipartisan bill, when a district cancels school, it could immediately post lessons to its Web site for each grade level or class, allowing students to download the material and turn in the work within two weeks. The bill would let schools use the e-lessons to replace up to five days missed because of snow, ice or other unscheduled closures. Supporters say the bill also could have an extra benefit: pushing districts to blend technology with classroom work to expand student learning beyond the traditional school day or year.

Ohio students who may be used to sledding or playing video games on snow days could instead be given schoolwork via computer, under a proposal from state lawmakers. A bill offered by a bipartisan group of legislators would let schools use online lessons so as many as five school days called off for bad weather or other calamities would not have to be made up. Districts could immediately post assignments on their Web sites for students to complete within two weeks.

Hybrid foreign language courses introduced for summer - Amanda Munger, UW Oshkosh TodayUniversity of Wisconsin Oshkosh students can now work on part of their foreign language requirements from home. Hybrid courses, a mix of online learning and in-the-classroom instruction, are being introduced as part of the foreign language department’s 2010 Summer Session offerings.
Catherine Bryan, co-chair of the foreign language department, said hybrid classes combine the convenience of online courses and the personal learning of regular classes.

YouTube said Thursday that it will start automatically captioning videos on its site, opening up a huge share of its content to people who are hearing-impaired, and a first step in creating a network of videos that could be subtitled between many languages. For now, YouTube can only transcribe videos uploaded in English into text, which can then be translated into text captions in other languages. But given the 20 hours of video content that YouTube uploads each minute, the San Bruno unit of Google said this is the largest effort ever tried on the Internet to harness evolving speech recognition technology to caption video content.
Editor Note: Imagine the impact on online learning! Open captioning of video - automatically upon upload! Auto-Translation available to all viewers!

If the contents of a course are the same, it doesn’t make sense to differentiate between online classes and regular classes. Online courses cost less, can be completed in a time frame the student chooses and sometimes have almost open book tests. Why wouldn’t students want to take courses this way? Online courses are going to continue to grow. Whatever the decision — to denote or not to denote — it will make little difference.

When the University announced it was switching from its long-standing online learning management system WebCT to eLearning Commons, Kelly Wright was a bit concerned. “I’ve been used to dealing with WebCT and it took me a while to get comfortable with it,” said Wright. “Now I’m having to re-teach myself on another system that some of my professors are new to too. It’s a bit confusing.” Wright, a pre-Business major from Peachtree City, has started to figure out eLC’s features, however, and now prefers it over the old WebCT system she called “clunky.” It is a description students and professors agree on.

After public demonstrations of two online learning management systems—Desire2Learn and Remote-Learner—in January, the Office of Information Technologies has elected to replace Blackboard with Desire2Learn. The switch to Desire2Learn is not yet official. OIT is working on a contract to establish the amount of support they can expect from Desire2Learn, when to begin implementation of the product on campus and the price—OIT Chief Information Officer Sharon Blanton estimated $200,000.

Students spend a great deal of time online, and teachers may wonder how they can best teach students to use -- or disregard -- the information they find. Created by the Intute organization in the UK, "Encouraging Critical Thinking Online" consists of two teaching units for use in classroom settings. Visitors will note that the exercises can be used individually or consecutively. The resources "encourage students to think carefully and critically about the information sources they use," and the lessons learned are broadly applicable to range of humanities disciplines. Here visitors will find a teacher's guide and the two units that ask students to use the Internet to explore a question with multiple possible answers and also to gauge public opinion on a controversial topic. From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2010. http://scout.wisc.edu/

IE Business School in Spain has been running its distance-learning programme, the International Executive MBA, for ten years. It is aimed at executives with around seven years’ work experience—three of those managerial. The MBA lasts for 13 months and students are spread across the globe. Gamaliel Martinez, the director of the programme, gives the inside track

For students who cannot immediately relocate to Dubuque to begin seminary studies, Wartburg Theological Seminary has a new long-distance learning program. Beginning with the fall 2010 semester, students can fulfill the first year of a degree program over a two-year period by taking classes online and studying on campus for periodic intensive sessions.

Community colleges in particular lag in offering high-speed internet connections, the FCC said: Just 16 percent of community college campuses have high-speed broadband connections, compared with more than 90 percent of research universities. Markey’s bill would allow community colleges to benefit from the e-Rate as well. Another area of focus for the broadband plan is supporting and promoting online learning. The Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is an example of the potential that broadband offers for students who do not have access to Advanced Placement classes in their brick-and-mortar schools, or for students who want to take a specialized course not often offered.

U.S. News University Directory in collaboration with E-learning insiders clear up four common myths about the online learning experience and how online classes are perceived.
Myth 1: My online class will be easier than a face-to-face one.

“People are sometimes unpleasantly surprised that it’s not easier,” says Kathleen Moore, executive director of the University of South Florida’s (USF) ECampus. ECampus supports more than 84,000 enrollments in 2,000-plus distance learning sections each year, and since “regular faculty are teaching both online and face-to-face courses, there’s probably 100% comparability in terms of students’ workloads and the demands,” she adds.

Working professionals can now pursue a Northwestern degree with little disruption to their daily lives. The School of Continuing Studies has developed several online programs that allow students to get both undergraduate and graduate degrees online. “The benefits are that people really can be anywhere in the world and attend Northwestern and get a Northwestern degree,” said Tracey Schroeder, manager of marketing and communications at the School of Continuing Studies.

Macmillan, one of the largest textbook publishers in the world, is introducing a new software for instructors that will allow them to change the online versions of textbooks that their students use. According to the New York Times, with DynamicBooks, "Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations."

Last month's snow storms and "calamity days" off from school didn't affect a small but growing segment of area students whose classrooms are found not in school buildings, but in their own homes. Instead of attending traditional schools - or learning via home schooling programs where parents double as teachers - these students "attend" kindergarten through 12th grade at home via state-accredited, online schools. Ohio is among the top three states in the nation for total number of students learning at home while enrolled in full-time, online schools, according to a 2009 national survey by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.

Every aspect of our lives is increasingly influenced by technology. Education is no different. Today’s students need to be able to compete in a global society. Part of that is having an understanding of the virtual world, along with having the motivation and self reliance to do things themselves, especially if they want to succeed in college. Today’s college students are reportedly taking 30 percent of all their classes online, so logically, requiring online classes for Florida high school students would be a step in the right direction.

In a down economy with many out of work, more and more college students are looking online to complete their degrees. The Babson Survey Research Group looks at national online enrollments. Its most recent report shows that 4.6 million college students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2008, the most recent term for which figures are available. That’s a 17 percent increase from a year earlier. Greg Simpson, Kansas University’s interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is a candidate for the permanent position. In a recent public forum he addressed online education at KU as something he’d like to see improved.