Judith Boettcher’s Countdown Guide for Planning Distance Degree Programs

"This timetable describes six major phases of the planning and development of the degree and assumes a launch of the program 24 months out."

High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom

from the New York Times

The vast majority of the nation’s 15 million college students — at least 79 percent — live off campus, and with gas prices above $4 a gallon, many are seeking to cut commuting costs by studying online. Colleges from Massachusetts and Florida to Texas to Oregon have reported significant online enrollment increases for summer sessions, with student numbers in some cases 50 percent or 100 percent higher than last year.

Gartner Identifies Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008 to 2012

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=681107

• Multicore and hybrid processors
• Virtualisation and fabric computing
• Social networks and social software
• Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
• Web mashups
• User Interface
• Ubiquitous computing
• Contextual computing
• Augmented reality
• Semantics

7 Things You Should Know About Second Life

from Educause ELI

EDUCAUSE Proposes New Approach to Broadband Development

Press Release

Report

eLearning Show and Tell @ BTC

FYI: Bellingham Technical College's eLearning group hosts a Thursday, 11:00am (Pacific) "show and tell." Join here.

Archives online.

Gas Prices Drive Students to Online Courses

from the Chronicle:

"Many institutions say their online summer enrollments have jumped significantly, compared with last summer's, and that fuel prices are a key factor in the increase."

Education for a digital world

from George Siemen's blog...

BC Campus and Common Wealth of Learning are offering a free download of their book Education for a digital world (the book can also be purchased).

The book covers significant topics, including: impact of instructional technology, implementing technology, preparing online courses, e-learning in action, and engagement and communication.

Future of Education (Michael Wesch)

http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html

Barry Dahl writes that Wesch’s presentation is “all about media literacy and how he engages his students at Kansas State University. This 66 minute video is well worth the time in order to get a glimpse of how he tries to make students knowledge-able (able to create and critique knowledge) rather than knowledgeable (mind dump education). A few highlights: (8:00) The Crisis of Significance (making education significant in the lives of students), (9:00) eleven minutes on "if these classroom walls could talk, what would they say" - and how does the WWW blow these assumptions away, (45:45) what he does in the classroom to get students to go "beyond the grade," (57:00) a five-minute video in a video showing how the students go through 600 years of world history in one 75-minute class period using Netvibes, wikis, Twitter, Jott, etc. - but where the technology is secondary to the F2F collaboration.”

California Community Colleges Promote Videos on iTunesU

Intelecom, a nonprofit consortium of 31 California community colleges that develops distance-education courses, announced today that it has made 10 video lectures freely available on iTunesU.