Welcome to Module 11 - Learning Communities

Make sure you participate in the polls, available at http://www.davidwees.com/etec522/polls

“Educators are confronted with a new medium for public instruction whose magnificent possibilities daze them, but whose technical and psychological peculiarities they do not yet fully understand.” 

-Psychologist Gordon Allport (1935), referring to the use of radio in distance education*

 
For centuries, schools and universities have been the physical site of learning, holding knowledge literally within the walls of their libraries. With the invention of new technologies, learning became something you could do by correspondence, by radio, by television, and, eventually, by computer. But if distance learning has been around since the invention of the post office, what makes it an emerging market?
 
The emergence of the Internet has virtually erased physical location as a factor in the delivery of education, allowing schools everywhere to reach far beyond their catchment area. In addition, it has allowed small niche learning communities to effectively link themselves in a version of the long tail theory of economics. These two factors have combined to make distance education an emerging market once again.
 
Distance education (DL) – formal learning communities – is booming. While traditional higher education in the US is growing at between 1 and 2% per year, DL has had a compound annual growth rate of 19.7% between 2002 and 2007 – and the trend shows no sign of slowing. (Allen and Seamen, 2008) In Canada, Ryerson’s Chang School distance education division grew its enrolment by 5 ½ times in approximately the same time period. (Hampson, 2008)
 
How would an EVA assess an LC? We've chosen to break the discussion down into four areas: brand, cost, quality, and accessibility. These clearly overlap, but by teasing the four factors out, we can more easily assess the requirements for success as an entrepreneur/intrepreneur within this market space. Although there are many questions that need to be asked about LCs, we have chosen to restrict ourselves to just four forums this week, organized around our four assessment criteria, in the hopes of a rich and focused discussion.
 
This week's topic gives us an opportunity to bring together a number of the emerging technologies we've been studying, as all of the new technologies we've looked at can be used in a variety of ways within an LC. 
 

Some instructions:

This site has been built using the Drupal content management system which is currently considered one of the top 3 open source systems for building websites.

We've allowed you to log in using something called 'Open Id' which might help mitigate some of the frustrations some of you have been feeling about having many different log-ins and passwords because there are many sites where you can use the same Open Id log-in. If you go to myopenid.com you can create a new open id account if you do not already have one. Also, some other email providers like, Yahoo and AOL can be used to log-in using 'Open Id' as well, which may be handy for some of you.

Of course, you have the option of creating an account here which is a 2-step process. Click on Create New Account then enter in a user-name and an email address. Check your email for a message from this website, which will hopefully not go into your spam box. Follow the instructions in the email, which basically say to click this link to return to this website, and provides you with a 1 time log-in. After that, we suggest you change your password to something you can remember, and then you are set. If you have problems with the registration, you can email davidwees (at) gmail (dot) com and David can activate your account for you.

Once you are logged in, you have the option to create content.  In order to format the content the way you would like, you may wish to check out these 2 videos we found on using our editor.

Schedule for Discussions

Day 1 - Monday: Discuss Brand

Day 2 - Tuesday: Discuss Quality

Day 3 - Wednesday: Discuss Cost

Day 4 - Thursday: Discuss Accessibility

Day 5 - Friday: Open Discussion

Additional Site Organization

The site is organized with links along the top right hand side of the website leading to different areas. To make it easier to find recent information, we have a Recent posts link which leads to a list of all of the most recent activity on the site.  Note that when you first come here, all of the posts we have initially created for you will count as 'new' for you.The new tag stays until you read the post. If you have read a post/page and then it is updated, an updated flag will appear.

As well we have Forums, Videos we have found, a page for Polls on various topics, Information pages we have gathered, with a separate section for references. We have a site Calendar where we have posted the dates we'd like to participate in various conversations.

Looking forward to talking to you all in the forums!

The Module 11 Team: David, Laura, Melissa, Nancy, and Zilong

 

*As quoted in Buck, G. 2006 Jun 1. The First Wave: The Beginnings of Radio in Canadian Distance Education. The Journal of Distance Education / Revue de l'Éducation à Distance [Online] 21:1. Available: http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/view/67/48

 * Images combined using the Gimp photo editor, for credits for the images, see the references below.

References: 
Do we need to change our understanding of how we learn!
Laying a good foundation
Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States 2008
Strategy, Research, and Management in Online Higher Education