For-Profit Institutions Share Innovations in Assessing Online Education, JALN 15.2
Educational leaders, faculty members, instructional designers and researchers who convened at the 3rd Annual International Sloan Consortium Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in 2010 decided to publish the ways technologies help to assess online education so that rapid growth doesn’t diminish quality. The latest issue of the Sloan Consortium’s (Sloan-C) scholarly periodical, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, (JALN Volume 15 Issue 2), is the result, and the authors will present their findings at this year’s 4th annual symposium, Empowering Next Generation Teaching.
Jorge Klor de Alva, President of the Nexus Research and Policy Center and guest editor for the issue, observes in "Advances in Online Education at For-Profit Colleges and Universities" that today’s learners expect “videos, vivid graphs, and pictorial referents—personalized by sophisticated algorithms able to be reproduced globally in an instant.” Innovations in technologies and advances in cognitive sciences enhance web-based learning environments, with smart tutors, continuous tracking, and text mining tools that promote deep learning in ways that are “cheaper, faster, and more accountable than anything heretofore thought possible.”
In “From Scarcity to Abundance: IT’s Role in Achieving Quality-Assured Mass Higher Education,” Peter S. Smith of Kaplan University makes the case for practical technology-assisted solutions for meeting the nation’s need to educate millions more students who have fewer resources than traditional college-bound students in schools with fewer resources. “Having consistent, reliable, and valid assessments that are linked to life skills as well as workplace and professional abilities will become the new standard for academic quality,” says Smith, and he illustrates how innovative technologies embed assessments in a curricular matrix that enables individual, on-demand and cumulative snapshots of learning and personalized support services.
Barbara Weschke, Raymond D. Barclay, and Kirk Vandersall of Walden University share their replicable research design and results in “Online Teacher Education: Exploring the Impact of a Reading and Literacy Program on Student Learning.” At the American Public University System, by Phil Ice, Angela M. Gibson, Wally Boston, Dave Becher, Angela M. Gibson, Wally Boston and Dave Becher, study the predictability of course-level disenrollment, in “An Exploration of Differences Between Community of Indicators in Low and High Disenrollment Online Courses.” Over 12 semesters APUS measured and compared 34 indicators for community of inquiry in 1,252 courses with 64,781 enrollments. Their findings are critically important for increasing student satisfaction and achievement especially now when national statistics indicate that “one in three students leave college after the first year.” Norma Ming and Eric Baumer of the Nexus Research and Policy Center apply advances in technology and cognitive science in “Using Text Mining to Characterize Online Discussion Facilitation,” to show how text mining tools and latent semantic analysis can be used to understand and facilitate online discussions.
The issue draws its data from for-profit institutions, but, says Klor de Alva, “the tax status tag is irrelevant—except as a marker pointing to some important distinctions: a continuous focus at for-profit colleges and universities on innovation, openness to technology and a quickly growing interest in applying the best of the learning sciences to tackle the challenge of educating large numbers of students not only efficiently but effectively.”
About JALN
Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN), published by the Sloan Consortium, is a major source of knowledge about online education. The aim of the JALN is to describe original work in synchronous learning networks (ALN), including experimental results. For more information, visit http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/jaln_main. Tweet about it, http://bit.ly/iCfvCd.
About Sloan-C
The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is an institutional and professional leadership organization dedicated to integrating online education into the mainstream of higher education, helping institutions and individual educators improve the quality, scale, and breadth of education. 4th Annual International Symposium on Emerging Technologies in Online Learning: Empowering Next Generation Teaching begins July 11, 2011: For more information, visit http://sloanconsortium.org/et4online.
