Sustainable Sustainability

Yesterday I finally took all of the cardboard boxes from the garage to the recycling center. After only four months (since moving here) I somehow managed to fill half of one bay. Arriving at the recycling center, I found ten or so large dumpsters with sliding doors in the lids. Looking to see which one [...]

Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference

I’m attending the 7th Annual Sloan-C Conference on Blended Learning in Chicago today and tomorrow: The Promise and Practice of Blended Learning. Thought I’d share a little about my day. Here are my notes from this morning’s keynote… Joel Hartman, Vice Provost for Information Technologies and resources, University of Central Florida focused a little on [...]

Extending the Virtual Classroom

The LMS of today is too confining a virtual learning environment. Such closed systems lock out all but those officially enrolled in the course. The emerging LMS needs to accommodate others in addition to students and faculty, allowing learners to benefit from interaction with a broader network and community of practice. Last semester, as part [...]

Interactions: Online vs Classroom

I was speaking with a number of late adopters the other day (I realize the expression is not actually “late adopters”, but I am somewhat of an optimist – I think about TV and Microwaves and have to believe that everyone will eventually adapt). Anyway, I heard a couple of questions I hadn’t heard in [...]

Blended by Design

For the past several years I have offered weekly walk-in sessions introducing faculty to various online technologies for teaching & learning. Invariably, an instructor will find a particular solution intriguing and decide to integrate it into their class. Many of the attendees teach in a traditional face-to-face format and their goal is to simply add [...]

The very short celebrated life of EtherPad

I’ve been hearing quite a bit about EtherPad for the past several months. Its sort of a chat/wiki/Google Docs/Wave thingy. I hadn’t actually tried it out until the other day when a faculty member asked if I had any suggestions for an alternative to the chat tool within our LMS. He was hoping to include [...]

The Future of Online Learning

I predict that in ten years there will be no such thing as “online learning”. There will be only learning; all learning will be to some degree online. Students will choose to what degree based upon their personal learning preferences and the availability of course sections in relation to their location and schedule. Sloan-C recently [...]

Blended Learning and the Space/Time Continuum

  small_space_chart, originally uploaded by bill.knapp. Meegan Lillis and I presented on this topic at the Campus Technology 09 conference this past summer in Boston. The idea was to visually represent the concept of using instructional technology (in this case web 2.0) to bridge time and space. The space continuum along the left side of [...]

Blended or Mixed-delivery?

Our institution of higher ed began using web-conferencing about a year ago. By the end of the year we had 100 host licenses. A host is a user who can initiate a meeting/training/support session. Attendees need not have a license – just hosts. I began using it to permit faculty to connect to our weekly [...]

The “Online” Continuum

We often talk about online delivery in terms of “fully-online”, as opposed to blended/mixed, or enhanced. These conversations tend to try and clarify what considerations we should take when designing and delivering instruction and training. However, I think we need to further consider whether these are distinct modalities, or a continuum. Fully-online (asynchronous) Online (w/ [...]